Lost my list of 2007, 2008, 2009 films viewed; going to incorporate into main blog.

Either way, this powerful film, having watched on a Saturday evening after having read the reports of exactly what the CIA has been doing for the past five years, and I was left wondering how Americans can begin to re-build a government that stands for something.

Love your country all the time and your government when they deserve it.
Mark Twain

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney, “Voices from Lemnos,” in Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), 305-306.

Someone should write an article describing the ebb and flow of that elusive facility called the junior high school or middle school or the eighth grade wing of the K-8 school. Nobody wants to teach these kids or maybe few people actually know how to teach this age; either way it’d be an interesting comparison to see when shifts in programming were about policy or research and where they were about money.

Just so I have them nearby, here are links to the three reports describing the success or failure of public school alternatives over the past few years:

Vaughan Byrnes, American Journal of Education, here

Zimmer, R., Blanc, S., Gill, B. P., & Christman, J. B. (2008, Mar). Evaluating the Performance of Philadelphia’s Charter Schools. : RAND Education. (here)

The Paul Peterson piece, here.

He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage – cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

Interview here.

Funny, too, that he likes Obama’s prose so much and criticizes Ulysses Grant’s writing, whose autobiography tends to be roundly praised.

This is a quote from an article about soccer but it could be an article about any sport, the American system of education, or childhood in the United States:

In U.S. soccer circles, there is an ongoing discussion about how American players, from a young age, are overcoached and coddled. They practice only under a coach’s supervision, and games take place as parents hover with lovingly cut orange slices and juice boxes. The selection of talent for top U.S. teams, from the youth level all the way up to the senior national squads, tends to emphasize speed, strength and aggression over great technical skill or improvisational ability. Marta will present a strong visual image of what can happen with less coaching and a childhood spent learning to pick up the bounces and spin of a soccer ball on nearly every imaginable surface except a groomed field.

Hear this one a lot, but rarely see the full citation:

Those that control the past control the future and those who control the present control the past.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949; New York: Signet, 1950), 32.

Putting it next to this quote: It is one of the less visible ironies of the democratic system that the academy’s freedom of expression rests securely on its being ignored.

from Marilyn Young, Dangerous History: Vietnam and the “Good War”, Edward Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, History Wars (NY: Henry Holt, 1996), 206.

“Part of the reason urban education has struggled historically is you haven’t had that leadership from the top,” he said.

“Where you’ve seen real progress in the sense of innovation, guess what the common denominator is? Mayoral control,” Duncan said.

It’s an AP article, but one version is here.

So the Education First Compact/Philadelphia Education Fund/Cross City Campaign launched their “Effective Teaching for All Children Campaign” yesterday. There’s reference to a policy paper in the news coverage but I couldn’t find it on their website. Whether it’s their intent or not, it seems a clear salvo at the PFT, a way to undermine seniority.

We’ll see how much traction they get with this — it’s a contract year and the PFT will strike over this issue — but last night I wondered what would happen if they allowed teachers to form groups or teams that could transfer to troubled school together. What if these teams could gather, write a proposal, and then see if there was a principal willing to take them on (and a principal they’d be willing to deal with) ?

Then, they could all be rewarded equally, as a team, if the school’s performance turned around… It would avoid some of the nastier elements of merit pay — principals with minimal understanding of instruction or teachers essentially competing against each other — and support a community “grown” by teachers themselves.

(Just to reiterate a point I’ve made over and over again: with such a shallow pool of administrators, you can’t expect veteran teachers to take a chance on the sanity/intelligence of a principal they don’t know. And you can’t create new school culture by dropping an assortment of new folks — experienced or not — into a building.)