Curriculum
The College Board and Foreign Languages
Italian professors all across the country should salute the College Board and the advocates who pressed for reviving the course, including Dr. Margaret Cuomo, the Italian Language Foundation, and the Italian Government.
Curriculum
Holding Students Accountable for Changing into Their Gym Clothes
Are traditional P.E. classes likely to be an effective tool in fighting obesity? What little research there is finds no association between PE and weight loss and obesity. One reason more P.E. has not led to weight loss might be that traditional PE classes do not always offer students a real workout, particularly in high school. Students don’t like having to change into gym clothes and get sweaty in the middle of the day. So P.E. teachers may end up grading students in part based on whether they change into their P.E. clothes. The 25th Hour PE class at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia is different.
Curriculum
A Language Arts Curriculum for Students in Jail
In “School on the Inside: Teaching the incarcerated student,” just posted on the Ed...
Curriculum
When Schools Shun Competition, Middle Class Families Seek It Out After School
June Kronholz writes that the self-esteem movement in the 1990s made many educators squeamish about competition. In fact, American educators have had a love/hate relationship with it over the past century. But what we have seen is that as schools move away from promoting competition, those parents who think schools are not providing enough competitive outlets go outside of the traditional education system.
Curriculum
Edutopia: Inside George Lucas’ Quixotic Plan to Save America’s Schools
It was just about a year ago that I first started paying attention to Edutopia. They’ve been around for years, but they weren’t on my radar screen. Then suddenly, they wouldn’t stay off it. You couldn’t listen to the radio without hearing their ubiquitous underwriting credit on NPR, with its sublimely confident tagline “What Works in Public Education.”
Curriculum
E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy and American Democracy
In a new book, The Making of Americans, E.D. Hirsch explicitly connects the idea of cultural literacy to the subject of civics—“the role of a common system of public schools in educating a citizenry to the level necessary to maintain a democracy.”
Curriculum
Book Excerpt: Richard Whitmire Reads from Why Boys Fail
EdNext is teaming with authors of newly released books to provide 15-minute audio excerpts...
Curriculum
Book Alert: Intelligence and How to Get It
There is no end to the debate over intelligence. The latest book-length entry into this debate is University of Michigan psychology professor Richard Nisbett’s "Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count."
Curriculum
Happy T-1 Peoples Day
Controversies surrounding the celebration of Columbus Day raise a number of interesting questions. Unfortunately, many of the new answers offered are at least as simplistic and historically false as the established answers they are meant to replace.
Curriculum
Does Teaching More Science Content Produce Better Scientists?
A new study does not demonstrate what the authors believe it demonstrates: that teaching more science content leads only to more content knowledge, not to higher-level science competence.