Friday, February 17, 2006

Selections from EducationNews.org - 17 Feb 2006

From EducationNews.org I found the following:

David W. Kirkpatrick of http://www.freedomfoundation.us/has a nice article about some of the history of homeschooling. I had not heard of Everett Reimer before. David Kirkpatrick mentioned Creating Learning Communities which I hadn't know about either, and Alliance for the Separation of School & State, which I check in on once in awhile.

There has been a movement to force school districts to spend at least 65% of the budget in the class room. This opinnion piece looks at some of the problems with this approach. At the The Education Gadfly is a little more in depth analysis. I like Joanne Jacobs' line: "Instead of devoting more resources to teaching, it will devote more resources to redefining 'in the classroom.'"

Finally we have another account of out of control school district spending. Yesterday we blogged about one high school of costing millions of dollars more than originally planned. Today we have a school district in New Jersey which has 300 contrsuction projects, and the costs keep rising, but now we are talking about billions. The original estimate had been $6 billion, but the costs have climbed to $12 billion, with expectations that it may be $19 billion before the building is all done. Every time there is a call for more money in education, the public needs to push back and make sure the money is spent wisely.

1 comment:

Spunky said...

Thanks for the link to the article. I hadn't heard of the first organization mentioned either. I loved last few sentences of the article.