Word: schooled
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...born Protestant who changed her name from Marie to Miriam to accommodate her Jewish in-laws. His father Solomon was a food importer who was successful enough by the time Salinger turned 13 to move the family to Park Avenue and enroll his underachieving son in a Manhattan private school. Salinger flunked out within two years. He was then packed off to Valley Forge Military Academy, outside Philadelphia. It would later be the model for Pencey Prep, the school Caulfield runs away from. (See the top 10 banned books...
After graduating from Valley Forge, Salinger ran away from several schools. He managed only two semesters at New York University before dropping out. His father decided to take him into the family business and brought his boy along to Austria and Poland to learn all about ham. "They finally dragged me off to Bydgoszcz for a couple of months," Salinger wrote years later. "Where I slaughtered pigs, wagoned through the snow with the big slaughtermaster." Ham was not in his future. Back in the U.S., he made another halfhearted attempt at school, this time at Ursinus College in rural Pennsylvania...
...nationally, in the Democratic Party). The UFT's slogan is "A Union of Professionals," but it is quite the opposite: an old-fashioned industrial union that has won for its members a set of work rules more appropriate to factory hands. There are strict seniority rules about pay, school assignment, length of the school day and year. In New York, it is near impossible to fire a teacher - even one accused of a crime, drug addiction or flagrant misbehavior. The miscreants are stashed in "rubber rooms" at full pay, for years, while the union pleads their cases. In New York...
...challenge has come not from privatization - but in the form of public charter schools, in which individual entrepreneurs are chartered by states to create their own schools, according to their own visions. Not surprisingly, those visions usually don't include the workplace straitjacket that comes with unionization. The successful charters usually have longer school days and years, more intense efforts to guide student behavior, more creative or theme-oriented curriculums and more aggressive evaluation of teachers. Not all these schools work. Indeed, it can be argued that most states have been too slow to close down those that...
...There are national implications to this fight. As Shanker pointed out, American schools have been slipping for decades - our students are now 32nd internationally in math scores, 10th in science, 12th in reading. It will be impossible to rebuild our economy - to create the sophisticated, high-paying jobs we need - as long as we have an archaic, industrial-age school system. It's also hard to keep a strong democracy with a citizenry that is increasingly uneducated and ill informed. No, teachers' unions are not the only problem here. Troglodytic local school boards and apathetic parents are just...