The Pope Center posts a provocative “clarion call” for reform in Education schools–coming from an Education professor, Nick Shudak of Mount Marty College. Shudak sees as soluble the problem besetting college and university Education departments, but through the kind of courageous action that, I suspect, can only come from outside the ranks of the faculty. Shudak, who chairs […]
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Radical Math held its third annual conference in New York last weekend. Four hundred high school math teachers and education professors attended the conference on “Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math Education and Social Justice.” At thirty-two workshops on Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus and in half a dozen city public schools, math teachers […]
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The National Research Council has finally issued its rankings of doctoral programs, with coverage appearing here, here, and here . Right now, everybody is trying to assimilate the results, which are more complicated than those in the 1995 report. The “Data-Based Assessment” runs to 282 pages, the “Guide to the Methodology” 57 pages, and each […]
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Two law-school professors, Vikram David Amar and Kevin R. Johnson, recently published a piece in FindLaw.com on “Why U.S. News and World Report Should Include a Diversity Index in its Ranking of Law Schools.” Early on, the piece notes a research finding that, by including in its law-school index the LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs […]
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By Frank J. Macchiarola and Michael C. Macchiarola Why do law schools charge higher and higher tuitions that keep outrunning the cost of living? In the two decades ending in 2007, according to the American Bar Association, the cost of attending the average private law school (including tuition and fees) more than tripled–increasing from $8,911 […]
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Thanks to the efforts of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—and a rare, if welcome, instance of Congress standing up for students’ rights in higher education—the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) abandoned its de facto “social justice” criterion. Yet while the development made […]
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In May the Illinois State’s Attorney’s office issued a stunningly unusual subpoena. It asked for the student grades, grading criteria, class syllabi, expense reports, and even e-mail messages of undergraduates taking an investigative reporting class at Northwestern University. The class tied into the Medill Innocence Project, a program administered by Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism […]
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The ABA is very big on diversity. To satisfy its standards, nearly all law schools must seriously relax their admissions standards for minority students. But how many of so-called beneficiaries of affirmative action are graduating and passing the bar? And how many are winding up with nothing to show for their trouble but students loans? […]
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By Gail Heriot (Ms. Heriot is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. This piece is adapted from Ms. Heriot’s Commissioner Statement for the Civil Rights Report on Affirmative Action at American Law Schools released last fall.) I have no doubt that those who originally conceived of race-based admissions policies – nearly forty […]
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Beware the words “social justice” and “dispositions” when used by schools of education and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). These apparently harmless terms lay the groundwork for politicizing the training of teachers and giving the ed schools an excuse to eliminate conservatives from their programs. The news this week is that […]
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In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice “from local to global level.” This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn’t long […]
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