A few notes:

• How are the Common Core math standards helping or hurting our most disadvantaged students? Anthony Rebora asks a few teachers … including me. [Education Week]
• Arthur Wise and Michael Usdan take a look at the landscape of teaching and politics from a bird’s eye view. [Education Week]
• And this article says that we can start sentences with conjunctions if we want to. And end a sentence with a preposition. Here’s more. [The Week]
• Say what you will, but Randi Weingarten is one of the most influential New Yorkers of the last quarter-century. [Observer]
• 8% of the responders to this Pew Research survey got all the questions right. Join me. [Pew Research]

Quote of the Week:

Two things helped me break through. The first, being vouched for by someone in a position of power who had a relationship with someone else in a position of power. I met that person when costs of investment were low: I worked for David Carr at a rate of $100 dollars a week and ten cents a word for anything I published. The first summer I worked for him, I made $1,700. I did not consider myself underpaid. This was 1996. The New Republic had just told the world that black people had evolved to be stupid, and it seemed like every week they were saying something just as racist. I was at Howard University, surrounded by a community of brilliant black people, cut off from the Ivies. None of them had the contacts or the resources to reply. They just had to take it. I can’t tell you how much that angered me. I was made in that moment. And when I got my first break in writing, I didn’t think about being ripped off. I thought about whipping ass. I haven’t changed.

– Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, on writing “for free”. Worth the full read.