Michelle Rhee-Test Results Scandal

Apparently the DC school that had a dramatic rise in test scores and was Michelle Rhee's prime example of how well her reform methods work? Apparently there may have been some funny stuff going on with the tests at that school. Lots of erasure marks. An unusually high number of erasure marks changing answers from the wrong one to the right ones. Not Good. Diane Ravitch calls Rhee to task here.

On My Wish List

I'm SO reading this book.

Pound Cake

Two weeks ago, I made a coconut oil pound cake. I think I mentioned it. It was very good! Today, I'd like to stay home and make a kamut flour pound cake. I write that like me and kamut flour go way back. We don't. I hardly know what it is but who cares? I'll try to get some over the weekend and postpone my pound cake baking until then, or then some. Because, really, who knows when the baking time meets baked good craving meets ingredients moment will appear?

The Bus Does Not Run Express

On the bus today, an older woman was very upset that the bus was not moving along at a nice enough clip for her. "What is this?" she wanted to know when the bus stopped, for a red light, "if they're going to stop for the schedule they should post a sign that says 'slow bus'!"

Um, really? You think a bus driving down Broadway without a dedicated bus lane needs a sign?

I just had to share. Forgive my indulgence.

Make Schools Not Prisons

Why is that hard, Mr. Republican Governor of Pennsylvania?

Smells Like 1990

According to a recent college grad with what's got to count as a very good first job at the Council of Foreign Relations, the current crop of recent grads were disappointed when they graduated from college only to find they couldn't get a job.

"The cost of youth unemployment is not only financial, but also emotional. Having a job is supposed to be the reward for hours of SAT prep, evenings spent on homework instead of with friends and countless all-nighters writing papers. The millions of young people who cannot get jobs or who take work that does not require a college education are in danger of losing their faith in the future. They are indefinitely postponing the life they wanted and prepared for; all that matters is finding rent money."

It's emotionally taxing to be unemployed at any stage of life, and getting a nice high score on your SATs can't protect you from life's difficulties. All that SAT prep maybe taught you persistence, work through it. It's not easy to leave college in the face a really bad job market, but recent college grads aren't the only ones who've ever had to do it.

Teachers Are So Greedy and Wall Street CEOs Work Really Hard 12 Months of the Year

John Steward, once again, tells it like it is. Watch it here. There's also an interview with Diane Ravitch who wrote The Death and Life of the Great American School System, a terrific book in which an historian of education rethinks her formerly held positions on testing and charter schools as the solutions to the problems of the American education system.