Articles of Note

School Budget Announced

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So a new budget has been announced. Two curious paragraphs from the Inquirer’s coverage of this development:

There’s also a cut of about 0.5 percent in individual schools’ discretionary budgets.Asked if principals had been notified of the cut, which amounts to a savings of about $1.2 million, Masch said: “I hope so.”
Michael Lerner, president of the principals’ union, said his members had not heard a word.”They have neither been notified nor consulted on the budget cuts,” said Lerner.

Second snip, which will undoubtedly show up in the casework of a special education attorney:

Masch said the district was able to reduce costs by dismantling some “self-contained” classrooms and putting those children into regular education classrooms with teachers able to teach students at multiple levels.

Articles of Note

Poverty and film

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I liked these two paragraphs from A.O. Scott’s review of Precious and The Blind Side:

Both movies tell stories that suggest a way out of poverty, brutality and domestic calamity for certain lucky individuals while saying very little about how those conditions might be changed. For all their differences, they ultimately occupy a common ground that is both optimistic and, at the same time, curiously defeatist. Both locate the problems facing their main characters in the failure of families — of mothers in particular — and find solutions in better families, substitute mothers (Ms. Rain and Leigh Anne), whose selflessness and loyalty exorcise the biological monsters who have been left behind. The fact that “The Blind Side” is based on a true story lends credibility to this sentimental idea.

Snipping a bunch to get to this line:

We believe she (Precious) will be all right because we would rather believe that than confront the failures of institutions, programs and collective will that leave so many other Preciouses unrescued.

One more reason why The Wire rules.

Quotes

Harry Smith quote

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Fan of Greil Marcus…re-reading the Basement Tapes book and found this quote from Harry Smith (the assembler of the Anthology of American Folk Music):

“When I was younger, I thought that the feelings that went through me were — that I would outgrow them, that the anxiety or panic or whatever it is called would disappear, but you sort of suspect it at thirty-five, and when you get to be fifty you definitely know you’re stuck with your neuroses, or whatever you want to classify them as–demons, completed ceremonies, any old damn thing.”

Soothing on a Friday when one’s book manuscript seems miles from completion.

Articles of Note

Gordon Wood

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So I found this article a few days ago, a brief essay by Gordon Wood describing the “choices” made by historians about writing analytic vs. narrative histories. And it got under my skin a bit…he writes:

“Instead, most (new historians) have purposefully chosen not to tell stories; that is, they have chosen not to write narrative history.”

While I have great respect for Professor Wood’s work, he’s not really being fair here. There are many graduate students and scholars who would love the opportunity to chose to write narrative history. But those sorts of books will not get you tenure at many, if not most, places. The initial choices made by “new” historians are those that will best serve them if they want to remain university based historians. He’s also fails to acknowledge the historians who can do both — write a book within an analytic framework that still offers a compelling narrative. Two recent books, Lisa Levenstein’s A Movement without Marches and Hilary Moss’s Schooling Citizens, manage this quite well. And both books are written beautifully.

Either way, why isn’t there at least a paragraph on the ways in which scholarship is evaluated in the university? And why isn’t there a paragraph asking why senior historians, who have tenure, don’t chose to write larger narratives? Or why those that do are not always successful?

Quotes

C. Wright Mills

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“Caught in the limited milieu of their everyday lives, ordinary men [and women] often cannot reason about the great social structures—rational and irrational—of which their lives are a subordinate part. Accordingly, they often carry out series of apparently rational actions without any idea of the ends they serve.”

will post full citation later.

Articles of Note, Education

what does this mean?

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quote from Superintendent Ackerman, cited on the KYW1060 site:

“And I think we need to support them more in what they do really well, not ask them, one size fits all, so you’re an EMO, and you have to all do the same thing. I think that we build on their strengths and expertise. And as I’ve been talking to some of the EMOs, they really, really like that. They sort of cut for themselves an area or a sphere of expertise. And I think we should open it up for all schools.”

Education

Selling lesson plans

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Okay, so there’s an article in this weekend’s Times about teachers selling their lesson plans. This is fascinating stuff on all sorts of levels.

1. In a world where teachers and administrators, depending on their orientation, complain or brag about scripted lesson plans, how can a market exist for lesson plans?

Is scripted curriculum being ignored?
Are teachers doing the script and then looking to do “real” lessons?
Are teachers trying to work within the scripted curriculum but need a bit of help?

2. In a world where everybody copyrights everything, how long can this last? I’m sure that at least one textbook company has copyrighted a lesson plan that contains the most basic questions about pretty much any text that’s ever been assigned. So how will this sort itself out?

3. Similarly, I discovered last year that if you put “philosophy of education” into google, you get a number of teachers from all across the country who seem to have published the exact same teaching statement. How can this be? Are unit plans published by teacher cooperatives being, well, co-opted, and put on these sites?

4. Many, if not most, new teachers hate the idea of writing curriculum. It is my favorite part of teaching — figuring out which texts to use, how to structure a unit, how to design fun, effective assessments –but I know that I’m that sort of loser/intellectual. Teacher ed programs have varying degrees of success with this; some seem to feel that curriculum is the district’s job while others spend much of their time teaching you how to do it. But in a world where teachers have far too many responsibilities, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a few teachers are willing to pay a few bucks to have something to do Monday morning.