In USN I take a look at the recent Mockingbird dust-up and what it might preview about a coming debate in our sector.
What does Justin Trinidad do all day? Funny you should ask! Interview with the Bellwether research assistant here.
Phil & Friends review via GratefulEd.
Richard Whitmire on charter district collaboration in Texas.
Here’s a nice piece about Mitchell Chester.
Some NCLB history in this John Boehner profile.
Derrell Bradford on what’s next after Janus. Outside of the hysterics on both sides, (greatest thing ever or death blow for democracy) people’s take on this seems to owe a lot to how they answer a more fundamental question about the K-12 education sector: Are the teachers unions, in their current posture, more a cause of our educational problems or a symptom of them? If you think the latter you’re more likely to see a less linear path ahead if the SCOTUS strikes down mandatory dues.
Understanding this argument requires an ability to detect and follow nuance, but nuance has largely been dismissed from the debates about speech raging on college campuses. Absolutist postures and the binary reign supreme. You are pro- or anti-, radical or fascist, angel or demon. Even small differences of opinion are seized on and characterized as moral and intellectual failures, unacceptable thought crimes that cancel out anything else you might say.
No one should have to pass someone else’s ideological purity test to be allowed to speak. University life — along with civic life — dies without the free exchange of ideas.
In the face of intimidation, educators must speak up, not shut down. Ours is a position of unique responsibility: We teach people not what to think, but how to think.
Realizing and accepting this has made me — an eminently replaceable, untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD — realize that no matter the precariousness of my situation, I have a responsibility to model the appreciation of difference and care of thought I try to foster in my students.
If I, like so many colleagues nationwide, am afraid to say what I think, am I not complicit in the problem?
At Reed and nationwide, we have largely stayed silent, probably hoping that this extremist moment in campus politics eventually peters out. But it is wishful thinking to imagine that the conversation will change on its own…
Actually, the intersectional Left will leave at least one enduring legacy: a generation of university-educated people – “progressive” yet deeply illiberal
