Category Archives: big box stores

Poverty and Education; Gates and Broad

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The thing that gets pushed aside with “school reformers” is the link between poverty and lower grades.  I never fully understood this country’s contempt for the poor until now.   You truly have to experience it as a poor person to understand.  You’re worse than criminals because at least criminals get three hots and a cot.  What does Congress do?  Cut funding to the Housing and Urban Development and cut food stamps.

And I found this excellent post by Joanne Barkan  on the fallacy of “school reform” by Gates, Broad, et al.  It is sickening how Gates has manipulated data, ignored poverty, and is stealthily racist when you view the public schools that closed being heavily minority.  Gates shoveled millions upon millions towards this boondoggle when instead he could have paid taxes so that those schools would be well-funded and able to have smaller class size so that teachers could help those that had more difficulty learning, or it could have helped the poor kids get nutritious meals cooked from scratch….the simple solutions that would have the greatest impact.

From the website:

In November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in education at their home outside Seattle to announce that the small schools project hadn’t produced strong results. They didn’t mention that, instead, it had produced many gut-wrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. No matter, the power couple had a new plan: performance-based teacher pay, data collection, national standards and tests, and school “turnaround” (the term of art for firing the staff of a low-performing school and hiring a new one, replacing the school with a charter, or shutting down the school and sending the kids elsewhere).

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Sickening, isn’t it??

 

More:

States were desperate for funds (in the end, thirty-four applied in the two rounds of the contest).

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Enter the Gates Foundation. It reviewed the prospects for reform in every state, picked fifteen favorites, and, in July 2009, offered each up to $250,000 to hire consultants to write the application. Gates even prepared a list of recommended consulting firms.

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That pretty much says it right there.  States were desperate for funds –they had little choice.

In the same article, the Post broke the news that Bill Gates had “secretly bankrolled” Learn-NY, a group campaigning to overturn a term-limit law so that Michael Bloomberg could run for a third term as New York City mayor. Bloomberg’s main argument for deserving another term was that his education reform agenda (identical to the Gates-Broad agenda) was transforming city schools for the better. Gates put $4 million of his personal money into Learn-NY.

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And this should be great cause of concern:

On October 7 and 8, 2010, the Columbia Journalism Review ran a two-part investigation by Robert Fortner into “the implications of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s increasingly large and complex web of media partnerships.” The report focused on the foundation’s grants to the PBS Newshour, ABC News, and the British newspaper the Guardian for reporting on global health.

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Both Gates and Broad funded “NBC News Education Nation,” a week of public events and programming on education reform that began on September 27, 2010. The programs aired on NBC News shows such as “Nightly News” and “Today” and on the MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo TV networks.

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Gates and Broad also sponsored the documentary film Waiting for Superman

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As a vehicle for their partnership, the foundation and Viacom (with some additional funds from the AT&T Foundation) set up a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization called the Get Schooled Foundation.

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There is a reason that Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s FCC* allowed more consolidation of the media–the press has always been part of the Fourth Estate that kept Congress and the President in check.  If the media was weakened with consolidation, it concentrated ownership which in turn shut off different opinions, viewpoints, and independent voices.  It also stifled competition between media….ironic coming from people who often bring up “encouraging competition”  as a reason for allowing bank deregulation, relaxing EPA rules, and repealing or relaxing antitrust regulation.

The corporate takeover of public schools got a foothold because the media was not doing its job of investigating what was going on and who was behind it….because they were being bankrolled by those very people they should have been investigating.

*The Federal Communications Commission is staffed by presidential appointees.  The American public owns the airwaves, but those rights are being taken away from them by media consolidation.

The link between poverty and how well a child does in school broaches the subject of healthcare.   Children who live in poor areas are more likely to be exposed to toxic environments.  Heavy metals seriously impact one’s ability to learn, one’s ability to remember, and one’s ability towards impulse control–all of these impact a child’s education.  In addition, as anyone who has read this blog knows, ADD is a problem when heavy metals are involved–totally frustrating a child who may get distracted and lose focus during the teacher’s instruction, missing important information.

 

 

 

 

 

Speaking of Badasses

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Diane Ravitch has a blog on the Badass Teachers Association:

 

 

 

 

I didn’t know what they meant when I searched for G4s –it came up a security agency and had many links including Israel.  However, when I searched for Gates and prisons, voila.

So I’m trying to wrap my brain around this, because Gates had invested in Monsanto, which purchased Blackwater/Xe…

…..so I’ve read several different sites that claim Monsanto did NOT buy Blackwater.  Stay tuned…jury is still out.

Whether Monsanto owns Blackwater or not, it is still a reprehensible corporation, and owning prisons?

