StickWithANose

The tide has been turning on integrated schooling for the past three decades, and now it appears as though one of the most successful integrated school districts in the South will follow the lead of urban districts all over the nation. Funny how the re-segregation of a school district in a Southern city finds its [...]

One of the key failings of American democracy is the substitution of constructive political discourse with rhetoric designed only to achieve political ends through linguistic subterfuge. The dark arts of political marketing and message framing have achieved a central place in the generative construction of power and is on full display in this EdWeek article [...]

Team Obama floated its first trial balloon on how to pay for Education Jobs without touching Arne’s precious Race to the Top funding… Take the money from food stamps! That 55% of Americans believe Obama to be a socialist speaks volumes about how far down the rabbit hole we’ve gone…
We were told we have to [...]

Yesterday, the oligarch funded Center on Education Policy released another installment of its three year research project tracking the impact of the stimulus package on education. The results suggest that stimulus dollars helped to stave off the worst-case scenario of collapsing school budgets. However, as the stimulus dollars begin to run out, school budgets are [...]

While it is easy to dismiss the craziness that is Glenn Beck, it is important to see him for what he is… a manifestation of the generative character of political power. As the new super-pundit of cable news and talk radio, Beck is a pedagogue in the truest sense of the word in that he [...]

Posted without comment: The Big Picture
I continue to see the Austerian movement in the United States as thinly disguised partisan politics. These are people who will say anything to keep the subsidies and tax benefits flowing to their electoral base. They will say anything –regardless of whether they actually believe these things — to thwart [...]

A couple of weeks back I had an odd encounter with an old acquaintance on a social media outlet in which I tried to have a conversation with him about a video he had posted. Let’s just say that it didn’t end well… What struck me about the whole episode was the degree to which [...]

The New York Times is featuring a piece today on Teach for America, and it follows the predictable recipe of framing actual information and controversy between anecdotal interviews and observations that undermines any sort of critical judgment or actual reporting. I’ve blogged about TFA previously, so I don’t think that it is necessary to cover [...]

I noted earlier in the week that the machine had kicked into gear to discredit Diane Ravitch after her very public conversion from being a big supporter of NCLB and charters to a critic. To her credit, Ravitch’s conversion was one based on the growing body of evidence that the accountability-charter juggernaut is both destructive [...]

West Tennessee Edition:

The Hamptons Edition: from The Big Picture
The slowing economic growth may be what most people are focusing on, but the brutally apparent trend here is on luxe spending. Conspicuous consumption may have had its setbacks the past few years, but its on full display out here.
We went to several very nice, quite pricey [...]