Teacher strike miscellany
Word is that the Chicago teachers’ strike is on the verge of settlement. That probably means that school reform will fade as a political issue, but it shouldn’t. But before it does, a few odds & ends to address. Dylan Matthews, revisited In my critique of Dylan Matthews’ awful bit of apologetics for Rahm Emanuel (“How much do teacher strikes hurt kids?”), I spent a lot of time on his use of Michael Baker’s NBER working paper (“Industrial Actions in Schools: Strikes and Student Achievement”) that allegedly showed damage to student test… Read More
From the vault: Class
I wrote this for The Baffler back in 1998. A little old, but still full of truth. This is what I submitted; the published version was edited modestly. On the first page of his awful book, One Nation, After All, Alan Wolfe writes, “According to the General Social Survey, at no time between 1972 and 1994 did more than 10 percent of the American population classify themselves as either lower class or upper class.” He says this to prove that the rest, 90%, are middle class. But they’re not. Wolfe forgot to say that… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 