Yeah…this would not have been possible if we didn’t have state governments privatizing state services like prisons…

Do you get the theme here?  Privatizing schools, privatizing prisons, cornering the biotech market and bullying farmers….

I found this on Cascade Investment, which is owned by Gates and family. More stuff here

Teaching, for real…

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I think that everyone who proclaims to know how to teach and more importantly, knows what we need to *cough* fix education should be required to teach for an entire school year.  Absolutely.

…but then, the poor  kids they would be in charge of would lose an entire school year of education…and they’d be worse off than before.

Limbaugh and Hannity being cut by Cumulus

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Well, now.  Didn’t expect they would do it.  I seriously thought that Limbaugh was entrenched and nothing short of him murdering someone would they cut the strings.  I’m happy that they are cutting off the hate-filled blather.   Who are they going to get now to bang the drum for the rightwingers…?

I just hope they aren’t replaced with more hate-filled blather by someone even worse than Limbaugh and Hannity.

Teacher confronts Weiner

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(hat tip to Diane Ravitch)

Well, now, teachers may be the nation’s punching bag right now….but this one isn’t down with this predator’s actions.    As she said, she would have lost her job if she had done what Weiner did.  Not only that, she would be in jail.

Don’t like the NSA? How About Gates snooping into children’s school records?

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Diane Ravitch has this and this up on the continued invasion of privacy…only this time, it’s your kid they are gathering information on.  This critical information gathered by a Foundation that now owns 500,000 shares of Monsanto, .

…and what about Rupert Murdoch getting hold of your family’s records? Especially since the newspaper he owned invaded people’s privacy already…even after a warning about his dealings went unheeded.  

From the first Guardian article:

When the high court last summer ordered the News of the World to pay damages to Max Mosley for secretly filming him with prostitutes, the paper was furious. In an angry leader column, it insisted that public figures must maintain standards. “It is not for the powerful and the influential to run to the courts to gag newspapers from publishing stories that are TRUE,” it said. “This is all about the public’s right to know.”

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Does anyone else see the irony of a paper that is invading innocent people’s privacy complaining about maintaining standards….apparently lying and invasion of privacy are not standards someone should uphold…?

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The Uniparty

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One of the commenters here called the absence of real oppositional parties the “Uniparty”. …yep.

See…the Dems really believe in the Fourth Amendment and the rights of the American public to be let alone…

bwhahahahaha *snort*  bwahahahaha…

Don’t blame me.  I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.  The first time in all the years that I had been voting that I wrote a candidate’s name on the ballet.  Of course, now Indiana has changed to the computerized system so a voter wouldn’t be able to just write in a candidate.   Supposedly, they have paper ballots at each voting station, but this voter was not told there were paper ballots available, not even when I voted early, nor were there any paper ballots visible so that one could ask for it.

They changed the law so that one had to have 2% of the general votes cast for the Secretary of State in the previous election.  Note the deadlines were repeatedly pushed back in order to diminish the ability to gather signatures during summer events where crowds gather…

I found this page absolutely fascinating.  I had no idea that we had other candidates to choose from, as the write in candidates were not on the electronic ballot.  And being without access to media (no TV antenna in the community room at the time), nor did I have more than an hour per time from the library’s internet computers…so information was limited, as are most poor.  And I would venture a guess that even with cable TV, many middle class were also ignorant of this–funny how the nooz just doesn’t seem to get around to covering important issues like this….they’d rather scare you into getting a vaccine that will likely cause as much harm to your body as any good or tell you not to take Vitamin E because some bogus *study* says it’s bad for you…pfft.

The invisible walls that came after the visible…

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A commenter on Diane Ravitch’s blog put up this video:

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More here on the Detroit fight for worker’s rights, i.e., the pensions they were promised, versus the bond holders.  Like I said before, everybody has to lose a little bit–the city workers should not bear the brunt of it.

The Bullying Society

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Diane Ravitch has this up.

As I said in my comment there, bullying from children is just a reflection of the adults and culture around them.  We have shows like “Survivor” that encourage groups to pick apart others and zero in on a target.  My Boomer generation didn’t have violent video games which desensitizes one to violence.

I think these all feed into the bullying mentality. Pick on those that are different or weaker. Keep at it until they disappear–either through suicide or crushing their soul until their light goes out…the effect is still the same.

It has even broader implications than “just” bullying–creativity comes from thinking differently.  Bullying will crush the ones that think differently, limiting the greater impact they might have had on the world.

I don’t think the solutions are campaigns telling kids to stop bullying.  It’s too complicated a problem.  And it’s not the kids fault as much as it is society’s.