Tag: Education

While the Extoll the Virtues of Tech in Education

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The Nomenklatura of Silicon have decided that when their children are education, they want a human touch with an absolute minimum of computers:

The Waldorf School of the Peninsula is small, exclusive and packed with the children of Silicon Valley executives who love the role that technology plays in the pupils’ education there. That is, it plays no role whatsoever.

Instead children at the $25,000-a-year elementary school in Los Altos, California, are learning to explore the world through physical experiences and tasks that are designed to nurture their imagination, problem-solving ability and collaborative skills.

Pencils, paper, blackboards and craft materials abound while tablets, smartphones and other personal electronic devices are banned from the classrooms until they are teenagers studying at the middle and high school campus nearby. Even then technology is only introduced slowly and used sparingly.

Alumni and present pupils include the children of Alan Eagle, a director of communications at Google, who helped to write the New York Times bestseller How Google Works, as well as those of a chief technology officer at eBay and senior executives at Apple and Yahoo. Their outlook is in line with some of the most powerful figures in the industry. Last month Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, said he did not want his nephew, who is about 12, to use social media. Last year Sean Parker, the billionaire and an early Facebook investor, admitted that he and the other creators of the publishing site had deliberately made it as addictive as possible. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he said.

………

Ms [Beverly] Amico [Head of outreach at Waldorf Schools] sees no contradiction. “It’s a very attractive option for people in the tech world for their children,” she said. “All employers, tech world or not, are looking for graduates these days that can think independently, take initiative, are capable of collaborating, have curiosity and creativity.”

The approach contrasts starkly with the new classroom orthodoxy in most American schools where children are spending more and more time staring at screens in lessons. There too, however, a grassroots movement is beginning to build against the relentless march of technology, supported by research illuminating the harmful effects of smartphone use on young brains and new shareholder pressure on the IT giants that make them.

These folks know that at best, they are peddling digital crap, and at worst, they are peddling digital crack, and they want their children to have none of it.

Think about that the next time that you hear about your local school district, or charter school, going all “high tech”.

Another Day ……… Another School Shooting

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Today, it’s Benton, Kentucky, for the 11th school shooting of the year, and it’s only January 23rd:

On Tuesday, it was a high school in small-town Kentucky. On Monday, a school cafeteria outside Dallas and a charter school parking lot in New Orleans. And before that, a school bus in Iowa, a college campus in Southern California, a high school in Seattle.

Gunfire ringing out in American schools used to be rare, and shocking. Now it seems to happen all the time.

The scene in Benton, Ky., on Tuesday was the worst so far in 2018: Two 15-year-old students were killed and 18 more people were injured. But it was one of at least 11 shootings on school property recorded since Jan. 1, and roughly the 50th of the academic year.

Researchers and gun control advocates say that since 2013, they have logged school shootings at a rate of about one a week.

F%$# the NRA.

F%$# Wayne LaPierre.

F%$# the ammosexuals.

Most particularly, f%$# the cowardly politicians who run screaming from even the most basic common sense gun laws.

A Sordid Chapter in a Tawdry Tale

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Dallas Dance is growing up so fast. Seems like it was just last year that he was finishing up with education, and now he’s already on his way to prison.

— Charles E Saroff (@W4t3rf1r3) January 24, 2018

My son was never a fan of his

Former Baltimore County superintendent Dallas Dance has been indicted for perjury.

He was appointed superintendent in 2012, and required a waiver for this, because he did not meet the statutory requirements, then he dumped lots of money into unsuccessful whiz bang and consultants, and finally, he paid lots of money to high dollar consultants through no bid contracts.

It turns out that these consultants also paid his company for consulting, something he neglected to mention on his disclosure forms, hence the perjury charges:

Former Baltimore County school superintendent Dallas Dance was indicted Tuesday on four counts of perjury for failing to disclose nearly $147,000 in pay he received for private consulting with several companies and school districts beginning in 2012, the Maryland State Prosecutor announced.

The four-count indictment handed down by a Baltimore County grand jury alleges the former superintendent falsely stated on financial disclosure forms filed with the county school district that he earned no additional income personally or through his consulting company, Deliberate Excellence, in 2012, 2013 and 2015.

………

The charges allege he negotiated a no-bid contract between the school system and Chicago-based SUPES Academy in 2012 while he was earning approximately $90,000 from the company without telling the school system.

“Parents of Baltimore County Public School students should be able to trust that their Superintendent of Schools is carrying out his duties, honestly, with transparency and in the best interest of the students and the schools,” state Prosecutor Emmet C. Davitt said Tuesday. “Any violation of that trust is intolerable.”

Oh, You Delicate Snowflakes!

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There is a course on the history of white racism at white racists’ feelings have been hurt:

When a “White Racism” class meets Tuesday at Florida Gulf Coast University, at least two campus police officers will be on guard as a precaution.

Today marks the start of the spring semester at FGCU, and Tuesday will be the first time the class meets. The course has caused controversy due to its name and garnered national media attention.

“We have prepared for any possible distractions related to Tuesday’s first class of the White Racism course, but we are expecting normal campus civility as our students engage in this and other courses at the spring semester’s start,” Susan Evans, FGCU’s spokeswoman and chief of staff, said in an email.

