“Just in case you hadn’t seen this,” a friend wrote, passing along the latest piece by Greg Sargent at the Washington Post. “The next big liberal cause,” he called universal child care. “Does it really have a chance?” my friend asked. The multi-billion-dollar question. Sargent’s “next big liberal cause” was …
June 17th was the darkest of nights. A white man slaughtered nine black people during worship. Our nation’s soul is sick, threatened by an ancient malignancy. We continue to search for the words to make sense of it all. Young black men are taking to their posts with anguish and …
Americans love data. We cannot get enough of it. Collectors on speed, we measure every indicator in sight. Children are the youngest, most fragile casualties of our obsessive compulsive disorder. How many words do they have in their emergent lexicons? Do they know their letters? Can they count up to …
Earlier this year, Robert Pondiscio, a policy pundit at the Fordham Institute, took to his “Common Core” blog and blasted Reading in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose, a report written by three early childhood educators. Why shouldn’t kids be reading in kindergarten, the man wanted to know. …
Ruby Takanishi, who presided over the Foundation for Child Development for many years, sends me small gifts. In a recent email with the subject line “Favorites,” I clicked on the link to a TED talk by Takaharu Tezuka about a kindergarten that he and his wife and partner, Yui, renovated …
Not too long ago, I read a piece at the Huffington Post with this title: “Cost of Military Jet Could House Every Homeless Person in U.S. with $600,000 Home.” Author Robbie Couch was reporting on a project, seven years behind schedule due to chronic incompetence, to create a fleet of …
Read at HuffPo (Huffington Post) What a winter of discontent for New York’s parents. Strep, sub-zero temps, tantrums. Then Andrew Cuomo declared there was “little” appetite for paid family leave. The governor may be a glutton for women’s equality. Still, there’s only so much equalizing one can do. He had …
I’m the last person to indulge in Monday-morning quarterbacking. I hate football. My proto-hipster father, author of a cult classic, The Hiptionary, referred to America’s national pastime as a “monster jam.” So, no, I didn’t watch the game—although my husband and stepdaughter settled down with their nachos in her new …
Read at HuffPo (Huffington Post) As December loomed, Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top hit a snag. At a meeting of school superintendents, he took “white suburban moms” to task for rebelling against the Common Core academic standards, guidelines for math and language arts instruction. “All of a sudden, their …
Read at HuffPo (Huffington Post) Ivanka Trump made an eloquent pitch for family-friendly policies when she introduced her father at the Republican convention. But his party has other ideas. A week before Donald Trump closed the deal, the First Five Years Fund had announced the results of its annual poll. …
