I just finished reading Suad Amiry‘s Sharon and my Mother-in-Law. The books is a result of her Ramallah diaries (from 1981 to 2004), where she described her everyday life under occupation. Absurdity and agony would be the words to describe this book (the feelings it ewokes), spiced with a lot of humor. For example, there is the situation when Amiry’s husband Salim gets arrested during curfew , but not because he was breaking curfew. The reason for the arrest was  that Amiry was refusing soldier’s orders to stop staring at him. Then there is Amiry’s dog, Nura, toy Manchester terrier who enjoys more political rights than her owner (Nura was granted a coveted Jerusalemite passport by her Israeli veterinarian in a settlement nearby Ramallah). Amiry decides to laugh about it all! To stay sane – you must find a way to laugh at things, otherwise – it’s easy…

In a much-awaited decision, Governor Jerry Brown has appealed the Vergara decision.

LOS ANGELES (CBS / AP) — Gov. Jerry Brown appealed a court ruling that struck down tenure and other job protections for California’s teachers, setting himself apart from leaders in some other states who have fought to end such protections or at least raise the standards for obtaining them.

Attorney General Kamala Harris filed the appeal late Friday in a Los Angeles County court on behalf of the governor and the state.
The move came a day after Superior Court Judge Rulf Treu finalized his June ruling that found five laws violated the California Constitution by depriving some of the state’s 6.2 million students of a quality education. He’d earlier said the system “shocks the conscience.”

The governor’s one-page notice of appeal said that under the state’s constitution “the important issues presented in this case — if they…

Ruth Conniff of “The Progressive” reports that the FBI is becoming more assertive in its investigation of criminal behavior by charter schools. Charter schools receive millions of dollars of public money with minimal accountability. In some states, they have gone to court to fight public audits, claiming that the schools are public but the organization running them is a private corporation.

Conniff reports: “From Pittsburgh to Baton Rouge, from Hartford to Cincinnati to Albuquerque, FBI agents have been busting into schools, carting off documents, and making arrests leading to high-profile indictments.”

She adds:

“Charter schools are such a racket, across the nation they are attracting special attention from the FBI, which is working with the Department of Education’s inspector general to look into allegations of charter-school fraud.

“One target, covered in an August 12 story in The Atlantic, is the secretive Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who runs the largest charter-school…

So the WHO have published a roadmap to stopping worldwide Ebola transmission in the next six months. $490m is all they’re estimating is needed! That’s about half of what we paid for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, or a third of the Edinburgh tram system. And its all relatively straight forward. That’s the thing. The public health nerd in me loves that this is so understood. That there is best practice waiting to be rolled out. And as a nurse, that I have a very limited knowledge of Ebola, yet the treatments that can make such a massive difference to patient outcomes are providing basic nursing care (I don’t mean the experimental antibody serum which has been given to four so far, but the hygiene measures and symptomatic treatment such as rehydration, pain control and coagulation support that is available locally).

My alarm bells went off reading about the…

On Saturday, August 23, 2014, I participated in a six-minute WWL-TV Eyewitness Morning News segment on the controversy surrounding the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in Louisiana. The link to the segment can be found at the end of this post.

The segment was scheduled to precede the Tuesday’s pro-CCSS “forum.”

I was the only individual against CCSS out of three.

The other two participants want to keep CCSS in Louisiana. One is State Representative Walt Leger.

The other, Kenneth Campbell, is president of the national group financing the pro-CCSS lawsuit: the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO).

I wrote about BAEO in my book detailing individuals and organizations exploiting public education, A Chronicle of Echoes. You will want to read about this supposed “choice” group bankrolling Louisiana’s pro-CCSS lawsuit. In this July 2014 post, I offer readers the opportunity to read my chapter on BAEO…

This has the potential to be big. A District Court judge has ruled that the system that the state of Texas is using to finance its school system is systematically inequitable and unconstitutional.

From what I’ve heard from Texans at the Network for Public Education meeting this past vernal equinox, Texas for years had a system where kids in poor working-class and/or Latino or Black towns or neighborhoods had much less spent on their education, so much that the school facilities and so on were markedly — even shockingly — different from the facilities and so on in more wealthy towns and regions.

The link to the decision is here.

I would assume that the current governor Rick Perry (whose gifts to comedians just keep on coming) and the rest of his administration will appeal to the state supreme court, and if they lose again there, they will probably…