I don’t quite understand this story: the Superintendent has declared that principals will be measured by how many children eat breakfast each morning.

So…we wake up every morning and cook breakfast for our kids and their school will be punished because they didn’t come to eat in the school cafeteria? I don’t understand. Is this something that downtown will use to blame principals when their school is under-performing?

(Sidebar: in some ways, this threat is indicative of how school reform proceeds in general: you can’t treat all of the kids in Philly as if they come from the same homes. There are definitely some families and kids who would benefit from being coerced into having breakfast at school. But there are also families who have structured their lives to spend as much time as possible with their kids and who have no intention of giving up the morning meal. You can’t treat all communities in the same way.)

So there’s a great editorial in Monday’s times detailing the joke that is the grading profess for standardized tests. I’m sure this going to be a fun book to read as well, even though I can’t believe anyone will truly be surprised by how inherently flawed the evaluative process actually is.

By Weds, we should have at least two letters from testing companies excoriating the writer, one letter from an outraged governmental official, and one letter from a good hippie professor commending the author.

Here.

It’ll probably get deleted, so here’s the text:

This is the most badassed guitar in the history of rocking with guitars. It’s shiny black with an awesome wood neck from a tree and a sweet mirror pick-guard that you can do lines off, check your fro, and defend against lasers. I have done two of these. The lasers were awesome. The pick guard is cracked and only the volume knob works because of the power this thing puts out. And then there’s the amp. The AMP? Oh hell yes – this amp is only just about the most badass little bitch in the world. It screams like a harpie and bangs like (cut here). How many watts? I’m gonna guess 28 because there’s one number on the front, and that’s 28. No-name you say? It has a name – right on the front. LGA. You know why you’ve never heard of it? Because everyone but me who’s tried to tame this beast explodes. That’s why. Are you man enough? And if you’re a chick, are you man enough? $150 lets you ride this ride.

It looks like this book is going to be the latest “it” book on urban education. And while the thesis is profound and important, I just have to hope that the message principals receive is that this task, of forming teams, of working together, or ensuring instructional coherence, has to be in place of other activities.

What I see happening in most Philly schools is a principal hearing about this (or more likely a region person) and adding another meeting and another set of responsibilities to already overburdened teachers. The “Christmas tree” approach — yeah, we’ll have that too…

It was big night on television tonight. And instead of showing President Obama’s health-care speech that was on tonight, Fox aired its season premiere of “So You Think You Can Dance.” I guess they wanted to give viewers a choice between hearing what’s wrong with our country and watching what’s wrong with our country.

brilliant…

Reading an Iris Murdoch novel — The Sea, The Sea — mostly because Matthew Crawford cited her so extensively in his book on the nature of 21st century work — and remained baffled by the book. It raises the question I ask my student teachers to consider constantly: why do we continue to read books we’re not sure about? In other words, what do I do if:

*I like the writing but don’t understand the plot; should I continue muddling on?
*I despise the main character and don’t really care what happens to him; should I keep reading?
*I don’t believe in the possibility of the main character or the plot…
*”finish what you start” is in conflict with “I’m bored senseless”

The budget situation remains appalling; the failure of city council to do anything other than pass the buck to the state legislature may prove to be quite dangerous. I think Governor Rendell is well aware of the potential for this kind of thing, a resurgent, 1994-esque, election cycle next year should the economy force a tax increase next year.

As a long-term resident (and home-owner), there just isn’t the trust necessary for a major revision in property taxes, which is probably the long-term solution. The Inqy’s continued series on the failures at the BRT highlights the difficulty in using real estate taxes as a source of revenue. For example, they assess my house at $415k, at least $80k higher than it could possibly sell for, while identifying many of the fancy homes in the fancy Penn school catchment area as being worth significantly less. Not quite sure how this could happen. I’d be willing to handle a property tax increase but it has to be done fairly and accurately.

“In some ways I’m dismayed at the fact that professionals would not think of the impact of their actions on children.”

Listening to Tom Waits, Down there by the train, and Colin ponders, “Does he have a frog in his throat while he’s singing this?”

Arne Duncan (meet the new boss…) suggests that states had better not get in the way of charter schools, as if the hold up with charter schools is occurring at the state level.

It’s as if he didn’t spend time running Chicago, squealing at every moment about the lack of state support. One of the few things that state legislatures WILL support is charter schools: doing so sticks it to teacher unions, school district bureaucracies, and allows many business types an entry into the education trough. The hold up for charter schools in Philadelphia doesn’t come from the state but from the SDP, who has control over how many charters they will grant.

There’s a Paul Krugman editorial today detailing some of the ways that the Obama administration has alienated the left; I think more could be made about the decision to go with Duncan as opposed to someone like Linda Darling-Hammond and the betrayal that many educators feel about Duncan’s work so far.