Graduate students and I recently began a course together called Critical Approaches to Literature. It’s one of simplest pleasures I know of: sitting around a table in good, smart company and making sense of something. We first had to make sense of the course title. “Critical Approaches to Literature” seems to float in the ether [...]

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The professoriate is losing its radicals, the New York Times reported recently, and new professors are more moderate than their predecessors. The article suggests that the professors who flooded universities in the 60s and 70s were cut from a different cloth. Today’s academics are less politically motivated, more moderate, and research-minded rather than ideological. [...]

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I’ve become hypersensitive to a term recently that gets floated in education discussions. It seems used with lightness and universal comprehension. The word is literacy. In a recent meeting, someone asked a roomful of educators and doctoral students what literacy actually meant. No one knew. On a basic level, we agreed that it had something [...]

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General Electric just gave the New York City public school system $17.9 million. It’s the largest single grant given to the city schools and will be distributed over a five-year period. The mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg, had this to say: “Public-private partnerships like this one with the GE Foundation have been essential to [...]

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In yesterday’s paper, the New York Times heralded the Department of Education’s efforts to break up the large public high schools into smaller learning communities.  Speaking of one particular high school in Brooklyn, the Times wrote: “Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made new small high schools like Law and Justice a centerpiece of his [...]

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