I liked this novel a lot; this passage, from a broken-hearted young woman who’s had just about the worst year imaginable, is perfect:

…A little girl with four women wondering after her, looking for her, sort of, without her ever knowing. That was love of the most useless kind, unless you believed in love’s power to waft in from a burning sky to the unseen grass it had designated as its beloved, unless you believed in the prayers of faraway nuns, unless you believed in miracles and magic, rapture and dice and Sufic chants and charms behind curtains and smoky, unfathomable distances.

I’m pretty sure that every education blogger will take a whack at this article and lay out some of the issues with this article. I got to thinking, though, about longevity. Fifteen years into the charter school movement, is there any evidence that schools without unions are producing “veteran” teachers, i.e., those who have taught for many years?

Whatever one thinks of teacher unions, they make it possible for people to build long careers. And while longevity doesn’t necessarily create effectiveness, it does allow for a kind of institutional wisdom that is lost when teaching staffs turn over every three years.

Who would sign on to teach in an inner-city system knowing that even if you broke yourself for ten years you could still lose your job?

So I’m a fan of Michiko Kakutani; whatever one makes of the reviews, they’re always written well and they almost always inspire you to read (who wouldn’t want to be that erudite?)

yesterday, though, I found myself using the dictionary after this phrase:

but new anecdotes and details add chiaroscuro to the picture.

new one on me; gradations on a print where only varieties of a single color can be used. Once I figure out how to say it, I’ll be working that into conversation…

So if you’re child insists on listening to a Justin B song, what do you play to ensure that it doesn’t become toxic?

This morning’s antidotes:

Sublime, What I got
Social Distortion, Ring of Fire
Public Enemy, Bring the Noise

I’m wondering if, as the pop songs get deeper under his skin, I’ll need to go deeper and into scarier music. Lil Wayne? Grindcore? To be determined…

So this school presents as the Holy Grail of urban education: a high poverty school with high test scores. And the article does a good job of explaining the focus on test preparation and the ways in which the school embraces the testing process.

Is it too much to ask, though, for a little follow-up with kids who went through the school — it seems pretty stable if the principal has been there since 1984 — to see if they’ve succeeded in middle school, in high school? Is the school working to ensure kids understand the concepts underneath the test questions, or is the school just engaging in empty test preparation, such that the kids flame out in middle school?

Wouldn’t be hard to find out.

You’d think that Philly would find a way so that the poor fools who actually try and pay the wage tax would be able to do so easily.

Guess again.

Here’s the page; click to register and it’s a broken link.

Typical.

I read the book. I’m drinking the cool aid. Ran my little 5k today without shoes and realized a bunch of things:

1. Running barefoot you spend a lot more time looking where you’re going and thinking about your landings.

2. Running barefoot eliminates the noise of a Clydesdale class runner plodding along. When I used to run with headphones, my rule was that I had to be able to hear my feet landing, which was definitely cheating because the smack of shoe on pavement was so loud.

3. With super flat feet — a friend once described my feet as pancakes with stubs — running shoes just add another inch for me to roll my ankle over.

4. Running without shoes reminds you how heavy running shoes — even good running shoes — are. My feet felt so much lighter and it made running that much easier.

Richard Rothstein’s critique of the Obama education plan points out something often overlooked in the rush to free market competition: if you demand applications, you need grant writers. If approved, you need evaluators. As he points out, “a full employment program for grant-writers is no substitute for stable employment for educators.”

Article here.

I’m glad this study has been released and look forward to reading it; the “we’ve brought more AP courses into secondary schools” mantra is popular among urban school reformers, mostly because they get credit for setting up the courses. Later, when the results are released, they either don’t get publicized or the leader who set up the classes is gone. Sounds great — we’ve started 80+ AP courses — but does it really matter when neither the students nor the pupils have been set up to succeed?

This story from Detroit is exactly why I study school construction and why it’s so important:

1. Voters approve an expensive construction bond to re-build a number of schools.
2. The School District decides to shutter a number of those schools.
3. Voters are pissed; why would we vote to increase our taxes by spending money for schools that won’t serve our communities?


From the time a community begins agitating or from the moment a school district official decides a school is necessary, vast changes can occur, both within the neighborhood and within the school district. Each step of the process adds new wrinkles to the design and once decisions are made, it’s very difficult to go back and change them. But once the school opens, man, that’s it, what you see is what you get. For the next fifty to one hundred years.