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Sunday, November 8, 2020

CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION + ICYMI: That Was A Week All Righty Edition (11/8)

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: That Was A Week All Righty Edition (11/8)




That Was A Week All Righty Edition

Has it only been a week since we got together here? Seems like that was in a whole different world, and I have a feeling that we have a few more to go through before we're done. But as soon as the last echoes of Beloved Leader's 1,732 lawsuits dies down, maybe we can get back to doing some important stuff and not dying and--well, won't it just be nice not to have to have him barging into our consciousness every damn day. 

In the meantime, Other Stuff is still going on. Here's some reading.

When Jesus Needs a Visitor's Badge

Blue Cereal Education has been working his research muscles on the issues of church-school separation, and he has three reads to recommend.

Success Academy Will Be Remote Through March 2021  

This Chalkbeat story is worth noting because to listen to some folks talk, the only reason any schools have closed in this country is because of those damned selfish teachers unions. Apparently not.

The Wildest of Wild Weeks  

This post at eduhonesty is from way back on Thursday, and it offers some good thoughts on the ongoing discussion of how much political talk should be allowed into the classroom.

The Post-Espinoza End Game   

This is from way back in July, but I find I keep going back to these insights from Bruce Baker and Preston Green, and something tells me the issues involved here are going to keep flaring up, so study up. Speaking of which...

How The Court Inverted Constitutional Protections Against Discrimination

Leah Litman is at the Atlantic looking at how SCOTUS has been flipping the First Amendment all sideways. Again, this is going to come up again. And again.

Schools Adopt Facial Recognition in the Name of Fighting Covid  

Wired takes a look at these shenanigans. More surveillance state baloney.

Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student's critical tweets  

This is a trick we've seen before, back when a certain test manufacturer was running around getting blog posts taken down because the brutal criticism involved vaguely describing test content. Proctorio has proven to be mighty aggressive in shutting up its critics. Here's one more example.

Overstating Nothing  

Paul Thomas offers some excellent thoughts about student writing and the art of being both grandiose and vague.

In Some Ways, This Is Worse Than 2016  

Nancy Flanagan says much of what I'm thinking. The actual election doesn't change the actual underlying issues.


CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION



Betsy DeVos Will Be Leaving. Prepare To Curb Your Enthusiasm.
9Kby Peter Greene / 23h
It has been a few hours since the race was finally called, and now, once we get past a few hundred petulant lawsuits, the Trump Train will be leaving DC (undoubtedly kicking over every table it can find on the way out). That means that Betsy DeVos will be leaving the department of education, and that is unquestionably, undeniably a good thing. And if you want to celebrate it for the rest of the w
New Update From What Is No Longer The Trailing Edge of the Pandemic
by Peter Greene / 3d
It has been just about two months since I told you that if anyone had a shot of starting school up without major Covid consequences, it would be my little corner of the world. I'm here to report that things are not going well. Back on September 7, the number of cases for the whole county, since March, was 70. People were not panicked, but cautious, with the usual outlying groups of deniers and to
Trump's Executive Order for 1776 Commission
33by Peter Greene / 4d
Like many of you, I'm hoping that Trump's Executive Order establishing a 1776 Commission will be rendered moot sometime within the next 12-2,215 hours. But because, like many of you, I need something to distract me from doomscrolling (and the board of directors is napping), I'm going to go ahead and look at this damn fool executive order . The short form is that this is all empty political hooey
Survey: Pandemic Effects on Early Childhood Education
by Peter Greene / 5d
Defending the Early Years is an organization whose stated mission “is to work for a just, equitable, and quality early childhood education for every young child, by informing educators, administrators, and parents about how children develop and learn best and advocating for the active, playful, experiential approaches to learning informed by child development theory and evidence-based research.”
School Choice Disempowers (Almost) Everybody
100+by Peter Greene / 6d
The standard argument for school choice is that it will empower all sorts of folks, but it's just not so. In fact, modern school choice is designed to deliberately strip power from all sorts of public education stakeholders. Unions Let's start with the most obvious--one big dream of choiceniks is to finally break the damned teachers unions. You can see in pieces like the one I discussed yesterday
ICYMI: Dear God Let It Please Be Over Soon Edition (11/1)
by Peter Greene / 7d
Of course, it probably won't be. This is probably going to drag out for weeks. But we can hope that we're, as they say, turning a corner this week. Hope you en joyed that extra hour. Happy All Saints Day. In the meantime, here's some stuff to read. A Voting Rights Battle In A School Board Coup In Georgia, the battle over voting, schools, and race, surfaces in yet another battle. New York Times re
The National Review Vs. Evil Teachers Unions
39by Peter Greene / 7d
Upon first reading " Teachers Unions and the Myth of 'Public' Schools " at National Review, my immediate impulse was to just mutter "fatuous bullshit" and move on. But this piece is a fine distillation of a current genre of writing--the piece that blames current school closures on the self-serving teachers' unions, who see distance learning as a great way to pursue their dream of being paid for d
Psychic AI and Plagiarism Detection
by Peter Greene / 9d
Artificial Intelligence is used to sell a lot of baloney. It would be bad enough it were used only to teach badly and provide poor assessments of student work, but AI is also being hawked as a means of rooting out plagiarism. For an example of this phenomenon at its worst, let's check in on a little webcast from Mark Boothe at Canvas Learning Management System . He's talking to Shouvik Paul at Co
DeVos New NAEP Baloney Sandwich
91by Peter Greene / 10d
Betsy DeVos would like you to know--again, some more--that public schools are failing. Her exhibit this time is the newly-released NAEP results for 12th graders in 2019. And as usual at NAEP time, her brief exhortation is riddled with baloney. America is the greatest country on the face of the earth, and we should deliver our rising generation the greatest educational opportunities possible. Sadl
Another Skills of Tomorrow Pitch
by Peter Greene / 10d
Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat has made a small hobby out of tracking one of the pervasive made-up statistics of education-- "65% (or 80% or what-have-you) of the jobs that this years kindergartners will fill don't exist yet." Well, the folks at the World Economic Forum have another variation on this kind of crystal 

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