Miscellaneous Stuff

A bunch of interesting things today:

• A paper by Rajashri Chakrabarti (Federal Reserve Bank of NY) and Joydeep Roy (Columbia Univ) makes the case that charter schools significantly and clearly reduce private school enrollment in nearby communities.  The effect is modest in size, but observable and more than enough to throw some independent and parochial schools into the red. (Thanks to Tom Toch at Independent Education for the pointer.)

• Faith Popcorn's trend list for 2011 organizes around the theme that differences between the genders are disappearing as major divisions in society, economic and culture.  The trend list is worth a look even if one rejects the gender premise.

• A new ChangeThis manifesto by Daniel Burrus & John David Mann makes the case that reinvention (of self, company, school, whatever) is no longer a one-in-a-while sort of thing.  Rather, the pace of change is such that reinvention becomes on ongoing imperative. Good food for thought before your next strategy-making session with the board.

• Returning to an August 2010 Smithsonian Magazine aricle on the changing demographics of America, I was horrified to read the stream of xenophobic and reactionary comments appended to Joel Kotkins' interesting piece (cited here in an earlier post).  I plan to write much more about this (the comments, that is) in the coming days.