« Rhee-Write?
Two On Teachers’ Unions »

Money Matters

Smart NYT Magazine roundtable on education philanthropy. The invaluable Paul Tough moderates a discussion with Steve Barr, Rick Hess, Vanessa Kirsch, Joel I. Klein and Tom Vander Ark.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 7:36 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Money Matters”

  1. john thompson Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 5:27 pm

    This, and your previous post, gets us back to the same issue. In the “Graduate,” the word was “plastics.” In today’s posts, the word should be “toxic.” How much toxicity do we want to pump into our children’s schools?

    When I was a kid, there were plenty of “There Will Be Blood” type parents who were so competitive that they even imposed a jungle-like upbring on their own kids. I remember when Jummy Peirsall had his nervous breakdown at Yankee Stadium (which was the basis for “Fear Strikes Out” if I remember correctly.)

    But today, how many people want to impose the full brutality of unrestrained competition and shame on their on kids as they are growing up? But schools are our kids “home away from home.” What values do we want to model for them? Shouldn’t we at least say “hello” to subordinates?

    NCLB is fundamentaly based on blame and shame. When we blame and shame educators (or others) as a class, won’t that shame roll downhill? We shouldn’t “foul or own nest” at home or at school.

    The funders who want to bet on Michelle Rhee should look to Oklahoma City. Last summer we hired a superintendent from the Broad school, who brought in Broad experts who didn’t bother to listen or take time for a diagnosis of our problems. After throwing the system into a complete mess, he was thrown out after seven months. The district attorney’s report (yes, it was that bitter) was just published and it should be a cautionary tale.

  2. Anonymous Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 7:51 pm

    Huh?

    Millions of kids fail to get even basic literacy skills out a K-12 education, but by all means, let us worry about “blame and shame.”

    The guy who made the most sense in that is Steve Barr.

  3. Anonymous Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 10:30 pm

    If my child was in one of those districts, I would want some blaming and some shaming.

  4. john thompson Says:
    March 11th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

    Anonymouses,

    The real question is whether you want the blame and shame dumped on your child? If you could find a blame sytem that only hurts adults, that would be a different issue.

    If you think you can dump all of this toxicity onto poor schools and not have it land on children, shaming and damaging them, then I doubt you or your child has much real-world contact with poor schools and the conditions that created them

  5. Anonymous Says:
    March 12th, 2008 at 1:28 am

    What precisely is it that is not toxic about failing to teach children how to read in the early grades and then warehousing them until they see no point in staying in school and dropout?

Leave a Reply