Posts Tagged ‘education’

What a month. It started out well enough, and after about a week and a half I was well on my way to a very solid January. Then all hell broke loose, and I lost heavily for the rest of the month, finishing it well in the red. I already made one whine post, so I won’t do any more of that here.

The good news is that the month is over and I started February off yesterday with a great day, digging myself about a third of the way out of the hole. First a graph, then we’ll look at progress towards the year’s goals:

Resolution One: Keep Grinding NLHE Cash Games

Goal 1: Earn $X in NLHE Cash Games

Ha. At this rate, I’ll be busto by the end of the year.

Goal 2: Earn Supernova status on PokerStars

I’m already a Gold Star, not that that takes much. I earned 9022 VPPs, which actually wouldn’t see me hit Supernova until November. However, I now have more money on Stars than I do on FTP, so hopefully I’ll be playing bigger and more often on there. Probably I’ll make Supernova by September, certainly by the end of the year.

Resolution Two: Diversify My Income Streams

Goal 3: Monetize This Blog  Read the complete post...

The Boston Herald ran an article this morning about the Boston Debate League and one of its member schools which was nearly closed by the school district:

The debate team at the Academy of Public Service sailed into the “elite eight” last year at the national championships in Chicago.

Now, thanks to that oratorical success, the debaters have talked their way into another year of funding as their school merges with the nearby Noonan Business Academy in Codman Square.

“The output of the debate team was a big part of the decision,” said team coach Locksley Bryan. “They saw these kids doing academic calisthenics at a very high level and it impressed them.”

The backstory, as I understand it, is that several years ago the Boston Public Schools received a multi-year, multi-million-dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support a transition to small schools. The grant funded the dissolution of Boston’s large public high schools into multiple small schools sharing a single building. Thus, what was Dorchester High School became three schools within the renamed Dorchester Education Complex: Tech Boston, Noonan Business Academy, and the Academy of Public Service (APS).  Read the complete post...

About five years ago, when I was a senior in college, I attended a panel on education reform that a professor of mine had organized. One of the panelists was “domestic terrorist” Bill Ayers. I don’t recall what Ayers was bloviating about, but he told some story about seeing a group of big, “thugged out” guys getting interviewed by a reporter at a high school in a rough part of Chicago. He asked if they were the football team and was told that in fact they were the chess team, and that they had won the city championships. He was surprised that that this school with a bad reputation in a bad part of town would be so into chess. I didn’t know about the chess championship, but I actually coached debate at the same school.

After the panel, there was a reception. It was a small crowd, and I was one of the only students there, certainly the least consequential person by a mile. My professor called Bill over to introduce him to me, and I began to tell him my story, “I was interested to hear about the [High School] chess team you met, because I actually coach a debate team at that same school. I’ve had similar-”  Read the complete post...

While reading a relatively unrelated opinion piece in today’s New York Times, I was reminded of a comment left by Jen on one of my recent Savage Inequalities posts. She asked whether Kozol addressed the question of inequality between states and pointed me to the condition of schools in her native South Carolina, where her mother is a public school teacher. I’ll address that in a moment, but first, here’s Bob Herbert on South Carolina’s rural schools:

“If you were to walk into some of those schools — which are spread along a crescent-shaped corridor on either side of Interstate 95 from the southern edge of North Carolina to the northern edge of Georgia — you might forget that you were in the United States.

A former South Carolina commerce secretary, Charles Way, talks in the film about the time his car broke down near one of these schools and he went inside to use a phone.

“I just couldn’t really believe my eyes,” he said. “It was the most deplorable building condition that I’ve ever seen in my life. How the hell somebody could teach in an environment like that is really just beyond me.”

Among many other problems, ancient plumbing has resulted in raw sewage backing up into some schools, bringing in vermin and unbearable odors. The first school profiled in “Corridor of Shame” was built in 1896.  Read the complete post...

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It has been 25 years since Savage Inequalities was first published, and there have been some changes. Schools are still funded primarily by local property taxes, guaranteeing that wealthier school districts will produce better educated children. However, the federal role in education has greatly increased, and funds from Title I and other revenue streams have in some cases ironed out the most glaring disparities. According to a 2002 study by the Government Accounting Office, pupils in Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis now receive more investment than their suburban counterparts.

But I have worked in two of these districts, and I have seen and heard about conditions at some schools that would not be tolerated in Newton or New Trier. Without engaging in an extensive critique of the GAO’s numbers, I will say that there are some reasons why they may be misleading. Dropout rates, in part of a product of inferior schools, are much higher in the city. In fact, as Kozol points out, schools often plan for and rely on substantial numbers of students dropping out. Thus, 35 students may be assigned to a classroom with 27 desks on the safe assumption that 8 of those students will not be attending school by the end of the first semester. While per-pupil spending may be high for those students who remain in school, the numbers may not be so rosy when distributed across all of the students that the district ought to be educating.  Read the complete post...

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One thing I admire about Kozol is that he is much more upfront about his agenda and the sacrifices required than are many other advocates of reform. He admits that, “Attorneys in school-equalization suits have done their best to understate the notion of ‘redistribution’ of resources. They try instead, whenever possible, to speak in terms that seem to offer something good for everyone involved…. No matter what devices are contrived to bring about equality, it is clear that they require money-transfer, and the largest source of money is the portion of the population that possesses the most money.”

This is where the issue gets thorny. Moral outrage is one of Kozol’s strongest weapons, and seeing the conditions of the schools he visits, it is hard not to be outraged. The problem is that it is getting harder and harder to find a specific law or institution, let alone specific individuals, to be outraged at.  Read the complete post...

The argument can be made, sometimes convincingly, that many forms of inequality in the US result at least in part from poor choices on the part of those who hold the short end of the stick. That argument absolutely disintegrates in the context of education. Not only is it patently unjust in principle to punish or reward children for the actions of their parents (assuming, still, the framework of the ‘personal responsibility’ crowd), but it is all the moreso in the realm of education, which is a fundamental prerequisite for future responsible decision-making. The result is a rigged game where children are denied the necessary tools for citizenship and employment and then blamed for their failure to find work and obey the law.

I’m no wishy-washy, self-esteem-promoting, “all children are beautiful” hippy. I believe in merit, I believe in special programs for gifted/talented/advanced/whatever-you-want-to-call-them students, and I am perfectly comfortable stating that some people and some kids are smarter, more capable, and all around better and more deserving than others. Higher education is not for everyone, and we need plenty of people to work low-wage, unskilled jobs in our economy. What I am not comfortable with is making those distinctions based on the test scores of a first grader, or even more troubling, based on the color of her skin or the size of her father’s salary.  Read the complete post...

I’m a voracious reader, and it’s not my intention to write a review of every book I read. Having just completed Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, however, I am moved to record some thoughts here. It turns out I have a lot of thoughts, so I’m going to post this in smaller chunks.

As most of you know, I’ve done a lot of work, both paid and unpaid, in the Chicago and Boston Public Schools. Racial and economic justice is very important to me, particularly in the context of education. I’ve rarely encountered anyone who articulated the importance of these issues as well as Kozol, nor anyone who could so deftly expose the most common justifications for the educational disparities that exist in US public education. The book is a lot heavier on outrage and indignation than on solutions, but from what I’ve seen, that is sadly appropriate. There is much to be outraged about in urban public education, and when it comes to systemic reform, more than 100 years of effort have not yet produced a solution to the dual problems of institutional neglect and racism.  Read the complete post...