Summer Squabbles

What are the big debates of the summer?

Photo by Somesh Kesarla Suresh on Unsplash

When I was an education journalist, I would typically not work in the summer. Flexibility is the one perk of a being a freelancer, after all. It just didn’t make sense to write articles about schools in the summer time.

Because parents are busy with camp schedules and trips to Disney, education articles are not read. Teachers and professors are too hard to track down for quotes or input, because they are also driving their kids to camp and to the beach. And, foundations and think tanks also know the scene and don’t release any new studies during that time. So, why bother? I was plenty busy with my own mom-stuff at that time anyway.

But this has been an unusually active education summer. The Supreme Court decisions to overturn Biden’s student loan program and to strike down Affirmative Action in college admissions certainly heated things up, but there also a lot of low level discontent out there, which I’m picking up even in random comments in conversations with friends. If things are at a low simmer right now, this fall should be very, very interesting.

With Ian under the care of Jonah and my folks, Steve and I are having a weekend ALL ALONE in the Catskills this weekend. (At some point, we’ll feel comfortable leaving him alone, but epilepsy is scary.) For the most part, I accept our non-empty-nester status with good humor, but sometimes one does need an escape. We drive away Friday morning. Yay!

Today is packed with randomness. I have find my hiking boots, do some website maintenance, fill out more paperwork for November’s election, along with all the usual stuff, so I’m going to keep it brief here. Just some links and quick thoughts.

As I said before, the real issues in school politics are different from what you see in the news. Sometimes you have to dive deep into local politics to see the big picture.

For example, Laura Waters wrote a great post about a fight happen in a town just ten minutes from us. At issue, was an effort to create greater equity within one town. Yes, equities even exist within a very small community. I’m hearing about more towns merging elementary schools, not just for equity reasons, but because it increases efficiency. It’s political dynamite though.

The Harvard-Affirmative Action Supreme Court decision has opened up a can of worms. Some interesting links:

• “Affluent students are overrepresented among the nation’s best high school students — but the colleges are nonetheless admitting a larger number of affluent students than if the decisions were based on academics alone.” David Leonhardt, NYT

• If you are interesting in college admissions and inequity, follow Susan Dynarski on Twitter. She’s fantastic. Check out this article that she wrote several years ago about SATs being GOOD for equity.

• Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic makes the case for why we should care about Harvard admissions issues. I’m not convinced.

• I’m hearing a lot of buzz from affluent parents about college admission decisions. Things are going to get ugly.

The “Citi-bike Karen” backstory.

Nice graph with the differences about disability rates across the country:

Building an Anti-Ableist Pedagogy

America’s pop-culture armageddon

One in five community college students is a high schooler.

RIP Sinéad O’Connor, who once tweeted out a link to one of my autism articles. So beautiful, so kind, so tortured.

Freddie deBoer opened a can of worms when he criticized AOC. His response.

Personal: I haven’t had a chance to post many personal pictures this week, except some images of the streets of Florence. Below is a picture of my folks at my house for Sunday dinner.

Travel: We haven’t been to Newport, Rhode Island in ages, but love it. Maybe we’ll do a weekend trip there in the fall.

Watching: I love The Bear so much that I'm watching it for the second time. I love it for a lot of reasons, including its loving tribute to Chicago, where three generations of mine worked in the steel mills, and where I went to grad school. We also started watching the Nick Fury series on Disney+ with Ian.