(JTA) — “The public school system in this country is broken,” says Campbell Brown, education-reform advocate and former NBC and CNN news anchor. It’s this sentiment that led Campbell to create The Seventy Four, a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational news site launching Monday. The name refers to the 74 million school-age children in the United States….
It was the end-of-year party at my daughter’s religious preschool in the Israeli city of Modi’in, where we live. Raising cardboard Torahs aloft, around 15 children jumped up and down beneath a tallit held up by some of the dads. In a mixed-gender class of 35, not one of those children was female. The theme…
The Board of Education of the East Ramapo Central School District is under siege. There has been a relentless drumbeat in support of a bill pending in the legislature that, if enacted, would require the appointment of a “monitor” to exercise complete control over the school district. The elected Board of Education will be figureheads,…
In my previous column, I wrote about how a revival in Jewish education, one with a low bar for entry, is essential to maintaining our tradition in a world where the superficial trappings of religion — all dream catchers and menorahs — are replacing deeper meaning and understanding. Creating the infrastructure for this requires an…
All across New York City, Muslims are cheering Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to close public schools on the two holiest days of their religious calendar. And Jews should be cheering right along with them. Why should we be happy to see the city observe Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, days that commemorate the end…
An innovative lawsuit in Quebec offers an intriguing model for reforming the substandard secular education provided in many Hasidic communities. For years it’s been well known that many Hasidic yeshivas in New York fall far short of the state’s education department requirement that private school curricula be “substantially equivalent” to those in public schools. As…
It was ironic, to say the least, that it took coming to an oil-rich Arab emirate to get me to lead my first Rosh Hashanah service. Forty-five years ago I had earned Conservative rabbinic ordination from New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary. But this was the first time I had ever used it. I had turned,…
While purveyors of childhood Jewish education as a whole struggle with enrollment and relevance, a small number have become pioneering practitioners of “digital badging,” a new pedagogical model in which learners in a wide variety of learning environments earn digital badges that indicate their accomplishments, skills or knowledge. With help from associations like the Bill…
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