23:11; got stuck on the middle clues.

It’s recommendation season and as I write these letters for future teachers and potential graduate students, I wonder if the folks who end up reading them understand that the highest compliment I pay students is to describe them as a “reader.” I love my students who furtively hide books that aren’t for class. I love my students who bring other things they’ve been reading into the class discussion. I love any evidence that students are reading.

I just wish I could describe more students this way.

So I agree with almost everything in Philip Goldsmith’s post here regarding the likely explosion of middle class parents when district officials even think of tampering with magnet schools.

All except this line:

Magnet schools, whose admission is based on academic achievement, represent meritocracy in a school district that is often focused on ensuring equity.

Maybe represent is a purposefully chosen verb; any child at these schools can tell you of a classmates whose entrance was secured through parental action or political connection. Not a mystery. Special admission schools do represent meritocracy but I’m not sure that they exemplify it. Nor do these schools do anything to address the fact that while anyone can apply not all children have the same opportunities afforded to them before the admission application begins.

Sickened by the whole thing, I particularly appreciated this comment:

“There’s a strong tendency to approach this as a problem of faith, when it is a problem of church management and a lack of accountability.”

Reading exceptional historian Jon Zimmerman’s latest, Small Wonder: The Little Red School house in History and Memory, and found the following quotes:

“Some of our children are paupers and some are millionaires in educational opportunity. An American public school at the moment may connote anything from an unheated, dilapidated one-room shack, closed without further notice, to a 200-room palace whose frescoed walls, swimming pool, and air-conditioned interior a Roman emperor might envy.” –Journalist Eunice Barnard (p.102)

James Agee on a new white school in Alabama in the late 1930s: “A recently built, windowy, ‘healthfully’ red brick and white-trimmed structure which perfectly exemplifies the American genius for sterility, unimagination and general gutlessness in meeting any opporunity for ‘reform’ or ‘improvement.'” (p.107)

Read this essay last night before bed and it got me thinking. Most of the novels I’ve read lately don’t speak to the experience of work; it’s peripheral, something that happens in a paragraph at the beginning of the chapter, something that barely frames the terms of each character’s existence. Schuessler cites a novelist who claims that “work has become central to many people’s self conception.” I think this is nonsense. For most Americans work has become a place to earn a check while you keep your soul safely protected far from the degrading, crushing stupidity of all too many jobs.

Yet work is central to who we are in our house. The decisions we’ve made about where to work or what to do with the time when we’re not together as a family…we’ve tried to be doing something meaningful, some set of tasks that actually matters. Yeah, teaching and social work, it’s often deck chairs on the Titanic, but the struggle is important, and there are successes along the way. Work shouldn’t be something where you forget who you are for seven or eight hours a day. I know there’s a counterargument here — such work is a luxury of the upper middle-class — but it’s not impossible to carve out a decent life without immense amounts of disposable income, so the choice to do what’s right (as opposed to what’s easy, thanks Albus) isn’t as inconceivable as some would believe.

Not a huge fan of Huffington Post — have the phone app and read it occasionally — but Bill Maher’s comedic piece on firing teachers works pretty well. While there’s some objectionable content, his summary of the American response to the Rhode Island teacher firings is spot on:

But isn’t it convenient that once again it turns out that the problem isn’t us, and the fix is something that doesn’t require us to change our behavior or spend any money. It’s so simple: Fire the bad teachers, hire good ones from some undisclosed location, and hey, while we’re at it let’s cut taxes more. It’s the kind of comprehensive educational solution that could only come from a completely ignorant people.

I also love that he cites Whitney Houston, whose line about children being the future (Sexual Chocolate), I’ve explicitly banned my students from using. Which seems silly but before I started mentioning it, I’d get three to four essays a semester where students knowingly or unknowingly referred to this song.

Why a Saturday roll out for NCLB revisions? Talking education is a win-win for most politicians, so why do it over a weekend news cycle?

So this was coming for awhile and there will be critics from states from both ends: too low compared to ours says Massachusetts, too intrusive says Texas. My only thought upon reading the Times article was who was involved (and explicitly thanked in the introduction to the document):

…the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers set the common-standards initiative in motion last year. They convened panels of English and math experts from the College Board and A.C.T., and from Achieve Inc., a group with years of experience working to upgrade graduation standards.

Hmmm…cue sarcastic, nicotine-soaked voice: I guess these were the only folks who know anything about standards. The document is here and is now open for a whole three weeks of review.