Midlife Meditation

None of these people believes in public education. Here's a non sequitur for an essay about how bad things are about to be: there are far scarier things in the Trump agenda than appointing Betsy DeVos, a charter school advocate with no training or experience in public education, to run the Department of Education. The reason is perspective. Federal subsidies actually account for just eight per cent of public school funding overall, and much of that comes from departments other than Education, subsidizing meal programs and Head Start. Directing some of that money toward charter schools and vouchers is still problematic, but the local impact of whatever nastiness DeVos can push through is going to be minor compared to the abomination that was No Child Left Behind. Stack it up against protectionist global trade policies and climate change denial, and it seems even less of a worry. What stinks about it is what it says about these ersatz populists who are now going to pick th...

We don't teach to get rich. No American teacher has ever taught with an eye toward luxury. Since public education was conceived by Thomas Jefferson, teaching has always been treated as a calling akin to the priesthood or the military: a servant profession that relies upon dedicated idealists whose primary reward is the work itself. Becoming a teacher in the nineteenth or early twentieth century was tantamount to taking a vow of poverty. Teachers were revered not just for the good work they did, but also for the sacrifices they made in order to do that work. The unionization of education helped bring teacher salaries up to a living wage, and to grant teachers pensions and health benefits (in fact, the first insurance companies were created precisely to make health care affordable to cash-strapped teachers), so that today, teachers can expect to live comfortable middle class lives, looking forward to secure retirements. But no one--not even administrators, the best paid professio...

I've been putting off writing about the misogynistic motives behind the Isla Vista shootings for a variety of reasons. Slate  magazine, my main source for journalism these days, has covered it well, including the meta-coverage of the hashtag activism growing out of it. Some of the opinions expressed in their many essays and podcasts have caused me both to nod in agreement and squirm with recognition. Writing and publishing my own angle, tiny though my audience may be, has felt like it would be redundant, and might also shift me uncomfortably into a no-win zone I am loath to enter. With all that said, there were two pieces published today that got me thinking I could add a perspective that is, if not unique, at least underrepresented in what I've seen elsewhere. The first, an essay by Christin Scarlett Milloy in Slate 's "Outward" blog, asks the question "Is It Natural to Be Queer? "and comes to the surprising conclusion that it doesn't matter; t...