Joel Shatzky

In a recent program on 60 Minutes, Peter Thiel, self-made billionaire and founder of Pay Pal, claimed that for most students college was a waste of time and money. He paid 24 students with promising ideas for entrepreneurial ventures $100,000 each not to go to college. Although I...

At an all-day meeting featuring panel discussions and break-out sessions, a group of parents, students, teachers and other educators met to propose an alternative to Mayoral control of the New York City public school system. Sponsored by the CPE (Coalition for Public Education) an education advocacy group, and held at...

A preliminary report by the Independent Commission on Public Education (ICOPE) with the support of the Coalition for Public Education (CPE) compared the present public school governance under Mayor Michael Bloomberg using the business model to one in which education is regarded as "a human right." The report,...

The recent report in the New York Times, "Poor Further Dropping Behind the Rich in School", states what educators have been saying for many years: Poverty is a major contributor to problems in learning just as wealth provides many educational opportunities not readily available to the poor. The...

A recent bill proposed in the Florida State legislature to allow dissatisfied parents who are outraged by their children's lackluster academic performance to fire their teachers reminds me of a Modest Proposal I wrote several years ago: "If Doctors Were Treated Like Teachers."

It's hard for me to recall the English Regents I took over 50 years ago although I remember our class did little, if any preparation for it, certainly not during class time. However, I know that we had to read a number of passages with a fairly complex vocabulary, do...

A recent article in Salon magazine described the paranoid behavior of the educational establishment in Arizona in banning ethnic studies curricula in public high schools throughout the state. In "Who's Afraid of the Tempest?" by Jeff Biggers, the author described the effects of the decision of...

In a recent news item on CNN (January 7, 2012) I was struck by the way in which educational opportunities are presented in the media. The story heralded in broad headlines "94% get jobs," featuring the graduates of a computer program at NYU where most all of...

As we approach the end of the year, we educators should give some thoughts to where our country might be heading in the future of public education. From the beginning of the year, there have been countless public demonstrations protesting the closing of neighborhood schools, "co-location" of public schools with...

In a recent New York Times article "Military Children Stay a Step Ahead of Public School Students," a very favorable picture of public school education on military bases was revealed where black student scores on the NAEP -- National Assessment of Educational Progress -- were much higher...

In a recent speech, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg advanced the following solution to the problems of public education. It reveals, once more, how far from "getting it" public officials are in understanding what education is all about. According to the mayor:

"Education is very much, I've always thought,...

As one of those rare beings who managed to survive high school, college and two universities without ever having a football team to root for, I sometimes wonder how serious we take higher education in a country where team sports often define one's educational experience. According to its own statistics,...

The news that the burning issue in Congress at this moment -- 11/3/11 -- is to reaffirm the national motto "In God We Trust" is about as reassuring as if the crew on the Titanic, in desperate need of leadership, had found the captain on his knees in his cabin...

Shortly after Mayor Michael Bloomberg assumed control of the New York City school system, he presented his programs as a national leader in "educational reform." But there has been evidence in the New York public schools in the recent past of cheating on standardized tests by teachers and...

In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch, who has been writing critically and incisively for the last five years about the inadequacies of the "School Reform" movement, wrote a review of a book by Steven Brill called Class Warfare: Inside the...

I was moved last Sunday morning by the recital over the radio of the names of those who had been killed on September 11, 2001. Their humanity and the loss of so many parents, children, brothers and sisters was embodied by the sometimes dispassionate, often emotional voices...

In my last blog on Huffington Post, "Is 'Online Learning' Learning?", I questioned the extensive use of online learning and other technological approaches to teaching as a panacea for improving the education of young learners. Several respondents questioned my assertion that unless there are teachers in the classroom...

In a recent interview on Democracy Now, Diane Ravitch, the noted educator, and Brian Jones, an education leader and teacher as well as the producer of a must-see movie, The Inconvenient Truth about Waiting for Superman discussed one of the more pressing issues facing education today:...

The recent reports coming from the Department of Education that Arne Duncan has decided to grant "waivers" to states that feel overwhelmed by the requirements of No Child Left Behind for a 100% compliance for student achievement gives hope that the many reports and protests that have come to his...

The "Save Our Schools March" that took place last Saturday and the two-day conference that preceded it on July 28- 29 might not have been large in terms of participants: 300 at the conference and 5,000 at the march. But more important was the enthusiasm and determination to change the...