"In today's increasingly globalized world," he writes, "our children need more exposure to different people and cultures, not less."
Although he recognizes that the hiring of foreign teachers alone will not solve critical shortages in science and math educations, Zimmerman notes that foreign teachers can help students in innumerable ways.
"As more and more countries outpace the United States in science and math, these teachers might help up catch up. Best of all, though, they can also teach our kids something new and important about the larger world."
To read Professor Zimmerman's entire opinion article, click here.
]]>Zimmerman notes that "the idea that there should be state-supported education was, although not unique to the United States, in many ways distinct to it. By 1850 there was a greater fraction of elementary school-age kids going to school in our country than in any other on earth."
Despite their many deficiencies (which include lack of heat and lack of proper training for teachers), one-room schoolhouses were communal institutions, often the only public building in a community, providing truly democratic spaces for functions like debates and voting.
To listen to the segment, produced by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, click below.
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Writing in The New York Times, book critic Dwight Garner calls Michael and Elizabeth Norman's Tears in the Darkness "authoritative history" and "a narrative achievement."
Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath, is the extraordinary story of America's worst military defeat told from the shifting point of view of three cultures: American, Japanese, and Filipino. Until the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the Filipino and American prisoners of war on the tiny Philipine peninsula of Bataan suffered an ordeal of unparalleled cruelty and savagery: forty-one months of captivity, starvation rations, dehydration, hard labor, deadly disease, and torture.
Juxtaposed against the sobering tale of the Death March and its aftermath is the story of Ben Steele, a young 22 year old Montana cowboy who wanted to see the world and serve his country.
To read the full New York Times review of Tears in the Darkness, click here.
To read an interview with Michael and Elizabeth Norman, click here.
Elizabeth Norman is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Professions at NYU Steinhardt.
]]>IREX, an international non-profit organization in Washington, DC, is offering an exciting international travel grant opportunity for US secondary level teachers through the Teaching Excellence and Achievement Program (TEA). This program is funded by the U.S. Department of State.
IREX is recruiting for the U.S. teachers reciprocal visit component of the program. The applicants we are seeking are U.S. secondary-level teachers of English or the social sciences to participate in a two-week professional exchange program in one of the following countries: Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Colombia, El Salvador, Georgia, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Nicaragua, Senegal, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine.
Eligible applicants must be:
Secondary-level (middle or high school), full-time teachers with five or more years of classroom experience in disciplines including English as a Foreign Language, English Language or Literature, and the Social Sciences (including social studies, civics, and history); U.S. citizenship; and ability to travel in April, 2010.
The program is fully funded and provides: visa support; round-trip domestic airfare, lodging and meals to attend the TEA U.S. Conference; round-trip airfare from the U.S. to the assigned country; emergency medical insurance; as well as lodging and a daily stipend in host country.
The TEA U.S. teacher application is available for download at our website: www.irex.org.
]]>Early application is crucial for the fullest consideration. Visit our financial aid section to see a full listing of options and to learn how to apply for financial aid.
Selected opportuntities include:
21st Century Scholarships are offered to full-time, newly admitted master's and advanced certificate applicants showing the greatest potential and who show the strongest fit with the vision and mission of NYU Steinhardt. Applicants must meet all application deadlines (admission and FAFSA) for automatic consideration. No scholarship application required.
Steinhardt Graduate Scholarships are offered to full-time master's and doctoral students who are academically talented and show a need for financial assistance. Applicants must meet all application deadlines (admission and FAFSA) for automatic consideration. No scholarship application required.
The New York University Opportunity Fellowship is awarded on a highly competitive basis to newly admitted students from underrepresented groups (African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans) who exhibit strong academic ability. Several scholarships (some with stipend awards) are offered each fall to those intending to pursue full-time study. A completed scholarship application, separate from the admission application and FAFSA, must be submitted by March 1 (only available for the fall semester) to the Office of Graduate Admissions. Click here for the application and instructions.
