The Winner(s) Made Everyone a-Twitter
(Humor)
Thought Leader Extraordinaire
This was the year where the *ed-documentary* took center stage and brought the education conversation beyond the established edu-crat circle and mucked it up, cracked open some silos, exposing too much here yet not enough fact-checking there and made everyone mad
as hell for one reason or another yet got more people talking about education and poverty
and test score burn-out and corruption and teacher unions and charters and greed and
Arne Duncan and teacher bashing and Michelle Rhee and that damn bingo ball rolling
in that socket . . .
. . . which started rolling on TV screens with MSNBC's "Education Nation" where Mika and Scarborough rubbed elbows with Holly-weird starlets at the same time they were talking to, dare I say, educators? Then the Teacher Town Hall with NBC's Brian Williams fueled even more ire burning up the Web wires with more wild photo-shopped pictures of Superman and Bill Gates than one ever thought imaginable.
It was so much easier when education was only about policy buried on page 26 in The Washington Post with so many acronyms which no one understood except Diane Ravitch - NCLB, ARRA, NORA - oh my, that last one was an old flame, sorry about that. Now, education is all over the front page of The New York Times and LA Times like tweedle-dee and tweedle-dom with everyone jumping in and, my word, having an opinion. Unnerving, indeed.
Life here in my once-serene bubble world of education has changed so much and I blame Guggenheim* with his "Waiting for Superman" especially, along with Sackler, Abeles, and Bowdon, for getting people who don't belong mixed up in this business, er, I mean, revered institution. Personally, I liked the status quo. Sigh. It was difficult enough keeping up with all the other education marauders who have joined the ranks with those other annoying intruders, corporate control freaks and tech nerds, and now this explosion. Education has become a bona-fide media darling, sitting right next to rehab celebrities on Huffpo, for heaven's sake!
It's a mad, mad education world I tell you, and yes . . . don't forget, (sigh), "it's about the kids".
What a year.
To add salt to my wounds, The Daily Riff just announced their "Persons of the Year" in Education for 2010 and guess who and where they are? Behind the camera:
Davis Guggenheim
Waiting for Superman
Madeleine Sackler
The Lottery
Vicki Abeles
Race to Nowhere
Bob Bowdon
The Cartel
Cheers!
Happy New Year!
Dr. D.
Thought Leader Extraordinaire
*Davis Guggenheim is an Academy Award-winning American film director and producer. His credits as a producer and director include The Shield, Alias, 24, NYPD Blue, ER, Deadwood, and the documentaries An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman.
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