Do you have one of these in your neighborhood?

Because my school does. So please, before you say that you understand growing up in an impoverished community, agree that we just need to fire the bad teachers, and mail your check to the Manhattan Institute, try to consider growing up with a gigantic police watchtower keeping your neighborhood under surveillance.

In the latest TAP: Widening Inequality + Locally Funded Schools = Credit Crunch

The American Prospect is growing on me. Founder Robert Reich is one of my intellectual heroes and TAP is an intelligent, unapologetic source of progressive ideas.

The latest has a good summary piece on the national education debate, although for my tastes it is too willing to paint Rhee, Klein, et al. as "reformers". This is the sort of David Brooksian nonsense that too much of the public, and even our President, has bought into. Painting the debate as one that pits these "reformers" against Randi and the union is a gross oversimplification.

It also, unsurprisingly, has a lot concerning the stimulus package and current economics. The cover story by Cornell economist Robert H. Frank, explains how widening inequality and property tax-funded schools contribute to overspending by the middle class:

Additional spending by the rich shifts the frame of reference for those just below the near rich, and so on, all the way down the income ladder. Such expenditure cascades help explain why the median new house build in the U.S. is now about 50% larger than its counterpart from 30 years ago, even though the median real wage has risen little since then. Higher spending by middle-income families is driven less by a desire to keep up with the Joneses than by the simple fact that the ability to achieve important goals often depends on relative spending. Because of the link between housing prices and neighborhood school quality, for example, the median family would have to send its children to below-average schools if it failed to match the spending of its peers on housing. Instead, middle-income families have opted to save less, borrow more, work longer hours, and commute longer distances than ever before, all in an effort to keep pace with escalating consumption standards. (Bold added)

The connection between property values and local school quality has been a long-standing and well-recognized obstacle to true equity. Frank's point stretches beyond the traditional egalitarian argument and shows how the connection between property values and school quality has actually fueled our crazed consumption, thirst for credit, and massive mortgages that are beyond our means.

All of this, of course, makes me want to become an economist.

So does reading this. Seriously, a must-read.

John Dewey

Had a lot of awesome things to say. And much of it rings true today, 100 years later. Most important, I think we're at place today where so many people that talk, write, and make decisions about education are not educators. Dewey was an educator, and it comes through in everything he writes. While the non-educator crowd will continue to push for pencil-and-paper tests that ask for regurgitation of simple facts and not understand how anything else could be important to learning, Dewey speaks the language of educators in his push for more thought and thinking in education:

"[A]ny habit of teaching which encourages the pupil for the sake of a successful recitation or of a display of memorized information glide over the thin ice of genuine problems reverses the true method of mind training."

-from How We Think, 1910

I agree, and at this point wonder what this looks like in 2009. Who are the teachers and schools that are doing this? What does it look like, especially in low-income communities? Can this kind of teaching and learning be reconciled with pencil-and-paper tests? Can it be made politically popular enough to be put into practice anywhere?