The Deans Opportunity Scholarship is a competitive award for newly admitted master's and advanced certificate students from underrepresented groups (African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans) who intend to pursue full-time study. A completed scholarship application, separate from the admission application and FAFSA, must be submitted by March 1 for the fall/summer and November 1 for the spring to the Office of Graduate Admissions. Click here for the application and instructions.
The Health Professions Opportunity Scholarship is designed to assist newly admitted full-time graduate students from historically underrepresented groups (African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans) enrolled in any of the following health-related areas: physical or occupational therapy, community and international health, health education, nutrition, and speech pathology. A completed scholarship application, separate from the admission application and FAFSA, must be submitted by March 1 for the fall and November 1 for the spring to the Office of Graduate Admissions. Click here for the application and instructions.
All applicants to Ph.D. and Ed.D programs who meet the December 15 application deadline are considered for fellowships, assistantships, and scholarships. There are no scholarship applications required.
]]>"Last time I checked," he writes, "universities were supposed to challenge students' biases and preconceived opinions"
To counter the pro-Obama bias expressed by students and many faculty, Zimmerman suggests ways in which teachers can use the hotly contested campaign to infuse "political energy" into the classroom. Teachers, he writes, can bring in outsider speakers to discuss opposing viewpoints, or give assignments that challenge student's preconceived notions.
He looks to Barack Obama himself for inspiration. Obama, Zimmerman reminds us, "taught law for 12 years at the University of Chicago, where he developed a reputation for rigorous open-mindedness. He challenged everyone, especially the students who agreed with him."
To read the full USA Today article, click here.
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"We're deeply grateful to the Jim Joseph Foundation for this exceptional grant," said Mary Brabeck, dean of NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. "The Foundation's generosity will allow us to recruit and train even more students, to further strengthen our programs, and to inspire a new generation of men and women to devote their lives to teaching and learning."
"We are proud to be associated with NYU in supporting these programs," said Alvin Levitt, the Foundation's board president. "The Jim Joseph Foundation believes that NYU's outstanding Education and Jewish Studies faculty and graduate student community provide an ideal setting in which this kind of training for future Jewish educational leaders can take place."
Graduate students benefiting from the Foundation's grant support will be named Jim Joseph Foundation Fellows. The graduate students will be selected from the following programs:
Additionally, the Foundation's grant will include funding for program administration and will allow for the hiring of adjunct faculty members in both NYU Steinhart and Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies.
"The Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS) is deeply grateful to the Jim Joseph Foundation for enabling this historic development in Jewish education," said Catharine Stimpson, dean of NYU's GSAS.
"Our graduate students in education and Jewish studies are geographically diverse and come from every sector of the highly diversified Jewish world: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Zionist, cultural, and secular," said Robert Chazan, co-director, with Professor Harold Wechsler, of the Education and Jewish Studies programs. "What's common among them is the desire to assume leadership positions in Jewish educational enterprises. The excellent programs in education and Jewish studies and Hebrew and Judaic studies represent a real breakthrough in the training of the next generation of Jewish leaders."
"The Jim Joseph Foundation believes ardently in the importance of Jewish educators and their critical role in ensuring a vibrant Jewish future," said Chip Edelsberg, executive director of the Foundation. "We are confident this significant investment in NYU supporting these degree programs will produce future Jewish educational leaders."
Students interested in learning more about the programs should consult http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/humsocsci/jewish. Reporters wishing to speak with faculty or deans related to NYU's programs in education and Jewish studies should contact Tim Farrell, NYU Office of Public Affairs, at 212.998.6797.
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Sasaki is also the recipient of a scholarship from the Japanese American Association Honjo Foundation. The scholarship will allow her opportunity to travel to Japan to study Japanese-Brazilian and Peruvian communities there, with an emphasis on how migration patterns shape their ethnic identity, how they readapt to Brazil and Peru, and what influence this migration has on the groups' future aspirations.
