new location, same obsession

hello! i am blogging from NYC; from TC, to be precise. a few stories of interest to those of you who keep checking in:

here's a story from the daily pennsylvanian on gutmann and GET-UP. the writer picks up on the fact that gutmann's unionbusting stance seems to contradict her previous liberal leanings. and check out the comments; michael janson (who was my TA once) posts an interesting op/ed from Columbia.

meanwhile, it looks like judy rodin (or j-ro, as she was sometimes dorkily known) has a new gig. it makes sense given her fundraising achievements at penn. does this position support or weaken the argument that she has political aspirations?

vouchers! the washington scholarship fund has posted the list of schools participating in the voucher program in '05-'06. guess who's not on the list?

an "arresting insight" from the fordham foundation - "Where do Public School Teachers Send Their Kids to School?" - comes to the expected conclusion, that they send their kids to private school more often than the general public. why? because they are education "connoseurs." one problem: this is only true in one of the three income brackets they looked at (the lowest). if it's true that with more money comes more leisure time, and that those with more leisure time are more likely to be "connoseurs" on any topic, and if it's true that private schools are so much more savory than public ones, why would so many more of the wealthiest teachers (if there were that many to begin with) send their kids to public schools? this bogus study wouldn't raise my hackles so much if it didn't smack of the nasty bus ads that "DC Parents for School Choice" ran last year.

and finally, here's a very interesting story ... i was talking to a friend last night who helped set up a college program in a women's prison in new york. she mentioned that statistic that's in the csmonitor story, that:

A 2002 study tracked 2,305 inmates released from Bedford Hills over a three-year period. Only 7.7 percent of the inmates who had taken college courses while incarcerated committed new crimes and returned to prison, while 29.9 percent of the inmates who did not take courses were jailed again.

pretty amazing.