Connecting the Dots
Whatever the outcome of this month’s U.S. election and however bad the second wave of COVID-19 hits this winter, our world will continue to become more interconnected and more interdependent. Despite the closing of...
Standardized Testing Detriment to Minority Children
Over the last year or so, the movement against high-stakes standardized testing has subsided, maybe due to educational activists focusing their attention on more pressing issues, such as funding, in the Trump era, or...
Teachers Don’t Add Up
Instead of further denigrating the education profession by suggesting that teachers double up as armed bodyguards in the wake of the latest school shooting, we need to be taking radical steps to improve their...
Heritage Values
Last month, the United Nations and people around the globe celebrated International Mother Language Day by focusing on the movements to restore the status of indigenous and heritage languages and other mother tongues, and...
A Letter of Apology and Hope from America to its People
To the people who gave me life,I have failed and hurt you. I have turned my back on my people when you needed me the most. And, in truth, I’ve tried to erase the...
Electing Education
During last month’s midterm elections, education reform was a big issue in many races across the nation. The creation of more charter schools is at the core of most “reformist” agendas, but despite many...
End the System of School Segregation
One of the most disturbing realities of the U.S. education system is that schools remain largely segregated by race, ethnicity, and language more than 60 years after the Supreme Court declared “separate but equal”...
Opinion–Can We Make Chinese Less Graphic?
While many schools are dropping foreign language classes, the number of schools offering Mandarin Chinese courses is rising. In 2001, about 300 schools...
The Right to Multiple Identities
Editorial by Dan Ward
The constitutional crisis in Spain’s autonomous region of Cataluña highlights the new reality of identification in our globalized world. Although many Catalans consider themselves to be both Catalan and Spanish, speak...
The Creativity of Human Language
Richard Lederer marvels at our capacity to invent language
For most of us, language is like the air we breathe. Like air, language is invisible and all around us. We need it to live, yet...