WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Diane Ravitch on Chicago's "renaissance"

It's 2010. Has Chicago had a renaissance yet? ... Usually when you set a goal, that's the goal you plan to meet. I've looked at the evaluations of the Chicago plans and what I've seen is that when schools are closed, communities are disrupted -- in some cases, shattered.  (Progress Illinois)

Bruce Dixon, co-founder of Black Agenda Report

There was a time and place when "school reform" meant empowering parents  to collaborate with teachers in those local schools to evaluate teacher performance and improve the quality of learning and instruction.  In the 1980s, Chicago's mayor Harold Washington acceded to the demands of the grassroots neighborhood forces that elected him, and had state and city authorities enact a radically democratic kind of school reform. (Huffington)

Alan Singer, Hofstra prof.

I never thought of Tennessee and Delaware as models for anything, except now it seems their bureaucrats are really good at filling out paper work. (Huffington)