Links to interesting postings - 17 Dec 05

The District Administration Daily has a post about a New York Times article. The article talks about trying to measure the return on America's investment in education. Overall I wasn't that impressed with the article, but one statement jumped out at me. In this academic year close to one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) dollars will be spent on education. It is a mind numbing amount of money.

At EducationWonk today there is a post on school food in Los Angeles and a link to an article about some of the problems with public school food. A lot the food is basically typical fast food, and not all of it is well prepared. As part of our homeschool our daughters make about a fifth of the meals. It is rarely fast food and they are learning a number of useful skills.

HomeSchoolBuzz has a post and links to an good article about homeschool and the dedication it takes to homeschool. This was a great line: "No matter how good a teacher is in any school, they don't love my child like I do." Seven mothers talk about some of the lessons they have learned in homeschooling. This is part of a series on homeschooling.

Townhall's section on education links to a Heritage Foundation article which frames a vote coming up in Congress as being between students and special interest groups. Congress has promised to help students affected by Katrina, but nothing has happened yet. The teacher unions are fighting any effort to allow vouchers or school choice.

Mike Antonucci of Education Intelligence Agency Online has a post on his blog Intercepts that links to an article about the contrast of teachers asking parents to train their children to respect teachers, but the teachers don't have respect for each other.

Mike Antonucci has another interesting post about what public education is in a financial mess. Money for education is largely tied to the number of students in a school. It appears one of the main causes is that the growth rate of teachers is higher than the growth rate of students. So the pie goes up by the number of students, but there are more teachers which need to be paid. A good point from Mike's post: "In 2004-05, America enrolled 297,101 more students than in 2003-04. But it employed 49,732 more teachers. That's 1 teacher for every additional 6 students."