Gary Rubinstein offers his favorite posts, his Top Ten.
Every one of them is a jewel, reflecting Gary’s inside understanding of TFA and corporate reform, and his frank acknowledgement of their failures.
He left out many wonderful posts, including his careful exposes of the failure of the Tennessee (Non)Achievement School District, which consumed $100 million of Race to the Top funding and still failed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I love the one to Duncan.
Thanks, Gary Rubinstein.
Biden loves Duncan’s book, How Schools Work. DUH. Go to Amazon and read Bifden’s comments about this book. Biden need to just RETIRE and GO AWAY.
Duncan didn’t write it and Biden didn’t read it.
My hunch.
a telling point
Gary’s Blog throws a banner ad at me. cannot delete with ease. I regret this intrusionon on his blog.
I read Gary’s piece, The death of Math. He summarizes his ideas about changing the math curriculum as
1) Greatly reduce the number of required topics, and to expand the topics that remained so they can be covered more deeply with thought provoking lessons and activities.
2) Make Mathematics, beyond eighth grade, into electives.
I think criticzing the math curricukum is timely and necessary, but I think it’s not wise to prescribe concrete fixes. In particular, I agree that way too much material is taught in math (and many other subjects), but the advise “reduce the number of topics and cover the remaining part more deeply” is arguable, so is “make math elective in high school”.
I think the following criticisms of the math curriculum and the questions are legitimate and at a general enough level.
Math books are way too heavy, verbose, full of useless pictures, colors, exercises—-probably to make them more expensive.
Should we put actual limits on the weight, size, number of pages of math textbooks?
Math books and the math curriculum are boring.
The math curriculum is too technical.
The math curriculm emphasizes calculations way too much.
The math curriculum reflects the interest of quite a few adult groups, such as politicians, professors, billionaires, textbook authors and publishers.
Should the math curriculum serve only the students’ interest?
Should the K-12 math curriculum consider what’s needed in college or should colleges adjust to the K-12 material?
Do students need to learn proofs?
Is it important that students love math?
Is it important that students are excited about math?
Is it possible to make math easy to learn?