Sol Stern
The Archive
Don't play dumb: Fariña's witnessed cheating in city schools for years
Like Captain Renault in “Casablanca,” Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña is “shocked, shocked” to discover that there’s lots of cheating in the city’s public schools. Fariña was apparently so unnerved by...
Common Core tests raise the bar for all students
It is hard to say which claim about the Common Core is the more absurd — the right-wing activists’ assertion that it’s President Obama’s instrument for “federalizing the schools,” or...
Why Common Core matters
The biggest new thing in American public education these days is a two-volume, 230-page, written-by-committee document called the Common Core State Standards. Forty-five states have pledged to the federal government...
US ENGLISH TRAGEDY
AT a campaign stop last week, Barack Obama scoffed at the idea that our schools should put a premium on teaching English to Spanish-speaking kids: "Instead of worrying about whether...
PULLING A 'FAST' ONE
JONATHAN Kozol has a new book out, which means that he hasn't been eating lately. Let me explain: According to his publisher, every Kozol book is a "courageous expose" of...
RADICAL TEACH
MORE than 400 New York City high-school math teachers and education professors gathered in Brooklyn late last month for a three-day conference on "Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math...
SAVE THE CATHOLIC SCHOOLS
THE schools that have the best record in our inner cit ies are also the most endan gered. It's a system that largely started here in New York City, too:...
MATH AND MARXISM
THERE'S a fifth column in New York City's public schools - radical teachers who openly undermine Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's curriculum mandates and use their classrooms to indoctrinate students in...