Category: Education
It’s Friday
So have a silly video/movie trailer:
There are a couple of swear words.
If You F%$# Your Base Long and Hard Enough, They Won’t Be Your Base Anymore
Attempts by mainstream Democrats to turn education into another private sector profit center from which they can extract campaign donations is starting to piss off teachers:
The strike by public school teachers in Chicago this month drew national attention to a fierce debate over the future of education and exposed the ruptured relationship between teachers’ unions and Democrats like Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Over the past few years, even as Republicans have led efforts to thwart unions, lawmakers previously considered solid supporters of teachers’ unions have tangled with them over a national education agenda that includes new performance evaluations based partly on test scores, the overhaul of tenure and the expansion of charter schools.
As these traditional political alliances have shifted, teachers’ unions have pursued some strange bedfellows among lawmakers who would not appear to be natural allies.
In Illinois, the top two recipients of political contributions from the Illinois Education Association through June 30 were Republicans, including a State House candidate who has Tea Party support and advocates lower taxes and smaller government.
………
“The notion that just because you’re a Democrat” you can take the teachers’ unions for granted has changed, said Jim Reed, director of government relations for the Illinois Education Association.
As teachers grapple with a reform agenda backed by hedge funds and large philanthropic donors and championed by the Obama administration as well as some conservative Republicans, the unions are navigating a delicate political landscape where they increasingly pursue friends in unlikely places.
There are way too many Democrats, including Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who think that handing our schools off to hedge funds is a good thing.
It’s not.
The creation of the educational-industrial complex, much like the creation of the prison-industrial complex, and their granddaddy, the military-industrial complex, are a disaster for our society.
Chicago Teachers’ Strike Over
Technically, the strike is just suspended, but I can’t see the teachers hitting the line again:
The Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates decided this afternoon to end the city’s first teacher strike in 25 years and return more than 350,000 students to the classroom Wednesday.
The voice vote was taken after some 800 delegates convened at a union meeting hall near Chinatown to discuss and debate a tentative contract. Union leaders had already signed off on the agreement with Chicago Public Schools.
“We said we couldn’t solve all the problems. . .and it was time to suspend the strike,” CTU President Karen Lewis said at a news conference after the vote.
One hopes that Rahm gets taken down at the next election.
To the degree than anyone lost, it was Emanuel, and here’s hoping that he gets taken down at the next election.
He’s a f%$#ing bully who never seems to muster the guts to use it on the other side, and he’s yet another case of an incompetence failing up.
He’s Dick Cheney minus one finger tip.
Doctors: Someone Else Who Did it All By Themselves
Except for the inconvenient fact that the federal government covers about 90% of the cost of medical residencies:
So let me get this straight. Currently, the Federal government fund about 90% of the cost of training new doctors at a cost of $12 billion per year? The health care industry itself only picks up 10% of the cost?
I would love to know how this state of affairs got to where it is. I can’t think of another major profession – other than those that are exclusively government professions (military, police, firemen, etc.) where the government pays such a huge amount of training costs for its key personnel. It’s actually kind of mind-boggling.
Yet another case of Randian Übermenschen who simply picked themselves up by their own bootstraps, I guess.
H/t Atrios.
And Torture Becomes the New Norm in the Classroom
One of the problems with “looking forward” on torture and not prosecuting peopel is that it makes torture a normative activity more generally.
Now we are seeing it being used on our children in our schools:
In my public school 40 years ago, teachers didn’t lay their hands on students for bad behavior. They sent them to the principal’s office. But in today’s often overcrowded and underfunded schools, where one in eight students receive help for special learning needs, the use of physical restraints and seclusion rooms has become a common way to maintain order.
It’s a dangerous development, as I know from my daughter’s experience. At the age of 5, she was kept in a seclusion room for up to an hour at a time over the course of three months, until we discovered what was happening. The trauma was severe.
According to national Department of Education data, most of the nearly 40,000 students who were restrained or isolated in seclusion rooms during the 2009-10 school year had learning, behavioral, physical or developmental needs, even though students with those issues represented just 12 percent of the student population. African-American and Hispanic students were also disproportionately isolated or restrained.
