QUOTABLES

Mike Rose, author of Why School?, is interviewed at Pulse

I’m all for having structural alternatives in big district bureaucracies, and there are a lot of good charter schools out there. But as report after report has now demonstrated, there are also a lot of average charters, and there are some that aren’t very good at all. This is the kind of variability you’d expect if you didn’t see the charter school as a cure-all.

Deb Meier at Bridging Differences

Between now and next week, all readers must go out and buy Diane's book (The Death and Life of the Great American School System). It's an important book and lays out the basis for Diane and my agreements and, on occasion, our disagreements. It would be fun to explore it with an audience who has at least dipped into it, or has it at hand to refer to.

Just got my copy. Still waiting for my review copies of Hargreaves & Shirley's The Fourth Way and Bryk, etal.'s, Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago

Problems of philosophy(ers)

While I'm sure that most of my Philosophy of Education Society colleagues will refuse to cross the picket line at San Francisco's Hyatt Fisherman's Warf, the Society's leadership is having a hard time trying to decide whether or not to support the union boycott. On the one hand...

Although the Board is sympathetic to the union, we also feel keenly our responsibility to the Philosophy of Education Society. Among the concerns raised were sustaining the financial health of the organization in order to maintain a forum for philosophers of education in the long term, recognizing that the funds that have been raised on behalf of the organization over the years were meant to be used for this purpose, and honoring the collective will of the membership with regard to hotel labor disputes (we will provide a process for this at the 2010 meetings).