Margins
  Donovan A. Landers

COLERIDGE

As opium-sweat
Beads on your brow
And your pay-the-rent
Newspaper columns remain
Closed tombs
In your ship-tossed
Mind,
Your wife grinds her teeth,
Your child nurses what's left,
And flames in the fireplace
Flicker with Wordsworth.

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Quality and Standards, Rhetoric and Realities
  Cathy C. Kaufman

A focus on improved quality hallmarks standards now guides practices from elementary classrooms to administrative offices. An increase in quality rhetoric, nonetheless, does not guarantee quality realities. Those realities depend on the accomplishments of many educators who, on a daily basis, construct and refine the meaning of quality within a vast array of educational settings. The individual held accountable for the quality management of each particular setting, however, is most often the building principal. Peters and Waterman (1982) suggested that quality management in any organization was characterized by an integration of loose-tight relationships, of flexibility and high levels of participant input while maintaining measures of administrative control. Ten years later, in the shift to less authoritative more collaborative managerial relations, Schmidt and Finnigan (1992) offered the analogy that accomplishing this new balance was comparable to making the transition from handling a motorboat to guiding a sailboat. Today's beliefs about quality management of the school environment are broadly reflected in governing standards for school leaders developed by the Interstate School Leader Licensure Consortium (ISLLC). This article examines the rhetoric of these standards against a backdrop of realities documented in the fields of organizational management and instructional leadership.     full text >>>

3-7 year old Children With A Parent in Prison:
What do Teachers need to know?
  Sydney Gurewitz Clemens

QUESTION:
I'm a teacher educator. How do we prepare a teaching force to work with families and children of prisoners?
IT'S A HARD SUBJECT
It is crucial that teachers be willing to discuss the very hard subject of parent in prison with children. Many teachers shy away from this discussion, mostly saying "I don't know what to say.... I'm afraid I'll say the wrong thing." As a teacher educator, you can open dialogue with teachers about rising to meet these children's needs.
AND THERE IS AN EXCEPTION
(NOTE: The case of the child who has been the victim of the prisoner is rare, and what follows should NOT be used with such a child. You will want a professional counselor or therapist to work with you on what to say to this child...but you can safely indicate being on his/her side while you're seeking such counsel.)     full text >>>

Dinner with Eli
  J.M. Parker

      On the Palatine Hill, billboards are discreetly miniature-sized and advertise mainly Versacci. Taxis line the porte cochere of a hotel stacked in columned tiers like a giant beige wedding cake. Inside, the walls and carpet are beige, leaving dark furniture to float as if against a blank sheet of parchment. The elevators rise and fall in the lobby. Brass innards humming with the middle-class accents of tan, English bridesmaids. There's a wedding reception on the second floor. Nervous groomsmen smoke before the mirrors and pick at the carpet with the tips of their shoes.
      On the third floor, a concert pianist and I have been smoking cigarettes all afternoon in the bathtub with the curtains drawn and the lights off, looking at each other, but not quite in the eyes. I'm saying, "Maybe he's still in love with you."
      "He and I never talked about love."
      "Maybe he's jealous and wanted to keep me from coming."
      "Maybe," says the pianist. "He's jealous. But he does want to meet you."
      "Do you want us to meet?"     full text >>>