Joseph Ryan, an expert on the use of restraints who teaches at Clemson University, told me that the practice of isolating and restraining problematic children originated in schools for children with special needs. It migrated to public schools in the 1970s as federal laws mainstreamed special education students, but without the necessary oversight or staff training. “It’s a quick way to respond but it’s not effective in changing behaviors,” he said.
State laws on disciplining students vary widely, and there are no federal laws restricting these practices, although earlier this year Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote, in a federal guide for schools, that there was “no evidence that using restraint or seclusion is effective.” He recommended evidence-based behavioral interventions and de-escalation techniques instead.
The use of restraints and seclusion has become far more routine than it should be. “They’re the last resort too often being used as the first resort,” said Jessica Butler, a lawyer in Washington who has written about seclusion in public schools.
We did experience this with Charlie on occasion, though not to this degree.
When you look at this, or the relentless use of Tasers by police departments, when the circumstances do not involve any need to protection of either the target of the public, but rather inconvenience.
Rahm, Switch Parties
So Rahm’s vision for education in Chicago is to break the unions and turn the schools over to his rich campaign contributors, and it’s gotten Randroid Paul Ryan positively giddy:
Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan has twisted the knife just a bit more in an attempt to draw out President Obama on the Chicago Teachers Union strike, now entering its second day. He told a fundraiser in Portland, OR yesterday that he endorsed the position in the strike of the former chief of staff of Barack Obama:………
I think the most important by-product of this strike is that it will show how deeply embedded the Students First/Waiting for Superman frame has become, in the traditional media, in the cultural firmament among elites, and in the Democratic Party. I’ve heard people on social media wondering what this strike is about. Narrowly speaking, Chicago teachers aren’t supposed to be able to strike over anything but pay and benefits. And certainly, they’re trying to retain their health care. But it’s not that hard to see what this is about. Significant sections of the Chicago Public Schools system are starved for funds. They are putting 40-50 students in classrooms without air conditioning. The kids don’t have books or materials weeks into the term. And ultimately, the goal is to make those schools so poorly maintained, staffed and administered that they “fail,” allowing Rahm Emanuel and his hedge fund buddies to essentially privatize them: ………
Seriously, all this guy has is his ability to suck up to rich people.
I have no clue as to why he is a Democrat.
As to what Obama will do, I expect crickets as a best outcome.
How is Penn State Like the Catholic Church?
Their attempts to cover up child rape are so heinous that even the hiring of the hactackular Louis Freeh to run the investigation cannot mitigate the truth:
The independent panel investigating Pennsylvania State University’s role in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal has determined that the school’s top leaders, including legendary football coach Joe Paterno, tried to cover up the abuse for 14 years.
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who led the investigation, outlined the findings of the panel’s 162-page report in prepared remarks released in advance of a 10 a.m. news conference in Philadelphia.
The report is available at www.philly.com/freeh
“The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized,” Freeh said.
Naming Paterno, former Penn State President Graham Spanier, former Athletic Director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, a university vice president once in charge of the campus police, Freeh said they “never demonstrated, through actions or words, any concern for the safety and well-being of Sandusky’s victims until after Sandusky’s arrest.”
To state the obvious, if this had been curling, or for that matter college Baseball, they would have turned this matter over to the police over a decade ago.
There is no better case to be made that big ticket athletic programs are a corrupt and corrupting influence on higher education, and they need to be excised from higher education, either by the schools themselves, or by the IRS pulling tax exempt status from these programs.
What, You Mean the Money Won’t Only Go to Jeebus?
Legislators in Louisiana have just realized that when they voted for Governor Bobby Jindal’s school voucher program, that they voted to fund Muslim schools as well:
Rep. Valarie Hodges, R-Watson, says she had no idea that Gov. Bobby Jindal’s overhaul of the state’s educational system might mean taxpayer support of Muslim schools.
