Valerie Strauss has an excellent article up here on her perspective of the critical reasons for the strike.
The problem with the whole pay incentive thing is that really doesn’t appeal to those who love kids and love to teach–this appeals to people who are there for the paycheck…
People who love money over everything else have little sense of fairness and compassion.
I really don’t want them anywhere near kids…
Story here.
Emanuel is just another member of “the team” that is trying to undermine public education. (haha, I typed “undermind” at first–perhaps a better term? 🙂
…because, you know, bankers, financiers, business-oriented people who look at kids as products or resources to be exploited. They look at the kids with $$ in their eyes–what can we squeeze out of them? What kind of profit can we make off of them?
From the story:
But Russ Simnick, president of the Indiana Public Charter School Association, said it’s disingenuous to compare charter schools with other schools based on the ISTEP results. For one, such comparisons are between individual charter schools and the overall results of school corporations, in which high and low ISTEP scores are lumped together. Thus, he said, larger corporations have a better ability to mask their lower scores than smaller individual schools. A more honest comparison, he said, would involve lumping all charter schools together and treating them as one school corporation in order to compare with others.
Simnick also disputed Schnellenberger’s statistics on the lowest 50 ISTEP scores; he said only four were charter schools, and all of these opened in 2008. He said it’s not fair to expect such young schools to post high ISTEP scores, especially since many charter schools are in some of the most challenging communities and take in students who just transferred from poorly performing schools.
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Unbelievable. What a way to worm out of accountability. The teachers from public schools have made the argument for not giving them a failing grade for the above reasons–children from “challenging communities” are difficult to bring up to speed if they are poor, the parents are not involved, and there is some learning/behavioral difficulty.
But charter schools officials want to claim it’s not their fault that the kids are failing?
This from Pennsylvania. Nepotism? Um, yeah. Nice little game they have going there.
Notice how they use the same lines as the Indiana officials–the kids are poor performers, they’re special needs…blah, blah, blah. If you’ve got only a 15% graduation rate, you’re not the people to be teaching kids. Period.
This from Miami. Taxpayers should not be funding them at all. But that would cut into the profit margin for the education vultures, wouldn’t it?? You know, privatize the profits while socializing the costs, eh?
Her speech last night, seen here, is what truth looks like… (hat tip to crooksandliars.com)
…only when a corporation can walk into a voting booth will it be a *person*, in my view.
And as that refrigerator magnet said “I’ll believe corporations are people when they execute one in Texas.”
I don’t know why she didn’t name names when talking about a credit card company that cheated cardholders…why not publicly state it?
For me, she should have been the one running for president. I would have no problem with going to the voting booth to cast a ballot for her.
AP has this up on the Clinton speech.
Yeah, I for one am sick of the “we were prosperous when Clinton was president…” while forgetting that he instituted NAFTA. We, in the midwest, were feeling this before the rest of the country–there were factories closing down left and right in the town I was raised in.
The health care law only makes sense to me when it will help me with preventative care. That includes organic food and attention to diet by the medical profession instead of pushing pills as the solution for health ills.
Of course, I don’t have cable and didn’t watch it, so I can’t comment on that, but from what is being reported–he took an hour to speak? WTH?
…the conservatives are running a Reagan vs. Carter theme, and this popped in my head from Barlett and Steele.
DN! has this up with Matt Taibbi giving the scoop on what Romney is all about–he’s not about creating jobs, and saving companies, but swooping in, making a boatload of money, and leaving the carcass behind…
Taibbi mentions Carlyle Group--red flags go up. (hat tip to this site)
From the article:
But what sets Carlyle apart is the way it has exploited its political contacts. When Carlucci arrived there in 1989, he brought with him a phalanx of former subordinates from the CIA and the Pentagon, and an awareness of the scale of business a company like Carlyle could do in the corridors and steak-houses of Washington. In a decade and a half, the firm has been able to realise a 34% rate of return on its investments, and now claims to be the largest private equity firm in the world. Success brought more investors, including the international financier George Soros and, in 1995, the wealthy Saudi Binladin family, who insist they long ago severed all links with their notorious relative. The first president Bush is understood to have visited the Binladins in Saudi Arabia twice on the firm’s behalf.
Another article here.
On the rest of the video–the guy going to the Romney campaign event and being told he was unpatriotic for wanting to save his job should be blasted on every radio station, every TV station, and printed on the front page of every newspaper (what ones are left…). People are being lied to and are not getting that “fair and balanced” coverage. I mean, the utter gall of them saying that unemployed people on food stamps are just lazy and unmotivated…while shipping their jobs to China…
…my mind flashed to Romney’s poor rendition of “America, the Beautiful…” while Taibbi speaks of him and his cohorts’ non-allegiance to the States and the people trying to earn a living.
Taibbi makes a good point when he says the dispute over the actual time that Romney left Bain isn’t as important as to what profit he was reaping from Bain’s actions…that’s the key–what money did he make off the deals?
And Taibbi hints about how they don’t want to pay for anything–they make boatloads of money on these companies, after borrowing the money to do it.
You know, sometimes it ain’t so bad being without cable…
I had no idea this kind of garbage was on NBC. And look at the cast–Todd Palin…why does that not surprise me?
…um, do people know that GE, a defense contractor, owns NBC? Do they think that just maybe this is a way to *glam up* war so more folks will blindly go into combat not knowing how horrific and soul-destroying it is…? Or how the viewers watching it will become more numb to human suffering?
What about Mark Burnett, the producer of “Survivor”…which I always detested for its pitting people against one another, and encouraging a “weakest link” mentality…I often said that I grew up on “Gilligan’s Island”, where everyone worked together– while my kids were exposed to crap like “Survivor”, where people worked against one another for their own selfish reasons. This encourages that mentality of fear and violence and discourages cooperation and charity.
Good God.
…it’s rare that profit loses… (Shirley Chisholm, first woman presidential candidate)
commondreams has the story here on the banks’ speculation on food: corn, soy, and wheat. Be sure to look at the comments–someone has posted on the Federal Reserve bailing out foreign banks, as well as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase…the list goes on…
I’m a little skeptical, however, of the person who lists the quotes against the Federal Reserve…sounds too civil libertarian, right-wingish for my liking…
If you recall, I wrote about the drought here in Indiana, but how the ag undersecretary was saying that it shouldn’t affect corn because there were record numbers of corn planted this year. But after that declaration, they suddenly started saying that there was, indeed, a corn crop shortage and prices at stores were going to reflect that.
About six months ago, a resident of the building I’m in said something prophetic—when Social Security gave a cost-of-living increase…she said that grocery prices were going to go up–they always went up after s.s. increased their checks. I’ve seen more than one single item jump $2.00 in a month’s time…and they weren’t corn, soy, or wheat or anything that depended on those three…
Eagle 
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