Are you ready for some. . . recidivism? Notre Dame is number one in the Tarnished Twenty, a list compiled by FindLaw Sports (www.sports. findlaw.com/tarnished). The football rankings are “based on the number and severity of ongoing or recently concluded criminal, civil, NCAA and other administrative proceedings and investigations involving players, coaches, boosters or other persons or entities associated with a program. . . . The Tarnished Twenty takes into account everything from murder to the smallest of recruiting and on-campus violations.” As of September 2 the list included Big Ten teams Michigan (6), Wisconsin (8), Michigan State (16), and Iowa (18).
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
New Age news from Gayle Lawrence, writing in “Cholla Wayra: The Winds of Vision” newsletter (Fall) based in north-suburban Wadsworth: “My theory is the whales and extra-terrestrials are so evolved that they would naturally understand one another!”
“Ironically, the story of Chicago’s [educational] success is told largely by outsiders who rarely set foot in a classroom,” writes Reader staffer Ben Joravsky in Education Week’s teacher magazine (August-September). “The story told by many teachers is much different. They claim that the Vallas administration has taken the district back to the bad old days before the 1988 reforms. Each week brings some new edict from the central office. Vallas has ordered one high school English teacher to remove the novel Coffee Will Make You Black from her required reading list; converted a well-regarded vocational school into an exclusive college-prep school; set earlier starting times at dozens of grade schools; and prohibited teachers from taking classes on field trips during the last two weeks of school.” In other classrooms, however, Joravsky finds teachers who appreciate Vallas’s willingness to make them live up to higher standards. Pat Boland of Roberto Clemente High School says, “It’s much better than before. He made teacher accountability an issue. You may not like it. It may be a pain in the neck; teachers can be as bad as kids if they don’t want to do something. But it’s good for us.”
