Weekend Quotables
Team Englewood at LTABTeam Englewood Spoken Word Team"Hide Your Schools, Hide Your Homes, Hide Your Children, 'Cause [Rahm's] wrecking it all." -- Louder Than A Bomb Fran Spielman, Sun-Times reporter"What is the one thing that trumps money? Movement." -- Rahm’s re-election and GOP gov raceFox Business commentator Todd Wilemon"If You’re Poor, Stop Being Poor." -- Truth
School-to-prison pipeline
Former judge Mark Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for his involvement in the Kids for Cash scandal;NEW FILM...Robert May's documentary Kids For Cash, tells the story of the Zero Tolerance scandal that rocked northeast Pennsylvania, and led to the 2011 conviction of former judge Mark Ciavarella for funneling thousands of children into for-profit prisons in exchange for kickba
True 'grit'
The next of my fellow academics who mentions the word "grit" to me is going to feel the wrath of my electric sander on their behind. This latest in a long line ed clichés, has become the buzzword du jour of the no-excuses, corporate school reformers like University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth, who claim that grit is the critical ingredient to academic success. The notion was popularized in Paul Tough'sbook, How Children Succeed and has become the 2014 version of telling poor kids to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Thanks to Pedro Noguera and Anindya Kundu for this gritty response the other day on MSNBC.
More often than not, we discuss disparities in student performance in isolation from other factors that contribute to them, such as inequity in per pupil spending. If instead of posing the problem as an “achievement gap” which reinforces the idea that individual effort is the key factor determining differences in outcomes, we acknowledged it as an “opportunity gap,” we might do much more to address the disparities that limit the ability of children to learn.
Social science research has consistently shown that public school students with higher-income parents are likelier to attain higher levels of education than their