Kansas City District School Closings

I hope closing schools will get the district’s finances down to a manageable level. They have spent too many years living in the past and bouncing from one temporary fix to another. Their mission has changed. Instead of serving all the students in one geographic area, they now serve students who aren’t interested in the offerings of charters schools, or can’t afford private school, or particularly want to invest in the district, or want some specialized experience they offer, like African-centered education or an arts focus.

Getting Your Sea Legs, or The Secrets of My (Wobbly, Five-Year) Success

I know, you want to help people. Change lives! Reach out to the disenfranchised! Create educational equality in an unequal world! My goal was to do all that, and to make it through five years in teaching. More than half of our new teachers in America quit before five years. In schools with lots of […]

For Peace and Freedom

So they dug out this ash heap in Queens and built all these pavilions. They had cars already driving around in 1939. Cars were not yet drudgery and traffic jams and Jiffy Lube– they were leisure and freedom. They had an early television. Television was not yet aesthetic assault and battery everywhere you turn. You could see the Magna Carta. They had a dishwasher, which was about to make everyone’s life better (except for people who insist on living in minimally renovated pre-1935 housing like stupid, stupid me). They had a robot who smoked cigarettes. He was seven feet tall, spoke 700 words from the record player in his belly, and I would definitely go out on a date with him if his reconstruction goes as planned.

Getting A Grip

Slipping standards, slipping standards” will always be with me. It does sound like a prophesy from a robed, scraggly figure. I’ll probably find it laid out there in my cup, next time I check out my tea leaves. Like most prophesies, it has a seed of truth: standards are always in danger.