Long before today’s education-reform movement was born, indeed long before A Nation at Risk, there was the Council for Basic Education (CBE), founded in 1956 by such notables as Jacques Barzun, Hyman Rickover, and Mortimer Smith.
If an undergraduate were accused of committing murder, no one in charge of a U.S. college or university would think of convening a committee of students, professors, and administrators to gather and analyze evidence, prosecute, adjudicate, and mete out punishment.
Granted, we probably overdo it with the boxing metaphors when scoring political debates, but in this case it comes in handy in assessing Thursday night’s encounter, in Sacramento, between California Gov. Jerry Brown and his Republican challenger, businessman Neel Kashkari.
Finishing out the California governor’s debate: I have this Sacramento Bee op-ed suggesting that, as Jerry Brown campaigns for four more years, America’s nation-state merits four more debates.
I’m hardly the first person to extol the virtues of the sharing economy—the latest iteration of which comes in the form of smartphone apps like Airbnb or Uber that connect people who want somewhere to stay or a ride with people willing to provide it.
This month, more than 6 million students will have returned to California's public schools, as have their 300,000 teachers, the vast majority with academic tenure. All returned under the shadows of Rolf Treu and Beatriz Vergara.
As the NATO heads of state meet in Cardiff, Wales, Putin is engaging in his usual distractions to stave off more sanctions or worse. The day before the summit, rumors of a “peace move” between Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s president, Sergo Poroshenko, began to float.
Last week, I said the Environmental Protection Agency has become a monster that does more harm than good. But logical people would say, "What else we got?" It's natural to assume greedy capitalists will run amok and destroy the Earth unless stopped by regulation.
This fall Teach for America welcomes its “most diverse” corps in its history, according to a recent press release, with 50 percent of its teachers identifying as people of color.
Vilified and ridiculed throughout the second half of his long life—he died in 1964 at the age of ninety—Herbert Hoover was a great and good man. Statesmen often find themselves required to kill, earning their reputations in part by fighting and winning wars. Hoover’s statesmanship consisted first of all in saving lives, literally by the millions.