]]>The new, twelve-month project is devoted to improvement in the teaching of Jewish history in Jewish day schools at the high-school level. The project will bring together teams of teachers from seven to eight major Jewish high schools, will assist them in defining the current status of their Jewish history teaching and their aspirations for change, will provide an intensive week-long summer workshop for all participants, and will carefully monitor progress during the ensuing school year. The key liaisons to these schools will be students in the Doctoral Program in Education and Jewish Studies at the NYU Steinhardt, who will simultaneously implement and study change in the participating schools.
]]>Beginning in fall 2008, one student will be selected to receive a fellowship. Students interested in receiving the fellowship will write a special essay describing their reasons for seeking the fellowship and their plans for environmental leadership; NYU will select fellows on the basis of students' academic and leadership potential. Applications are due to the Office of Graduate Admissions by April 15, 2008.
"We're delighted to partner with EnergyWatch for such a wonderful initiative," said Mary Brabeck, Dean of NYU Steinhardt. "This Fellowship will enable us to give invaluable support to the next generation of leaders in environmental education, research, and advocacy."
"We hope the EnergyWatch Fellowship will inspire and encourage NYU Steinhardt's exceptional students to go forward and achieve great things in the field of Environmental Education," said EnergyWatch President Jay Raphaelson. "It's our way of giving back to the community."
Parties interested in supporting the Fellowship with a tax-deductible gift may contact Lisa Klimkiewicz at NYU Steinhardt, at 212-998-6942 or lisa.klimkiewicz@nyu.edu.
Founded in 2000 by Jay Raphaelson and Diana Sweeney, EnergyWatch is the premier energy consulting firm located in New York City. Their clients include Morgan Stanley, Vornado, Sony and British Airways, among others.
Editor's Note
About EnergyWatch Inc
EnergyWatch Inc. is an innovative, full service utility rate and renewable energy consulting firm located in Manhattan's financial district since 2000 and serving clients throughout the U.S. EnergyWatch has negotiated and implemented more than 1,500 energy contracts. Its principals are on the leading edge of regulatory issues - Diana Sweeney is President of the New York Energy Consumers Council, one of the largest consumer advocacy groups in New York State, and Jay Raphaelson has been appointed to and currently serves on Mayor Bloomberg's NYC Energy Policy Task Force.
About the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Founded in 1890 as the School of Pedagogy, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development was the first school of its kind in the United States. Today, NYU Steinhardt advances knowledge, creativity, and innovation at the crucial crossroads of human learning, culture, development, and well-being. Through rigorous research and education, the school's faculty and students evaluate and redefine processes, practices, and policies in their respective fields and lead in an ever-changing world. For more information, go to http://steinhardt.nyu.edu.
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“The program is special because it is helping meet the pressing need for highly qualified leaders in Jewish education by preparing students at the doctoral level for key positions in virtually every educational setting in the American Jewish community,” says Mary Brabeck, dean of the Steinhardt School. Graduates of the program have earned highly competitive positions in the academic world and in educational settings within the Jewish community.
]]>"To an American," he writes, "the most refreshing part of this celebration is the apparent absence of national jingoism or chauvinism."
Zimmerman writes than American sports fans should look to their Ghanaian counterparts for a lesson in celebrating the home team without "diminishing others."
This semester, Zimmerman is teaching at NYU's study abroad program in Accra, Ghana.
]]>Last month thousands of our best and brightest high-school students found out whether they had been accepted by early decision to the colleges of their choice. Each had spent weeks poring over application forms, polishing essays, and agonizing over where to submit an application - a promise to matriculate at one institution, forsaking all others, in exchange for often considerably better odds of admission and a couple fewer months of worry about where they would spend their college years.
The applicants' anxiety was unwarranted - and it was also deceptive. Even before the applications were mailed, most of the decisions had been more or less preordained by social class.
I recently spent a year and a half in the admissions office of a highly selective Eastern college as an ethnographer, seeking to understand just how admissions officers make their decisions. I accompanied them on recruitment trips to high schools and college fairs, helped manage their offices' relentless current of visitors and mail, and observed them deliberate the fate of literally thousands of applicants.
