Education

Brantley did his Sherrod Brown impression on the baseball, and bailed out Francona of his...odd decision.  I don't know; yes, Allen is his "best reliever," but De Aza is a lefty, and Rzep has been quite solid all year.  To be sure, he's not Terry's guy -- Rich Hill is -- but that just goes to show you why God invented waivers, even if no one in the organization seems to understand this concept.  To me, you have to go to the lefty there, even if you dare Ventura to bring in the pinch-hitter. 

I am now reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, next on the fiction list.  It concerns a writer milling about Paris, having lots of sex, not writing, not eating, and cadging cash and meals from his friends.  Typical liberal.  It was banned way back when for being scandalous, and I can see it; you couldn't write "prick" or "cunt" or "erection" in the 20s.  Now, it's not very dirty, but very boring, and the story itself is fairly aimless, like the author/narrator.  So we plod along, and not in the sense of Cramer's book, where you went a long way but learned something.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/do-american-public-schools-really-stink-maybe-not-97142.html

I think this is probably true...for a few reasons.  First, Americans love to complain and not spend money, and this is a way to do so.  More seriously, I wonder how much of this is because of competition from private and charter schools.  I think rich public schools are good, but the voucher and charter movement has pushed competition into places where normally -- because of union dominance -- it would not have happened before.  I also think the push for testing and standards -- and I am not a fan of them -- did encourage teaching; I mean, you get rid of some of the dead wood, you cause changes to teaching, and lo and behold, things improve.  I think we all know most charters and private schools aren't as good, but the money disappears, so public education professionals had to adjust to maintain market share (to look at it from an economic perspective).  Some of the testing, for its faults, did show teachers HOW they had to improve and reach more students, which isn't a bad thing.