Sunday links.
Mayor Daley sold Chicago’s parking meters to Morgan Stanley. It’s pissed just about everybody off. Want to know who Morgan Stanley is backing on Tuesday? Ben Joravsky and Mike Dumke tell us in the Chicago Reader.
In Washington State kids will be getting on the Nike bus or the State Farm bus when they go to school in the morning. Kenneth Libby at Schools Matter.
Leo Casey goes after Joel Kline. This time because the NY schools boss has created a policy which predicts which kids will fail and which will succeed. Maybe Joel can pull a quarter out of your ear as well.
Jim Broadway at State School News Service has some interesting analysis of the impact of Obama’s budget freeze on federal school funding for Illinois. It is kind of a good news, bad news deal.
Over at Ed Sector, Andy Rotherham says no credible people were upset by Arne Duncan’s Hurricane Katrina remarks. Wonder if he asked anyone in the lower ninth. Or aren’t they credible?
The right winger Checker Finn gives a thumbs up to what he calls, “Obama’s K-12 education themes.” Uh oh.
What can I say about my friend Howard Zinn? I met Howard at Boston University, where I attended his classes in the mid-1970s.
To this day, I can quote chapter and verse from his lectures. The man could be spellbinding in a gentle, whimsical way.
One lecture stands out because it says so much about Howard. It was the last lecture of the semester, and he said, “Enough of me; let’s turn it over to you. Let’s talk about whatever you want to talk about.” His lecture attracted 500-plus students, so I was quick to hold up my hand.
I liked to challenge Howard, so I gave it my best shot: “Howard, we just finished an entire semester on American politics, but we’ve never talked about compromise, and compromise is fundamental to the American system. Could you talk about the fine art of compromise and tenure?”
With his Buddha-like manner, he nodded and said: “So, you want to know what I compromised for tenure? Is that the question?” Essentially, that was the question. William Holtzman
Hey, don’t you and Ben forget about Bill Daley, Jr., the mayor’s nephew, who joined Morgan Stanley in ’06. A year later, the mayor signed a 99-year-lease with M.S. to run the downtown parking garages.
As the da mare’s daddy, Richard J. Daley said when he got caught feeding city insurance business to his son, William Sr., “If they don’t like it, they can kiss my ass.”