Recently I asked my students in my writing course at Kingsborough Community College what motivated them to learn. As this is an evening course, most of them are in their 20s and 30s with full-time jobs, some with families, who are "credentialing" themselves for better jobs in what most see...

The present debate on what to do about gun violence as a result of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre reminds me of an observation by Winston Churchill: "The American people will find a solution to every problem after they've tried everything else." On the one hand the pro-gun supporters...

The devastating Hurricane Sandy should not only remind us of the fragility of civilization, which depends so much on necessities that can be easily taken from us like food, fuel and shelter. It should also remind us that if we want to avoid descending into barbarism, we have to teach...

The recent decision by the United States Supreme Court to revisit "affirmative action" in college admissions leads me to the observation that the advantages of diversity in higher education could be applied as well to the specialized high schools in New York City. In a recent report by the Civil...

The controversy over standardized testing was given new focus by the recent Chicago teachers strike. One of their major objections was to having the Chicago Board of Education use these tests heavily to determine teacher competence. This issue prompts me to suggest a "modest" proposal that might go far towards...

At the Republican National Convention held last week, the thorny issue of Todd Akin's remark about the distinctions between "legitimate rape" and what I suppose he might call "consensual rape" was, for obvious reasons, were not foremost on the minds of the delegates. At the end of the convention, they...

On a recent trip to visit family and friends in Turkey and Israel I asked, a propos of the Olympics, what importance is given to sports in their respective national universities. After all, many Olympic athletes train at universities in the United States where the excellent coaching and focus is...

A report on the effectiveness of a "virtual school" company, K12, Inc., was released recently by the National Education Policy Center based at the University of Colorado in Boulder. It provides a serious warning to educational "innovators" who are moving in the direction of relying on technology as a substitute...

A bill recently passed in the N.J. legislature making tenure for public school teachers more difficult to achieve illustrates a fundamental problem in the "school reform" movement that has become viral in the last decade. By making it more difficult for teachers to get the legal protections they...

There have been several recent reports on the future condition of the planet, including the impending water crisis in which the lack of drinkable water may well be an issue confronting the entire world in the next generation. Yet many of the basic issues of the kind of...

The Nobel Prize is awarded annually in recognition of the highest achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economics and peace. With all of the criticism of public education in New York City and the movement toward charter schools and vouchers with an increased emphasis on "privatization," it would be instructive...

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."

The...

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...