Ted Thornhill, the assistant professor of sociology who will teach the class, said he received some disturbing emails and voicemails after news of the class spread. He also said a couple of students enrolled in the class talked to him about safety concerns.

………

A security plan was put in place after Thornhill, FGCU President Mike Martin and others met in December. Thornhill wouldn’t say if the police presence will continue throughout the semester.

………

Thornhill said he started getting the emails and voice messages as word about the class spread through news stories and on social media.

The course will cover everything from ways to challenge white supremacy to the ideologies, laws, policies and practices in this country that have allowed for “white racial domination over those racialized as non-white,” according to a course description.

Some of the emails and calls Thornhill received were from people who simply expressed disappointment about FGCU offering the class and challenged the course’s validity. Others expressed their views with foul language, called Thornhill a racist and referred to him using the n-word.

………

Thornhill sent FGCU police 46 pages of emails and some voicemails that were left for him regarding the course. Thornhill said he sent the emails and voice messages to police out of an abundance of caution.

Losers.

Why Am I Not Surprised?

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I just found out that in most states, “Hairstylists are Required to Attend Significantly More Training Than Cops.”

I guess that a blow drier is more dangerous than a Glock:

Absurdity is a common trait of bureaucracies. But nothing says “we have no clue about the laws we pass” more than state requirements for law enforcement training.

Police are given the trust of the municipalities in which they ‘serve’ to uphold the rule of law. They are given a gun and vehicle and a certain level of autonomy in order to accomplish this task.

They consistently find or place themselves in compromising positions in which they must make life or death decisions; decisions which affect the lives of every person in this country.

………

With all of these particularly intricate responsibilities, one would naturally come to the conclusion that a police officer should be required to attend a significant amount of training to achieve maximum proficiency.

Some would assume that the required training to become a trustee of public safety and carry the vast responsibility of a police officer would require considerably more time than say, the training that it takes to learn how to cut hair.

However, they would assume incorrectly.

In New York, hairstylists need 50% more training than cops, and in California,  it’s 140% more.

Something is seriously f%$#ed up.

Love Me, I’m A Liberal

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Roll Phil Ochs

Liberalism is all well and good for papered staff at elite educational institutions when it doesn’t actually cost them anything personally:

Georgetown University this week refused to support a movement by graduate students to unionize, arguing that teaching and research assistants are students, not employees.

The decision arrives a month after the Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees asked university president John DeGioia to support their union campaign. The students said that embracing a union would align with the school’s Jesuit values affirming the dignity of labor. University leaders, however, maintain the work that graduate students contribute is fundamental to their studies and should be considered part of their education.

Georgetown’s decision echoes opposition to graduate student unions at other prestigious universities. Yale University, Boston College and Columbia University have railed against a 2016 National Labor Relations Board ruling that granted teaching and research assistants the legal protection to unionize. Yale, Columbia and Princeton posted information on their websites warning students that unionizing could alter their relationship with faculty and limit their individual rights once a union becomes their collective voice.

In a letter sent this week to the school’s graduate student alliance, Georgetown provost Robert M. Groves and Edward B. Healton, the school’s executive vice president for health sciences, said the university is “eager” to address issues that affect graduate students, but not through collective bargaining.

………

The union organizers want to join the American Federation of Teachers. To do that, they need to file a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for an election. Organizers say they wanted the university’s backing, but will forge ahead regardless.

“We were hoping to negotiate with Georgetown administrators about the terms of the election, but now we’ll have to proceed on our own, without their help and anticipating their active push-back,” said Hailey Huget, a doctoral candidate in philosophy and a member of the graduate student alliance. “We hoped that Georgetown would be better than this.”

University leaders say they have discussed the collective bargaining campaign with the faculty senate, academic departments and the executive committee of graduate studies, the principal policy-making body for graduate programs. That committee has since passed a resolution affirming the position that students enrolled in degree programs are students and should be treated as students, not employees.

Silly grad students, don’t you realize that respect for human dignity and labor rights is only for OTHER people, and that it cannot be allowed to INCONVENIENCE the august denizens of the ivory towers of academy.

You need to focus on the bad people, you know  ……… The “Deplorables”.

What a Pathetic Whiny Loser

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I am referring, of course, to Anthony Scaramucci, who has threatened a college student with a defamation suit for a nasty editorial.

Oh, you poor delicate snowflake:

Tufts University postponed a Monday event featuring Anthony Scaramucci, a former Trump White House spokesman, after he threatened to sue a student and the school newspaper for defamation following the publication of an op-ed column criticizing him.

 Scaramucci, a Tufts graduate, has served on an advisory board at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy since 2016.

 An attorney representing Scaramucci demanded in a letter that graduate student Camilo A. Caballero and The Tufts Daily newspaper retract “false and defamatory allegations of fact” about his client and issue an apology.

 In an e-mail to Caballero, Scaramucci said the student had “suggested publicly” that Scaramucci had engaged in unethical behavior.

 “So either back it up or you will hear from my lawyer,” Scaramucci wrote on Nov. 16. “You may have a difference of opinion from me politically which I respect but you can’t make spurious claims about my reputation and integrity.”

