Education
Feb 12, 2012
Minnesota's yawning racial and ethnic academic achievement gap is among the nation's worst. In nationwide tests of fourth-grade reading, for example, our state's black and Hispanic students lag three years behind their white peers. In recent years, only Washington, D.C., has consistently had a wider gap of this kind.
Jan 30, 2012
Madame Chair, Senator Nelson, and Members of the Committee: My name is Mitch Pearlstein and I’m founder and president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative and free market think tank up and running in Minneapolis for 22 years now. My previous lives in education have included service on the staffs of University of Minnesota President C. Peter Magrath and Gov. Albert H. Quie, as well as in the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. My doctorate is in educational administration from the University of Minnesota and my most recent book[i] spends a considerable amount of time on ways in which we might improve the educational achievement of all children, but especially our most disadvantaged young people.
Jan 10, 2012
When it comes to government’s essential role in funding education, the holiest of grails is significantly improving quality while simultaneously constraining costs.
Dec 21, 2011
C. Peter Magrath, who served as president of the University of Minnesota from 1974 to 1984, previously served two years as president of Binghamton University in Upstate New York. Without getting into the long and winding story, he’s finishing off his second stint as president there later this month—just a short of 40 years after he arrived the first time.
The fact that I worked for him at both institutions and that he’s a great friend and mentor is personally important, albeit not vital to this story, which has to do with how public universities have come to elect presidents. Or, more precisely, it’s about the constrained pools from which presidents get picked.
Dec 15, 2011
In a column for Bloomberg, Virginia Postrel explains how “federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.”
She calls the idea heretical, which it may be to some. But anyone who understands anything about economics should immediately nod their heads in agreement. I think I audibly uttered, “No duh.” There’s just no question that tuition will increase when, thanks to government grants or low-interest loans, people have more money to spend on tuition.
Nov 20, 2011
Nowhere are liberalism's failures on greater display than in the race-based busing schemes of recent American history.
For decades, social planners—armed with elaborate maps—have sought to impose their vision of perfect racial balance on other people's schools and neighborhoods.
Oct 9, 2011
In America today, we rush to fumigate our public schools at the slightest hint of religion. Yet until recently, a Minnesota public charter school—Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TiZA)—operated in our midst as an Islamic school at taxpayer expense.
Sep 25, 2011
A north Minneapolis school at Olson Memorial Hwy. and Humboldt Avenue has demographics that seem a sure predictor of our state's most intractable education problem. The student population there is 99 percent black and 91 percent poor, and about 70 percent of the children come from single-parent families.
Sep 11, 2011
Our children are living in perilous times. To prepare them to preserve their heritage of freedomin this dangerous world, we must place education aimed at cultivating democratic citizenship at theheart of the school curriculum.
Sep 7, 2011
Very high rates of family breakdown in the United States are subtracting from what very large numbers of students are learning in school—besides holding them back in many other ways.
This in turn is damaging the country economically, by making us less hospitable to innovation while also leaving millions of Americans less competitive in an increasingly demanding worldwide marketplace.
All of which is leading—and can only lead—to deepening class divisions.