What I found was consistent with the American ideal of educational meritocracy. I saw admissions officers who invariably made the quality of high-school transcripts the most prominent criterion of evaluation. They assessed standardized-test scores as only one part of an application, recognized outstanding records of leadership and community service, and were wise enough to distinguish genuinely strong applications from ones that were buffed and puffed by private consultants. Yes, I saw officers give special consideration to applications that were connected to promising donors - it was a private institution and, while hardly poor, it depended on philanthropy for its financial well-being - but nothing close to the shameless horse trading that occasionally makes selective admissions headline news.
Recruited athletes also enjoyed a systematic admissions advantage and often were admitted with weaker academic records. But then fully a third of the students who enrolled at the college in a typical year were varsity athletes who had invested heavily in their athletic skills throughout many years of childhood and were eager to hone those skills at competitive levels of play. In a sense, admissions preferences for top athletes are not really preferences but rather an extension of meritocratic standards to nonacademic skills.
Indeed, I realized that it was not big donations or athletic recruitment that most undermined the American dream of meritocratic admissions, but rather, and however paradoxically, the fact that our dream has come true. The days when old-school connections were enough to get through the doors of top colleges, and when dark skin or a Jewish surname were enough to be excluded, are over. Selective colleges now sort applications based on measurable accomplishment. But in general, only the more affluent among us can afford the infrastructure necessary to produce that accomplishment in our children: academically excellent high schools, rich with extracurricular programs; summer sports camps; private tutoring; "service" trips to Israel or Guatemala; and, of course, the time and money to invest in the elaborate competition for seats at selective institutions.
All that investment means that by the time upper-middle-class 17-year-olds sit down to write their applications, most of the race to top institutions has already been run, and they already enjoy comfortable leads. As William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University and president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and his colleagues demonstrate in Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (University of Virginia Press, 2005), the majority of students likely to meet the baseline criteria for admission to top institutions are from the top quarter of the national income distribution. For those kids, the big question is not whether they will be admitted to an elite institution, but which ones will offer them spots. Even while the fate of individual applicants at particular colleges remains uncertain until decision letters are mailed, the overall distribution of outcomes is heavily skewed in favor of affluent applicants. That is not the result of discrimination by admissions officers, but rather the consequence of privileged families deftly playing by the rules of the meritocratic game.
My research convinced me that the ever-more-frenzied activity surrounding selective admissions is essentially ceremonial - an elaborate national ritual of just desserts. The fact that the fates of particular applicants at particular colleges remain uncertain until the end enables us to believe that the winners earn their victories in a fair game. That is how the anxiety that attends the application season is deceptive: It encourages those who experience it to believe that the outcomes of the process are considerably more uncertain than they actually are.
More perniciously perhaps, the feverishness of each year's application season allows us to take comfort in modest reforms that mostly only tinker with that process. Some recent fixes at selective institutions - eliminating early decision, making the SAT an optional component of applications, or, a bit more radically, proposals to replace individualized selection with a lottery system for all those applicants who meet some general criteria - will do nothing to change the distribution of opportunity that delivers talented applicants to admissions officers in a markedly class-stratified way.
It would be far better if we turned our reformist energies toward improving educational opportunity earlier in life. Research in child development makes clear that young people's academic fates are decisively shaped by the amounts and kinds of resources available to them in their earliest years. A national preschool program, generously supported by the federal government, would take us a long way toward equity in selective college admissions. So too would national support for adequate college guidance at high schools in low-income areas and for the "extra" curriculars, like music, art, and varsity sports, that make meritocracy more varied and more fun for kids in wealthier school districts. Focusing our concern on larger, undoubtedly more difficult educational problems will be a tough change, especially when it means thinking about the needs of children other than our own. But the only way to have an educational meritocracy that is also genuinely just will be to make the entire system of college preparation more equitable.
