I liked this letter, both for its style and its description of how a university functions:

The university is essentially a medieval institution, a bazaar of intellectual goods hawked by hoary promulgators of many divergent truths. It mysteriously produces, after four years, educated people — university graduates. No one has ever figured out another way to do this. However, the university cannot survive without government funding (replacing the church support of medieval times), contingent upon compliance with an array of complex regulations and laws. This has given rise to an entrenched quasi-governmental bureaucracy of managers.

The tenure system — antiquated, ritualistic and of course unfair — by its very quirkiness protects the academic side from being engulfed by the administrative side, as does the independence of departments. Without these inefficiencies, universities would become little better than branches of government, and the variegated thread to our cultural past would be broken. As long as we don’t tamper too much with the core model, we can limp along and pass something of value on to our children, so they can complain bitterly, in their turn, about the cumbersome, inefficient, unfair and bizarre institution called “the university” (and become educated in the process).

I received this email this morning.

Good afternoon. You are invited to participate in the Take a Parent to Work Event on Friday, October 23rd between 2 and 4 pm. This is an excellent opportunity for parents to see the work of some of our staff and how it relates to what is being done in our schools.

Afterward, we will have a fashion show in which parents and District staff will model donated clothes from the closets of our Superintendent, Dr. Arlene C. Ackerman, and the staff at 440. Please contact Pat Gamarra at 215-400-6538 or pgamarra@philasd.org if you are interested in participating in either event.

Space is limited, call ASAP.

Quibila A. Divine
The School District of Philadelphia
Office of Parent, Family, and Community Engagement

So in this article, George Packer asks Richard Holbrooke to describe how he runs his office:

Holbrooke described his method to me as “a form of democratic centralism, where you want open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward, but once the policy’s decided you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it. And very often in the government the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don’t air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.

It’s the second part that sounds so familiar to me; it’s as if he sat in on most “leadership team” meetings in schools or really in any educational bureaucracy. Replace “government” with “Local High School X” and his description is right on target.

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.