Speaking of video....

....the Fordham Foundation just recently got their own YouTube Channel.

Mike Petrilli on Margaret Spellings? Good!
Mike Petrilli channels Al Shanker while a man twice his size looms in the background? Not so good!
A swipe at Ed in '08 with an old, bald man saying "I am the future"? Frickin' bizarre.

They're still the best education podcast around, though.

Update: I hit the page refresh button and get this message:

This is a private video. If you have been sent this video, please make sure you accept the sender's friend request.

Apparently, the Ed in '08 dagger was intended to be in-house only. Tee-hee!

Read more here, if any.

Jonathon Kozol is an Idiot

Sez the Gadfly:

Gadfly was still a bit groggy from the holidays when this fine piece about Jonathan Kozol appeared in the Weekly Standard. The article traces Kozol's development, from failed novelist (an excerpt of his book Fume of Poppies: "The white of her belly was lovely and gay. The fire beat at us."), to teacher in an affluent Boston suburb, to Communist sympathizer, to angry old man. It's a sad story, really, about someone who has talents but simply squandered them, preferring to rail against private schools and those many decent people he perceives to be racists than to actually help improve the squalid state of inner-city classrooms.

Education Next agrees, as does the Weekly Standard.

As a good Dem Kozol should probably be speaking right to me, but the one book of his that I did try to read (Shame of a Nation) seemed like an awful lot of fluff and very little substance.

Read more here, if any.