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March 11, 2010
Texas: The Most Embarrassing State
Texas, our most embarrassing state, is on its way to re-writing history for its students. Here are some ideas for what should be taught in Texas, according to the Texas school board (sans links):
For instance, one guideline requires publishers to include a section on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
There have also been efforts among conservatives on the board to tweak the history of the civil rights movement. One amendment states that the movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes” among minorities. Another proposed change removes any reference to race, sex or religion in talking about how different groups have contributed to the national identity.
The amendments are also intended to emphasize the unalloyed superiority of the “free-enterprise system” over others and the desirability of limited government.
One says publishers should “describe the effects of increasing government regulation and taxation on economic development and business planning.”
Throughout the standards, the conservatives have pushed to drop references to American “imperialism,” preferring to call it expansionism. “Country and western music” has been added to the list of cultural movements to be studied.
References to Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are proposed to be removed, while Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, is to be listed as a role model for effective leadership, and the ideas in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address are to be laid side by side with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.
Early in the hearing on Wednesday, Mr. McLeroy and other conservatives on the board made it clear they would offer still more planks to highlight what they see as the Christian roots of the Constitution and other founding documents.
“To deny the Judeo-Christian values of our founding fathers is just a lie to our kids,” said Ken Mercer, a San Antonio Republican.
The new guidelines, when finally approved, will influence textbooks for elementary, middle school and high school. They will be written next year and will be in effect for 10 years.
March 10, 2010
March 9, 2010
How Much Are You Worth? More Than $5?
From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:
Women of all races bring home less income and own fewer assets, on average, than men of the same race, but for single black women the disparities are so overwhelmingly great that even in their prime working years their median wealth amounts to only $5.h/t CBB
Make of this what you will. But remember this the next time you feel like bashing parents for their kids' lack of "effort" or "ability" in getting the necessary high test scores in school needed to keep their teachers from getting fired--teachers who are needed by these neediest of our children--and from getting their school "privatized" so the wealthy can continue to subjugate the least powerful for their own gain and perpetuate the re-segregation of America. Given the $5 net worth described above, I would say the oligarchs are doing exactly what they want, and are succeeding.
Poverty is a reflection of society; a mirror of what we deem important as a people; it is the civil rights issue of our time (and ALL time), Arne.
March 8, 2010
Unemployed America: Headed For Bereavement
At least the bankers got their bonuses.
Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, in the U.K., and a pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says no other circumstance produces a larger decline in mental health and well-being than being involuntarily out of work for six months or more. It is the worst thing that can happen, he says, equivalent to the death of a spouse, and “a kind of bereavement” in its own right. Only a small fraction of the decline can be tied directly to losing a paycheck, Oswald says; most of it appears to be the result of a tarnished identity and a loss of self-worth. Unemployment leaves psychological scars that remain even after work is found again, and, because the happiness of husbands and the happiness of wives are usually closely related, the misery spreads throughout the home.
Especially in middle-aged men, long accustomed to the routine of the office or factory, unemployment seems to produce a crippling disorientation. At a series of workshops for the unemployed that I attended around Philadelphia last fall, the participants were overwhelmingly male, and the men in particular described the erosion of their identities, the isolation of being jobless, and the indignities of downward mobility. (link)
Robert Reich Chimes In On RTTT
Bail Out Our Schools
MONDAY, MARCH 8, 2010
Any day now, the Obama administration will announce $4.35 billion in extra federal funds for under-performing public schools. That’s fine, but relative to the financial squeeze all the nation’s public schools now face it’s a cruel joke.
The recession has ravaged state and local budgets, most of which aren’t allowed to run deficits. That’s meant major cuts in public schools and universities, and a giant future deficit in the education of our people.
Across America, schools are laying off thousands of teachers. Classrooms that had contained 20 to 25 students are now crammed with 30 or more. School years have been shortened. Some school districts are moving to four-day school weeks. After-school programs have been canceled; music and art classes, terminated. Even history is being chucked.
Pre-K programs have been shut down. Community colleges are reducing their course offerings and admitting fewer students. Public universities, like the one I teach at, have raised tuitions and fees. That means many qualified students won’t be attending.
Last year the nation committed $700 billion to bail out Wall Street banks, the engines of America’s financial capital, because we were told we’d face economic Armageddon if we didn’t.
We’ve got our priorities backwards. Our schools are the engines of our human capital, and if we don’t bail out public education we face a bigger economic Armageddon years from now.
Financial capital moves instantly around the globe to wherever it can earn the best return. Human capital – the skills and insights of our people – is the one resource that’s uniquely American, on which our future living standards uniquely depend.
