ICYMI: Neighborhood Reunion Edition (9/20)

My family moved down here from New Hampshire when I was 9; our new home was on a street at the back of a development, and I grew up there with an assortment of other kids playing four square and just generally hanging out harmlessly. My best friend back on Beech Drive was a guy with whom I collaborated on a variety of shenanigans. Then while we were at college his family moved away, and we have had little face to face contact since (yay, internet). But this weekend he's in town for his 50th high school reunion, and we got together this morning. 

So while I can play the old fart card and waggle my fist at clouds and how Kids These Days don't appreciate the simple joys of playing with balls and chalk and other carbon based life forms, I must also praise the modern technology that makes it so much easier to maintain and revive connections to the people in our lives. If only our tech overlords weren't so committed to making it worse.

Got some reading for you this week. Remember to share.

Florida’s New Education Commissioner Doesn’t Want Government to Run Schools

Sue Kingery Woltanski reports on the new Florida education honcho, who is pretty unabashed in his desire to do away with public schools as we know them.

Natalie's volleyball team cut 40 girls. They didn't find another sport: they found their phones

Jenny Anderson at "How to be brave" tells the story of one youth athlete who found a way around the mess that is youth sports these days.

The $75k-a-year private school encouraging kids to go viral on Twitter

Ben Riley's take on Alpha School has, among other things, highlighted the old school model of how blogging and journalism go together. You remember-- a blogger hits a story and then "regular" press picks it up. Sometimes it's subtle (I've seen more than a few instances of reporting that eerily echoes something I've written) and sometimes the reporters call you up and then build on your work. Here's Ezra Wallach at the San Francisco Standard expanding on Riley's work.

Slop schools

And here's Will Austin's piece that originally ran in the Boston Globe. Lots of folks have something to say about Alpha now.

Click Here to Comply

Nobody better than Audrey Watters to remind us just how not-a-new-idea Alpha Schools are

Helicopter Parenting May Be Doing More to Kids’ Brains Than You Think

Robyn Shulman at Inc. looks into some research that shows the ways in which helicopter parenting is Not A Good Thing. 

Music Class and Showing Up: What Eight Years of Rhode Island Student Data Tell Us

Bob Morrison reminds us that research shows a strong link between arts participation and regular school attendance.

Inside the Outrageous Collapse of a ‘Montessori Ponzi’

I wrote about these folks a while back, and they are still a failed grifty nightmare. Claire Suddath covers the story quite thoroughly for the New York Times.

School choice proponents say it offers families more options – but those don’t always extend to immigrant students

William McCorkle and Beth Lloyd at The Conversation explaining yet again that school choice doesn't work for everyone. How about immigrant students?

Mississippi school district released from federal desegregation order after 50 years

Chris Williams reports for Fox9.

Educational Guilt

Nancy Flanagan responds to the people who thinks that teaching should just be the process of dropping facts into brains. 

I’m a Writing Tutor at Harvard. The College is Failing Us.

Many excellent lines in this, for example, "The College is actively demonstrating that it would rather cut what’s hard to measure than defend what’s hard to replace." Well worth a read on the question of whether it's a great idea to replace human beings with AI.

US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say

Your "just how stupid is AI" story for the week. This is the CNN story that supposedly got them kicked out of the White House.

Some very cool swing.