Last bastion?
Convective thought: Plain old public schools may be the last bastion of localism.

Two different news items show a strong crossgrained stubbornness and a resistance to national or global "solutions".

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(1) Murdoch's attempt to break into Innovative And Disruptive ed tech with big money fails.

My first thought was "No duh. Idiot union thugs won't allow Murdoch in because KKK BUSHITLER NAZI SEXIST RACIST HOMOPHOBE CLIMATEDENIALIST TRANSPHOBE, even though Murdoch is actually 10 times more Commie and 100 times more Green than any union thug." Nope. The facts aren't nearly that simple. There was some political shit in NY, mainly because Murdoch had hired former NY school official Joel Klein to head the project. Even there it wasn't really R vs D. Klein is firmly D but earned the hatred of union thugs by trying to reform the schools. In other states Murdoch's people arrogantly assumed they could Innovate And Disrupt existing business relationships. Didn't work. School boards were happy with existing publishers and didn't see any reason to switch.

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(2) Chicago parents are staging a hunger strike to keep their neighborhood school open. Jesse Jackson is getting involved, yet again the dispute isn't racial or partisan. Everyone on both sides is both D and black.

By objective standards the school deserves to be closed. Its last graduating class had only 13 kids. But the neighborhood likes its school and wants to keep it open.


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(3) Semi-related... Spokane's first public charter school has started, several days before the regular public system. The school's agenda is suspiciously leftist and internationalist, but the classroom itself is old-fashioned. The short video shows serious kids working hard, using nothing but #2 pencils and paper. No technology or distraction in the room at all, nobody peeking at iPhones or Innovating And Disrupting. Only one thing in the classroom was different from the room where I started school in 1955: markers on whiteboard instead of chalk on slate. And that's a definite improvement. (Old tech isn't better just because it's old. SIMPLE tech is always better, and markers are better SIMPLE tech than chalk.)  ¶ 2:15 AM