Starting immediately, the federal government should give states and local governments interest-free loans to make up for all school and university budget shortfalls. The loans can be repaid when the recession is over and local and state tax revenues revive.
Over the longer term we must shift incentives away from financial capital toward human capital. A tiny one half of one percent tax on all financial transactions would generate about $200 billion a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That might put a crimp on Wall Street bonuses but it’s enough to fund early childhood education, smaller K-12 classes, and lower tuitions and fees for public higher education. [emphasis mine]
The Street’s financial capital is important to the American economy, but over the long term the classroom’s human capital is absolutely crucial.
March 7, 2010
What's The Lesson Of The Central Falls Firing?
Open Left has a great post up about the inevitable conclusions one should draw from the mass firing of the Central Falls staff. It's a fairly long post, but well worth going to the link to read the whole thing.
The bottom-line reason given for the firing [of the Central Falls High School staff in Rhode Island] in many news reports was a 48% graduation rate. Now, that rate is nothing to be proud of--even though it would have been quite respectable for the "Greatest Generation", which sent a lot of high school dropouts off to war. But 48% is still almost halfway to perfection. Contrast that with the violent crime rate for Oakland, California, 1917.8 per 100,000 in 2007 (the most recent year for which statistics are available in the DOJ online database). You'd have to double their performance (cut their violent crime rate in half) eleven times before you'd get close to perfection, a violent crime rate of less than 1 per 100,000.
Obviously, the entire Oakland Police Department should be fired. No other conclusion is possible. It's a no-brainer.
But why stop with Oakland?
The safest community in California is Laguna Woods, and it's violent crime rate is 16.4 per 100,000. You'd have double their police performance four times to get close to a violent crime rate of 1 per 100,000 and five times to get under 1 per 100,000. If perfection's your measure (and why shouldn't it be?) then the Laguna Woods police are spectacularly worse than the Central Falls High faculty and staff.
The conclusion is obvious: Every police department in America should be fired en masse.
March 6, 2010
A Legislator Who Understands
Bill Perkins, NY State Senator:
...recently announced plans to hold public hearings on charter schools, to examine, among other things, the sources of their financing and “how much profit there is in not-for-profit” schools.Finally, someone in charge who gets it. Now if only the other 49 states could get some legislators like Bill.
h/t Ken Libby via Twitter
War Is Still A Racket
I posted about Smedley Butler before but didn't have this video to go along. The actor does a good job reciting some of Butler's words. It's frightening how prescient Smedley seemed to be. Of course one could call it obvious instead of prescient. When will the rest of America catch on?
San Francisco: Want Some Sludge For Your Garden?
This is just disgusting. With all the gardening going on in the Bay Area, especially gardening programs at schools, should we be asking about the compost municipalities give away? Considering the following, yes!
When San Francisco, one of the greenest cities in America, offered its residents free compost, many were excited to take it. After all, purchasing enough compost for even a small 10 x 10-foot garden can cost over $50, and generating one's own compost in high enough quantities for such a garden takes a long time.
Few of the gardeners who lined up to receive the free compost at events like last September's Big Blue Bucket Eco-Fair suspected that the 20 tons of free bags labeled "organic biosolids compost" actually contained sewage sludge from nine California counties. On Thursday, March 4, angry San Franciscans returned the toxic sludge to the city, dumping it at Mayor Gavin Newsom's office in protest.
Sewage sludge is the end product of the treatment process for any human waste, hospital waste, industrial waste and -- in San Francisco -- stormwater that goes down the drain....
When confronted by angry gardeners who had been duped into applying toxic sludge to their gardens, city and state authorities defended their actions. The California Association of Sanitation Agencies insisted that because San Francisco has "virtually no industrial facilities within its borders or sewer service area," the waste was not a combination of "industrial, commercial, hospital, and household wastewater." But, according to Organic Consumers Association, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) has documented the following in San Francisco sludge alone: p-Isopropyltoluene (an industrial chemical used in the manufacture of paint, furniture, etc); 1,4-Dichlorobenzene, a disinfectant, deodorant and pesticide; Tolulene (an aromatic hydrocarbon widely used as an industrial feedstock and as a solvent); 1,2,4-Trimethylbenzene (a product of petroleum refinery distillation); and Phenol (used in the manufacture of drugs, antiseptics, nylon and other synthetic fibers).
Rep. George Miller: Charter School Lover
Representative George Miller (D-CA) has decided to rely on charter schools to fix what teachers and schools can't fix: poverty. He also chooses to ignore the facts: charters are no better than traditional public schools, and are sometimes worse. And none of these reformers ever mentions the fact that nearly every charter school deals with discipline in ways traditional public schools can't. It is a farce!