“I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools,” the District 64 Representative said Monday.
“I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school,” Hodges said.
Hodges mistakenly assumed that “religious” meant “Christian.”
So I guess that she opposes giving vouchers to Yeshivas as well.
Also, this is a very, VERY stupid person.
Have You Considered a Career in Education
H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Nope, No Racism Here
Justin Combs excelled at football, and got a 3.75 GPA, and so he got a $54K mertit and athletic scholarship to UCLA.
It appears that the good folks at CNN find this controversial, because it was Shawn “P-Diddy” Combs kid, (no direct link, they don’t deserve it) and they want him to give the money back.
There are plenty of kids who get scholarships whose parents are filthy rich, but they aren’t black, in a profession which is stereotypically black (rap), so there is no question if they should return their scholarships.
I believe that a two word phrase was in the head of whoever whoever mad this post (no name listed) on CNN.
The first word was probably “uppity”, and the second word probably began with the 14th letter in the English alphabet.
H/t Atrios.
Deep Thought
Whoever came up with the idea of graduation ceremonies for anything below high school should be drawn, quartered, and burnt.
Whether it’s elementary school, middle school, or (in today’s case) Hebrew school, it really needs to stop.
The “Educational Reformers” in a Nutshell
Doug Lynch, University of Pennsylvania’s vice dean of its Graduate School of Education was found to have been lying about having a PhD, and nothing happened, until the Inky found out, at which point he was first put on leave and then he resigned.
It appears that the university wasn’t going to do anything meaningful until it became public:
Earlier Wednesday, Penn officials said they became aware of the misrepresentation a couple of months ago, taking unspecified “appropriate sanctions” but deciding to leave Lynch in his leadership role.
That changed after The Inquirer placed a call to Penn president Amy Gutmann for comment. The university then issued a one-sentence statement from Stephen J. MacCarthy, vice president for university communications.
“Doug Lynch has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an ongoing investigation,” MacCarthy’s statement said.
As to why he was kept on, it was because he was so in tune with the educational reform “crap on teachers” orthodoxy:
Since joining Penn, Lynch has become a lightning rod for controversy. He has pushed entrepreneurial methods and supported programs such as Teach for America, which puts bright college graduates who lack education degrees in some of the nation’s toughest public schools for a two-year commitment.
A February 2011 feature on him in Penn’s alumni magazine said: “What happens when you unleash an entrepreneurship evangelist on an education school? Meet Doug Lynch, the vice dean bent on making Penn GSE a hub for social entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and next-generation educational reform.”
Because bringing in the private sector will allow Wall Street to do to our schools what they did to our retirement savings.
It appears that everyone in the educational reform is a fraud on some level.
H/t Atrios.
So Not a Surprise
Michelle Rhee is speaking at a conference of for profit colleges, which, considering their record of taking students’ (actually our, through the student loan program) money without providing any, you know, education:
Republic Report previously reported that former President George W. Bush will be speaking at the annual meeting of APSCU, the leading association of for-profit colleges, on June 22 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. For-profit colleges get $32 billion in student aid from your tax dollars every year, but many are marked by deceptive recruiting, low-quality programs, sky-high prices, and high dropout rates.
………
Finally, some really depressing news: APSCU has announced the conference’s “additional speaker,” and it’s former District of Columbia Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, now the CEO of education advocacy group Students First. If you’ve been on the fence about Rhee, not sure if she’s a sincere reformer with real results or a union-busting elitist aimed at replacing public education with charters, private schools, and online learning companies, you may find cause to jump off the fence now. By speaking at the annual meeting of the most cynical group of “educators” ever assembled — Wall-Street owned businesses that enrich their CEOs and ruin students’ lives at taxpayer expense and then hire armies of lobbyists to protect their privileges — Rhee has made her preferences very clear. (It’s always possible that she agreed to speak with the intent of telling the for-profits to clean up their act, but I doubt it.) Rhee staked her career on the concept of shutting down underperforming, bad schools. And now she will address a room full of them.
