Every Executive-Director in the non-profit world is smart, articulate, compassionate. Each can describe ad nauseum the lamentable plight of a poster child, one whose life challenges well-told can easily cause a funder to be separated from his or her charitable money. Overall, nonetheless, success in aiding such young people is more random than systematic.
In contrast, those who are accomplishing ambitious, societally-important objectives at scale are attacked by the existing power structure – they must be doing something wrong, they must be making money off their scheme.
We believe the societal return on investment from a positive preschool is high. We underfund it.
Mental health services are a crying need in underserved areas. We give it lip service.
The slope of digitization of education is steep; the education results are a flat line.
Almost nobody talks in polite society about the destruction of the family unit as an input relevant to subsequent education challenges for the children involved.
The Silicon Valley techies who have brought us all those wondrous, addictive products are signing no-phone technology contracts with the nannies who are taking care of their kids.
The cumulative hard copy pages devoted to education reform analyses defy the description of environmentally friendly.
Howard Fuller said it right a quarter-century ago concerning the need for reform in K-12 education: “it ain’t about the research, it’s about the will.”
One must hunt to find in-depth analyses of college costs. Reports with the C word in the heading are rarely about deconstructing the why behind tuition/room and board/the long list of fees. Instead they are about finding money, from the student and from the rest of society, to pay for said costs, as if they were fixed for some reason.
When did the Federal Reserve become solely responsible for economic growth? When did the sole function of the Federal Reserve become managing economic growth?
What if the data analytics people discovered that the combination of single parent households, punitive drug laws, inadequate minimum wage levels, and disproportionately expensive daycare actually drove education outcomes more than any other quartet of factors.
Why does a person lead with, “to be honest.” It raises questions about everything else they say.
Why do so many people respond reflexively to a question by saying “that’s a good question.” Are they stalling for time to dream up an answer.
Writer: not sure when I wrote this, but it certainly was pre-lockout. How many of the questions and comments will still be relevant when the pandemic is behind us?