It was a big, big day for the students at James C. Wright Middle School in Madison, Wisconsin, when the President came to town.
"The President of the United States is here in the same place where
you walk the halls, where you learn," Wright principal Nancy Evans told
the students. "Take this moment in history as nourishment."
TUCSON, Ariz. -- I’ll refer to her as Leticia X.
She is undocumented, but has been in this country since the age of three and is a top student at her high school. Yet, unless the law changes soon, she will be unable to continue with her studies. She tells my students at the University of Arizona that it is wrong that she will not be able to attend college next year: “I consider myself a U.S. citizen. It’s the only country I’ve ever known.”
Food is essential to our survival.
It impacts our health and wellbeing. It has the power to bring people
together.
Food can be manipulated in many ways,
from cooking to processing to using it as fuel. It provides tremendous
opportunities to create value, and, as such, food is big business.
Much of the food we eat starts as a
simple seed, or one that has been genetically manipulated to achieve
some desired objective. From there, food can be growing in any number
of ways, from conventional to organic and beyond, before it finds its
way to our plates.
President Obama has launched
a new national initiative against youth violence in the wake of the
brutal killing of Derrion Albert, a 16-year-old sophomore at Chicago’s
Fenger Academy High. Derrion’s fatal beating by several other
teens,
captured
on video from an
onlooker’s cell phone, has inundated the nightly news and the blogosphere
—prompting U.S.
If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word, that word would be “education.” In the 19th century, America led the way in universal basic education. Then, as other nations followed suit, the “high school revolution” of the early 20th century took us to a whole new level. And in the years after World War II, America established a commanding position in higher education.
Jaydon Serrano pushes back and forth in his swivel chair, his back
against a wall of blinking sound equipment. "I'm a little nervous and
excited," says the second-grader.
"You'll do great," says his mom, Ida Martinez.
When I graduated from high
school in San Antonio, Texas, I can remember at least two dozen girls
(out of a class of 600) pregnant or already with babies. It may seem
astonishing now, but it was fairly normal in 1991: so normal, in fact,
that our high school had responded with an academic track geared toward
expectant and young mothers.
Some of the most courageous actions for equality in the United States and South Africa have come from children - from the thousands who marched in Birmingham, only to have been met with fire hoses and police attack dogs, to the students who integrated Southern schools to the Soweto child uprising over the brutalities of apartheid.
In the lunchroom at Stowe Elementary School in Duluth, Minn., forlorn piles of half-eaten sandwiches and bruised bananas are transformed from trash to treasure.
Instead of tossing their uneaten school lunch scraps in the garbage bin, Stowe students donate their leftover fruits and vegetables to the school's worm compost. Items that aren't as compost-friendly, such as breads and potatoes, are donated to area farmers, who feed the free and tasty slop to their pigs.
To the surprise of many educators who campaigned last year for change in the White House, the Obama administration's first recipe for school reform relies heavily on Bush-era ingredients and adds others that make unions gag.
Standardized testing, school accountability, performance pay, charter schools -- all are integral to President Obama's $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" grant competition to spur innovation. None is a typical Democratic crowd-pleaser.
