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Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it.

He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far.

he backed away from his advisers who proposed a big stimulus, and then diluted it with tax cuts that had already been shown to be inert. The result, as predicted in advance, was a half-stimulus that half-stimulated the economy.

About two-thirds of the approximately 125 charter schools in New York City are in public school buildings. The city generally provides the space for a nominal fee, such as a token $1 a year

With all those freebies, charter school students in public school buildings got about $650 more per student in public money and in-kind services in 2010 than traditional public school students, according to the Independent Budget Office.

lawsuit, brought by Leonie Haimson,

philanthropists doled out $684 million in private grants from 2000-08 to organizations involved in reforming the teaching profession.

biggest chunk of the money — 38 percent — went to teacher recruitment

22 percent was spent on professional development

According to Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.”

What she recommends, in fact, looks much more like a classical education than it does the industrial-era holdover system that still informs our unrenovated classrooms.

Arne Duncan’s proposal to “reward excellence” and push to directly connect teacher and principal evaluation and their income will only increase the stakes in testing, and will likely provide more incentives for cheating.

we may see high performing schools participate in cheating in the future because they now have a reason to want to score well to be rewarded for “being excellent while before they only have to pass to avoid failure, which their students already do.

high-stakes testing

In fact, when longitudinal studies of testing were examined to see if the achievement test scores of young children could predict the achievement test scores received by those same children a few years later, the answer was that the tests did not predict well at all.

scores received by young children on assessments of their social and behavioral skills turned out to be completely useless as predictors of the scores the children received on the same measures a few years later.

young children are undergoing significant changes in brain growth, physiology, and emotional regulation throughout their first eight years of life

Schools practicing this new culture of learning don’t t have to be invented. As pointed out by my colleague, Daniel Petter-Lipstein, the new culture of learning takes place in thousands of Montessori classrooms every day, as noted in his marvelous article, “Superwoman Was Already Here“ “The Montessori method cares far more about the inquiry process and less about the results of those inquiries, believing that children will eventually master–with the guidance of their teachers and the engaged use of the hands-on Montessori materials which control for error–the expected answers and results that are the focus of most traditional classroom activity.” Ironically, Bill Gates himself is a product of the Montessori system, so he should be intimately familiar with it.