Where is the bureaucracy reenactor crowd?
In the past few months, I have been struggling with how to teach a difficult topic: bureaucracy. It’s not hard to enter the topic with a class; everyone experiences bureaucracy in ways that they can talk about at one level. Generally, I find that students absorb notions of street-level bureaucrats, scripts about “real school,” and […]
Deantidisestablishmentarianism in education policy rhetoric
Joel Klein and Al Sharpton wrote an open letter to Barack Obama and Arne Duncan that appeared this morning in the Wall Street Journal. And I have just a few questions about this: How can the sitting chancellor and a long-time civil-rights activist claim to be railing against “the entrenched education establishment” when you could […]
Sansom watch, January 11 edition
With Florida House Speaker Ray Sansom’s resignation Monday from his job at Northwest Florida State College, I wondered whether the story would disappear. Not by a longshot. Editorial boards of the St. Petersburg Times and Bradenton Herald as well as former friend and fellow Republican Joe Scarborough continued to savage Sansom. Investigative reporter Alex Leary discovered […]
Columnists exist to make the rest of us look smart
The intellectual woes of major-paper columnists continue. Ken Bernstein and Kevin Carey both think Thomas Friedman is wrong in arguing for tax cuts for teachers. One calls the idea very bad, and the other thinks it’s stupid. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just surprised Friedman didn’t ask for a pony. In the meantime, Berkeley […]
Last chance to tell me off
By Sherman Dorn on January 11, 2009
No, it’s not: you’re always welcome to tell me off in comments. But this is the last day that the January 2009 reader survey will be available. Again, my thanks to everyone who has participated. It takes just a few minutes (or more if you want to give me lots of ideas for topics). Tell […]
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