You’d think no one would do anything else while the History of Education Society was meeting in Columbus, Ohio, but there were still some headlines this past week:
The Chicago teachers’ strike is over, after 11 days. Was it worth it? At Vox.
The district also committed to spending $35 million to shrink oversized classrooms and to prioritize schools that serve the most at-risk students. The deal includes a 16 percent pay raise for teachers over five years, and a remarkable 40 percent raise for teaching assistants, clerks, and other lower-paid workers. The new, five-year contract will also boost investment per pupil and reduce the number of students in each class.
Teachers had wanted more, though. They also wanted more affordable housing in the city for students and teachers. That’s something no teachers union has demanded in recent contract negotiations.
What happens to public schools when there are fewer students? The view from MI:
Fewer students mean less funding. But schools costs don’t drop in lockstep with enrollment declines, as school officials point out.
Another evangelical college shuts its doors, at WCPO.
[Cincinnati Christian University] did not “operate with integrity in its financial, academic, personnel and auxiliary functions” or establish processes governing fair, ethical behavior among its employees.
- Can other evangelical colleges avoid this fate by studying HBCUs? Here at ILYBYGTH.
Didja miss the headline that Queen Betsy was held in contempt of court? Two historians explain why at WaPo.
Last week’s ruling forced the department to admit wrongdoing. But its actions were not an accident or oversight — abetting the exploitation of our nation’s most vulnerable students goes to the very core of DeVos’s vision for education.
How Trump’s Bible teacher became a shadow diplomat, at NYT.
[Ralph] Drollinger himself is aware that some foreign governments’ interests in his studies might not be entirely biblical. “I can get these guys to help me,” he told me a few weeks earlier, speaking of his allies in Washington. “And everybody overseas wants to know someone in D.C.”
Why is Liberty U’s star professor leaving? At NA.
Karen Swallow Prior, a longtime English professor at Liberty University and a high-profile voice in the evangelical movement, will leave the school next year because of mounting frustrations over what she said is an administration-led campaign toward standardization that limits academic independence.
“For me, teaching is an art and I need the freedom to express that art,” Prior, who has accepted a position at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, said in an interview this week.
- I thought big-time sports would be the thing to crack Liberty U., but maybe academic abandonment like this will do the trick instead. Here at ILYBYGTH.
“Trump cult?” Not so fast… at R&P.
Scholars of new religious movements have shown that the mythology of cultic mind-control is more rhetoric than reality. It is easy to understand why critics of the president dismiss him as a cult leader, and his political followers as brainwashed. But it says a lot more about the power of the language than it does the president himself.
Sports page: Congrats to the Nats, but please stop saying a Washington team hasn’t played in a World Series since 1933. The Negro-League Washington Homestead Grays played in the 1948 World Series, at SUSIH. HT: PS.
Jill Lepore’s This America—resurrecting the tradition of liberal history, at The Nation.
Driving the demagogues out of the Barnes & Noble will require more than just taking back the nation as an object of serious historical inquiry. Lepore also sees a need to show that object in a more flattering light. Whereas many of her colleagues narrate US history as a tragedy and a chronicle of oppression, Lepore sets out to capture a fuller range of feeling. Her version features “a great deal of anguish,” she admits, but it also contains “decency and hope,” “prosperity and ambition,” “invention and beauty.” Lepore’s relatively upbeat tone is more than a sensibility; it’s a politics. The Bill O’Reillys of the bookshelf, she insists in This America, have not only taken control of the national story but also claimed for themselves the mantle of patriotism. Lepore wants to take it back for liberals. . . . In the end, she argues, it is liberals, not radicals, who can deliver progressive change. They do so using the most powerful tool within reach: the nation.
I Love You but You're Going to Hell 