Mitchell L. Stevens is associate professor of education and sociology at New York University. He is the author of Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (Harvard University Press, 2007).
Originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2008 (http://chronicle.com)
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=btd28353rsy8qkwtdxlcv4g539qtw626]]>
Funding from the grant given by the Department of State will go towards short-term, non-credit courses on American studies and cultural exchange topics, in which worldwide representatives are invited to participate. Staff of Hosay's institute have served as consultants in over 15 countries around the world in order to better improve their studies of the U.S. Hosay has served as a consultant for the U.S. State Department in Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Italy, Egypt, Armenia, Belarus, Russia, Japan, Korea and Thailand, and has also lectured at a number of foreign universities.
More information on MIAS can be found at: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/humsocsci/mias/
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Miller-Idriss, who studies how ordinary people construct and understand citizenship and national belonging in their everyday lives, was honored for her article, "Everyday Understandings of Citizenship in Germany." The article emerged from eighteen months of ethnographic research in three vocational schools in Berlin, where Miller- Idriss studied generational transformations in citizenship and national belonging through interviews and focus groups with teachers and students as well as observation in civics classrooms.
Llosa received a Carras award for her project, "Validating a Standard-based Classroom Assessment of English Proficiency: A Multitrait, Multimethod Approach," which investigates the validity of teacher judgments of English learners' language proficiency.
The W. Gabriel Carras Award was established in recognition of former Associate Dean Gabriel Carras, who during his 50-year career at NYU, mentored junior faculty. The annual award for promising research and scholarship is given to a member of the faculty who is in the first or second year of their pre-tenure appointment.
]]>"It's a place where morality and personal life and behavior and social change all come together," he told the Times. "There's this feeling it's an important issue in everyday life."
Source: New York Times, Oct. 25, 2007
]]>"By providing really nice things for our kids, we're teaching them to expect such goodies as their due. And we're forgetting the older collegiate ideal, which prized the life of the mind over the lure of materialism."
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (10/23/07)
]]>"We want to be an outside agency that is looking at data to see what is really effective," Arum told the New York Times.
The group's inaugural conference will be held on October 5 at the CUNY Graduate Center. For more information, visit http://nycresearchpartnership.ssrc.org/.
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A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher, Zimmerman is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century" (Harvard, 2006), "Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools" (Harvard, 2002), and "Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America's Public Schools, 1880-1925" (Kansas, 1999). His academic articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Teachers College Record, and History of Education Quarterly. Zimmerman is also a frequent op-ed contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and other popular newspapers and magazines.
For more information on the History News Network, visit http://hnn.us.
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Arum and his collaborators, Calvin Morrill (UC Irvine), Lauren Edelman (UC Berkeley), and Karolyn Tyson (UNC Chapel Hill), are conducting the first large-scare survey and ethnographic analysis of the dynamics of law and everyday school life. The research focuses on three arenas of legal regulation that are central to schools: discipline, civil rights (including sexual harassment), and free speech.
Arum's research study, "A National Probability Survey of Teachers and Administrators: Tracking Variation in Educators' Perceptions and Experience of Law," also has received funding in the amount of $92,400 from the Kauffman Foundation. An extension of the research project mentioned above, the study will survey a national sample of public school teachers and administrators and will identify variation in legal consciousness and its relationship to education.
]]>New ideas suggesting the introduction of social justice principles to math classes are stirring much debate among educators. Introducing these new issues can work to either further engage students with their coursework, or to take away from the quality of math that students learn.
Diane Ravitch believes that integrating social and economic justice ideals into math class will become propagandizing and distract from math curriculum. She tells the New York Sun that these issues should stay in social studies classrooms.
]]>Home Depot has announced that its in-store signage in all new stores will be in both English and Spanish—a decision that does not surprise Marcelo Suarez-Orozco.
Because of the large percentage of immigrants coming of Latin America, wealth generated by Spanish-speaking residents in the U.S. will approach $1 trillion by the end of the decade, he told the New York Sun’s Gary Shapiro.
