StickWithANose

One of the most frustrating aspects of our current push for high academic standards and achievement [masquerading as a push for educational equality] is the expansion of ’schooling’ to the early years of childhood and with it the increasing fetishization of assessment. It is now commonplace for policy-makers and politicians to establish their educational street-creds [...]

Despite my propensity for publishing posts that take, let us say, a bleak view of education policy, economic issues, and politics, I really don’t consider myself to be all that cynical. [Although my friends might beg to differ...] I find joy in the small stuff like enjoying the roar of cicadas in the early evening [...]

Well, it looks like the Sherrod incident has brought the issue of race back into the spotlight of popular discourse and [predictably] the same old narratives are surfacing to obscure and dismiss the racial character of American culture. This week Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia offered up more boilerplate opinions that race is no longer [...]

Ed continues to offer some of the most thoughtful [& profane] critiques of modern American culture to be found on the inter-tubes. In this post, he tackles an issue that appears to be taboo for the “family values” crowd…
Parenting is miserable in part because we make it miserable. Other countries have a year of paid [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One of the current elements of today’s political dynamic that is most disturbing from a democratic perspective is the slickly packaged media techniques being employed by political actors both private and public. An entire knowledge industry has emerged over the past 35 years funded primarily by the business sector with the express purpose of naturalizing [...]

In doing the research for my dissertation, I read all of the popular texts* addressing education policy and reform produced by six major think-tanks between 1998-2008. One of the many things that struck me was the degree to which the books produced identical narratives that employed the same talking points and political sloganeering and the [...]

My intention for today’s post was to focus on the news that several states are seeking federal waivers to cut special education funding in response to budget crises. I intended to discuss the impact that these kinds of cuts have on poorer urban schools that have higher proportions of students classified as having learning disabilities [...]