Education

The subprime crisis certainly highlighted the need for American consumers to become more financially literate. But who defines financial literacy? And what makes someone an expert? Mike Konczal at Rortybomb asks these and other questions regarding financial literacy education — a subject TWI has also been looking into lately.
Did you know that since 2003, when [...]

Just as we wrote about the pressing need for financial literacy among consumers as credit tightens, The New York Times reports on the government’s efforts to combat those “free” credit report firms, which charge people for a service they are entitled to get for free.
On television it’s hard to miss the wildly popular band of [...]

Dallas police wrongly ticketed at least 39 drivers for not speaking English over the last three years, reports the Dallas Morning News.
It seems Dallas police were confused when, after pulling drivers over for other suspected violations, the police checked their in-car computers and a pull-down menu listed the “non-English speaking driver” charge as an option. [...]

Washington’s prognosticators have all but written off a strong public option as part of the health reforms working their way through Congress. But don’t tell that to Sen. Charles Schumer. The New York Democrat went out on a limb Thursday evening, telling reporters that a “strong, robust” public plan will be included in whatever final [...]

The Family Research Council is taking aim at the guy they hope will be “the next Van Jones” in their latest action alert. It’s apparently Kevin Jennings, who was appointed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan to head the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools (and who has been included among the list of “czars”). His [...]

House lawmakers on Thursday easily passed legislation to eliminate billions of dollars in federal subsidies to private insurers offering low-rate student loans. The proposal basically cuts out the private companies as middle-men between students and the federal government, which not only subsidizes the loans currently, but also protects the private lenders against default.
The count was [...]

Trapped in a deepening fiscal quagmire, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has proposed a budgetary shift that could jeopardize federal stimulus funding for education, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Although $10 billion in stimulus funds for education has been granted to the state, those funds come with a caveat, as outlined by the U.S. Department of [...]

If the recent Supreme Court decisions denying prisoners the right to DNA evidence or allowing companies to dump toxic mining waste in public lakes were getting you down, you can take heart in today’s decision, perhaps the last to be written by retiring Justice David Souter. The high court today ruled that it’s not okay [...]

The Chronicle of Higher Education raises a question worth examining, as the credit stays tighter than usual and the economy remains sluggish: Is higher education the next bubble to burst?

When I last wrote about conservative attacks on potential Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, I noted that the one case she’s really been pilloried for is her position as one of three judges who affirmed the dismissal of a reverse discrimination case. White male firefighters in New Haven insisted they deserved to be promoted over [...]