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I’ll admit it. I’ve always had a secret fondness for stories about one-room schools. Why? Perhaps it’s the simpler time. Perhaps it’s the fact that they seemed to value good education and hard work. Perhaps it’s the family-like structure and community they fostered. That last element is especially missing from today’s schools, which ship busloads
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New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio is making headlines suited for satire. A commission he assembled recently released a report recommending the elimination of gifted programs in order to reduce inequality – a remedy of Harrison Burgeron proportions. Unfortunately, as a general nationwide trend, public schools have already neglected the top students in favor of an
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In his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, the late Allan Bloom wrote of a debate he once had with a psychology professor when he taught at Cornell University. The psychologist “said that it was his function to get rid of prejudices in his students. He knocked them down like tenpins. I began to
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It appears that many Americans still believe that merit is the most important factor in determining who will get into our top colleges and universities. On Tuesday, the College Board announced – after receiving considerable criticism – that it will no longer pursue adding an “Adversity Score” to the SAT. In May, the organization announced that it would start ranking
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(This story was originally published by Intellectual Takeout on September 2, 2016.) Have you ever thought that high school graduates today… well, just don’t seem to know or understand as much as they once did? According to a new research report from the Urban Institute, such a thought is not simply a result of generational
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Plans for the Boston Public Library, the nation’s second-oldest public library, were approved in 1852, the same year Massachusetts passed the country’s first compulsory schooling law. Both public libraries and public schools are funded through taxation and both are “free” to access, but the similarities end there. The main difference between public libraries and public
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