Bellwether’s Max Marchitello on why CALSTERS doesn’t work for most teachers. Chad Aldeman on how you can fix your pension debt problem. Emmeline Zhao and I are taking our media curation work to The 74, where we’ll do that among other things.
John King exit memo (pdf).
Quality Counts. Alabama report cards, look for more of this.
Susan Dynarksi on why the reality of “free markets” in education is more complicated than the rhetoric.
A lot of attention understandably focused on Washington, but there will be a lot of action in the states on education worth watching.
Here are six possibly consensus ideas from Robin Lake. And 10 education ideas from New America.
Claudio Sanchez education predictions for 2017.
…you argue for a liberalism that works “quietly, sensitively, and with a proper sense of scale” when it comes to highly charged issues like sexuality and religion. Is there a campus corollary to that?
Yes, because there has been a radicalization of student demands and also a loss of a sense of proportion. Our campuses are not Aleppo. And to witness the rage around some of these issues — whether it’s the naming of buildings, the transgender-bathroom issue, or the pronoun issue — we’re an evangelical country, and we tend toward fanaticism whenever we try to reform ourselves. It’s unfortunate to see the university become a place where this kind of self-induced hysteria is drawing in students who should be thinking more outside of themselves. College administrators and professors have stood by and not resisted that very strongly.
It has created a spectacle that is very damaging — and here I speak as a liberal — to the liberal cause. A fact of our political lives as liberals is that everything we do and say is filtered through conservative media. To constantly feed the beast the way these identity theatrics do only harms the liberal cause when it comes to reaching out to voters. It’s an enormous distraction and an enormous loss of energy — energy that could be directed outward, toward common political goals in the real world. Instead it’s directed inward, toward the self and the little utopic communities we try to create for ourselves on our campuses.
Atlantic deep-dive on Clinton, Mississippi and the schools there.
I’m going to miss most of these can’t miss education conferences, but a few look good.
Guns and Roses as you haven’t heard them before.
