Public Education
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Douthat on Democracy
To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters. But when it comes to the work
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Jacobin Magazine on The Great Books
As early as 2003, a student editorialist for the Harvard Crimson complained that it was possible to graduate from that august institution without reading Aristotle or William Shakespeare. True, students bothered by this tend to be conservative little shits — but they are right to complain. More important than the decline of Harvard, however, is
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The Hard Tyranny of Ridiculous Expectations
From Curmudgucation: We've heard plenty about the "soft bigotry of low expectations." And Michael Gerson wasn't entirely wrong– we have a history of all too often writing off students because of poverty or race or chaotic home life or not-so-brightness. Too often we really have held our most challenged students to no expectation at all. But for
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The Elite Center of Gravity in the Democratic Party
Michael Lind nails it this morning: During the Progressive Era and the New Deal era that succeeded it, idealistic professional-class reformers were only one element of a coalition they were forced to share with the representatives of farmers and blue-collar workers — groups that made up a majority of the workforce in the mid-20th century.
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Neoliberalism and Public Education 3
This chart lays it out pretty well:
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Neoliberalism and Public Education 2
It's interesting to me that whenever I do a post on public education, the pageviews go down. My guess is that it seems like such a niche issue, and when people read me squawking about Charter Schools or the Common Core, they think that's my problem, but not theirs. But if anything I've been saying
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Neoliberalism and Public Education 1
I recently posted that the Democrats will be useless in supporting economic justice issues until being called a Neoliberal has the same stigma as being called a homophobe. Neoliberal ideology is just repackaged late 19th Century Social Darwinism, which is an ideological justification for social stratification that rewards winners and punishes losers, where the winners
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Technocratic v. Humanistic Education 3: Contra the Common Core
I am localist when it comes to education. I think parents and teachers know best what is in the interests of the particular children in their care. The main job of principals, superintendents, and legislatures is to support teachers and parents, not to prescribe for them in top-down paternalistic fashion what they think is in
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Technocratic v. Humanistic Education 2
I wrote on this theme here, but this kid really gets it: See also Patrick Denneen's eloquent speech at Notre Dame against the Common Core. Key grafs: I began by suggesting that it was in the very absence of any national standard for education, and the strong tradition of local control of education, that we
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Erase to the Top
Here are some posts I put up when this cheating scandal in Atlanta first broke in 2011. See here, here and here. The emphasis on test scores is all about the technocratic compulsion to measure one kid againsst another, one teacher against another, one school against another–to what end? Does anyone with good sense think that