The Choice Channel

“My concern is with the unintended consequences of preferences that have damaged higher education in general. To understand the magnitude of this damage we need to think of it as systemic—that is, damage to the entire system of thought and behavior on college campuses. It begins with changes to the way in which a relatively small number of students and faculty are brought into colleges and universities, and that might seem to be a circumscribed kind of change that would not touch anything else that is going on there. But systemic damage happens when small changes trigger other changes, and those lead to still others, until the chain of reactions adds up to something that overwhelms the system.” (09/26/08)

http://tinyurl.com/5x22uz

“My daughter, noting that her one-eyed hedgehog Peter Prickles was suffering from sev ere energy depletion and a growth over his single eye ( a birth defect), panicked and so we took him f orthwith to a vete rinarian who had worked with rescue dogs after 9/11. We thought Peter was a goner but wanted to do everything possible to avoid being haunted by a guilt trip l ater if we had failed to act and Peter was no more. There was no sign of the cause, but after the vet focused a tiny camera on Peter and projected an image onto a large overhead screen, we saw immediately what was ailing him: mites. Countless mites were having their way with him, romping between his quills and tormenting him to no end. An injection and some aftercare ultimately cured him.” (09/29/08)

http://tinyurl.com/3pookp

“In the last two decades, charter schools have emerged as one of the dominant reforms in public education in the United States. While desegregation and magnet schools were hallmarks of education reform in the 1970s and into the 1980s, by the end of the century charter schools had eclipsed such initiatives to take center stage. From only a handful of schools in the early 1990s, by the 2006–07 school year there were more than 4,000 charter schools enrolling more than a million students in 40 states and the District of Columbia.” (09/08)

http://tinyurl.com/45w97x

“Across the state of Maine, students have gone back to school. Our hopes for their success in school and life goes with them; however, many of them won’t make it through high school, creating problems for themselves, their families, and often for law enforcement. The cold, hard truth is that high school dropouts are more likely to turn to crime. A recent report released by Fight Crime: Invest In Kids shows that high school dropouts are three-and-a-half times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested, and more than eight times more likely to be incarcerated.” (10/01/08)

http://tinyurl.com/4z6py3

“It’s happened again. September. Back to school. Even though we’re homeschooling, we can feel it in the air. Time to get going. We start planning, organizing, preparing. Whether we’re new or experienced homeschoolers, we can easily feel overwhelmed. How are we going to get everything done? How do we know the kids are learning enough of the right things? What about all those things we worry about in the middle of the night?” (09/08)

http://tinyurl.com/3zrcm7

“Educators call them ‘teachable moments.’ Circumstances accidentally cross paths, creating the opportunity or need to learn about a certain topic. We might have witnessed such a moment this spring on a national level after Fox News aired short video excerpts from sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s minister and friend. Right-wing talk-show hosts had a field day and YouTube buzzed as people viewed Wright’s denunciations of U.S. social ills.” (09/08)

http://tinyurl.com/4qwa6b

“The traditional government-operated school is not the only way to educate children, and it has clearly proven it is not the best way. Charter schools are one of the newer alternatives to traditional public schools–they are publicly funded schools with private boards often staffed by idealistic members of the communities they serve. They run on about 80 percent of the budget of a traditional public school, but recent studies show they do a better job of educating children.” (09/08)

http://tinyurl.com/48g9wk

“We were proud to serve with Jim Nehring and our colleagues on Gov. Patrick’s Readiness Project MCAS subcommittee (’MCAS bashers hiding from truth,’ Sept. 24). We agreed that it’s past time to return to a goal of the 1993 Education Reform law, a comprehensive system employing a variety of assessment mechanisms that will drive high-quality instruction for all students. Patrick asked for, and we delivered, a research and data-driven set of recommendations to improve assessment, with an eye toward improving the quality of instruction in our classrooms. Unfortunately, our recommendations were not adopted.” (09/29/08)

http://tinyurl.com/3zvnjr

“American citizens with scant economic and political power, non-whites last hired and first fired in the labor market, are often easy pickings for charter school operators. These entrepreneurs do not proceed alone as they compete in the mythical marketplace of free competition between buyers and sellers of goods and services. To the contrary, charter school operators across the U.S. can and do turn to well-heeled donors. One of note is Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates. In 2003, his largess helped propel former NBA-All Star Kevin Johnson to charter Sacramento High School, located in a low-income, multi-racial neighborhood. The school is operated by Johnson’s non-profit St. HOPE Academy, under a continuing federal probe for how it spent $800,000 in federal funds from 2004 to 2007.” (09/30/08)

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18964

“When I covered the Detroit Public Schools for the Free Press in the mid 1990s, writing umpteen stories about failed programs, stolen money and incompetent management, I reached a point where it seemed to me better just to shut the system down and start fresh, to build something that worked, rather than continuing with what clearly didn’t. People laughed when I would say that out loud. What would you do with the kids? You can’t just give up on the whole thing. But who’d be laughing now?” (09/28/09)

http://tinyurl.com/3ttspn