Category Archives: big box stores

Education: Throwing kids into the deep end

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Seamus McCarville has a thoughtful post up on the nonsensical approach of Common Core and its proponents.

I went to the NYSUT website and briefly looked over the cheerleading of Common Core.  It states that up until now, there has been a wide variation of standards from place to place…like that indicates failure…

…and as I’m reading that, I’m thinking of all the contributions to America that have happened by people who came from different areas of the country with different educational systems–Neil Armstrong pops into my head as I type–he was not educated under Common Core…

What about the artists? What about the musicians?  What about culinary endeavors or farming?  This is just sooo short-sighted and myopic in that it has such a narrow focus of what these self-appointed education gurus have deemed important.

They seem to want robots teaching class…instructing them which side of the classroom to be on? Seriously??  Micro-manage much?

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More on Education:

Mercedes Schneider has this up on Arne Duncan blaming everyone else but himself.

 

 

The PR ads against Teachers and Public Education

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Mercedes Schneider has this up on a billboard blasting Randi Weingarten and teachers  unions (read: public education).  (hat tip to Diane Ravitch)

Note that sleazy Rick Berman is behind this attack ad.

This is what parents have to look forward to, with dictatorships as Charters:

This is a comment signed Concerned Charter Teacher:

I work at Success Academy and thought you might be interested in the following. Just heard that we are planning a pro-charter parent march on October 8th. Our schools are being closed for the morning. Teachers, parents, students, and central office staff are being required to join the march. Other charter schools are joining as well. Several emails from senior leadership make it clear that the event is not optional. It seems very unethical that adults and children are being forced into this political statement, but I don’t know what, if anything, can be done. [Emphasis added.]

 

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Event is not optional.

Thinking is not optional.

Art is not optional.

Music is not optional.

Being a kid is not optional.

 

Slanting the news

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Diane Ravitch has this up on Politico’s slanted reports on Education.  I have noticed this myself lately of the few articles I’ve read on there–a definite change in the wind, so to speak.  The comments are interesting, too, as others have noticed and some suspect the Billionaires Media Club is at work here.

From the comments:

Ryan

January 14, 2014 at 11:20 am

It’s the billionaire boys club at work again, I’m afraid. Stephanie B. Simon was a superb reporter working stories on the privatization of public schools, and Silicon Valley’s and Wall Street’s pieces of the pie. Then she was hired by Politico, and her stories have changed. Similar thing happened to the NYT Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Mike Winerip, who early on did a great piece on the scam that is K-12 Inc’s so-called ‘virtual schools.’ Really K-12 is just peddling incredibly overpriced software and a few overloaded teachers to answer questions. NYT offered him full-time work, and put him on the baby boomer beat (?) and now he is writing its Motherlode blog — dispensing advice to parents. Gates $$ have totally shifted Ed Week’s reporting — it seems they aren’t even bothering to re-write the press releases fro the privatizers. PBS has done only a little reporting on the privatization of education. Rachel Maddow is silent. And on it goes.

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(underlining is mine to emphasize reporters’ collaboration by silence or slanted reporting.)

 

Republican Mask – Democrat Mask

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Reclaim Reform (Ken Previti) has this up on the Chicago Teachers Union’s new IPO….the solution isn’t with those wearing Democrat or Republican Masks whom are in reality corporate employees…but with us.

God bless Karen Lewis and the CTU.

Huffington, Gates, join forces

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In what could be called the Billionaires’ News Service, Ariana Huffington and Bill Gates, amongst other billionaires, want to control even more of the media message….er, I mean, news…

…and this, my friends, is why we need the Fairness Doctrine.  This is why we need a break up of the monopoly of the press and media by the 1%–they already have their voices heard, over and over.  They were able to sell the Iraq War through their monopoly of the news outlets–radio, paper, TV–as we saw in the previous blog on Iraq Veterans against the War.  It was scripted without so much as one critical media reporter…oh, wait, Phil Donahue was critical…and he was fired.  The more that media is concentrated, the less independent voices are heard.  If we had the media we had in the 60s and 70s, there would have been more investigating of WMD’s, and less cheerleading by the talking heads.

The Guardian link, has a little more detail.  Keep in mind that the Guardian has also joined forces with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation… further concentrating Gates’ media messaging…

A side note~~A commenter on the commondreams site has this link up**.  Wow. If this is true, it opens up yet another can of worms of falsifying evidence to get us into yet another war….

