It's the start of the semester, I've acquired a few added responsibilities, and so this entry will be a combination of a few items.
- Planning for disaster–please turn on head. Bruce Baker and Mike Petrilli have been battling back and forth over the best ways to cut school budgets, or rather the least worst way. Petrilli has been on the colonic-theory-of-reform kick for more than a year, and his last entry looks a bit as if it's a setup for nonresponsiveness (with the implicit threat that "if the unions won't suggest cuts and only suggest tax increases, then they're to blame for what follows" with Bruce and other ed finance faculty thrown in for good measure). I think Petrilli is better than that, so let's talk instead about the best argument for looking for cuts: if you're going to make the argument for tax increases, you really want to make it from the standpoint of schools' being a worthwhile way to spend money. Denver has the ProComp performance-pay system because it was a (fairly obvious) quid pro quo for a tax referendum. Or even holding education relatively harmless compared to cuts to non-mandatory health coverage, community mental-health services, nonviolent-offender diversion/treatment programs, domestic-violence task forces, and all the other things that people desperately need. I've been ducking the poorly-aimed vitriol while reading the entries, and my instinct is that most of Baker's criticisms are well-taken in terms of suggestions not being practical. So, take a step back, assume that being willing to compromise is worth a few billion dollars, and ask: what would be the best deal?
- Did anyone else notice that Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan both visited Miami in early January? No, I'm not making any claims here other than that we live in a generally-non-freezing state in winter. Sorry: For you it may be winter. For us, it's the dry season. What?? You think that they just happened to want to highlight reform in Florida? When honchos visit us in early August, then I'll be convinced it's not the weather.
- Aftermath of the Tucson shooting: is it my imagination, or is it written somewhere in a TV news producer's contract that if there's a shooting that kills more than one person, you have to send a camera crew out to find at least one person who was acquainted with the murderer to explain why the murderer was obviously seen as a creep for years and years? I think all of us could be labeled as creepy in some way by someone who knows us or knew us or had a vague and faulty memory of knowing us as creepy. But there are roughly 5 murders in the U.S. for every 100,000 person-years lived, and our life expectancy right now is a little under 80 years. Being perceived as creepy is not a very good predictor of murder, though you can generally extrapolate from the murder to the post-hoc claim of accurate anticipatory judgment. Let me get in on the game: you're going to die. So am I. There, two 100% correct predictions.
- Black swans for education in 2011? We already have it, called the economy and the condition of state budgets.
- Gotham Schools has the best take thus far on the pending Jeanne Allen rate-the-reporters project. When this appeared last week I emailed the Gates Foundation media-relations folks to ask for an explanation of why Gates was a funder, and I have heard nothing. At first glance, this appears to be a foolish investment that is going to make the Gates Foundation look self-serving: at some point, the project is going to rate coverage of Gates work, making it appear as if Gates is trying to put pressure on reporters to shape the way Gates is being reported. I thought the Ed in '08 disaster would have chastened program officers a bit more before another misadventure (or more likely another fizzle) in media relations…
- A small rural newspaper in Central Florida has a solid piece by Merissa Green on tensions between local charter schools and Polk County school district officials over the administrative overhead charges for the district's supervision of charter schools. Hat tip to the St. Pete Times blog.
- The iPad has passed my Ultimate Work Test: 86 job applicants for a faculty position, all submitted electronically. I didn't have access to the materials until 8 days ago. Over the weekend, I scooped the PDFs, sent them to the iPad, settled them into a folder in GoodReader, and went off to various places with caffeine with just an iPad and a sheaf of review-comment pages. First round of reading, DONE. Hours spent? Probably 15. Hours I would have spent if I had not had PDFs or the iPad? At least 10 more, and they would have been worked around lots of other things, especially if I would have needed to go to an office to see physical applications.
Well, I stand corrected. I’d predicted almost one-thousand would apply, if we are talking about the same position(s). Hm … only 86? I still find that odd. What about paper applications? I don’t like the taste of crow, no matter how it is served. I wonder how many of the applicants know about John Taylor Gatto, and David Labaree?
Re item 3:
There is “creepy” and there is “students insist that a police officer be present in class when a particular student is there and the police officer agrees with them”. Tucson was in the second category. So was a student in one of my colleague’s classes last year. Armed police officer sitting in the class on an as-needed basis.
Seriously. You have no idea what you are talking about.
I’ve had creepy. Seriously and distinctively creepy. Another colleague had a schizophrenic regularly off hir meds. Neither situation got close to the one described above.
I’ll let Dean Dad’s essay this evening be the best answer for me.
Dean Dad only agreed that he was ignorant, which means he didn’t read the police reports from Pima CC like he would if he was there and responsible for a situation where police had to be present during a Pilates class.
If you have never had the police come to your classroom looking for a student (I have) or had to call the police to your classroom or office (colleagues have), you DON’T know what you are talking about. There is a difference between “creepy” and “threatening”, which is why our cops carry guns.
Everyone seems to agree that we can expect more of this, unfortunately, but no one is saying why this is the case. I hesitate to comment, but the temptation is too great.
Randall Collins, in his book Violence, warns of a similar social dynamic stemming for stratification pressures in society. As anyone who has gone through losing a girlfriend can attest, this creates what Collins calls ‘positional stresses.’ The reason is that by leaving the relationship, the girl is saying that ‘she can do better,’ which apparently resulted in the down-ward shifting of social networks and drug use (thus fulfilling the implicit prediction).
The college’s failure to facilitate a meaningful transition to adulthood *status* is worth commenting on as well — this is also becoming more common. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/education/edlife/09books-t.html
There is, in Collins, a melancholy sadness — a tragic sadness, really — adhering to victims of all kinds, including the victims of bullying: they strike back at their abusers, but to no avail. Retaliation is ineffective, and the grievance is never settled. Just like now.
This may be why, in the present case, the grievance appears to us as trivial, or imagined, and the violence extended to children — although gang shootings long ago broke this taboo. Collins’ warning is that violence is becoming the newest venue for social stratification. I am perhaps wording this infelicitously. The book explains it better than I can, and it is a fascinating read. But the focus throughout is the role that society has in producing violence, of all kinds, only tragically leading to more violence.