Here are some good school reform-related pieces from the past couple of days:
Corey Bunje Bower uses the great Dilbert comic that I’ve embedded below as the beginning of an excellent post titled Outsiders and School Reform.
Class Size:What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy is a report from
Florida Governor Rick Scott has come up with a novel way to reverse his negative ratings with the public. Instead of meeting with newspaper editorial boards, he’s asking his supporters to write postive letters to the editor about his work for taxpayers. Printed below is a copy of the e-mail he sent out to his supporters. As one might expect, it’s full of lies and misleading statements. But could we expect otherwise?
Dear Editor,
When Rick Scott ran for Governor he promised to create jobs and turn our economy around. I voted for Rick because he’s always been a businessman, not a politician. While politicians usually disappoint us and rarely keep their promises, Rick is refreshing because he’s keeping his word. His policies are helping to attract businesses to our state and get people back to work. Some of the special interests are attacking the Governor for making
I wrote this for a friend’s zine when my older daughter, now eight, was a few months old. Father’s day seems like as good a time as any to repost it.
My daughter Casey was born in January, and so far the singing-to-the-kid duties have mostly fallen on me. If I’d thought about it before she was born, I guess I’d have imagined that I’d have sung mostly kids’ songs — some Woody Guthrie, some of the lullabies that my folks sang to me — but it hasn’t worked out that way just yet. I’m not quite sure how, but William Blake’s “Jerusalem” has wound up in heavy rotation, along with a slowed-down version of “Surfin’ Bird” that really seems to soothe her.
If she’s pitching a fit, I usually sing whatever happens to pop into my head, or hum nonsense until it resolves
NPR did a fun story on “All Things Considered” yesterday (audio here) riffing on the TNR piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the cicada-like reoccurrence of “Is College Still Worth It?!!!” scare stories. The best part is when they splice in audio from the bad stories in question and then later when they interview someone who was the subject of one of those stories 20 years ago. And while it’s not in the radio piece, the NPR web site has a quote from an “All Things Considered” story circa 1978:
“Lately there have been a lot of complaints from young persons, that the degree has not proved valuable at all, and that they are mired in jobs which could easily be done by someone who never had read a work of Kierkegaard or struggled through the close meshes of quadratic equations. And when one has paid $20,000 for a ticket to the good life, this seems a reasonable complaint.”
The ticket is more expensive now but otherwise this could be have been published yesterday.
In addition to the long-term trend of increasing returns to technology-enabled skills and so forth, there’s the sequential nature of education to consider. I, for example, graduated from college in 1992, which was a classic post-recessionary bad year to
Teacher's fight to renew visa a first for OaklandSaturday, June 18, 2011 MORE EDUCATIONA decade ago, Evelyn Francisco was one of many teachers recruited from the Philippines and other countries by the Oakland Unified School District at a time when qualified math and science instructors were not always easy to find. Now, as budget cuts force the district to lay off about 90 teachers for the coming year, the tenured advanced placement statistics teacher is facing deportation to the Philippines because district officials refuse to continue sponsoring her visa, which expires June 30. Francisco's case is the first of its kind in Oakland. But other teachers on similar guest worker visas worry that they could be next, as district officials say there is now a surplus of teachers who are citizens or permanent U.S. residents. Francisco, the only AP statistics teacher at Oakland Technical High School, is asking an |
NN11 Young Voter Turnout Session – How Do You Convince Someone They’re Better Off Despite Their Lying Eyes? | |
| By: one_outer Saturday June 18, 2011 2:10 pm | |
Marcy Wheeler, Dahlia Lithwick, and Barry Eisler in main hall for Van Jones speech - NN11 6/18/2011 (photo: bmaz)
The Teacher is In
With 10 days left of school, 8th grade culmination on the horizon, final marks, writing a reform plan to addressdistrict sanctions due to low test scores, and fundraising for a 2012 student trip to Washington, the education reform debate has to take a back seat to daily life at my vibrant public middle school.
Last week, in between three 13 hour workdays, I would arrive home, soak my feet, and pull out the ol’ laptop and try to make sense of the developments in the debate, and the National Council on Teacher Quality report came across my feed. I skimmed the report, and surmised that by now, no one would be surprised at the findings considering who the funders were, the fact that the report was not peer-reviewed, and who the main cheerleaders
I called my father this morning, a rather unusual thing for me since our relationship doesn’t necessitate the usual banter and warmth that sitcoms project upon those of us who rarely see our fathers.
When I grew up, I revered my father, a man whose voice and charisma reassured his young son that he’d always be there even if he wasn’t there physically. Soon, I came to find out that he made similar promises to my brother who was 5 years my senior, my sister who was 6 months my senior, my brother who was 2 years my junior, my sister who was 4-5 years my junior, and a few others now scattered throughout NYC and Miami. I was fraught with confusion during my early childhood, but soon it grew into adolescent rage and virulent insecurity in my own person. My semi-annual phone calls or visits from him ranged from boring drop-offs to a new apartment with a new woman to promises often left unkept with an eventual empty-handed return home.
My mom did everything she possibly could to assure that I was on the right trajectory, but not without a few
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