My reading habits are distressingly random these days. I’m not happy with feedly. Too many friends and favorite reads don’t have proper RSS feeds. I use twitter a lot for reading suggestions, but nine times out ten, the links lead to some stupid Buzzfeed article. My usual online magazines have been publishing crap lately. Ugh, what’s a compulsive online reader to do?

As a blogger, I like to skim through titles and look for common topics. What’s everybody bitching about today? What can I add to the dialogue? That’s a lot harder to do these day. I need to clean up my blogroll or something. Maybe later.

One common topic over the past couple of weeks has been some griping about Ivy League graduates. Frank Bruni and David Brooks were talking about that this week.

I came across a similar discussion in the education blogs this week.

Wendy Kopp of Teach for America and Diane Ravitch have been slowly and subtly fighting for months. Teach for America’s basic premise is that an untrained teacher with an Ivy League school is better than a trained teacher with a BA in education from a mediocre college. In other words, brains wins over education training.

Ravitch has been slowly simmering over this message. She is putting her eggs in the training basket and is making snide comments about Teach for America here and there.

I would love to see a drag out fight on this topic, but so far the comments have happened in a passive-aggressive, non-confrontational manner. I want a big debate about the merits of undergraduate education degrees. I also want a big debate about the merits of elite, private schools. Do they really produce better workers?