Endings and beginnings
Earlier this week, the dishwasher broke. So we’ve been doing dishes by hand for a few days. We have a delivery of the new one tomorrow sometime, and the majority of the world doesn’t have dishwashers, so what am I complaining about? Not complaining, but just thinking of how doing dishes by hand is a […]
Turnaround or abandonment in NYC?
The extent of school closings in New York City is becoming evident, and after JD2718‘s posts on the subject over the past half-week, UFT’s Leo Casey provides an overview and alleges an ulterior motive (to create available space for other purposes, not to improve education). I’m far from NYC and can’t speak from close knowledge of […]
Questions while procrastinating while grading
The Friday-at-the-end-of-finals-week edition… Did President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech as a wartime president demonstrate that irony is not dead, or what? Is the last question rhetorical, or what? Is Hannukah a holiday that celebrates energy efficiency, oil wars, or insurgencies? Why do no schools have a food as a mascot (e.g., the Souffles)? (My […]
Online grandiosity failed, so get back to work
So U21 Global looks like it’s failing, after the dumping of U of I Global and the morphing of Western Governors from the “we’re going to conquer the world through online enrollments” stage into the “we’ll settle for 10,000 students based on a Netflix model of tuition with half of our students in teacher ed” […]
“The gap is gone”
If Aaron Pallas’s report is correct, and Roland Fryer did tell Anderson Cooper bluntly in reference to the Harlem Children’s Zone and Promise Academy, “The gap is gone,” Fryer committed an understandable but all too common sin of education reformers across the centuries: overpromising. I’ve been in the room as one or more program directors […]