Dana Goldstein

Asking for Flowers is Just Asking You to be Nice...

This is a great performance of a great song, by Kathleen Edwards. I think it's about someone who gave a lot, but didn't get a lot in return. 

 

"I Was the Last Girl in Larchmont"

I just watched the documentary about Joan Rivers, "A Piece of Work," which inspired me to search for some of her early, classic stuff, when she was one of the only women in the world doing stand-up comedy. A lot has changed since this 1967 skit, but you can see how incredibly gutsy and dynamic she was.

It's unfair to the rest of us...

...that Zooey Deschanel looks like this and sounds like this. Anyway, sorry this is sort of an advertisement for Levi's, but it is still great. Check out M. Ward's guitar skills on the bridge.

Happy Jewish Christmas

The song whose name I couldn't remember last night....duh...

Congressional Republicans Kill Bill Fighting Child Marriage

Sad news out of Washington this week on women's rights: The House Republican leadership killed a bill intended to fight child marriage in the developing world, the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010. 

The legislation passed the Senate unanimously, where it was cosponsored by Republican Olympia Snowe. In the House, however, just an hour before the vote, the GOP circulated a "whip alert" asking Republicans to vote against the bill. The alert claimed, "There are also concerns that funding will be directed to NGOs that promote and perform abortion and efforts to combat child marriage could be usurped as a way to overturn pro-life laws."

This is hooey. The Helms Amendment--the foreign policy corollary to the noxious Hyde Amendment, which bans federal Medicaid funding of abortion--already bans American foreign aid dollars from funding abortion. Nothing in the child marriage bill would have changed that. 

Sometimes you hear the argument that American feminists spend too much time fighting domestic anti-choice forces and not enough time focusing on the deplorable conditions women and girls live under in the developing world. 

This is a reminder that it's all the same fight, because American conservatives will always use the specter of abortion to kill attempts to empower women and girls, both at home and abroad.

Here's a great video from the UN Foundation's Girl Up project on the "girl effect"--how a girl's life changes if she can continue her education at age 12, instead of entering into a forced marriage.

Click here to learn how to help.

Love It

A Deeper Look at the Newark, NJ Public Schools and the Zuckerberg Donation

For those of you who have not yet headed to your Christmas destinations (or are bah-humbug Jews like myself), perhaps you'd be interested in my latest feature story, for The Nation, about schools and education reform in Newark, New Jersey in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg's much-hyped $100 million donation.

I spent a good amount of time in Newark reporting this piece, and I left feeling that the city's story has crucial implications for the national education reform debate.  As one source told me, the Zuckerberg donation, announced on "Oprah," was packaged with a sort of "missionary spirit that will obviously grate on people." Yes. The media have painted a picture of the Newark schools as insufferably, uniquely terrible. In reality, Newark struggles with the same challenges most urban districts face, and Newark has actually achieved some nationally-recognized successes over the past decade on early childhood literacy and African American male high school graduation rates, which I detail in the piece. 

It's also very important to keep gigantic philanthropic gifts in perspective. Even with its matching grant, the Zuckerberg money is equal to only 4 percent of the Newark public schools' $900 million annual budget each year for five years. What's more, the gift comes as Newark and other New Jersey urban school districts brace for over $1 billion in budget cuts instituted by Gov. Chris Christie.

The bottom line: The donation is a drop in the bucket compared to the cuts, yet we hype corporate philanthropy even as we ignore the larger story of the public sector being starved of much-needed resources.

I hope you read the whole article, which also deals with Mayor Cory Booker's political ambitions and the debate in Newark over whether to spend the Zuckerberg money on neighborhood public schools or opening new charter schools. 

I'm Charmed...

...by this story of a 66-year old avant-garde fiction writer, Jaimy Gordon, who has finally gotten some major recognition--a National Book Award!--for her work. 

Jaimy lives alone in a house on a lake in Michigan...about a 20-minute walk from her husband, who also owns his own house, next to another lake. 

Just a reminder that life is long and strange and sometimes doing things the unconventional way works out just fine. 

So True

"Why Must We Pretend It Is Not Strange When Adult Celebrities Date Underage Celebrities?"

The Grassroots-ification of Education Reform

This afternoon, former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee appeared on "Oprah" to announce the launch of her new non-profit, Students First. "I'm going to do something different," Rhee told Oprah. "I'm going to start a revolution...a movement in this country on behalf of the nation's children."

Perhaps in recognition of the PR fiascoes that have greeted school reform efforts under Mayor Mike Bloomberg in New York (Cathie Black) and Mayor Adrian Fenty in D.C. (his reelection loss),  education reform power players have been paying extra attention in recent months to attracting grassroots support to their causes. 

Rhee's Students First will be harvesting email addresses and launching "chapters" across the country of educators, students, and parents who support taking on the teachers' unions over issues such as tenure and seniority-based firings. It's an online/real world advocacy model, not dissimilar from how President Obama used Organizing for America during the 2008 election. Meanwhile, in Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Cory Booker has launched PENewark using the first $2 million of the matching grants to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift. The group's goal is to raise public awareness of the Zuckerberg donation and survey Newark residents on how they'd like to spend the money--all while building public trust in Booker's own bid to assume control of the Newark schools.

A New York City PR firm working on the Newark project, SKDKnickerbocker, also represents Rhee. And the Newark team--Booker, Zuckerberg, and Gov. Chris Christie--also rolled out their big announcement on "Oprah."

In June 2009 I reported "The Selling of School Reform" for The Nation, which recounted how a number of anti-union ed reform players had wooed Al Sharpton with donations, in an attempt to attract more community-level African American support to causes such as expanding the charter school sector and instituting teacher merit pay. So in part, all of this is nothing new--though the efforts are certainly growing more sophisticated.