Beyond Labels

A 360° Discussion of Foreign, National and Local Policy Issues

Scott Miller

July 31: U.S. Education (again)

Recent articles triggered by a recent study of educational progress by elementary and middle-school students, such as this one in the New York Times, has motivated us to revisit the subject of our education system: where is it succeeding, where is it falling short, and what can be done about it?

We’ll be joined on Monday by Marc Tucker, former President and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy and now a resident of Brooksville. Needless to say, he should be well positioned to provide some experience-based content (and context) to our musings about how education can be improved.

Marc prepared a PowerPoint presentation, attached, to get us started. Please review it before Monday…we’ll probably start with this as a focus for discussion.

See you Monday!

7/24: Up for grabs

Tomorrow’s Beyond Labels discussion will have no predetermined topic, so we can be as freewheeling as the participants would like.

Next week’s discussion will be about education in the U.S., in particular, the recent declines in math and reading scores amongst eighth-graders (the age at which, I guess, we do comprehensive testing).

More to come on that subject in the next few days.

For July 10: Whither Russia?

Two weeks ago, we chose not to devote the discussion to the previous weekend’s “mutiny” (seems to be the favored term) by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries—we felt there were too few facts about where things stood.

We’ll never know everything we might like to, but things appear to have settled down a bit. So we decided to discuss the topic at next Monday’s meeting.

Potential Discussion Topics

  • Has Putin’s hand been materially weakened? Or is he likely to succeed in purging his worst competition for power and pulling the rest of the military/elites closer to him and emerging stronger than before?
  • Do we think these events will alter the course of the war in Ukraine? How so?
  • What will happen to Prigozhin? Will he last in Belarus, or will he meet with an “unfortunate accident?”
  • And the Wagner mercenaries? Will they join the Russian military forces? Coalesce in Belarus? Stay a quasi-independent mercenary force?

Some Reading

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