I would honestly prefer to read, think and write about poetry, about Bei Dao or Margaret Fuller in The Dial, or “the tyranny of vision” that I fear is our only REAL problem (vision becomes language: narrow what you look at, narrow what you think and say). But I think it might do us all [...]
Tag Archives: public schools
Tony Bennett and the Dark Night of Reform Ideology
I’ll confess that I have trouble focusing when it comes to the continuing and constant aggressive onslaught by “faceless” capital against human beings. I know that capital is not faceless–it shines in the face of Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction (a term of art if ever there was one) George Creel, er, I mean, Tony [...]
No Charter School Left Behind: Mitch Daniels, Tony Bennett, and Dennis Bakke’s Imagine Schools
This is a guest post by B-town Errant contributor, Doug Martin. This post was originally published on Mr. Martin’s blog on Fire Dog Lake, and has been republished on B-Town Errant with his permission. Introductory comments from B-town Errant’s Editor-in-Chief: Doug Martin shows us the machinations of crony capitalism. The USA is the land of opportunity for the [...]
Organs of Force: Free Market Grifters and Edupreneurs
*Please see footnote at the bottom of this post for a comment about my title choice. Fellow blogger and “education-minded” investigator Steve Hinnefeld suggested I check out the work of Karen Francisco who helms Learning Curve, “a blog about education,” at the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. And when Steve suggests something, you make a b-line [...]
Grading for Failure’s Sake
In my recent post “Dear Errant, Advice to the Marks: Always Be Cynical” I proposed that there is no way to understand “the way social life works” (that means cities and states and nations, etc.) without taking a big hard look at the POWER structure and questioning its motives–hell, impugning its motives! This is what [...]
Dear Errant, Advice for the Marks: Always Be Cynical
If you haven’t seen Glengarry Glen Ross, get thee to your movie outlet of choice (ah, choice) ASAP. (Of course let’s not talk about the Mamet of today, okay?) Briefly, a real estate sales office is trying to cold call “marks” to buy lots in new developments. Their leads are “very cold” and they hear [...]
What’s In a Name? School District as Corporation
“It rocks the core of education and what we’ve been accustomed to. From the changes in collective bargaining to teacher/principal evaluations, merit pay and changes in the immigration laws, it’s just been one thing after another. We’ve had a ton of changes thrown at us at one time. We will all have to roll up [...]
DeMuth to School Board: Don’t meet so much!
In today’s HT Bethany Nolan reports that the MCCSC School Board will reduce their public meetings to once a month, down from twice. Throughout it seems clear that this is the decision of the new Superintendent Judy DeMuth, who I will call Super J from now on. This is intriguing, as I always thought that [...]
