Laura takes on Linda Hirshman, standing up for those of us who think there is more to life than making loads of money and accumulating power. Laura is really pissed, and on a roll. Comment there.
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Harry
Some of you will already be aware of this story. I thought at the time that it was just a storm in a teacup — a group of teachers devise a spectacularly inappropriate assignment, some parents complain (I was shown some of the emails; they were annoyed but good-humoured), and the principal and District act promptly to stop the assignment. The local press make a meal of it because…well, its suddenly turned cold and there’s not a lot going on. The spokesperson for the teachers comes off as naïve, but not ill-willed. Ann Althouse, oddly, uses the case as a reason to suspect that the District does not have its act together — an odd conclusion to draw from a single instance in which it does the right thing effectively and immediately.
But then, yesterday, the local left-of-center paper published an extraordinary editorial defending the assignment. IF you read the NBC and Cap Times stories carefully you’ll see that their descriptions of the assignment differ. The NBC reporter showed me the assignment, and I have to admit that I did not take notes, but I definitely drew the implication that immediate withdrawal was demanded: the letter certainly said that if peace had not been achieved within 12 days the letter would be sent again.
The Cap Times editorial is wrong in so many ways I don’t know where to begin.
Ted Wragg is dead, aged 67. Guardian obituary is here. I never met Ted, only once spying him across the table at a long meeting, but I read his columns in the TES from my early teens, and was always struck by the nice combination of ironic humour and passionate concern. He was prolific and energetic, funny (he sometimes contributed jokes for Bremner, and the News Huddlines) and always ready to puncture the presumptions of the powerful. The obit says that an email address has been set up for messages of condolence at education@exeter.ac.uk
I know one should not speak ill of the dead, but I suspect he is one of the culprits (along with others I shan’t mention) for the tendency of education policymakers and even academics in the UK to indulge in excessive football analogies. A very sad loss.
The LSR Fellows program at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University has set its application deadline one month earlier than in the past – Nov. 1st. So if you are thinking of applying you should get a move on. My sense, from people who’ve done it, is that it is a fantastic experience.
Here’s a piece in today’s Guardian by Neal Lawson (the chair of Compass) arguing that Labour has something real to fear from a Cameron victory, and, more interestingly, that a smart unblinkered Tory (if Cameron is one) could reforge a kind of modern one-nation Toryism.
The bigger threat is that Cameron could outflank New Labour on the left. This would not be so hard, given the space that Blair’s march to the right has left vacant. On civil liberties, for example, it would be easy for Cameron to appeal to a progressive centre disenchanted with New Labour’s reactionary approach. In addition, Cameron and his Notting Hill crowd instinctively understand the “wellbeing agenda” and could play to the many voters who yearn for a better quality of life. Even on social justice, it would be possible to recreate a modern form of one-nation Toryism. At the last election New Labour was outflanked on the left by the Liberal Democrats. In four years’ time we could be outmanoeuvred on the left by the Tories.
Conjectural, obviously, but also interesting. Obviously Brits will be more interested than anyone in this, but Americans who read David Brooks’s column on Sunday, in which he praised Cameron for learning so much from that great conservative leader George W Bush, might also learn something. Or perhaps you already knew that Brooks doesn’t know anything about British politics.
If you support a legal right to abortion, you should read Russell Arben Fox’s careful and nuanced argument against his fellow abortion-opponents who support the right to abortion. If you think there is no right to abortion, you also might want to read his argument. Here is the interesting post by Hugo Schwyzer to which he is responding; and here is a response to Russell from the excellent djw.
Ok, this was all discussed 3 weeks ago, but I am the slowest blog-watcher on the web. Comment there, not here.
The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, the online journal run out of USC Law School which I blogged about back in the spring, has just introduced an updates service — sign up in the left hand corner. It has now published 6 articles, with one more coming in the next few days. Andrei Marmor tells me it has an acceptance rate of 1:11, and gets about 600 downloads per month.
I’m looking for ideas of high quality documentaries and musicals (and, if you know any, musical documentaries) to show to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. They are socio-economically disadvantaged (about 75% free or reduced school lunch) and about half are white, and half African-American. They’ll watch the films in grade-level-specific groups. Well?
If you live in the US and receive public television you might want to watch Making Schools Work tonight (9-11, 8-10 Central). If you do watch it, and want to use the comments below to comment about it, please go ahead.
Update: Well, I’ll get the ball rolling, if possible (though see comment 1 below, which predates this update).
I was at once impressed by the show and irritated by it. Impressed, because the makers seemed to have gone to real trouble to understand the character of the reforms they were describing, and to present the lived experience of going through those reform. I knew a good deal of what was presented, but by no means all, and learned a lot more than is possible from the kind of study I do.
But irritated for two reasons.
