Syndication
Education
Will Yalies March on the Sun?
The expensively educated elitists over at The New York Sun are making like they’re U.S. News & World Report. They’ve developed an ever-so-scientific system for grading New York City’s elite private schools.
The Sun’s methodology:
The New York Sun has assigned its own letter grades, using a mathematical formula that takes into account the school’s net assets and the number of students it sends to Harvard and adjusts for the size of the student body.
So it’s Harvard uber alles. Students who choose to go to Yale, Columbia, Amherst, Vassar or, heaven forbid, a fine public institution like Berkeley (full disclosure: my alma mater) — they’re worth bupkes.
The Jewish angle? Ramaz earned a respectable B+ from the Sun.
Okay, here’s the real Jewish angle: Sun editor Seth Lipsky and managing editor Ira Stoll (Harvard grads both, of course) are, respectively, the founding editor and former managing editor of this rag.
Pro-Palestinian, Pro-Israel Activists Team Up
In a historic instance of inadvertent collaboration, the combined efforts of pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students at San Jose State University in California landed their school a spot on Mother Jones magazine’s annual roundup of campus activism:
Mother Jones reports:
Adopting a tactic popularized on other campuses, in April San Jose State University students built a mock version of Israel’s “security wall,” complete with checkpoints and 50 fake Israeli soldiers and Palestinians. Pro-Israel students crashed the event, wearing shirts that read, “If I were a suicide bomber, you would be dead.”
It’s to Mother Jones’s credit that it seems to think both sides have legitimate grievances, given that left-wing magazines all too often place the blame solely on Israel.
A Liberal Perspective on Brooklyn’s Arabic Academy Brouhaha
Conservative media outlets like the New York Post have led the charge against a controversial Arabic-themed public school planned for Brooklyn, the Khalil Gibran International Academy. But, Richard Kahlenberg argues in a compelling New York Times Op-Ed, there’s reason for liberals to be wary as well:
The late Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, once famously said that the rationale for public schools was to teach children what it means to be an American.
At their core, in free democratic societies, schools are meant to develop children who will grow up with critical minds to be productive employees and tolerant, independent-thinking citizens. But in America, given our diversity, Shanker believed that public schools should provide a common education to children from all backgrounds that teaches not only skills but also American history, culture and democracy. Public schools, to him, were critical in this process of Americanization.
Keeping Shanker’s point in mind, there are principled reasons to be concerned about the Gibran school that are not simply bigoted. Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches history and education at New York University, has likened opposition to the school with anti-German hysteria during World War I, when state legislatures passed measures barring or restricting German language classes. But there is a significant difference between teaching Arabic in a public school — something all Americans should support — and creating a school dedicated primarily to the study of Arabic language, history and culture.
Ha’aretz to American Jews: Reconsider Opposition to Gov’t Support for Religious Schools
The liberal Israeli daily Ha’aretz is urging American Jews to reconsider one of the cornerstones of our community’s liberalism: opposition to government funding for religious schools. In an editorial on the importance of Jewish education for maintaining Jewish identity, citing in particular the effectiveness of day schools, Ha’aretz writes:
If Jewish community leaders in the United States are genuine in their desire to slow the processes weakening their community, they would do well to reexamine their entrenched opposition to state or federal support for religious education, including Jewish education. They fear that such support, even in the form of tax rebates, would violate the absolute separation of church and state, which could in the long term harm the Jews above all. But it would appear that the proven danger of assimilation must take precedence over fears of potential dangers, particularly after the experience of other Jewish communities that receive funding from the countries they live in without being hurt as a result.
This recommendation, in addition to being surprising, is problematic on two fronts.
Monkey Business at Jewish Girls’ School in Calcutta
India’s Express News Service reports:
Much to the amusement of students and teachers, a monkey sneaked into the campus of Jewish Girls’ School today and caused quite a stir. However, it also attacked a few students when they came near it. The incident occurred at 10.30 this morning. After watching its antics for some time the locals caught it by using a net. Later the simian was handed over to Park Street Police and is now being kept in a separate cell.
Who knew there was a Jewish girls’ school in Calcutta?