]]>New York City’s Department of Education announced in December that the School for the Physical City—a theme-based academy that uses city streets, bridges, and architecture to teach math, science, history, and art—would be closing in 2010.
Diane Ravitch says the demise of the school is instructive.
“It really goes to show how fragile these schools are,” Ravitch told the New York Daily News. “So many of these schools are dependent on one person with a big idea who brings people together, but they don’t survive when that person leaves.”
]]>Arum is currently engaged in a 15-country analysis on how inequality in access to higher education is related to system expansion, differentiation, and market structure. Under the Fulbright award, Arum will extend this cross-national analysis of access to higher education in collaboration with colleagues at Tel Aviv University.
James Devitt
Phone: 212-998-6808
james.devitt@nyu.edu
Diane Ravitch stresses the importance of science education, especially for New York City’s school children, in a Nov. 21 op/ed in the New York Sun.
“All of our city’s children need to understand the principles of science, which are so important to their futures and to the future of our nation,” she writes. “Ignorance of science is inexcusable in an age when computer science, medicine, pharmaceuticals, and other technology-related fields are our most dynamic growth-sectors.”
]]>Jonathan Zimmerman, writing in the Teachers College Record, argues that a Florida law requiring American history to be taught as factual, rather than as constructed, “reflects a profound and troubling ignorance about the rules, logic, and structure of our discipline.” However, Zimmerman, in part, blames history teachers and professors for the law’s passage.
The United States lacks “a system to evaluate and reward good history teaching,” he notes. “Instead, we penalize it! From Research One universities to liberal arts colleges, the best single predictor of your rank and salary is the fraction of your time that you spend doing research. The more time you devote to teaching, meanwhile, the worse your chances are for tenure, promotion, and raises. Until that changes, nothing will: Americans won’t know a lot of history because it won’t be in historians’ interest to teach them.”
]]>While colleges and universities can do a better job of training future teachers, the American public also bears some responsibility in improving teacher education, Jonathan Zimmerman writes in a Philadelphia Inquirer op/ed.
“As a professor at an education school, I freely admit that institutions like my own bear a big part of the blame,” he writes. “But as a historian, I also know that the problem has much deeper roots. The American public - that means you - simply doesn’t value teaching enough to improve it.”
“As a society, we possess the wealth and human capital to place a highly skilled, knowledgeable, and experienced teacher in every American classroom,” Zimmerman concludes. “We just don’t have the will to do it. The fault, dear American, is not simply in our teacher-preparation programs. It’s in ourselves.”
]]>James Devitt
Phone: 212-998-6808
james.devitt@nyu.edu
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco says that Latinos, who currently contribute nearly $700 billion to the gross domestic product in the United States, will eventually add $1 trillion to the American economy.
"To give you a sense of what's at stake, the gross domestic product each year by Latinos is now close to $700 billion," he said. By the end of the decade, Latinos will contribute $1 trillion to the U.S. economy.
Suarez-Orozco, speaking in Washington state, added that there are 41 million people of Hispanic origin living in the United States today -- more than there are people in Spain, Colombia, and Argentina.
His comments appeared in Washington’s Tri-City Herald.
]]>Jonathan Zimmerman takes a critical view of the Chinese government’s financing of an American high school advanced placement class, “Chinese Language and Culture,” in a Christian Science Monitor op/ed.
“About a decade after he seized power, fascist dictator Benito Mussolini began a broad campaign to promote Italian-language instruction in American schools,” Zimmerman writes. “The top five scholars won free trips to Italy, where they attended state-run summer camps. They wore fascist uniforms, received military training, and learned how to hail the Italian flag.”
The Chinese government, he writes, “will probably follow Mussolini's model and try to use the new AP course to play up China’s economic achievements and play down its crimes…What, if anything, will the texts - officially, written by the College Board - say about the Tiananmen Square massacre? About the jailing of Chinese journalists? The abuse of psychiatric patients? We have the right to know.”
