Sunday, April 15, 2012

I love Robert Caro, unto death.

Here's why.

Here's the speech itself.

(When the giant Texan intones: "it's an Amurican problem," you think it's the cat's meow. Just wait for 14 seconds...)
LBJ Music
I'm an awfully poor revolutionary. Obama, having actually become president, has left me cold and aloof since mid-March, 2009. My own indolence, compounded by a sinful nature whose horizon knows no bounds, has only sealed the deal.

Here's a reminder for myself, from the truly inimitable Ed Kilgore:

But let’s be honest about what New York’s “gifted” system really is: It’s much less about meeting kids’ needs (very, very few 5-year-old children are so advanced that they can’t or shouldn’t be educated with their average peers) than it is about rationing access to a limited number of high-quality school slots in New York City. And in doing so, the gifLinkted distinction often becomes a mechanism for reinforcing economic disparities:

On their face, the results, released on Friday by the Education Department, paint a portrait of a city in which some neighborhoods appear to be entirely above average. In Districts 2 and 3, which encompass most of Manhattan below 110th Street, more students scored at or above the 90th percentile on the entrance exam, the cutoff point, than scored below it……By contrast, in District 7, in the South Bronx, only six children qualified for gifted placements and none for the five most exclusive schools.
My brother and I, happy and proud and, chiefly, innocent white boys from kindergarten through third grade at Miami's Norland Elementary, were chosen to be 'gifted' when we were eight years old. Alone of our universally black classmates. One can be sure the lovely bourgeois white lady who chose us was rigorously objective in her choosing.