(emphasis mine)
For this, she will get a 50 grand speakers fee, but Michelle Rhee has always been a fervent devotee of pump and dump education, as evidenced by increasing evidence of her tolerance for fraud to create the illusion of success.
Considering the record of for-profit colleges, they are a perfect match.
I Unreservedly Support This Union
It looks like the slaves student athletes are looking to unionize again:
With college basketball’s March Madness approaching, commentators will soon regale us with tales of underdogs, upsets and last second heroics. But few will mention the moment, 17 years ago, when a group of players planned to stop the games.
Rigo Núñez, a reserve on the 1995 University of Massachusetts basketball team, says more than 20 players from several teams attempted to organize an action to halt March Madness. The plan was that the players would show up on the court, in full uniform, and refuse to play ball. The goal, says Núñez, was to “paralyze the whole NCAA.” William Friday, who co-chaired the Knight Commission on College Athletics at the time, recalled to the Atlantic the time he was warned about a planned March Madness strike.
Those plans fell apart. Friday says the plan he was warned about centered on a certain team, and that team lost prior to reaching the Final Four. Núñez says the culprit was fear of retaliation. “The fear of being blackballed overcame the ‘rah rah’ emotion … No one went on to actually pull the trigger.”
But in the 17 years since that strike plan fizzled, there’s been little change in the conditions that fueled players’ unrest. And, with the backing of a major union, there are still players organizing to do something about it.
It’s about time.
At the top tier schools, in the big money sports, the fiction of student athletes is a disservice to the athletes, and the schools as institutes of higher learning.
He Keeps Coming Back, Like a Bad Penny
Yes, it’s Ken Starr, and it looks like he got yet another trumped up investigation, this time of a Jewish Studies professor who isn’t right wing enough for the Clinton era persecutor prosecutor:
It’s unclear what exactly Ellis is on trial for, as neither Baylor nor Ellis would comment on the record about the nature of the charges. (One clue: no criminal charges have been filed against Ellis.) Roger Sanders, Ellis’ lawyer, says Baylor’s lawyers told him the internal process mandates nondisclosure, though Baylor spokesperson Lori Fogleman disputes this, telling RD that the charges can only be released with Ellis’ written permission.
Sanders says the investigation hinges on “bogus allegations.” One can only hope the result will not be another 336-page Starr Report—the $40 million product of the independent counsel’s four-year investigation, for which the beleaguered Monica Lewinsky was interrogated over 20 times. “‘You’re a pervert, Ken Starr,’” Lewinsky’s father once said he’d like to tell the former independent counsel.
In late November Cornel West, feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and other luminaries launched a change.org petition addressed to Starr, which has thus far gathered over 5,000 signatures. The petition asserts that the controversy “looks more and more like a persecution to silence a Jewish voice of dissent.”
“The charges,” reads a petition update, “are about ‘abuse of authority.’…Many of us were contacted several times by institutional lawyers who tried to persuade us to tell them examples of ‘abuse of authority’ he has exercised.”
According to Sanders, the investigation consisted of “sort of announc[ing] to people, ‘Here’s what Marc’s guilty of. Now tell us what you know about him.’” Fogleman claims no knowledge of the investigation’s procedures and declined to recommend officials who could answer questions about it.
The fact that, but for his misconduct in l’affaire Lewinski, he’d probably be on the Supreme Court now, should scare the hell out of us.
While Joe Nocera is Generally a Waste of Time
I agree with him that the N.C.A.A. is little better than a cartel engaging in human trafficking:
The N.C.A.A. despises sports agents — hates them so much so that it once helped promulgate an anti-agent law. As of January 2010, according to the N.C.A.A.’s Web site, that law had been passed by 40 states. A player who takes an “improper benefit” from a sports agent loses his eligibility. A player who gets drafted out of high school — this happens in baseball as well as hockey — and engages an agent to talk to the pro team that drafted him loses his eligibility. Indeed, the mere act of signing with an agent is enough for a player to lose his eligibility. N.C.A.A. “scandals” involving agents and athletes are almost as common as recruiting scandals.
