"This is a terrible education program," said Bob Chanin, the general counsel of the National Education Association, who is one of the plaintiffs.
A student can get a wonderful, or terrible, education at just about any institution, depending on the courses she takes, the professors from whom she learns and the amount of effort she invests.
It's too much to say that Charles Taylor, Liberia's recently exiled President, was behind all this conflict, because the causes are deeper — corruption, economic decline, terrible education, resource exploitation — and it's been prolonged by international indifference.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at a news conference Thursday that "what it means is that there is a whole bunch of kids that at least for one year will get a terrible education that they'll probably never recover from".
In many ways, he said, "the Arab Spring is the canary in the mine shaft for a broader problem — fragmented countries, too much population growth, terrible education systems, too little water — these countries are the losers".
Wodak told me: These were minority populations who almost certainly had a terrible education, lived in squalor, barely ate enough food to survive, had no money in the bank, no assets, no security, no quality of life, ditto for their children, ditto for the grandchildren, ditto for their great-grandchildren.
Texas' problems are of interest to us all because Texas is producing a huge chunk of the nation's future work force with a system that goes like this: Terrible sex education programs and a lack of access to contraceptives leads to a huge number of births to poor women.
This is a terrible model for education, which requires that all interested parties -- teachers, parents, students and institutions -- invest as much as possible for the betterment of students.
For many years, there has been a terrible distortion of education's promise, as everything besides reading, writing and math has increasingly been cut.
He refers to it as the "terrible irony," that education systems, which are meant to prepare students for their future are "paths to nowhere" (p. 19).
We must therefore mark the Day of the African Child in 2016 for young people to call for action against this terrible neglect for education, their futures, and the future of Liberia.