From Thompson:
WASHINGTON, February 26 — Signaling the important role of innovation in driving education reform, the House Education and Labor Committee chose charter schools as the focus of its first hearing to inform its rewrite of the eight-year-old No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law.h/t JH
"If our goal is to build world-class schools," Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said, "we absolutely need to look at high-performing charter schools for research and development and replicate what they are getting right."
Miller admitted that charter schools are not a "silver bullet," but those that are high performing can improve achievement levels of low-income and minority students by instilling competition into the traditional school system.
One in a "Handful" of Hearings
Committee spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz told Thompson Publishing that charter schooling is just one of many topics that will be discussed in a "handful of hearings" on reauthorizing NCLB, also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
The charter school hearing focused on the All Students Achieving through Reform Act (H.R. 4330), a proposal to provide competitive grants to expand and replicate successful charter schools. (Currently, about 1.5 children are enrolled at almost 5,000 public charter schools.) The bill would give priority to students from families with low incomes or those from schools with low graduation rates or in need of improvement.
Charter school proponent Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said the bill was a "promising idea" to expand these types of schools. The federal government, he said, could encourage the growth of charter schools by eliminating state-imposed charter school enrollment and growth caps and allowing new schools to be established under an existing charter.
Other hearing participants, however, weren't so keen to see the federal government expand charter schools or, at the very least, said stronger oversight is needed.
Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., pointed to a February 2010 study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA called Choice Without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards, which argues that "charter schools continue to stratify students by race, class, and possibly language, and are more racially isolated than traditional public schools."
Thomas Hehir, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said more needs to be done "on the authorizing level" to improve charter school access for students with special needs and be sure that these schools aren't cherry picking the best and the brightest students, leading to concentrations of the hardest-to-serve students in the traditional public system.
Choice Without Equity
March 5, 2010
Is Executing Children A War Crime?
From truthout:
Under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to execute a captive. Yet, in Kunar on December 26, US-led forces, or perhaps US soldiers or contract mercenaries, cold-bloodedly executed eight hand-cuffed prisoners. It is a war crime to kill children under the age of 15, yet in this incident a boy of 11 and a boy of 12 were handcuffed as captured combatants and executed. Two others of the dead were 12 and a third was 15.
Morton Kondrake Is A Moron
Mo touts the debunked Sputnik nonsense as well as the school-as-business model. He does not mention Diane Ravitch and her recent conversion from NCLB supporter to NCLB abolitionist. Kondrake is just another tool for big business and the oligarchs.
It has been nearly 30 years since the landmark “A Nation at Risk” report launched the education reform movement and still, as Obama noted last month, American eighth-graders rank ninth in the world on international math tests and 11th in science.It's the teachers, right? Wrong. Every study ever conducted to see what has had the biggest impact on a child's education points to SES. Period. There is not one bit of evidence to support the craziness that is RTTT, value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, longer school days/years, more homework or any of the other crap being touted.
A work force report by the Business Roundtable warned that the U.S. is the only major industrialized country with a younger generation that has a lower level of high school achievement than the older generation and is second to last in college completion.
And, as Obama pointed out Monday speaking to the America’s Promise Alliance, a third of U.S. children fail to graduate from high school — including half of all minority children — condemning most of them to a life of poverty and huge cost to society.
We need to do the right thing for our kids. We should teach them how to think, not what to think. This requires students who are ready. Let's make sure they have food, health care, a decent place to live, a job for their parent(s) and teachers who are free to do what they do best--teach.
Do You Know This Kid XIII? Updated
She was born in 1934. She is adorable, isn't she? She was in movies and folks have sung about her. She is not American.
Update: Shy reader anon nailed it by citing the song I was planning on using anyway. Good job! This is her emailed response. She's not French, just really smart:
Je pense qu'elle est dans ce chanson:
Now the reason we're here
As man and woman
Is to love each other
Take care of each other
When love walks in the room
Everybody stand up
Oh it's good, good, good
Like *brigitte bardot*
Now look at the people
In the streets, in the bars
We are all of us in the gutter
But some of us are looking at the stars
Look round the room
Life is unkind
We fall but we keep gettin' up
Over and over and over and over and over and over
Me and you, every night, every day
We'll be together always this way
Your eyes are blue like the heavens above
Talk to me darlin' with a message of love
Now the reason we're here
Every man, every woman
Is to help each other
Stand by each other
When love walks in the room
Everybody stand up
Oh it's good, good good
Say I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you
Talk to me darlin'
March 4, 2010
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