Table of contents

The organized ladies

For a brief time in the early 1880s, tens of thousands of Irish-American women mobilized to help finance the cause of Irish nationalism. They were housemaids, factory workers, and ladies of the middle and upper classes who marshaled their proven talents at church fundraising in response to the clarion call of Fanny Parnell, sister of the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell.

In “Petticoat Revolutionaries: Gender, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Irish Ladies’ Land League in the United States,” published in the Winter 2008 Journal of American Ethnic History, Ely M. Janis, a Ph.D. candidate in history, chronicles the spread of the Irish Ladies’ Land League from Boston to California, Buffalo to New Orleans, often with male members included. The league’s chapters dispatched untold thousands of dollars to Ireland for tenant relief; they also served as venues for sociability. They provided Irish-American women the chance to show their “fitness for public leadership,” writes Janis, and to demonstrate “their respectability [as ‘ladies’] in American society.”

The league foundered when radical members sought to expand the agenda to include labor abuses in America, dividing the membership. Bishop Richard Gilmour of Cleveland leveled charges of communism and immodesty against the league (it was inappropriate, he said, for women to behave like “noisy politicians”), and he excommunicated the members in his diocese who stood by the organization, causing further turmoil. In the end, however, it was a shift in the nationalists’ tactics overseas—toward “a conservative, parliamentary-based strategy,” says Janis—that in 1882 rendered the league inconsequential and signaled its demise.

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Basketball’s trees

There are 341 NCAA men’s basketball teams in Division I, and 156 of them publicly fired their head coaches between the 2001 and 2007 seasons, writes Daniel Halgin, a doctoral student in organizational studies. Halgin’s paper “All in the Family: Network Ties as Determinants of Reputation and Identity in NCAA Basketball” won an award last year from the Academy of Management. In it he analyzed every one of those firings and each coach’s subsequent career path to learn how past professional connections with other head coaches can effect a soft landing.

Of the 156 head coaches who were fired, 13 went on to work as head coaches in another league (e.g., overseas); 48 took NCAA jobs as assistant coaches; 63 left the profession; and 32 secured another head coaching position in Division I, sometimes better (at a school with a larger fan base, say) than the one before. The individuals most likely to rebound successfully—in fact, nearly three times as likely, says Halgin—belonged to seven “coaching families” that not only confer status but can trump performance when it comes to hiring decisions. Coaching families—sometimes called “trees”—can form around a coach (note the past assistants to Rick Pitino, Bobby Knight, Henry Iba, and Mike Krzyzewski) or a team (Michigan State, North Carolina, Princeton). A key element is that members, even when they enter into competition with one another after separating from the nuclear family, speak of their ties, at least in the off-season, in family terms (e.g., “the Tarheel family”)—and that the press does also. Halgin likens these families to the enduring and supportive associations sometimes found elsewhere in business, citing the former employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, who identify themselves as “Fairchildren.”

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Teaching for change?

Since 1990, Teach for America (TFA) has been sending idealistic college graduates into the poorest schools in the country for two-year stints as educators. The organization has given them six weeks of training, and an assignment to raise their students’ reading and math skills by a grade and a half in one year. The program aims to become the country’s leading employer of recent college graduates by 2010. In a paper that won them an award in April 2008 from the New England Educational Research Organization, graduate students Randall Lahann and Emilie Mitescu of the Lynch School consider whether TFA’s goals and practices spell reform in public education.

According to the authors of “Teach for America and the Politics of Progressive Neoliberalism,” the last two decades have seen “the application of business-crafted solutions to public education.” They cite the proliferation of charter schools (a nod to the principle of “consumer choice”) and the enactment, in 2001, of No Child Left Behind, with its system of rewards (“trust the market”) built around students’—and teachers’—test scores. The field of teacher education too has become more of a marketplace, they say, with for-profit and “alternate route” programs (including TFA) now vying with universities to produce teachers who can meet the states’ certification requirements.

TFA (which had a budget in 2005 of $40 million drawn from private and government funds) has as its stated purpose the building of “a movement to eliminate educational inequity.” But, say the authors, its reliance on set government metrics and its targeting of specific school districts suggest that while TFA may achieve a “market correction,” it will bring the country no closer to a just system of “resource distribution.”

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Kathleen Hirsch teaches in the PULSE program at Boston College.