Enough said

Jon Stewart nails it

He's on to us, colleagues. The greed, the corruption, the sloth that led us into teaching and drives us inexorably in our war against the middle class, which we are waging while pretending to be one of them!

The Daily Show

"When you see a great teacher, you are seeing a work of art"

That quotation is heard in this trailer for Waiting for Superman, which opens in the next few weeks:



I just hope, even with the presence of Michelle Rhee, that they don't blame it on the teachers. It's a general social problem, compounded by post-Reagan conservatism, which hates public education and is taking steps to destroy it. Perhaps it's because public education is the greatest challenge to entrenched and unearned privilege we have. Without 1st-class free public education, democracy is impossible.

I just wonder if Waiting for Superman doesn't overlap with The Lottery, released earlier this year (not to be confused with The Lottery Ticket):



And of course, ramping up schools of choice (which is something I believe in) should not be done at the expense of standard geographic-based schools.

The existence of these two films is some indication that people are stoked about this issue and that perhaps the tidal wave is building which will make true postive change politically possible.

Bail out schools, not just failed investment banks

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich with a proposal for financing education, based on an assumption of the value of education to a society and an economy overall, rather than looking at it as an individual or family undertaking. What do we think about this?