Bob CollinsIn Waltham, Mass., a Boston suburb, the summer reading list has substituted a podcast for a book. For the record, you can’t read a podcast. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Education
In all the big news last week, the death of Marva Collins seemed to slip under the radar.
Too bad; she was an education superstar.
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At the start of the ‘Oh, your job is easy; you don’t have to work in the summer’ season, it’s a good time to remember that some pretty awesome people have those teaching jobs.
Joan Hochman, a third-grade teacher at Woodbury’s Middleton Elementary School is obviously one of them. Read more →
Wisconsin has always been a little bit ahead of its neighbor to the west when it comes to discouraging Native American mascots by sports teams. Read more →
Perhaps it should be no surprise that improving graduation rates in the nation’s high schools are often the result of cooking the books. Whenever the standards for earning a high school degree are raised, politicians seem to backtrack on them because so many students would fail to graduate. Well, yes, that’s the thing with higher standards; they have to be met or they have to be lowered — one or the other. Read more →
We’re declaring this Ingeborg Rapoport Day, in honor of the 102-year-old German woman who today will get a doctorate from Hamburg University Medical Center.
She wrote her thesis on diptheria 80 years ago, but the Nazis would not allow her to defend it. Read more →
Senatobia (Miss.) Municipal School District Superintendent Jay Foster told the audience at a high school graduation to refrain from cheering and applause until the end of the ceremony, he wasn’t messing around.
He’s turned the law loose on four people for cheering when their relatives got their diploma. Read more →
In Orange County, Texas, police Lt. Eric Ellison had the worst job any cop can have: He had to tell Kazzie Portie, 18, that his parents were dead.
Young Kazzie was to graduate from high school last weekend, but now his parents wouldn’t be there to watch him get a diploma.
So Lt. Ellison filled in. Read more →
There’s certainly a debate to be had over whether the Gaia Democratic School, a private school in Minneapolis, should’ve taken kids in a sex education class to the Smitten Kitten on Lyndale Ave., which calls itself a ‘progressive sex toy store.’ Read more →
The extent to which the adults were shamefully using kids to make their point in a beef at last February’s Minnesota state high school dance tournament seems underscored by a decision by the Minnesota State High School League yesterday to award medals anyway to the girls who refused them. They had previously been disqualified because of their display.
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There have been enough of these types of stories lately to declare that society is witnessing a significant shift when it comes to bullying.
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In New Hampshire, high school seniors spent some of the year raising the $8,000 it would take for a class trip to the Adirondacks of New York, part of the perk of being a high school senior.
Then they found out their principal, Courtney Vashaw, has cancer. Read more →
The National Spelling Bee preliminary round is being held today, and its officials are confronting the racism that has accompanied it in recent years.
Indian American children have won the spelling bee for seven straight years and 11 of the last 15.
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A kerfuffle in Wisconsin is shedding a bit of a spotlight on this question: “What’s the role of school sports?”
The problem is a bill that includes a provision allowing home-schooled and charter school students to play sports in their public school district. Read more →
The first U.S. woman in space is honored with today’s Google Doodle, the creator of which provides a pretty neat behind-the-scenes story.
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