]]>New U.S. Census data shows that the number of foreign-born people in New York City has grown by nearly half a million since 2000.
“Immigrants are not only our history but our destiny,” Marcelo Suarez-Orozco told the New York Daily News. “This is a city where, once again, immigrants will reshape its future.”
]]>James Devitt
Phone: 212-998-6808
james.devitt@nyu.edu
Diane Ravtich, in an op/ed in the Los Angeles Times, writes that foundations “have a decidedly mixed record” on education. Noting that Warren Buffett’s gift of $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will give the foundation unprecedented power to “direct the course of American education,” Ravitch contends that the “most successful American philanthropists by far were Andrew Carnegie and Julius Rosenwald,” who headed Sears, Roebuck, & Co., while others have failed to bring about beneficial changes.
“Educators are waiting with bated breath to see which direction (the Gates Foundation) will take,” she adds.
Jonathan Zimmerman contends that President Bush’s actions taken in the “War on Terror” echo Abraham Lincoln’s during the Civil War.
“In the name of national security, the Bush administration has jailed suspected terrorists without showing cause,” he writes in an op/ed in the Providence Journal. “It has denied them the right to counsel and other basic liberties. It has conducted warrantless eavesdrops on phone calls and e-mails. And it has insisted that the White House -- not Congress -- has the right to do all of this, on its own.
“As in the Civil War, meanwhile, the Supreme Court has sought to rein in the president. Most recently, it ruled that the White House could not establish secret military commissions without congressional authority. It's still not clear how the president -- or Congress -- will respond.”
]]>New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has invited 25 percent of the city’s public schools to join an “empowerment zone,” under which these schools operate outside of normal districts.
In the New York Sun, education historian Diane Ravitch calls this “an unprecedented move” that raises questions about what school districts will look like in five to 10 years.
]]>Marcelo Suarez-Orozco notes that the United States attracts India’s most educated to its shores.
“The average Indian in the U.S. is 30,000 times more likely to have an advanced degree than the average Indian in India,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “So we are really skimming the cream of the crop.”
]]>Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier, often at odds on the issue of education reform, have been united by concern over the status of the nation’s urban schools. “Recent trends and events seem to be confirming our mutual fears and jeopardizing our common hopes about what schooling might accomplish for the nation’s children,” they write in a commentary that appeared in the May 24 issue of Education Week.
]]>Jonathan Zimmerman, analyzing New York City’s efforts to bar students from carrying cell phones in public schools, contends parental resistance to this action is due to anxiety experienced by Mom and Dad, not concerns about the safety of their children.
“As a parent of someone who is about to turn 13, I can well understand the impulse to ‘stay connected’ with our kids - and to keep them safe,” he writes in a Christian Science Monitor op/ed. “But as a historian and an educator, I'm deeply troubled by it. By tethering our children to us, I worry, we’re not letting them grow up on their own. And we're foisting our worries on them, in ways that will haunt them well into adulthood.”
]]>The May 21 Week in Review section of The New York Times contemplates immigration. A story by Nina Bernstein, immigration writer, includes a look back at the last 100 years of Mexican immigration in the U.S.
Bernstein quotes Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of Immigration Studies at NYU in the Steinhardt School, who said, "We can't have it both ways -- an economy that's addicted to immigrant labor, but that's not ready to pay the cost."
]]>In an Associated Press wire story, Marcelo Suarez-Orozco said the immigration rallies made a statement for those who weren't aware of the issue.
Portions of the May 3 article:
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, director of immigration studies at New York University, said he believes any consolidation of local groups won't happen until leaders see what comes out of Congress.
A bill that passed the House would make illegal immigrants vulnerable to felony charges, while a Senate bill would allow immigrants in the U.S. longer than five years to apply for citizenship.
“Clearly the ball now is in the court of the political class,” Suarez-Orozco said. “But in the long run, the elephant in the room is how (the marches) will be translated into political muscle.”But Suarez-Orozco said the largely peaceful nature of the rallies should foster support for the immigrants' cause – especially for those who haven't taken a strong position on the issue.