The message I got as a graduate student was basically this: “Don’t publish anything unless it is outstandingly good, or in a high reputation journal, and even then don’t publish much”. I suspect this was slightly anachronistic even then (not complaining: it worked for me). So I have recently revised my advice to students; I mildly encourage publication (though stick to the advice that it should be pretty good). And, of course, the reputation of journals, which matters a little after tenure, and more before, matters enormously in pre-job search. But how do you know which have the good reputations?
While, thanks to the Gourmet report, potential graduate student have a pretty good sense of the reputation graduate schools have in the profession, it is much harder for existing graduate students to have a good sense of the reputation that journals (which they might choose to publish in) have. My guess is that they rely on their advisors’ judgements. But these judgements are likely to be less than fully informed. For myself I have distinct preferences within my own field, but have no idea whether they have shared. At the top it is pretty clear — Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs enjoy great reputations. I like the Journal of Political Philosophy for its more eclectic coverage than you get in PPA (or in Political Theory) and I also like Social Theory and Practice (not least because STP has provided great referee’s comments on my submissions, and copy-edited my publications beautifully). But are graduate students better advised to publish in those journals than in, say, Legal Theory, or Law and Philosophy or Economics and Philosophy? I’ve no idea, and nor have I any idea, really, how to find out. Except by asking the readers of CT, and by respectfully suggesting to Brian Leiter that there’s a missing market here…
Obit here.
When I first started arguing for lotteries in admissions to oversubscribed schools, I was ridiculed on 2 grounds — that it was wrong and that it was politically unfeasible — ridiculous, in fact. I disagreed that it was wrong, but thought it worth having the argument. I agreed that it was politically unfeasible, but saw it as worth arguing for, on the grounds that making the argument helped to show up the ways in which other methods for allocating children to oversubscribed schools did not give choice to parents but to school (or LEA) officials. Apparently I was wrong:
Ministers have given their support to the allocation of places at over-subscribed schools by lottery. An academy in south London is one of a number of schools now allocating some of its places to children in the area on a random basis. The arrangements are seen as a way of breaking social segregation, particularly where better-off families buy up homes near popular schools.
After a rivetting series, England have, at last, won the Ashes back. I have wasted a lot of work time listening to these matches — I hope there isn’t another series like it for years.
I pointed out to my dad yesterday that without Flintoff this would have been a walkover for the Aussies; he, reasonably, retorted that without Warne it would have been a walkover for England (even without Flintoff). I can’t remember any series in which both sides had one such dominating player. Warne is supposed not to be back — but the guy took 40 wickets in a 5 match series at 16.875 a piece; it is hard to believe that someone who can achieve that in his mid-30’s will be done for before he’s 40. And as for Flintoff — he’s like a throwback to the 60’s, or 30’s, or something, the days of Washbrook, Laker, and the like: if he didn’t seem so unselfconsciously generous, I’d think he had made it a mission to shame every other sportsman and woman in the world.
Oh, and I should add, well done, chaps! (as if any of you are reading!)
As a result of the evacuation from New Orleans, thousands of displaced students around the country will be absorbed into elementary, middle, and high schools which are not ready for them. If the experience of my own city (Madison, WI) is anything to go by, these students are largely disadvantaged, and are being placed in neighborhoods which are also disadvantaged; and will hence attend schools with high proportions of disadvantaged students. Department of Education officials are figuring out what to do — according to Education Week there is talk of relaxing unspecified provisions of No Child Left Behind; there is some pressure to relax or waive adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements for schools that take in refugees, and also to relax or waive the ‘Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom’ requirements.
I want to recommend that D of E officials would do well to resist some of this pressure. They should try to get their hands on some of the relief money, and use it to give schools both the incentive and the ability to meet the requirements. (If they do give into the pressure, they should, do this anyway). Specifically:
* Give schools which take evacuees totaling 2-5% of their previous student population funds which they can use to retain and attract qualified teachers (with incentive payments)
* Reward schools in this group which have increased their percentage of qualified teachers by February 2006 with flexible funds (which the schools could use, for example, for supplies, residential field trips, bonus payments to the teachers most affected, etc).
* Establish a program to incentivize qualified teachers who have left teaching to return to the classroom (in refugee-qualifying schools). The Department of Education could request current employers of such returning teachers to hold their jobs open for them for 24 months, and could pay the returning teacher the difference between her teachers’ salary and her non-teaching salary (again for 24 months).
The U.S. Department of Education has a website up to facilitate providing support to schools affected by the Hurricane Katrina. If you work for or run an organization that is in a position to donate supplies, money, or expertise to affected schools you might well check out the site. Or, if you know that evacuees are being accepted to a school near you, you might want to donate directly. If you are a employer, you might consider offering qualified employees paid leave to volunteer in local schools accepting evacuees.
More on hurricane help for schools later.