Wednesday, February 22, 2012

A Few of the Many Tabs

Diane Ravitch recently had two essays in the New York Review of Books, related to the publication of Pasi Sahlberg's book about the highly successful Finnish schools. Part one is a neat summary of the critique of the school reform movement. Part two nails New York's recent move to evaluate teachers based on testing and objective criteria, even in art and gym.
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A Modest Proposal to create eternal copyrights. After all, "How can our laws be so heartless as to deny [your great-great-great-grandchildren] the benefit of your hard work in the name of some do-gooding concept as the 'public good', simply because they were born a mere century and a half after the book was written?"
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Freelance science writer Kevin Zelnio tells what it's like to be uninsured and have your six-year-old hospitalized for pneumonia. I suppose at least a few people in the audience at tonight's Republican debate would yell out "Let him die!"
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I hope to soon read Laurence Lessig's One Way Forward: The Outsider's Guide to Fixing the Republic. According to Boing Boing, it offers concrete changes we could make to our laws to repair our damaged democracy.


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