Washingtonpost.com

Our education system starts at age 5, pays little attention to children’s development and achievement until third grade, and is strewn with remedial programs to get older children back on track.

Meanwhile, studies keep pouring forth that highlight the importance of children’s earliest years – birth to age 8 – in developing the mental capacity that enables life-long learning.

In short, our education policies don’t align with the latest science on how and when children learn. American public education is out of whack.

Joe Mathews over at the Daily Beast has a piece worth reading about the former Alaska governor's smackdown with current California Gov. ...

Compassionate conservatism won George W. Bush the White House in 2000, a year Democrats should have taken in a landslide. But over the next eight years, it badly undermined the Republican reputation for competence and fiscal rectitude. Instead, the GOP came to resemble a gaggle of earmark-chasing charlatans who veered from phony compassion to get-tough border-fence theatrics with dizzying speed.

Not too long ago, I predicted that a solid recent history of the 2008 election (Richard Wolffe's "Renegade") was likely to be the final word until President Obama wrote his own version of those storied events. A few months later, it appears that the conveyor belt is just getting started and that we will be reading about 2008 for a while to come. My bad!

Bedtime = book time. Parents know that equation by heart, or at least they're supposed to. The drill goes like this: Just before the goodnight kiss, we snuggle up with our young kids, open a book, and read with them. Okay, so maybe at first we have to beg them to just settle down. And maybe the baby is more prone to eat the pages than look at them. But still, we try. We're the ones responsible for these little human beings. It's part of our job.

Mathematics, on the other hand, that's not on the must-do list. Reading may be part of the raising-kids routine. Math -- not so much.

New America Foundation has proposed a Nutrition Fact box for broadband. Instead of calories, carbs and fiber, the broadband box would break down data on ...

Every Wednesday, Reihan Salam examines the ideological struggle for the future of American conservatism and how to revitalize the Republican party. ...

Every Wednesday, Reihan Salam examines the ideological struggle for the future of American conservatism and how to revitalize the Republican party. ...

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget's Marc Goldwein takes your questions about the proposed federal budget cuts announced earlier today...Original article

"This study is really good news for parents," says Lisa Guernsey, the author of "Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children From Birth to Age 5." "It’s a study about how much parents matter in some ways. It’s basically telling us that TV used at these very young ages is not having a significant effect for good or for ill if it’s a relatively low amount of TV watching.

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