Half an hour before my three hour policy class. We’re going to talk about education policy today. Just made a spanking new slide on Michelle Rhee and her tenure proposal. I’m very curious what the students will say about it.
I have read all sorts of goodies on the web/papers/blogs in the past day. Some quick links:
David Brooks writes about how the economic downturn will impact on the middle class (and totally jacks some ideas of mine from an earlier post).
Jeremy Teigen finds that military service does not give candidates an edge in elections. Veterans are not more likely to win elections than non-vets. However, candidates still continue to tout their war experience, so perhaps it has an impact when parties initially chose their candidates.
Some book reviews of books that I’m interested in. Harry loved Grading Education. Elizabeth hated Mother on Fire. Kakutani says the new Gladwell book is a "no, duh."
Apt. 11d 
I agree with Elizabeth that I want to hear a lot more about Loh’s experiences with the school that she chose. I think they’ve been there several years now, and Loh has apparently been a PTA goddess (getting violin lessons and violins for poor kids, etc.), but the book treats her activities at the school as just a quick blur toward the end. There needs to be a follow-up book. While Loh talks at length about the private schools that she decides against, she literally never describes the public school she chooses, other than saying that it’s a magnet. She also doesn’t talk about curriculum or content at any sort of length. On the other hand, her descriptions of private schools are deadly. I blogged her very funny price list for private school tuition, which is accurate, as well as being a scream.
Loh has really come into her own over the past several years, and I’m very interested in seeing what she does next.
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Hey, what happened to the site?
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I’m fooling around with the design. Do you hate it? Should I go back?
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The pattern at the top of the page looks like Pergo. I’d go with something different. Otherwise, everything looks great.
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Yeah, apart from the wood-panel look, it’s good.
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Paneling? Looks more like a stained glass to me.
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Maybe I got the export edition, though Amy’s description is closer to what I think I’m seeing that stained glass. Or we’re seeing different permutations? Or I need different drugs?
Things that make you go hm.
Hm.
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I’m seeing the Pergo version on Firefox.
Brooks doesn’t have a great handle on the populism of the 19th century. It wasn’t just the 1890s recession that fed populism — the 1873 crash and the 1880s recessions had been far greater influences. By the 1890s, Progressivism was ascendant in the cities — the middle class had begun to appropriate some populist themes and were well on their way to the reformist cooperation of the Roosevelt years. I would argue that it’s a decades-long pattern of radical income inequality, government favoring business over the individual, and the general pattern of environmental and other abuses during the Gilded Age that caused the unrest Brooks mentions.
Of course, those factors are operating today. But they’ve always had much deeper roots than a single recession.
(Also, to lay cynicism at the feet of a recession, and not at Vietnam and Watergate’s door, not to mention the long-term fallout in the southern cotton belt and northern rust belt of the Civil Rights Act, strikes me as a … fascinating … interpretation of 1970s history.)
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I like the Prego/wood-panel look at the top of the page, Laura; it’s woodsy and smooth and cool. I like the new design overall too. Neat work.
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I shouldn’t take credit for the design. It’s a new typepad pre-packaged design. I had been fooling around with something similar, but they did it better. I am going to replace the Pergo with a homemade banner, but it should probably wait until the semester is over.
Excellent comment, Jody!
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Thank goodness we have David Brooks to stand up against the legions of pundit I’ve been hearing who claim that global recessions are good things!
I’ve heard of straw man arguments, but this must be a completely new category — where you don’t mischaracterize your opponent’s argument, but completely make up an un-identified opponent and then attack the argument that is not even a version of an argument that someone holds.
I’m looking forward to future columns attacking those misguided “people who see nuclear war as a chance to get in to Chuck E. Cheese’s when its not so crowded.”
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Well, now I’ve had a chance to get used to it, I like it. But you’ve met me, Laura, so you know that I have no aesthetic judgment at all, so please don’t rely on me…
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