NCLB as a potential world epidemic To riff off an old saw, “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold.” This is beyond obvious when we think of the Iraq invasion, the refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and countless other examples. Less obvious, though, are the effects of American education policy on the world. [...]

8 a.m. Sunday morning in Onyang, where Chosun era kings bathed in the local hot springs to cure themselves of all sorts of maladies, and I hope in a few minutes to do the same. (It ain’t all that great a place now, by the way, with its ugly commercial strips and other modern blights.) [...]

Just a note to say my wife and I are going to an Extensive Reading conference for a working weekend in a resort area a couple hours south of Seoul. I hear there are hot springs, which sound good this cold week. So Happy Thanksgiving and see you on the other side. Enjoy the live [...]

Annotations of Obama’s 2004 Interview on His Religious Beliefs Obama is a year older than me, and that’s only the beginning of the list of ways I relate to him. Here are more things we have in common: He didn’t grow up rich and privileged. When he got out of college, he drove a car [...]

Bill Farren of Education for Well-Being, one of my favorite sites, writes about the fatal assumption of economic theory, and some new economics textbooks that may mark a paradigm-shift by questioning those assumptions from a green economics standpoint. Well worth a read, for both economics and environmental science teachers. And Dr. Jim Horn, who writes [...]

How’s this for proof that student blogging can lead places? Pretty cool proof that if a kid can blog about more than his favorite video game or her cat, Fluffy, the sky’s the limit. Here’s some link-love for Stas’ blog. Maybe I’ll subscribe.

He wins in a Democrat landslide. Hopes are high for a progressive agenda unseen since the New Deal, and he delivers, in the first days of his presidency, an avalanche of legislation meant to fulfill those hopes. But he also inherits a military conflict that his advisers are counseling him to escalate – with a [...]

Looking ahead, I have great hope that we will have the courage to embrace the changes necessary to save our economy, our planet and ultimately ourselves. In an earlier transformative era in American history, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two [...]

Preface: What I Learned from the Comments on My “Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist” Post I was surprised that my story of anti-black racism in the American South drew strong reactions in the comment thread from readers in New Zealand, Australia, England, and regions of the American Mid-west (where there were no [...]

Campaign news, Supreme Court analysis, evolution and intelligent design textbook battles and history, the future of books and reading, “freedom of e-speech,” and more in today’s mix. My wife made me canvas for Obama; here’s what I learned | csmonitor.com By a Southern banker conservative. Hopeful, wry, beautiful. tags: obama, elections08, history, usa Declarations – [...]