The N.C.A.A. claims — as it always does — that it is acting to protect its athletes “from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.” But this is classic N.C.A.A. Orwellian spin. Its true purpose in preventing athletes from engaging with agents while in college is to exacerbate their exploitation. The professional and commercial enterprise doing the exploiting, of course, is college sports itself.
“It’s all about control,” says Don Jackson, a lawyer who specializes in representing athletes who have run afoul of the N.C.A.A. Teenage athletes with agents are far more likely to make informed decisions about their lives than athletes acting on their own. Instead, athletes have to rely on coaches and athletic administrators, whose primary interest is the school, not the player.
And it’s not just hockey players who have to make important life decisions at a young age. When a baseball player gets drafted out of high school, he has a hard decision to make. Basketball players are usually eligible for the draft after one year of college; football players after three years. Yet N.C.A.A. rules force these athletes to make these major decisions without an agent at their side.
At some point, enterprising lawyer is going to find is going to use RICO, or the tax code, or anti-human trafficking statutes, or some combination of all these and other laws, and these folks will get taken down ……… hard.
What Atrios Said
The basic thinking seems to have been that it was wonderful for university to be free back when most people who attended were quite wealthy, but once the masses started getting ideas about going it was time to force them to pay. And there again is your generational divide.
—Atrios, on the institution of penury inducing tuitions at British colleges
It’s actually a bit more contemptible than that.
The skyrocketing college costs began with two things:
- Collusion by the Ivies and similar elite institutions on tuition and financial aid.
- It started in the 1960s, when the alternative to going to college was getting drafted, and playing hide and seek with a really angry guy with an AK-47 in rice paddies.
The Unbelievable Wankitude that is Sam Brownback
Seriously. It appears that a girl watching Sam Brownback address a mock legislature tweeted that he “sucked”, and Brownback’s office found her tweet and contacted school authorities:
A Kansas teenager is in trouble after mocking Gov. Sam Brownback during a mock legislative assembly for high school students.
Emma Sullivan, a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, was in Topeka on Monday as part of Kansas Youth in Government, a program for students interested in politics and government.
During the session, in which Brownback addressed the group, Sullivan posted on her personal Twitter page:
“Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot”
On Tuesday, Sullivan was called to her principal’s office and told that the tweet had been flagged by someone on Brownback’s staff and reported to organizers of the Youth in Government program.
The principal “laid into me about how this was unacceptable and an embarrassment,” Sullivan said. “He said I had created this huge controversy and everyone was up in arms about it … and now he had to do damage control.
“I’m mainly shocked that they would even see that tweet and be concerned about me,” she said. “I just honestly feel they’re making a lot bigger deal out of it than it actually was.”
Sullivan said the principal ordered her to write letters of apology to Brownback, the school’s Youth in Government sponsor, the district’s social studies coordinator and others.
Karl Krawitz, the school principal, did not return calls or e-mails Wednesday.
It goes without saying that Krawitz is a bully and a coward, full of demands when he’s leaning on a student, and silent when the press calls, though in all fairness, being a bully and a coward depending on circumstances is pretty much the definition of a Principal’s job.
That being said, the fact that any political operation decided to go after a teenager over a tweet is pathetic beyond belief. This is “Michelle Malkin stalking a 12-year old over his support of S-Chip” pathetic.
It’s also deeply evil, and un-American.
Just when I think that the ‘Phants could not go any lower, I am disabused of this quaint notion.
This May be the Most Powerful OWS Video Yet
Following the blatant police brutality via pepper spray at University of California, Davis, the Chancellor Linda Katehi held a press conference, where hundreds (at least) of Occupy Davis protesters showed up outside, and demanded to be heard.
After cowering in the building for hours, she finally came out, and the protesters lined the path to her car with arms linked, and sat silently as she walked past as a mark of disdain:
This is a powerful video, and my guess is that Katehi discovered the limits of her deodorant on her little stroll.
I don’t think that she’s going to serve out the full term of her contract.