And the questions begin:  Why did Scahill and Jones refuse to share a stage with Mother Marian?  If Scahill is as good as investigative reporter that he is reported to be, then why would he not investigate the accusations against Mother Marian?  Why did he not seek her out to get her side of the story?  This is all just mindboggling.

**also note that the author writes articles published in Huffington Post.

Slave Labor to fight fires

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So now the prison system is using prisoners to fight wildfires…for $1 an hour, and that’s if they’re lucky.  Others have received only 50 cents an hour.  This is just wrong on so many levels.

And, as someone noted in the comments, it fits right in with for-profit schools, for-profit security state, for-profit healthcare, etc., with forcing people to work for slave wages, so the 1% can make even more profits.  Disgusting.

This is what was happening with the mental health system before reform–they were forcing folks to work without pay.  While I do think that having something to do and learning a trade is valuable, it must be fair and paid with decent wages.

 

 

No More

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Jeff Nguyen has a blog up featuring Eddie Vedder’s song “No More”.

God bless Phil Donahue— still fighting the good fight.  I grew up watching Donahue and he opened my world.  He talked about subjects that were taboo.  He asked intelligent questions.  I loved the “live” aspect of his shows where callers could call in to add to the story.

It was a sad day when his show was no more.  And even sadder that he was fired from MSNBC for speaking out against the Iraq war.

 

Vanishing New York

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New York Observer has a link to this, among other stories:

Vanishing New York.  All the businesses that closed under Michael Bloomberg.

If you look only at this list and add up all the years in business represented, we lost approximately 6,926 years of New York City history in only a dozen years. And we know the real number is much higher than that.

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Pretty sad, eh? A hardware store in business for 100 years!  A bakery in business for 89 years! A restaurant in business for 48 years! A records store in business for 60 years! A hotel in business for 127 years!  A book store 86 years!

…and Shea Stadium destroyed.

That is a lot of history.  Think of all the people that passed through the doors…in their youth, in their adulthood, with their children, grandchildren…seeing familiar faces and catching up with each other’s lives.

Our culture is being destroyed before our eyes–everything that makes us connect with one another.  One of the things I loved about Fort Wayne is that somehow it’s managed to hold onto some of that culture–it’s known as the city of restaurants and churches….for good reason.  They still have many independent restaurants…not McRestaurants.  The downtown is walkable–pleasant—with many independent stores.

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Other stories the Observer posted:  Starchitects and the luxury apartment boom in NY, related to the previous story–

Don’t get me wrong, I love architecture.  I love the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.  But if it comes a the expense of neighborhoods, then, no, I can’t go along with that.

People deserve to have decent housing at rents they can afford.  Small business should be afforded the same.  Something needs to be done so that if a luxury building is built, those around it are not made to suffer by enormous rent increases.

Education News and the postal service

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Raginghorseblog has a good riddance message to “if-you’re-poor-blame-God” Mayor Bloomberg.

Mercedes Schneider has a post up here on New Years and here on AFT Myths–really good blog on the myths and debunking them with pointed questions.

As I thought about the profiteers circling around public education, the postal service popped into my head.  They actually made a profit last year, but you wouldn’t know it by theBush Administration’s demanding they pay into retirement funds for people not even born yet…

…it suddenly occurred to me that not only are the profiteers going after public education and other social programs, the postal service is also a target for a couple of reasons:  a) strong union–gotta break those unions; and  b) public service efficiently run but could be run more *cough* efficiently.  Or, in other words ::damn, look at the golden opportunity to make some bucks while delivering crappy service…::  and, finally, c) postal workers make pretty good money….so they gotta get rid of them!

See…they can’t portray the postal carriers like teachers and say that they are not doing their job because, well, the mail gets delivered in a reasonable time with good rates through wind and rain and dark of night. They had to come up with some other way to bankrupt them and make it look like it was their fault, see?  Hence, we have the nonsense of paying for people that aren’t even born….making it look like they can’t make a profit or be self-sufficient…then the neocons/neolibs cry foul and trot out the overused sob story that the postal service is costing taxpayers money!  Not exactly.  They are funded by Congress for $100 million to deliver service to the blind and Americans overseas.  Otherwise, they are funded by stamps and other services the public pays for.

Even more astounding is that the postal service made a profit in this economy.  Now that’s impressive!