As President Obama and his aides unveiled the administration's fiscal 2011 budget with lots of talk about reining in discretionary spending, they largely exempted programs important to higher education from the budget restraint they urged.
Not every higher education-related program would fare well under the budget blueprint; the administration would hold funding for many student aid programs other than Pell Grants at their 2010 levels and eliminate a handful of others; end the Department of Labor's Career Pathways Innovation Fund (a $125 million grant program for community colleges); and slice the budget of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
"At a time when most government spending is being frozen, President Obama is investing in education -- a clear reflection of the president's deep commitment to education," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a telephone news conference Monday. "The president has set a goal that America once again will lead the world in college completion by the end of the decade, and to do that, we need to improve the education at every level. This budget puts us on a path to success and meeting that goal. We have to educate our way to a better economy."
Read the full Inside Higher Ed article
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
VA County Not Teaching New Version of Anne Frank Classic
I was astounded by the article I recently read in The Washington Post regarding the classic work The Diary of Anne Frank. The Washington Post is reporting Culpeper County public school officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank's diary, one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, after a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes.
"The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition," which was published on the 50th anniversary of Frank's death in a concentration camp, will not be used in the future, said James Allen, director of instruction for the 7,600-student system. The school system did not follow its own policy for handling complaints about instructional materials, Allen said.
The diary documents the daily life of a Jewish girl in Amsterdam during World War II. Frank started writing on her 13th birthday, shortly before her family went into hiding in an annex of an office building. The version of the diary in question includes passages previously excluded from the widely read original edition, first published in Dutch in 1947. That book was arranged by her father, the only survivor in her immediate family. Some of the extra passages detail her emerging sexual desires; others include unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together.
In 2010 it seems we are still living in the days when books such as this classic are banned in our schools. A sad time indeed.
Read the full article
"The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition," which was published on the 50th anniversary of Frank's death in a concentration camp, will not be used in the future, said James Allen, director of instruction for the 7,600-student system. The school system did not follow its own policy for handling complaints about instructional materials, Allen said.
The diary documents the daily life of a Jewish girl in Amsterdam during World War II. Frank started writing on her 13th birthday, shortly before her family went into hiding in an annex of an office building. The version of the diary in question includes passages previously excluded from the widely read original edition, first published in Dutch in 1947. That book was arranged by her father, the only survivor in her immediate family. Some of the extra passages detail her emerging sexual desires; others include unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together.
In 2010 it seems we are still living in the days when books such as this classic are banned in our schools. A sad time indeed.
Read the full article
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