this is crossposted from dailykos - I think the content of what I wrote is relevant here, and I also want to encourage people to read the book. When I do review it I will probably also crosspost that review here as well. Peace. This is really the litmus test for you, as president. Each and every time a policy decision comes before you, you must ask yourself: What impact will this particular policy have on the development of trustful relationships in every local community? Every single law or regulation that comes out of Washington helps or hurts such relationships; none is neutral.Those words...
The Week in Ed Science Links, Mostly
A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking Danny Kahneman is a psychologist who is the co-creator of behavioral economics (with his late collaborator Amos Tversky), for which he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. Discussions with him inspired a 2-day "Master Class" given by Kahneman for a group of twenty leading American business/Internet/culture innovators—a microcosm of the recently dominant sector of American business—in Napa, California in July. They came to hear him lecture on his ideas and research in diverse fields such as human judgment, decision making and behavioral economics...
Left Behind
What IS Left Behind?We have reached a critical crossroads in our educational and national history. As NCLB’s reauthorization or expiration takes center stage in Washington, American citizens who care about the future of our public schools and our democracy must be heard. Our shared future is not an abstract political possibility but, rather, one that breathes in every son or daughter, every niece or nephew, every grandson or granddaughter, every neighbor’s child, and every one of our own students who enters the schoolhouse door.While Secretary Spellings and legislators from both parties stubbornly...
Fixing the Community Organizing Funding Disaster (Community Organizing and Urban Education)
To read the entire series, go here.Community organizing groups spend an inordinate amount of time grubbing after money—often fairly small amounts of money when seen from the perspective of large foundations. And organizing groups often have to tweak what they do in order to fulfil the requirements of a funder. Even more problematically, many organizing groups are forced to get funding for purely service oriented activities in order to survive over the long term. While I think organizing groups need to think more carefully and complexly about how they might embrace more service work in order...
NCLB and Ritual Performance
I recently moved our daughter to West Hollywood and her new post-college life. After wrestling 4 pieces of luggage, 3 of them overweight, and a cat, on and off an airplane and into our rental car, and then schlepping out to buy a car in 106 degree Montclair/Pomona, I needed a break.I tooled west down Sunset in my rented Prius to have lunch with Peter McLaren. I hadn't met Peter, but he was the major professor of my new colleague, Nathalia Jaramillo, and she said he lived near where our daughter would be. I figured, yes, what a perfect break from the chores of moving!The lunch was delightful, full...
The Week in Ed Science Links: Interesting, Useful, Odd
I read sciencedaily every day (I'm afraid) and there's often interesting stuff there that seems related to education in some way, however strange. So I though I'd save the ones that seemed possibly relevant to education, and put them up once a week. Enjoy (or avoid) as you please! [Please excuse the different formatting.]Medication For ADHD May Help Students Succeed At School n an 18-year-study on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, Mayo Clinic researchers found that treatment with prescription stimulants is associated with improved long-term academic success of children with ADHD. The...
A very good Education Plan from John Edwards
(this is being posted at a variety of sites, including dailykos, raisingkaine, and the education policy blog)While is Iowa this week Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards unveiled an extensive and fairly comprehensive approach to the educational issues facing America’s schools. It is entitled Restoring the Promise of America's Schools. It is by far the best overall approach to education I have seen in the last few presidential cycles. While I have some concerns, which I will address, I want to begin by acknowledging how good it is.I strongly urge people to go to the link above and...
Coopted by Foundations? (Community Organizing and Urban Education)
[To read the entire series, go here.]Foundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and, in effect, establish an agenda of what merits society's attention.--Arnove, cited in Barker, "Do Capitalists Fund Revolutions?"Community organizing groups often pride themselves by their refusal of any government money. The general agreement among organizers on this issue rests on very good reasons, grounded on a long history of...
NCATE, Diversity, and Dispositions
The Journal of Educational Controversy has just published a timely set of essays on the issue of dispositions. Most of the articles are, obviously, either directly or tangentially related to NCATE’s removal of social justice as a term in the glossary. I have an article in the issue that looks at the marginalization of foundations in regards to these issues. There are some excellent articles in the issue, including an historical perspective from Jennifer de Forest and a scathing critique from Bonnie and Dale Johnson. After reading the essays I wish there would have been an opportunity to create...
Buying Off the Fighters (Community Organizing and Urban Education)
[To read the entire series, go here.]After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools. --New York Times, September 17, 2007 An interesting article in today’s New York Times reports on an effort in Tuscaloosa to resegregate their public schools. As is regularly the case in America, today, this resegregation is being framed as an...
A Task for Foundations: Cognitive Dissonance for Conservatives
A recent study in Nature (see this summary in Slate) found that those with "a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change." In other words, even when faced with dissonant or contradictory data, people who identified as conservative were more likely to stick with their original idea rather than respond to new data and give more accurate responses.It seems to me that this highlights the importance of foundations as a place where students learn, through...
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