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.

[C]oming to the ballpark this time of year, being nervous, is an unbelievable feeling. When I was in Philadelphia, … you get to September and … we’re out there trying to tell ourselves we’re going to try to win today and be the spoiler. You know what? [Expletive] that. That’s not that much fun.

Found here (great RS blog); original article here.

So we owned a Gran Torino, one not nearly as nice as Clint’s, but still, it was cool to see it again in this awesome film.

I loved his garage — a lifetime of buying and using tools — his second chance at fathering, and the way the film presents teaching about tools and fixing things…

I also thought it a smart rejoinder to the recent Obama decision to move away from home ownership and towards supporting urban rentals. Yeah, the Clint character might be racist and a pig, but he cared deeply about his own property. It cuts both ways, I think; there’s something to be said for a neighborhood of homeowners who subtly pressure each other to keep their properties up. Apart from NYC/SF/Seattle, I’ve not seen many cities where there are communities of renters that are places you’d want to live.

And looking at the various landlords who own places on my block: it’s not about making a community to them, it’s about getting paid, about their building as an investment, not as a home. Only a pretty special landlord can do both.

I didn’t quite understand why the School District of Philadelphia has finally decided to settle the forty year old desegregation case. Then I saw this piece:

The agreement pledges the district will provide additional resources, better teachers and improved building maintenance to remedy years of neglect in the city’s lowest-performing schools.

Those schools are also what the court termed “racially isolated” schools, or schools at least 90 percent African-American and Latino, officials said.

Okay, no surprise here in the racially isolated schools: that number has probably been between 60 and 70% since the mid-1960s. And if you add in all the schools in the Northeast that are racially isolated as well, it’s an even higher number.

What I think Ackerman is trying to do is use this decision alongside Act 46 to break the union in the low-performing schools. She wants to get the right to disregard work rules (something the SRC seems in favor of) and this court decision and the 2001 legislation will provide partial political cover to do so…

That’s cynical. Wow.

I’ve been tracking former principals and administrators in the School District of Philadelphia, individuals who worked impossibly hard to carve out opportunities for children in the 1940s and 1950s. But it’s striking and sad how little is left of their work: google reveals little more than the school named for them. Even more tragic is the way their names emerge in articles about how messed up urban schools are, the same schools they worked to re-shape so very long ago.

Jonathan Kozol (among others) makes this point about MLK or Thurgood Marshall: look for the school named for them and it will invariably be in a tough neighborhood. But what about folks like principal/district superintendent Dr. Tanner Duckrey? A school may have been named for him but his steadfast work to carve out equal educational opportunity remains solely the domain of historians…

I do not see how you can ever point your fingers at a southern senator or a southern school district and tell them that they are discriminating against black children when you are unwilling to desegregated schools in your own cities. Let me say to my distinguished northern colleagues that the reason you are unwilling to do it is fear of political reprisal. The question is whether northern senators have the guts to face their liberal white constituents who have fled to the suburbs for the sole purpose of having their sons and daughters not go to school with blacks.

Abraham Ribicoff to Jacob Javits, 20 April 1971

Quote from
Clotfelter, Charles T. After Brown : The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 44.