Earlier this month, Becca Simone’s music appreciation class at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn, NY, sat down to a test. It was four pages long. The test started with:

1. List three characteristics about the Bronx in the 1970s:

2. What type of music was popular during the 1970’s when the hip hop movement was beginning?

And once the students got through those (and the 28 questions following) they were met with the essay question:

Part 2. Write a brief (about 5-8 sentences) response about the hip hop movement. What about it do you find interesting? How has the music changed over the years (i.e., in terms of [...]

This coming weekend, the New York Times magazine looks at our children and what private and charter schools are doing for/to them! It raises so many questions for those of us who are concerned about our babies and if they will go to top-tier colleges after top-tier primary and secondary education, which is something you really do worry about especially if you're dropping half a million on K-12 and then having to make a sizable donation to an Ivy League to make sure that little Crayson, Effexor and Randomly get to go to the right college! Here's the top ten questions that a parent may form whilst reading [...]

Last night in Fort Greene, more than a thousand people came to shout their way through a hearing. They were at the Brooklyn Technical High School to voice rowdy opposition to the shuttering of twelve more New York City public schools. Earlier this week, the city’s Panel for Education Policy—a body separate from the Department of Education, though filled with a majority of Bloomberg appointees—had already voted to close ten schools. So last night, everyone was back for a second helping—and the teachers’ union and its supporters came hungry.

Before the meeting, the union rallied its members along Dekalb Avenue for more than an hour. The union was here [...]

In short, almost literally no one knew that the chairwoman of Hearst Publications was going to be taking on the post of New York City Schools Chancellor. Not even Gayle King! But good news, I guess. "On Monday, Ms. Black was seen at the Hearst Tower with a thick stack of materials concerning public education." That's excellent, she's learning about public schools before she RUNS ALL OF THEM.

I do a lot of pretty random stupid shit thinking that I will write about it. Most of my activities turn out to be useless, though there’s always the idea that I could hit upon something so I live in this constant state of expectation that’s not as exciting as it sounds and is actually mildly depressing. This is because the pretense of adventure, day in and day out, when hardly anything actually ever happens eventually wears on you, especially when you are not rich. As much as one tries to tell oneself that things are being accomplished, such encouragement is no match for the more persistent mantra which goes [...]

"Decades of research confirm that summer learning loss is real." —"Jeff Smink is the vice president for policy for the National Summer Learning Association."

"More than a third of California's African American public high school students dropped out before graduation day," according to the just-released 2009 data. (The actual number: 37%.) The state's superintendent of schools blamed this crazily outrageous number on cuts to schools; that, in part, "drastic cuts to summer school have prevented students from catching up on credits during the break." Overall, about 1 in 5 students drop out over four years.

Here is a secret thing I do sometimes, when I'm feeling old: I search for school fight videos on YouTube, and revel in not being in school. Because school is awful, just like this video from Los Banos High School, in beautiful Merced, clearly shows. High school was always a pretty terrible place, with violence and math, the two worst things ever. Just now it's online. Which is very disturbing.

The Times and a host of other publications heralded last week's new study extolling the lifelong money-earning benefits of having a good primary/middle-school teacher. Oh, yay! Let's do what these economists from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggest, right?

Actually, ugh, no. What economists Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia want to do, apparently, is to identify and fire "weaker" teachers, for the sake of a barely perceptible increase in students' "lifetime income." Nobody has actually tried this yet; the report doesn't describe an experiment. It's just the conclusion they draw from their analysis of massive amounts [...]

What's that? A fundraiser to help expand a program in which New York City school kids build gardens, grow vegetables and make documentaries? Sounds like community organizing to me.

"Department of Education spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz wouldn't comment on the legal questions raised by the parents and politicians, but said, 'It's time to put politics aside and recognize that it's in all our kids' interest for Cathie Black to succeed as our next Chancellor.'" —Natalie Ravitz! You are really being grotesque while doing your job! That is the least enlightening, most inexplicably insulting, most negative positioning you could possibly establish for the Department of Education's defense of Cathie Black. Somehow this statement manages to be simultaneously outrageous, dismissive, obscuring and just plain dim. Most likely you are being praised over a lunch right now though. But honestly? Dismissing [...]