This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Can Everyone Be Excellent? — Alfie Kohn: The inescapable implication […] is that the phrase “high standards” in the context of education reform means standards that all students will never be able to meet. Because if everyone did meet them, the standards would just be ratcheted up again — as high as necessary to ensure that some students failed. Its inspiring rhetoric notwithstanding, the standards-and-accountability movement is not about universal improvement or leaving no child behind. To the contrary, it is an elaborate sorting device, intended to separate wheat from chaff. The fact that students of color, students from low-income families, and students whose first language isn’t English are disproportionately defined as chaff makes the whole enterprise even more insidious. […] Success seems to matter only if it is attained by a few, and one way to ensure that outcome is to evaluate people (or schools, or companies, or countries) relative to each other. That way, even if everyone has done quite well, or improved over time, half will always fall below the median — and look like failures.
• How Robert Bork Fathered the New Gilded Age — Sandeep Vaheesan at the University of Chicago's (!) ProMarket Blog: Due to the extraordinary influence of Bork’s writings as a scholar and judge, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission today mostly leave Google, Walmart, and other powerful businesses across the economy alone and seek to suppress the collective action of workers in the service economy. Antitrust enforcers have targeted Uber drivers, home health workers, music teachers, and public defenders, among others. As I detail in a recent law review article, antitrust law again resembles its Gilded Age form—accommodating capital and policing labor—and has given us corporate monopoly and individual powerlessness. Creating an equitable society requires nothing short of wholesale reform of our antitrust law and policy and renouncing the ideology and prescriptions of Robert Bork.
• EFA Warns Chinese-Style Facial Recognition Is Already Happening In Australia — Lyndsey Jackson at Electronic Frontiers Australia: Queensland Police deployed facial recognition during the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, ostensibly to protect against terrorism, but it immediately started being used for general policing. Stadiums Queensland continues to use facial recognition at its venues. Perth council is pushing ahead with its own facial recognition trial despite opposition from local residents. And Australian federal authorities are actively seeking to build a system, disturbingly called The Capability, to use facial recognition across all of Australia. “We see the same language being used in Australia as used by the Chinese government”, [EFA Chair Lyndsey] Jackson said. “It’s justified as being about terrorism, but that’s just a word used to stop people thinking about what’s actually going on. It’s really about using state power to abuse vulnerable groups.”
• The ‘new right’ is not a reaction to neoliberalism, but its offspring — Lars Cornelissen in OpenDemocracy: […] what originally remained an intellectual attraction between neoliberals and conservatives has in recent decades morphed into something more closely resembling a synthesis. As neoliberal hegemony reached its climax in the 1990s, its intellectual custodians began focusing their attention on what they purported to be the failures of multiculturalism. Decrying ‘cultural relativism,’ neoliberal think tanks began publishing pamphlets that sang the praises of western culture, which their writers regarded as inherently superior to its non-liberal (read: non-western) counterparts. They proceeded to assert the need to protect national identity from its dilution by immigration and to advocate patriotism and nationalism as a means of consolidating such identity.