Milwaukee’s public schools typify the kind of school district now undergoing state takeover in a wave of such imposition of “recovery” or “achievement” districts being rushed through state legislatures. The bills are often fast-tracked without legislative debate and without input from the communities where the takeovers are being imposed.   The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel describes the provision—log-rolled into Wisconsin’s state’s budget when it passed on July 12, that grants Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, “broad authority to oversee a special district in Milwaukee for the city’s most troubled public schools…. The Program, devised by Republican state lawmakers from the suburbs, is designed to take some of the district’s lowest performing schools from the control of the Milwaukee School Board and put them under the control of Abele and a commissioner he selects, or directly under MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver, if she chooses to use that authority.”

But the Milwaukee…

Today it was announced that US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, he who has used the awesome power of the federal Government to wreak layered and relentless havoc on the entire public school system, will resign in December.

Duncan said he was resigning to spend more time with his family and stated, in what appeared to be complete seriousness, that he expected to find work “expanding opportunity for children.”

Duncan was the longest serving education secretary in U.S. history and easily the most appalling.

Even as candidate Obama campaigned with Linda Darling-Hammond, in a bait and switch maneuver that can now be seen as characteristic of his presidency,
President–elect Obama named non-educator Duncan Secretary of Education. The appointment, made at the insistence of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a group made up almost entirely of hedge fund managers, signaled that under Duncan the Department of Education would serve in essence…

The Afghan city of Kunduz was seized by the Taliban this week. A hospital in Kunduz was bombed today during the US airstrike – Medecins Sans Frontieres says it gave the coordinates of hospital (hit by an airstrike that killed at least 19 people) to US forces several times.

Another 19 human beings and all their lives are now being reduced to collateral damage. Afghanistan, and all the other war-torn places can’t seem to leave my head…

Farzana Wahidy was born in Kandahar and moved to Kabul at the age of six. She attended school during the years of the Afghan civil war. After the Taliban came to power and prohibited the education of women, she secretly attended an underground school located in an apartment with three hundred other girls (it made me think of Nadia Anjuman and the Golden Needle Sewing School).

And Anjuman’s verses just keep on reappearing…

by CBC News, Oct 03, 2015

A joint inquest into the deaths of seven First Nations students begins Oct. 5 in Thunder Bay, Ont.

All of the students died between 2000 and 2011 while attending high school in the city, hundreds of kilometres away from their remote First Nations where access to education is limited.

Three of them were just 15 years old when their bodies were pulled from a local river. Two other teens are suspected of drowning while two more may have overdosed. The inquest is expected to fully examine the circumstances of their deaths and make recommendations to…

Below is a Youtube video of the October 02, 2015, White House press conference regarding US Secretary Arne Duncan’s resignation and former New York State Chancellor, John King’s becoming interim secretary for the remaining year that Obama is in the White House.

In my October 03, 2015, post, I transcribed Obama’s and Duncan’s remarks.

Below are John King’s remarks, which I transcribed using the above Youtube video. (King begins speaking at 55:30.)

And now, I offer my readers yet another dose of corporate reform disconnect: John King.

Thank you, Arne, for your very kind words. Thank you, Mr. President, for the opportunity to serve and for your faith that you have placed in me and the team that we have at the Department.

I’m deeply honored by the chance to serve and also deeply humbled by, uh, following in Arne’s footsteps. Arne is an extraordinary leader who I have watched…

“By appointing John King, the most unpopular education commissioner in the history of New York State, as Acting Secretary of Education, President Obama just gave a shot in the arm to every Republican Presidential candidate who proposes to abolish the US Department of Education.”
– Professor Mark Naison

Accountability?

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