Weekend Quotables

No A.P. tests in Scarsdale

From NYT:

A year after Scarsdale became the most prominent school district in the nation to phase out the College Board’s Advanced Placement courses — and make A.P. exams optional — most students and teachers here praise the change for replacing mountains of memorization with more sophisticated and creative curriculums.

“We have the luxury of being able to move beyond the A.P.,” John Klemme, Scarsdale’s principal, said in a recent interview. “If people called it a gold curriculum in the past, I refer to this version as the platinum curriculum.”

Dan Brown on Huff: “David Brooks made me wring my hands…”

Darling-Hammond sees value in nurturing and supporting teachers, not running them out on a rail based on high-stakes test scores. She sees collective bargaining for teachers as fundamentally fair. She understands that while our situation is urgent, we don't need to resort to shock doctrine-caliber panic and blow up our whole system. President-Elect Obama made an excellent choice in bringing her on his team.

Bill Ayers’ in Saturday’s New York Times

I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long. The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

Bill Gates on working for Obama

“If there was some committee or pretty focused task where I could contribute, I’d be glad to consider that, and I hope that the things we’ve learned about education, including the mistakes we’ve made — I hope we do get a strong dialogue and I’m very optimistic we’ll have that with these people.”

Community-Organizer.com likes my brother Fred.

Fred Klonsky is the president of a teachers’ union local in Chicago, and he’s been up at the Republic Windows and Doors plant to visit with (and bring coffee to) the protesting workers who’ve been laid off. You can read his blog and follow his stories about it on Fred Klonsky’s blog. I like this guy. And nice touch, Fred: the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. If you’d shown up with Starbucks, who KNOWS what kind of reaction you’d have gotten?