“What's at stake is that great middle section of the population who haven't really thought about immigration a lot,” Suarez-Orozco said. “Yesterday, they took notice.”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20060502-1510-immigration-whatnext.html
]]>Marcelo Suarez-Orozco describes what's behind the wave of protests across the country in response to the recent legislation on immigration.
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a professor and co-director of immigration studies at New York University, said no one anticipated the extent and fervor of the recent protests. They were, he said, the result of a perfect storm of anger at harsh legislation and the mobilization of what he calls "blended families" -- those in which parents and older siblings are undocumented and younger American-born youth are not.
"This is a generation for whom the issue hits very close to home. And it has been raised with American civic values embedded in its cultural DNA," Suarez-Orozco says.
]]>Diane Ravitch says a new report that says many requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act are left ignored and unmonitored by local schools, districts, and the federal government, will make the law more vulnerable to charges that it contains too many mandates.
Ravitch, research professor of education in Steinhardt and historian of education, was an assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush,
]]>Jonathan Zimmerman, associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, says that it's dangerous to presume knowing the overall attitude or value of an ethnic group or culture.
In an op-ed in the March 30 issue of USA Today, Zimmerman says, "The culture concept revolutionized Western thought, forcing us to acknowledge the huge distortions that a ladder of civilization based on race had fostered. But culture imposed distortions of its own, starting with the dubious idea that everybody in a given culture, or race, thinks in the same way."
]]>Miller-Idriss and Morning will study young immigrants as new Americans and their associations based on their home countries and current environments -- in schools-- and how those experiences shape their identities and perceptions.
After the initial pilot study, an extended ethnographic (research study on human culture) will be conducted in two urban northeast high schools next year, followed by a national survey of approximately 1,000 youth.
Jennifer Zwiebel
Phone: 212-998-6797
jennifer.zwiebel@nyu.edu
The March 16 issue of the New York Sun praises the work of Diane Ravitch, education historian and research professor in Steinhardt's Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, following her receipt of the Kenneth J. Bialkin/Citigroup Public Service Award on March 14 at the American Jewish Historical Society.
The article recounts the evening that included speakers Randi Weingarten, United Federation of Teachers president, and Harold Levy, former New York City schools chancellor, honoring Ravitch.
The Kenneth J. Bialkin/Citigroup Service Award is named for the former Citigroup board member, and is presented to individuals whose achievements mirror his areas of passion and commitment including education, law, business and finance, public service, American Jewish identity, and the defense of freedom and individual rights.
In 2005, Ravitch received the John Dewey Award for Excellence in Education from the United Federation of Teachers.
Ravitch's recent publications include The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Alfred A. Knopf, May 2003), and Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (Simon & Schuster, 2000).
]]>Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of history and education in Steinhardt's Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, takes the resignation of Larry Summers as proof that teachers need to be "graded" more accurately.
An excerpt from his op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor on March 14:
"Why did Larry Summers get forced out of the Harvard presidency? There were many reasons, starting with Mr. Summers's impolitic remarks about women's ability in the sciences. He also annoyed the faculty by suggesting that they teach more introductory-level classes, not just narrow courses about their research specialities.
But as Mr. Summers must have known, mere exhortation will never change university teaching. Although we all give lip service to classroom instruction, there's simply no reward in it. Teaching doesn't advance your career."
]]>Named for the former Citigroup board member, the award is presented to individuals whose achievements mirror his areas of passion and commitment including education, law, business and finance, public service, American Jewish identity, and the defense of freedom and individual rights.
In 2005, Ravitch received the John Dewey Award for Excellence in Education from the United Federation of Teachers.
Ravitch's recent publications include The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Alfred A. Knopf, May 2003), and Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (Simon & Schuster, 2000).
Jennifer Zwiebel
Phone: 212-998-6797
jennifer.zwiebel@nyu.edu