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Brief note on CTU strike

Unfortunately, I’ve got a ton of stuff to do this week, or I’d write a longer note on the Chicago strike. But please read Dana Goldstein’s blog entry today, which has a useful thumbnail history of teachers unions. A few notes: 1. Politics of public-employee unions. While Matthew Yglesias is correct that the politics of […]

Paul Tough on grit

Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed is an interesting book about “grit” and other non-cognitive issues in childhood, well-written for the most part. ((Disclosure: I read an ebook version of the uncorrected proofs; I think the ebook expires for me in late fall.)) It is not without some significant weaknesses–primarily an exaggeration of the coherence of […]

Tenure application: perspectives from the almost-grizzled reviewer

Yesterday, my college had its first “T&P brown bag” discussion for tenure-earning faculty (tenure-earning being the local equivalent of tenure-track outside Florida). My teaching schedule conflicts with the discussion time, but I had been asked to be a participant as a former member of the college’s tenure and promotion committee. While or perhaps because tenured […]

Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed

I’m partway through Paul Tough’s new book, How Children Succeed. In his first book, Whatever It Takes, most readers focused on Tough’s portrayal of the Harlem Children’s Zone. What I noticed as an historian of education was his intellectual history of the culture-of-poverty arguments–a nice long chunk I would like most graduate students in the […]

Chris Christie hates the First Amendment

Probably not that much, but New Jersey’s governor ignored a truth about private associations as he tried out the “love the sinner teacher, hate the sin union” line at his keynote address last night: We believe that the majority of teachers in America know our system must be reformed to put students first so that […]