Star Ledger--The best counties for kids in N.J., ranking all 21
Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ) released its annual Kids Count county profiles and pocket guide on Monday, comparing the state’s 21 counties across 12 measures of child well-being and providing 5-year child trend data at the state and county level.
The group didn't provide a cumulative rank for each county this year, but it did evaluate these counties across four domains: child and family economics, child health, safety and well-being, and education. NJ Advance Media then averaged each of the ranks of N.J.'s 21 counties in these four domains to establish a cumulative rank.
Justin Zaremba| Updated July 11, 2017, Posted July 11, 2017
Washington Post—Op-Ed: What today’s education reformers can learn from Henry David Thoreau
Snobbish elitism will hurt their cause.
When educators lose touch with regular people, they turn to less effective methods, such as high-stakes testing.
As a young schoolteacher in the 1830s, Henry David Thoreau took his students to meadows and rivers to observe the plant and animal world. They also visited the local newspaper in Concord, Mass., to watch how printers set type. But writing from Walden Pond, where Thoreau moved after his brief teaching stint, he ridiculed the broad public that actually read the paper. “I am sure,” Thoreau declared, “that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.”
This paradox speaks volumes about Thoreau, who was born 200 years ago today. Denouncing memorization from textbooks, the dominant teaching method of his era, he emphasized human activity as the key to learning. But he also exhibited a snobbish disdain for most human beings, especially when their activities — and their philosophies — differed from his own.
Jonathan Zimmerman July 12 at 6:00 AM