CRPE rolls up the education data on 50 large and mid-size cities. Not beach reading.

Here’s some inside baseball for you: Wayback machine to when the current NEA President was calling on President Clinton to resign and agreeing with impeachment proponents. And what that might might have to do with politics today.

Hillary Clinton is tugging at a weak spot in Bernie Sander’s higher ed plan. Shows another fault line in the Democratic Party, one that plays out more on higher ed than K-12: working class and middle class Dems versus Farmers Market Dems.

Big Gates Foundation confab in Seattle today. You can watch here live.

Bob Shireman looks at formerly for-profit colleges that he argues still in effect operate that way. Laureate is going public again. Collaborative For Student Success on Florida standards debate. Freedom of religion still doesn’t extend to vaccination policies in schools. And state proficiency levels still vary. Things are messy in Albuquerque. Not a lot of flattering things to say about the student loan industry.

Sara Mead’s congressional testimony on Head Start (pdf). Great line-up of speakers for this PPI event 10/15 about D.C. schools.

Let’s say you’re a state where fewer than one in five of your poor kids and minority kids are proficient in reading and math by 8th-grade according to national post-secondary ready standards but you’ve consistently told people almost all your schools are pretty good. Your accountability system – which doesn’t consider racial or economic disparities – shows that and performance awards are given out like door prizes. So when you modestly raise standards in a well-intentioned effort to raise the bar and better prepare students for life suddenly a lot more schools don’t look so good on the accountability acceptability system. Uh oh. What do you do? You change it of course and create a bunch of new categories.

Brett Peiser on John King.

Kaitlin Pennington weighs in on Smarick v. Weisberg on PD and evaluation. Diane Tavenner on personalized learning. Charter-like schools in New Zealand.

MacArthur* is spinning out a $25 million ed tech play. More efforts to diversify higher ed student aid. Pension liabilities by state. Teacher pensions don’t work very well for most teachers.

This column makes some good points on youth sports but I don’t know about this line:

That approach doesn’t cut it with some dads, especially the ones who also played football in high school or college. For them, playing on a field for two hours simply isn’t intense enough for their future RG3s.

In my admittedly unscientific sample I find the more success that someone enjoyed in sports the more chill they are about it. Friends who played professionally or at an elite level are pretty OK with sports, it’s the ones who missed it but aren’t okay with that who run around living through their kids.

If you work in higher ed, in any capacity, use some common sense about emails you send to students. Really. Good intentions don’t cut it.

Not everyone likes A Girl With A Watering Can. This punk did not get mac and cheese.

*Disc – I was paid to write a paper for them years ago on this issue. I predicted ed tech would over-promise and under-deliver in the classroom and that there was real room for innovation with data and analytics to transform the operation of schools instead. I think they hated it.