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Education
Articles from The Atlantic Monthly's archive and related links "College Admissions: The Big Picture" (October 2004) Our annual survey of the admissions landscape uncovered recent and upcoming changes to the process, growing concern about tuition increases, and serious questions about whether colleges are fulfilling their mission. By James Fallows & V. V. Ganeshananthan "Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore?" (March 2004) How several well-known writers (and the Unabomber) would fare on the new SAT. By John Katzman, Andy Lutz and Erik Olson "The Tuition Crunch" (January/February 2004) For low-income students college is increasingly out of reach. By Jennifer Washburn "The Other Gender Gap" (January/February 2004) Maybe boys just weren't meant for the classroom. By Marshall Poe "Our First Annual College-Admissions Survey" (November 2003) "Calm Down!" the deans and counselors say. Herewith an exploration of the American college-admissions system "The New College Chaos" (November 2003) College admissions officers say they now have many, many more applications than they know how to handle—and, often, less reliable information to help them decide which students to admit. By James Fallows "The Late-Decision Program" (November 2003) Most people have heard of early-decision programs. But there's also a little-known safety net at the other end of the process, to catch those who don't get in anywhere. By V. V. Ganeshananthan "What Makes A College Good?" (November 2003) A new survey seeks to get behind the well-publicized—and much criticized—college rankings and measure schools by how good a job they do of actually educating their students. By Nicholas Confessore "The Selectivity Illusion" (November 2003) Look at the data closely, and the neat hierarchy of selectivity begins to fall apart. By Don Peck "The Bias Question" (November 2003) In a surprising challenge to the SAT's reputation as an unbiased measure of student learning, one researcher has argued that blacks do better than matched-ability whites on the harder questions of the SAT—something he believes their scores should reflect. By Jay Mathews "A New Deal for Teachers" (July/August 2003) Here's how to fix our desperate urban schools: attract better teachers by paying them more—much more—but tie compensation to performance and allow districts to fire bad teachers quickly. By Matthew Miller "A Grand Compromise" (January/February 2003) Saving American education requires ending the reliance of public schools on local property-tax bases. By James P. Pinkerton "Reversing White Flight" (October 2002) Even if vouchers don't improve schools, they will almost certainly improve neighborhoods. By Jonathan Rauch "The University as Business" (June 2002) Universities have come to regard their students as customers. By Richard Posner "The New Counterculture" (November 2001) The rapid growth of the home-schooling movement owes much to the energy and organizational skills of its Christian advocates. By Margaret Talbot "The Early-Decision Racket" (September 2001) How a controversial tactic in elite-college admissions has distorted the admissions process and added an insane intensity to middle-class obsessions about college. By James Fallows "Confessions of a Prep School College Counselor" (September 2001) "I had no idea what I was in for"—no idea that confident students and loving parents would turn into complete neurotics. By Caitlin Flanagan "High Stakes Are for Tomatoes" (August 2000) Statewide testing of students, with penalties for failure, has run into opposition from parents across the political spectrum. By Peter Schrag "The War Against Boys" (May 2000) This we think we know: American schools favor boys and grind down girls. The truth is the very opposite. By virtually every measure, girls are thriving in school; it is boys who are the second sex. By Christina Hoff Sommers "The Kept University" (March 2000) Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education—disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies. By Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn "The Rise of Jewish Schools" (October 1999) The phenomenon comes at a bad time for the public schools—and opens up a new debate over the meaning of "integration." By Peter Beinart "Schooling the Imagination" (September 1999) Waldorf schools, which combine a multisensory approach to learning with a strong emphasis on ethics, may be the world's "best-kept education secret." By Todd Oppenheimer "A Bold Experiment to Fix City Schools" (July 1999) A case can be made for vouchers that everyone can support—and the time for a "grand bargain" is at hand. By Matthew Miller "Ready, Read!" (November 1998) Forget concepts like local autonomy, charter schools, and choice. The way to resurrect schools that have failed is to take power from the principals or superintendents, and to impose a simple and rigid curriculum. This approach is being tried in hundreds of places, and it's working. By Nicholas Lemann "University, Inc." (October 1998) "A revolution is afoot in higher education.... Those who pay the piper (corporations and governments) will surely call the tune. The relevance of universities is on the line." A review of Bill Reading's book, The University in Ruins. By David Harvey "The Case Against Bilingual Education" (May 1998) Why even Latino parents are rejecting a program designed for their children's benefit. By Rosalie Pedalino Porter "The Trouble With Single-Sex Schools" (April 1998) Proponents of single-sex education make a variety of claims for its advantages. Those advantages, the author argues, are greatly overstated. By Wendy Kaminer "How to Pay for a Good College" (March 1998) The former president of Stanford University reviews The Student Aid Game By Michael S. McPherson and Morton O. Schapiro. By Donald Kennedy "Toward a New Public School" (December 1997) A book review of Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting Can Transform America's Schools by Paul T. Hill, Lawrence C. Pierce, and James W. Guthrie. By Theodore R. Sizer "The Reading Wars" (November 1997) Improbably, a dispute over pedagogical method is now hot politics in California. By Nicholas Lemann "The Near-Myth of Our Failing Schools" (October 1997) There never was a golden age of education in America, and the present condition of the schools is far less gloomy than the rhetoric of alarm allows. By Peter Schrag "The Computer Delusion" (July 1997) There is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve teaching and learning, yet school districts are cutting programs—music, art, physical education—that enrich children's lives to make room for this dubious nostrum, and the Clinton Administration has embraced the goal of "computers in every classroom" with credulous and costly enthusiasm. By Todd Oppenheimer "The Academy vs. the Humanities" (August 1997) "The humanities are corrupted in the academy, the institution intended to do society's purest and most serious thinking for it." By Frank Kermode "What Should Children Learn?" (December 1995) National standards have been thwarted, but state-mandated academic standards and local action can yet save the schools. By Paul Gagnon "The Structure of Success in America" (August 1995) In America perhaps only race is a more sensitive subject than the way we sort ourselves out in the struggle for success. At the center of that struggle are higher education and ETS, the Educational Testing Service. Herewith an inside look at the history and workings of one of the most familiar yet least public of American institutions. By Nicholas Lemann "The Great Debate Revisited" (December 1994) Contention between proponents of the "meaning first" and the "phonics first" approaches to literacy goes back more than a century. That the former is now in the ascendant, the author argues, should be cause for concern. By Art Levine "The Failure of Sex Education" (October 1994) "Comprehensive sex education" mandated in seventeen states, is the educational fad of the hour, yet there is little evidence that it "works"—prevents teenage pregnancy and stanches the spread of sexually transmitted disease. Defended by its professional-class originators as "getting real" about teenage sex, it fails to speak to the grim reality of what the author calls "the new sexual revolution" among the young. By Barbara Dafoe Whitehead "The Newest Minority" (July 1993) We must face up to a looming political problem: the core constituency for the public schools is shrinking. By Michael Barrett "What School Choice Really Means" (November 1992) The elementary and junior high schools of East Harlem have been held up by many educators and politicians as models, and as proof that allowing parents to choose their children's schools is the key to improved performance. Many of the achievements in East Harlem are real, the author finds, but the reasons for them are not always apparent—and not always faced up to by educators. By David Kirp "The Other Crisis in American Education" (November 1991) A college professor looks at the forgotten victims of our mediocre educational system—the potentially high achievers whose SAT scores have fallen, and who read less, understand less of what they read, and know less than the top students of a generation ago. By Daniel J. Singal "The Case for More School Days" (November 1990) Call it Huck Finn's law: The authentic American flourishes in spite of schooling, not because of it. As applied, this has meant that American kids have one of the shortest school years in the Western world. It shows. Today what Huck Finn didn't know would hurt him. By Michael Barrett More on this issue from Atlantic Unbound: Flashback: "Educational Measures" Atlantic articles on educational testing and meritocracy. Related Links The United States Department of Education Project Vote Smart's Issue Links: Education Education Policy Analysis Archives Manual on School Uniforms The National Education Association Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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