Victoria L. Dunckley, M.D., – A Curious Case of Depression

Dan was a twenty-year-old young man with mild social anxiety and attention deficit disorder who — despite a genius-level IQ — was failing out of college. His social life had gone from being fairly active to nonexistent, his sleep-wake pattern was almost completely reversed, and he rarely left his room. Although not actively suicidal, Dan reported he often felt he ’d be “better off dead” and didn’t “see much …

Sarah Lazare – The FBI Has a New Plan to Spy on High School Students Across the Country

Under new guidelines, the FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies and “western corruption” as potential future terrorists, warning that “anarchist extremists” are in the same category as ISIS and young people who are poor, immigrants or travel to “suspicious” countries are more likely to commit horrific violence. Based on the widely …

When It Comes to Public Schooling, US Gets a Failing Grade

When it comes to supporting public education and investing in opportunities for students in K-12 schools, most of the U.S. gets a failing grade. The Network for Public Education (NPE), a reform group co-founded by education advocate Diane Ravitch, on Tuesday issued its annual “state report card,” analyzing states on six criteria: resistance to privatization, the professionalization of teaching, school …

Dustin Beilke – Obama Administration Enables Billionaire Takeover of America’s Public Schools

With the Walton billionaires doubling down [3] in their efforts to accelerate the charter school industry and with the Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, throwing in $100 million [4] to privatize traditional public schools, one might think that the U.S. Department of Education would be a major line of defense for America’s public schools educating the most underserved students or even a bold investor in …

Valerie Strauss – A primer on the damaging movement to privatize public schools

When, about 30 years ago, corporate interests began their highly organized, well-funded effort to privatize public education, you wouldn’t have read or heard about it. They didn’t want to trigger the debate that such a radical change in an important institution warranted. If, like most pundits and politicians, you’ve supported that campaign, it’s likely you’ve been snookered. Here’s a quick …

Ask Beatty – 11.16.15

What must we do to try and create a more loving and tolerant society worldwide, despite our differences? The terrorism that occurred in Paris and around the world should be wake up calls for all of us. How do we educate people to embrace or at least accept diversity and political and religious differences rather than destroy one another? Hear Beatty’s analysis of the problems and possible solutions.
Sexting and Texting in High Schools and Colleges….. Don’t miss Beatty’s conversation with her guest Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of Education and History at NYU and author of Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education.

The Gary Null Show – 11.10.15

Dr. Fritjof Capra is a physicist and systems theorist, an educator and activist and author of many international bestselling works dealing with emerging scientific principles that can alter our inadequate and dsfunctional worldviews and the ethics of society. Many listeners may remember his book The Tao of Physics, one of the most important books of the 1970s to introduce the properties of physics and its synergy with spiritual insights and teachings in Eastern mysticism. For the past 40 years Dr Capra has been researching the shift of worldviews and paradigms and how this might lead to a new vision of reality that would bring forth a cultural transformation. He is currently the founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley California, a fellow at Schumacher College in the UK, and serves on the Council of the Earth Charter Initiative. He holds degrees in theoretical physics from the University of Vienna and has worked on high energy physics at the Universities of Paris, London, Stanford and at the Lawrence Livermore Labs at the Berkeley. His most recent book “The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision”is perhaps the most comprehensive textbook to understanding how the emerging discipline of systems theory can inform and recreate our perceptions and actions in just about everything in our lives. His website is FritjofCapra.net

Nadia Prupis – Latest SAT Scores Raise New Alarms Over ‘Test-and-Punish’ Education

New statistics show that average SAT scores countrywide have dropped to their lowest level since the college admissions exam was redesigned in 2005, continuing a 10-year trend that education advocates say illustrates the failures of test-driven schooling. According to the College Board, which reported the statistics on Thursday, the average SAT score for the class of 2015 was 1490 out …

College readiness declines when school’s focus is improving test scores, study finds

Education reform policies that penalize struggling schools for poor standardized test scores may hinder — not improve — students’ college readiness, if a school’s instructional focus becomes improving its test scores, suggests a new study that explored efforts to promote a college-going culture at one Texas high school. Published recently in The High School Journal, the case study reveals the unintended …

America’s Attitude Toward Sex and Teens Is Insane – Amanda Marcotte

Throughout the Bush years, funding for programs that refused to teach contraception in lieu of telling kids to wait until marriage–known as abstinence-only programs–ballooned [3], putting a lot of schools in a situation where the only real access to sex education funding they had was federal abstinence-only money. The programs were wildly unsuccessful [4] at their supposed goals of reducing STI and teen pregnancy …