Obama to spotlight education reform efforts

Read the whole story:

Obama to spotlight education reform efforts – washingtonpost.com.

Even More Research: Technology Is Making Kids Better Writers, Not Worse | Techdirt

Every few months or so, we read about some freaked out reporter/columnist/pundit/politician complaining about how the internet and texting are destroying kids’ ability to write. Yet, pretty much every study on the subject has found the opposite to be true. Study after study after study after study after study have all found that kids today are better writers than in the past.

Clive Thompson writes about even more research on the subject, talking to a professor who suggests that, rather than “the death of writing” this is a renaissance:

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.”

New music distribution

How can we do this for education?

Thornton Closing

You can chalk it up to the economy and you won’t be completely wrong, but it’s also not the whole picture. Education is suffering much worse than the banks or the housing market  in this country, and that’s a crisis no one is talking about.

We live in a very wealthy county (Montgomery) in which statistics are regularly trotted out to show how well we educate our children. A graduation rate of 80% was cited as being among the top in the country.

The graduation rate is not the dropout rate, which is about 1 of 3 children nationwide. The graduation rate is simply how many students who enter thier senior year graduate at the end of it. 1 of 5 doesn’t make it, and this is cited as a shining example of how well we are doing. Meanwhile, the 33% of teens who never even graduate high school – what are we doing to address them?

I am convinced that small schools such as Thornton hold promise for a new kind of education which we desperately need. That model faces many serious hurdles – including how to be more financially accessible – but it is a generation ahead of our current public model of large, impersonal institutions where teachers are one step away from being replaced by computers and no one sees the devastating loss that represents.

I am still a bit in shock over Thornton, and my heart breaks when I think about the kids and their families, as well as the teachers who (like me) are now part of the unemployment statistic. But I really mourn for all of our children – whether they are being well educated or not – because as a group, they are being criminally under-served. How to face the crises of the next 50 years when one-third of your generation is uneducated?