Recommended reading

 This weekend's New York Times Sunday Magazine piece [gift link] entitled "How a sexual assault in a school bathroom became a political weapon," looking at the Loudoun County schools is a must-read for anyone involved in public education or public policy right now. 
The conclusion: 

“These are really complicated political issues, on which reasonable people can disagree.” But, he said, those fights did implicitly raise a question: “Do we care about learning, or do we care about these symbolic issues that get voters fired up?”

This was more of a zero-sum question than the combatants might wish to admit. A meeting that a school board spent debating a problematic mascot was a meeting that it did not spend on a new learning technology program. A million-dollar settlement over a textbook lawsuit was a million dollars not going to classroom instruction. The school board seats lost, superintendents fired or driven out, exhausted teacher retirements — all of that churn came at a cost, too.