by David Brooks | Feb 7, 2019 | Blog
Massachusetts students who took state exams online in 2015 scored significantly worse than their peers who took the same exams on paper, especially in English/language arts, although the effect faded after a couple years of testing. That’s from an article in...
by David Brooks | Feb 6, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
Americans like to tell ourselves that at heart we’re rugged individualist farmers and cowboys people living close to the land, modern descendants of Daniel Boone and Hiawatha and Laura Ingalls Wilder. But the reality is that we can’t wait to move away from...
by David Brooks | Feb 5, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
What a difference a K makes. “It has been an aggravation and irritation for some time,” is how David Thorpe of Meredith puts it when talking about whether the letter K belongs in the name of a small lake. “In the last 10 to 15 years, with GPS becoming so ubiquitous,...
by David Brooks | Feb 5, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
Evading politics while working in Concord is no easy feat – the other day I had to shoo away a presidential exploratory committee before I could get into my car – but newsroom colleagues can attest that I’m pretty good at it. Yet, even a government-phobe like me has...
by David Brooks | Feb 5, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
I wish solar installations were so common that we could move past of tallying how much solar power each state has installed as a sort of virtuous race but we’re not. Still, it has progressed: I can remember tallying it town by town, because it was so rare. As...