I read this article on Slate after finding a link to it on Twitter. Maybe this article is a little disheartening but I am finding that I am and others in my family are spending less. I’m relearning all the things I learned when I was a little girl (long ago) that "a penny saved is a penny earned."
Credit made life too easy. See an outfit you need, buy it. So what if you don’t have any money, charge it. Want to go on a trip? Charge it. Pay for it later over several years. It got too easy for all of us and now it’s coming to back to us. We became too greedy and wanted stuff. The best cars. A bigger ... more...
President Bush’s Reading First program has had problems from the beginning. There are charges of conflicts of interest, budget fights, and now the Department of Education finds that it doesn’t work any better than approaches already in place. There was no difference in comprehension scores between students who participated in Reading First and those who did not.
"There was no statistically significant impact on reading comprehension scores in grades one, two or three," Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the Education Department’s research arm, ... more...