You knew it would come when these people would be exposed.

Their conversation really is unbelievable. The more you listen the funnier it becomes.

My first expose’… enjoy!

Today is short and sweet. (Though I will say more in the coming days, I am sure.) But essentially, I am on this mom’s bandwagon.

And when she says she thinks other parents should opt out as well, all I can say is that It’s a conversation I have been having a lot lately with other thoughtful educators and parents.

She held her kids out of standardized testing and feels her kids were better off for her having done so. While it’s a complicated issue – and one that is really hard to sum up in one word – I am gonna try to do it in minimalist fashion.

NICE!

I am still on the TK bandwagon this week discussing what I believe is a must see, 60 minute documentary called, “Consider the Conversation.”

And just so you know, it’s not only me who thinks that my friend has put together something amazing and profound… PBS does as well. TK has already been able to get PBS affiliates in a variety of big cities to air his movie.

And hopefully, more will pick it up.

Here are a few links to some reviews.

Not to be morbid but hey, we will all die. And to spend just a wee bit of time with that idea bounces you right back to an even more important question: so how are you going to live?

Like right now? Like going forward? What do you want to experience, who do you wish to be with, what do you hope to tackle and what is it time to let go of?

Amazing stuff here. And let me tell you, a teacher that sees this movie doesn’t head back to the class the next day, cynical and bitter and jaded and ready to phone it in, I tell you that – because once your soul gets stirred like this, you WAKE!

I think people have become numb to the issue of race in our schools. And to bring it up, I think people just roll their eyes and feel a bit exhausted by it all. It’s like we’ve all heard about the Achievement Gap and we are all familiar with Kozol and we are all aware of the fact that the black and brown kids are, in many ways, getting less — and performing in an lower capacity — than white and Asian kids.

Has our national conversation petered out? Has the conversation about teacher quality, tenure, budget cuts and national standards bludgeoned the race issue to the point of it being like a punch drunk boxer who still wants to fight, still feels they need to fight but yet, can’t really keep up with the current fight going on?

On one hand we can take credit for having come far. It’s admirable the progress we, as a nation, have made. But have we come far enough?

Have we lost the mojo behind this “cause”?

As America becomes more and more and more racially diverse, has the issue of race become a tired talking point? Or worse, are we simply coming to accept that inequality is simply going to be the order of the day?

I mean there are like almost no white kids at my school… and we are in deep NCLB probation territory.

Are their any all-white schools, I wonder, that have absolutely no minorities which are in deep NCLB probation territory?

I know… sssshhhh! Go talk about teacher quality, tenure, budget cuts and national standards. Social justice, we did that already. Moving on…

“Reading” is a more fractured experience than ever before. Simply put, there are different types, different means and different levels to it. And unfortunately, in our schools we are mistakenly conjoining conversations about reading things such as Les Miserables in with reading twitter, with reading the lifestyle page of the USA Today, with reading an email and with reading GQ magazine… as if reading is reading is reading.

And it’s not.

There are different types which require different styles and different skills because they have different objectives.

Moreover, the conversation many people in education are having about reading right now strikes me as if we are all-too-often talking about apples and oranges, almost as an agumentative tool. One person will salute the literacy skills requisite to reading the Huffinton Post and another will take umbrage with the comment on behalf of reading Crime and Punishment. Another speaks thoughtfully about the benefits of reading Ayn Rand and someone else will counter with the detriment that reading txt messaging is doing to student writing in the classroom.

Reading is fractured. Our conversation is not. This schism is giving me schisms.

Is it time for the implementation of a new reading lexicon?