Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!  ES Senior Fellow Peter Cookson remembers his “mentor from the old school.”

April 1961. I am about to graduate from Saint Mary’s High School on the south side of Phoenix, Ariz. I am a fair student at best, only functionally literate, vaguely interested in history, a bit of a cut-up, and noted for talking back to the good nuns and fathers who wContinue Reading »

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! Here’s ES Senior Fellow Ben Wildavsky on one of his crushes favorite teachers…

I remember quite a bit about first grade at John Muir Elementary School in Berkeley, California, circa 1971-1972. Our portable classroom stood apart from the main school building, next to a small creek. Inside, first- and second-graders were mixed in a single experiContinue Reading »

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! From all of us here at Education Sector, thank you, teachers, for doing the amazing work you do! Tune in all week as we remember teachers who inspire us to do the work we do.

As other Quick and Ed bloggers write this week about teachers who’ve inspired them, I’d like to direct readers to this Quick and Ed post I wrote seven years ago about my Continue Reading »

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! From all of us here at Education Sector, thank you, teachers, for doing the amazing work you do! Tune in all week as we remember teachers who inspire us to do the work we do.

To this day, I still backspace when I type “there is” or “there are.” My high school journalism adviser, Mrs. (Marilyn) Dreistadt, ingrained it in our minds that “there is” is quite Continue Reading »

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! From all of us here at Education Sector, thank you, teachers, for doing the amazing work you do! Tune in all week as we remember teachers who inspire us to do the work we do. Policy Analyst Connie Clark starts us off:

I’ll never forget my high school principal. The year I graduated high school was Dr. Mary Kolek’s last year at Weston High School. She had Continue Reading »

Jobless, with a degree. About 17 million Americans with college degrees are working in jobs that don’t require one. Some argue the economy is as much to blame for graduates’ employment struggles as our society and government’s “overinvestment”  in higher education. (StateImpact Indiana)

Slow down or speed up? Kati Haycock says that the best solution to timing the Common Core Continue Reading »

Every wizard’s dream. “BREAKING NEWS: Hogwarts now accepts FAFSA.”  (April Fools! h/t Anne Hyslop)

Academic bankruptcy. One of the two triggers Emily Richmond says sets a state up for taking over a school district. She notes such a  takeover seems to be the fate of Camden School District in New Jersey. (NPR)

“Universal pre-K sends 200 million Americans back to school.” One of the Continue Reading »

Today, our thoughts, prayers, and deepest sympathies go out to the community of Newtown, Connecticut. A tragedy no one should have to endure.

A sobering statistic. 5,740 children and teens killed by guns in 2008 and 2009, enough to fill 229 classrooms. (Children’s Defense Fund, h/t Alexander Russo)

More than just free lunch. Education Week’s Sarah Sparks reports the NationalContinue Reading »

Devastating profits. Slate’s Matthew Yglesias says MOOCs threaten the very business model of traditional colleges: “The problem isn’t offering a higher quality product than what MOOCs offer, but how you pay for that stuff when the high margin low quality stuff gets competed away?” (Slate)

Killing two birds with one stone. A growing number of Ohio schools are taking a novel approach to acContinue Reading »

Are you a Quick and Ed regular? If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you are. We like that! And, we also appreciate your feedback. We’re in the midst of planning some changes to our blog, and we want to know what improvements you would like to see. So, if you could improve one thing about The Quick and the Ed, what would it be? Take our quick survey and tell us wContinue Reading »