Word: schools
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...every school day of his childhood, my grandfather padded barefoot down eight kilometers of dirt track to go to class. His family was poor, but understood this blistering walk was the ticket to a better life - one that would lead him from an obscure village in Kerala to success in India's cities. A landmark bill put into effect this month aims to open his path to all, making free education a fundamental right for children between 6 and 14. The law is sorely needed in a country with the world's largest population of young people. At least...
...pork-barrel stimulus and toward social services like education. As he puts it, "We will be spending not on concrete but on people." In March, the Diet, Japan's parliament, passed legislation promised by Hatoyama to provide a $140 monthly subsidy to parents for each child of junior high school age or younger. With such measures, "the new administration will be able to lead the economy to a new growth path," he says...
Highly effective teaching should be the goal, and shabby instruction that handicaps students is simply unacceptable. Currently, union contracts make it notoriously difficult for school officials to take underperforming teachers out of the classroom, except in the most egregious cases. If providing a better education for all students is the goal, then new reform must also make it easier for school officials to fire inadequate teachers. Specifically, teachers should be reevaluated frequently and should have to reapply for their position periodically. Regular job evaluations are accepted as standard protocol in many other professions, and there is no reason teaching should...
Rather than merely forcing teachers to expend more hours in the classroom, smart school reform must center on reinforcing and rewarding high-quality and high-impact teaching. In the end, teachers who want to improve will benefit students the most...
...stand up to scrutiny? "There are some things that states can do and some that states can't do, but this law threads the needle perfectly," says Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law professor who helped write the legislation. He believes it will withstand constitutional challenge. "In the bill, Arizona only penalizes what is already a crime under federal law," says Kobach, a Yale Law School graduate and onetime counsel to former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. "That constitutes concurrent enforcement in legal terms, which the courts have said is permissible." Says Mark Krikorian, executive...