You’d think that Philly would find a way so that the poor fools who actually try and pay the wage tax would be able to do so easily.

Guess again.

Here’s the page; click to register and it’s a broken link.

Typical.

I read the book. I’m drinking the cool aid. Ran my little 5k today without shoes and realized a bunch of things:

1. Running barefoot you spend a lot more time looking where you’re going and thinking about your landings.

2. Running barefoot eliminates the noise of a Clydesdale class runner plodding along. When I used to run with headphones, my rule was that I had to be able to hear my feet landing, which was definitely cheating because the smack of shoe on pavement was so loud.

3. With super flat feet — a friend once described my feet as pancakes with stubs — running shoes just add another inch for me to roll my ankle over.

4. Running without shoes reminds you how heavy running shoes — even good running shoes — are. My feet felt so much lighter and it made running that much easier.

Richard Rothstein’s critique of the Obama education plan points out something often overlooked in the rush to free market competition: if you demand applications, you need grant writers. If approved, you need evaluators. As he points out, “a full employment program for grant-writers is no substitute for stable employment for educators.”

Article here.

I’m glad this study has been released and look forward to reading it; the “we’ve brought more AP courses into secondary schools” mantra is popular among urban school reformers, mostly because they get credit for setting up the courses. Later, when the results are released, they either don’t get publicized or the leader who set up the classes is gone. Sounds great — we’ve started 80+ AP courses — but does it really matter when neither the students nor the pupils have been set up to succeed?

This story from Detroit is exactly why I study school construction and why it’s so important:

1. Voters approve an expensive construction bond to re-build a number of schools.
2. The School District decides to shutter a number of those schools.
3. Voters are pissed; why would we vote to increase our taxes by spending money for schools that won’t serve our communities?


From the time a community begins agitating or from the moment a school district official decides a school is necessary, vast changes can occur, both within the neighborhood and within the school district. Each step of the process adds new wrinkles to the design and once decisions are made, it’s very difficult to go back and change them. But once the school opens, man, that’s it, what you see is what you get. For the next fifty to one hundred years.

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)