Peter Schrag is very much a man of the left, so it is nice to see him getting disillusioned with the teachers’ union establishment. Related: “AWOL At The Kvetching” by Peter Schrag at California Progress Report

The goals of the Occupy movement are mystifying enough as it is without their apparently accepting the teachers’ unions in their ranks.  While admittedly teachers are not among the 1%, they are certainly not among the “least of these,” and they and other public sector unions may not be among the ‘rich’ but they are [...]

This story about troubled teens being exposed to nature reminds me that while there was a lot to dislike about Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Corps got lots of young people out into the natural world doing work.  And so the Civilian Conservation Corps is something I would like to see revived. [...]

I might take some of what is said with a grain of salt, but this cartoon video explains issues about education – the number one interest of conservative philanthropists – with a clarity I have never seen before.

Abby Wisse Schachter, in a recent Weekly Standard, unfortunately not available to non-subscribers, finds fault with both the Tiger Mom and her chief opponent on the ground that one cares about achievement, the other about following your bliss, but neither seems to make moral character a priority. Related: “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” by Amy Chua [...]

This article is not only interesting for its own sake, but because it illustrates a cultural division that has been raging in mixed Asian-Anglo communities such as Irvine, California.  There are not separate school systems, but there are ‘Asian’ churches and ‘Anglo’ churches and some trying to bridge the gap, and many Irvine public schools [...]

I will discuss Mr. Last’s article again, for he also made an important point that I had never heard of before, and that had nothing to do with the land-use issues which Blue Kennel takes a great interest in. It seems that there was, in 1971, a case called Griggs vs. Duke Power.  In this [...]