Letizia’s Natural Bakery on Chicago’s Division Street. Summer home of PREA Prez.

The long Chicago nightmare is over. Winter is done. Saturday coffee moves outdoors. No more Peets until Fall. We make our annual shift to Letizia’s Natural Bakery on Division Street where we can sit outside with the baby strollers, dogs and Eastern European guys who smoke at the next table even though that is now against Illinois law. It is true. You can’t even smoke at outside tables.

This morning one guy had two packs of Marlboros and the other guy had three packs of Parliaments stacked on their table. What is that? About $50 in cigarettes. You could fill half a gas tank for that.

McBush gives Obama a gift.

Here’s a winning plan: Get Bush and McCain to focus the election of their accomplishments in Iraq. These past couple of days have demonstrated Obama’s incredible Karma. And a preview of the upcoming campaign.

Gail Collins in the NY Times:

On the one hand, it’s always helpful to hear a candidate’s broad vision. On the other, the vision loses some of its import if you can’t get there from here. Pressed for details on his foreign-policy strategies, McCain said the secret was “setting goals and achieving.” You can just hear the Democrats of 2013 kicking themselves: Goals and achievements! Why didn’t we think of that?

And across the page Bob Herbert quotes the Times reporter, Elisabeth Bumiller (usually a Bush apologist and mouthpiece):

There were no real checkable facts in Mr. McCain’s divination.

What going on in District 207?

District 207 includes Maine South High School. My students all go to Maine South. Like a number of towns in Illinois, Park Ridge is not a unit district. Different school boards for the high schools and for the middle and elementary schools. Different contract. Different teacher union local.

207 teachers have been without a contract for all this past year. The 207 board and Maine Teachers Association have now called in a mediator.

The local paper reports:

Joann Braam, school board president, and Emma Visee, president of the Maine Teachers Association (MTA), which represents the district’s nearly 500 teachers, both said that the marathon negotiations have stalled over a relatively small number of items.

When asked about the potential for a teacher strike, Visee said that it wasn’t even in the MTA’s vocabulary.

Eduwonkette thinks you need a bigger sample size.

There was big media excitement about the study of Teach for America success in North Carolina. The NY Times even editorialized how the study showed that they ought to dump teacher ed programs as a national education policy.

The results suggest that states that want students to do better in math and science need to focus recruitment on more selective colleges instead of on traditional teacher education programs, which are often little more than diploma mills.

Eduwonkette wonders about what conclusions you can draw from this study:

A special shoutout goes to the New York Times editorial board for making national policy recommendations based on the Urban Institute’s study of Teach for America in North Carolina, which included a whopping 69 Teach for America teachers - a .5% sample of all TFA teachers placed during those years.