Getting students to recognize their privilege is one thing, but affecting the way they feel about and react to it is another. It's easy to have misguided or unreasonable expectations, and this article helps expose some of those potential difficulties.

A post making the connections between Naomi Schaefer Riley's controversial comments about black studies in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the privilege she employed to do so. Also, a look back at Peggy McIntosh's "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" essay, which my School and Society class read this past semester.

I really like this post by Checker Finn. He takes a balanced view of the history of federal involvement in education and lays out the conditions necessary for federal influence to influence education. This would be a good short read for School and Society.

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that every educational intervention comes at a cost (or penalty) to somebody, and part of understanding education is weighing the pros and cons. There are a lot of pros in this article about bilingual education in Summit County, and I'm tasking my School and Society students to think about potential cons. I imagine they'll find some, and then we can more intelligently weigh the benefits.

We discussed race today in School and Society and I appreciated our course reader's inclusion of several writings of Beverly Daniel Tatum, including a short section on the words we choose to describe race. This article poses the question "Latino or Hispanic?" although neither has suited many immigrants to the U.S.

After looking at education from a policy level, I think it's time my students see more from the teacher's point of view. I didn't give a prompt for this, but I'm interested in seeing what my students think.

Anecdotes can be dangerous, but ignoring them can be equally dangerous. Value-added models involve rather large measurement error, and policymakers will have to come to terms with the validity of scores when errors label teachers as bad when other indicators say they aren't.

Question for my School and Society class: If you were a parent, would you opt your child out of standardized testing?

The most shocking bit in this article: "the percentage of low income college students actually graduating by age 24 has grown by only 2.1 points, from 6.2 percent in 1970 to 8.3 percent in 2009. Among students from families in the highest income quartile, the graduation rate by age 24 has surged by 42.2 percentage points, doubling from 40.2 percent to 82.4 percent over the last four decades."

Schools seeking money often turn to philanthropists, but usually that money comes with strings attached. Should we be concerned? How do we weigh the benefits the money might bring with the risks of adopting practices that might have negative effects?

Another story of a teacher that people think is a good teacher yet poor test scores led to her dismissal. Why the disconnect between perception and scores? The article doesn't go into detail, but a lot of her students came from classrooms the year before that are now being investigated for cheating. If their prior scores were artificially raised, then her ability to show true growth was very limited.

Putting this one out to my School and Society class: How well do you think reforms will work if teachers don't like the reforms? Or are reforms not there for teachers to like?

This had been sitting in an open tab for a few days, but I'm so glad I finally took the time to watch it. Somehow I'm going to work this into my School and Society class, perhaps when we focus more centrally on race and talk about the school-to-prison pipeline.

This moment has been looming for some time, but given proposed tuition increases it will soon be cheaper for Colorado residents to pay out-of-state tuition at Wyoming than it will be to attend either Colorado State University or the University of Colorado at Boulder, their home state's largest public universities.

How can this happen? Wyoming has oil and gas money and only one university to fund, and they're willing to invest. Colorado has 13 public 4-year colleges and universities and a school finance system so broken it was declared unconstitutional by a judge last December.

This isn't the greatest article on zero tolerance policies, but I'm glad that there's a legislative-level effort to see how the unintended consequences of such policies have done a lot of harm.

I'm hoping some of my School and Society students respond to this article. They know what it's like to be tested, but having grown up with that reality they might put more faith in test results than many skeptics do. After all, it was their positive performance on many tests that positioned them to become the college students they've become.

"It's not about the box. It's about changing the culture of instruction -- preparing students for their future, not our past."

Right. In the past we might have helped prepare students to work on an assembly line. This sounds more like we're preparing them for the exciting, wonderful world of data entry. I'm glad the NYT at least put a hint of doubt at the end of the article, but I'd rather see a skilled ethnographer's take on what life is like for these students.

I typically don't go for things like this. A little too touchy-feely for me. But I've been around enough kids to know that many of them don't have the luxury to just sit, in quiet, and not be bothered. Home is stressful. School is stressful. Sleep is hard to come by. Maybe a little quiet time at school goes along way towards feeling safe and in control.

