Tzimmes and borscht.

Machu Picchu tour guide, Beto.

“That’s mixing tzimmes with borscht,” my mom used to say. Yiddish for apples and oranges.

Long posts have become difficult now that I’m back teaching.

95 students today.

Yes, my think-tank friends. Some of us with views on education actually teach children. In a classroom no less.

So, this is my “tzimmes and borscht” posting. A bunch of disconnected items.

The picture at the top is Beto.

He was our guide to Machu Picchu in the summer of 2006. With reports today that a deal has been reached between the government of Peru and Yale University on the ownership of artifacts and art that were taken by Yale professor, and what they used to call “adventurer,” Hiram Bingham, my thoughts went back to what Beto had to say.

“What do the Peruvians think of Bingham,” I asked?

“Well, on the one hand, they appreciate the fact that he brought to the attention of the rest of the world the great things that the people of the Andes were able to do 1500 years ago. On the other hand, he was a thief and a looter. He didn’t even give everything he stole to Yale. You think he didn’t keep the really good stuff for himself?”

Tuscaloosa and NCLB.

Sam Dillon’s story on resegregating Tuscaloosa schools suggest’s that NCLB is a remedy. But each family, individually, would have to request a transfer from a low-performing segregated predominantly black school to the newly redistricted white schools.

Leo beat me to the punch. And that’s OK.

I went looking for the same thing as Leo Casey when Democrats for Education Reform blogger, Joe “sourpuss” Williams claimed the farmworkers supported NCLB. Leo busted Joe good. This is in addition to Williams repeating the already discredited big lie that UFW leader, Cesar Chavez, was kept silent on education issues by an AFL-CIO bribe.

Is there a point?

Can someone at Educator Roundtable, or Philip Kovacs in particular, give an explanation for reprinting a 24 year old report and a one sentence remark of approval from the NEA of something in it? Is there a point you are trying to make? Context? Anything? Should we just guess?

Well, it’s better than nothing.

Ed Sector thinker, Andy Rotherham wants us to read an exchange he had with Randi Weingarten. He says if we read it we will see the real Andy and not the caricature. So, I read it.:

I could give a bombastic
one, blaming the teachers unions for
all the various problems that face public
education – for refusal to change, inflexible
defense of an unworkable status quo,
and so forth. That one would make the
critics swoon, but it wouldn’t be honest,
because the teachers unions are not the
root cause of our educational challenges.
In fact, many aspects of teacher contracts
that we’ll discuss at this conference are
really symptoms of the larger problems
we’re facing in public education today.

Thank God, Andy doesn’t think we’re the problem. We’re only the symptom.

Who needs a caricature when you have the real thing.