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Quote of the Day: Alfie Cohn
We are living through what future historians will surely describe as one of the darkest eras in American education — a time when teachers, as well as the very idea of democratic public education, came under attack; when carrots and sticks tied to results on terrible tests were sold to the public as bold "reform";…
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Poverty and Education
I don't understand in a personal way the challenges that poverty creates for families, and schools and teachers…I don't ever want to minimize it. Poverty is a terrible obstacle. But we can't let it be an excuse. So says Bill Gates and almost everyone else who is involved in the corporate ed reform movement. For…
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More on the Atlanta Testing Scandal (Updated)
The Seattle Times in an editorial Sunday morning defends the high-stakes test after the Atlanta scandal. It's interesting, though, that right next to the editorial in the hard copy edition of Sunday's paper is an op-ed by David Sirota (can't find the ST link) about the sanity of the education system in Finland. Why does…
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Teaching to the Test 2
A lot of news on the testing front in the last week. From last Friday's Seattle Times: A tall man with a booming voice, [third-grade-teacher Damian] Joseph has a way of inspiring his students to work harder. He knows the challenges some of them face because he, too, grew up poor. But he also knows…
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On the Question of Stability and Good Order
I understand the concerns of people who think ousting one set of board members for another just moves us more in the direction of chaos than good order. Any organization, if it is to flourish, needs stability and consistent leadership, and so, one might reason, we need to keep the current school board incumbents in…
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Obama kills Osama on Mission Accomplished Day
Ten years, two wars, and tens of thousands dead–it was all worth it, right? Symbolic deaths of mad men like Osama are worth something, but the price paid was way too high. Criminally too high. So excuse me for not getting on the party bus. Now what? Does anything actually change?
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Clip of the Day
From Capra's 1931 American Madness:
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American Soul
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Bush Lite
As early as May, 2009, former Bush OLC lawyer Jack Goldsmith wrote in The New Republic that Obama was not only continuing Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies, but was strengthening them — both because he was causing them to be codified in law and, more important, converting those policies from right-wing dogma into harmonious bipartisan consensus. Obama's…
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Zimbardo on Time
I'm an old McLuhanite who believes that our technology is reprogramming us in ways that we have not even begun to understand–certainly our orientation to time is one of those ways. (h/t Daily Dish and A. Dix)