I had my School and Society class look at this story, asking them, "Do you think studying ethic groups can cause resentment and division? If so, how can that be used for good rather than evil? If not, what is the study of ethic groups meant to cause?"

They were against the censorship, although some admitted that yes, teaching about racial and cultural division will surely lead to recognition of that division. But of course, we can't expect to simply get past what divides us by ignoring it.

Have we somehow managed to trade one achievement gap for another? The question I'm posing to my School and Society class this week: "Is an achievement gap based on class any better or worse than one based on race? When is it okay to have an achievement gap?"

I think we have a long way to go before we naturally accept standards of process over standards of content. Too much of what we think of school is about textbooks, tests, lectures, etc. that focus on the what, not the how. Still I'm throwing this prompt out there for my School and Society students:

If you asked most people today, "What were you taught in school," you'd likely get responses matching the subjects or courses they took: history, math, geography, English, etc. This list is very different. Do you think there's anything the list leaves out, or includes unnecessarily? Do you think teaching these "survival skills" directly is possible?

So a few institutions of higher education, including my very own University of Colorado at Boulder, have sold the naming rights to a bathroom. Is selling the naming rights to any part of an educational institution okay? If so, which parts? Where do we draw a line between keeping tuition lower and embarrassing the institution?

Last Tuesday the students in my School and Society class had a conversation about whether or not they felt like attending college was a choice. Most of them come from privileged backgrounds, with college-educated parents, and not going to college simply wasn't a part of their culture. We'll talk a lot about expectations within cultures in that class, and I'm sure those discussions will include ideas and topics they've never had to think about before. I'm hoping the college decision is a good place to start that process.

The conversation also led to talking about the value of vocational classes. In short, I'm pro-vocational, and I dislike the "college-prep-or-you're-a-failure" culture in many schools. While I didn't take any shop classes in high school (music was my primary elective), I learned a lot through helping my father, a trained mechanic and all-around handy guy. I've fixed appliances and engines, built a garage, shingled roofs, and learned a lot of other valuable skills that I wouldn't trade for college-prep knowledge.

Should school boards be endorsing presidential candidates? That's the question I've posed to my School and Society class, and I'm curious to see their responses.

My participation in a music program was an important part of my education, particularly in high school. But if you were JeffCo schools and had to cut 70 million dollars, what can you do? What if there's nothing else to cut?

I think Dana Goldstein summed up Obama's education portions of the State of the Union pretty well here: "long on platitudes and short on honest talk." As for the idea of making it illegal to drop out of school before you turn 18, she definitely gets it:

"...one can’t really address the drop-out crisis without making school much more engaging for low-income teenagers, whether or not they show an inclination toward making it to and through a four-year college. This means dealing head-on with curriculum, not just tinkering with how teachers are hired and fired, and by whom."

After the typical tech journalism rush to cover Apple's iBooks/education announcement, it was nice to see a story that actually talked to teachers and schools about the feasibility of using these iPad-only texts in their schools. I'm wondering what my School and Society students would do if they were buying books for a school and it was their decision to make.

The Colorado legislature is considering banning foods with trans fats from schools, including everything from breakfast, lunch, and vending machines. I'm putting this question to my School and Society students: Do we need state regulations like this, and if so, do they agree with this one?

A lot of discussion about charter schools and vouchers in this story, but the video by itself looks good for discussion in my School and Society class.

Income matters in education, but so do other aspects of a student's background. My question for my students this week: Should a school try to equalize for differences in students' backgrounds, and if so, how?

Dana Goldstein's (@DanaGoldstein) "The Test Generation" is a spot-on report of education in Colorado post-Senate Bill 191, which will require that teacher evaluations be based on student test scores. Unlike many media reports or the popular dialogue, Goldstein squarely addresses the imminent possibility that every student will be tested for every subject at every grade level, and illustrates that scenario with the standardized testing of 1st grade art students.