The ACLU has already offered to represent Caballero, and your alma mater has told you to get the f%$# out.

Cut ……… Your ……… Losses.

The Value of a Liberal Arts Education

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With a rather evocative headline, “How a half-educated tech elite delivered us into evil,” John Naughton explains how the people involved in tech these days are profoundly and deeply ignorant and incurious about the potential effects of what they are doing.

The Germans have a word for this, “Fachidiot,” and Japanese word for this is “専門バカ”:

One of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. We have a burgeoning genre of “OMG, what have we done?” angst coming from former Facebook and Google employees who have begun to realise that the cool stuff they worked on might have had, well, antisocial consequences.

Put simply, what Google and Facebook have built is a pair of amazingly sophisticated, computer-driven engines for extracting users’ personal information and data trails, refining them for sale to advertisers in high-speed data-trading auctions that are entirely unregulated and opaque to everyone except the companies themselves.

The purpose of this infrastructure was to enable companies to target people with carefully customised commercial messages and, as far as we know, they are pretty good at that. (Though some advertisers are beginning to wonder if these systems are quite as good as Google and Facebook claim.) And in doing this, Zuckerberg, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and co wrote themselves licences to print money and build insanely profitable companies.

It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters. Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid? The cynical answer is they knew about the potential dark side all along and didn’t care, because to acknowledge it might have undermined the aforementioned licences to print money. Which is another way of saying that most tech leaders are sociopaths. Personally I think that’s unlikely, although among their number are some very peculiar characters: one thinks, for example, of Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel – Trump’s favourite techie; and Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber.

I would actually argue that some in the tech field are willfully blind because their paycheck depends on this lack of awareness, while others are blind because they feel that they are somehow above such “mundane” concerns.

In either case, they aren’t people that we can trust with our future.

Read Matt Taibbi: College Loan Edition

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I really cannot do justice to Taibbi’s treatment, but it is classic Taibbi.

His basic thesis is encapsulated in this paragraph:

But the separateness of these stories clouds the unifying issue underneath: The education industry as a whole is a con. In fact, since the mortgage business blew up in 2008, education and student debt is probably our reigning unexposed nation-wide scam.

The solution is relatively straightforward:  Change the law that forbids debtors from using bankruptcy to discharge their debts, and change the loan program so that it no longer encourages tuition inflation.

Savvy Move

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This actually makes sense. Sweeney is guaranteed to win regardless of the contributions, but he has also been operating cheek by jowl with Chris Christie in gutting education and worker retirement plans.

In endorsing his opponent in the general election, the NJEA is signalling to other New Jersey Democrats that their support is not to be taken for granted.

It’s not like Sweeney could be any more hostile to the interests of teachers, and putting fear into the hearts of the caucus that he needs to get anything done.

As the song says,  “People will always be tempted to wipe their feet, On anything with ‘welcome’ written on it.”

It’s a well justified brush-back pitch:

In an otherwise predictable New Jersey election season, the state’s largest public sector union has come out behind a Trump-supporting Republican facing an incumbent Democrat. The New Jersey Education Association, which is New Jersey’s top political spender, is backing Republican Fran Grenier against Steve Sweeney, the Democratic state Senate president and New Jersey’s second most-powerful elected official. The controversial endorsement has angered liberal allies, but the union remains unapologetic in its message: Democrats cannot take teachers for granted.

It’s a contentious move, but one that is unlikely to change the ultimate outcome of the election. Democrats are expected to control all three branches of government after November, a major turning point for the Garden State. After seven years under Republican Gov. Chris Christie — a man boasting an impressively low 15 percent approval rating — a majority of voters are expected to cast their ballot for Phil Murphy, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate running against the GOP’s Kim Guadagno. And with a state legislature that’s also expected to remain blue, progressives have been eagerly anticipating their chance to start reversing the policies of Christie’s tenure.

That explains why the NJEA has decided to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in what’s shaping up to be the most expensive legislative race in state history to try to unseat Sweeney: The union feels the top Democrat has betrayed it one too many times.

………

Sweeney, who first joined the state Senate in 2002, became majority leader in 2007 and Senate president in 2010. His relationship with the NJEA began to sour in 2011 when he pushed forward a deal with Christie that limited pension and health benefits for public sector workers. The union says Sweeney has continued to cozy up with Christie and has failed to forcefully criticize the governor’s underfunding of public education. The relationship deteriorated even further last year when Sweeney walked back on a promise to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to fully fund pensions, and then accused the NJEA of bribery and extortion.

This past March, the NJEA declared it would try to unseat Sweeney, but there were no Democrats willing to primary him. The union could have chosen to give no endorsement and still run negative ads against Sweeney, but the NJEA instead decided to endorse his Republican challenger along with running attack ads.

There is a Thin Line Between Terrorism and Pumpkin Spice Air Freshener

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Just ask the Baltimore City fire department and its hazmat teams:

There was an unusual smell Thursday afternoon at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Upper Fells Point. The smell was on the third floor. Students and teachers didn’t know what it was.

“It was a smell that they certainly weren’t used to,” said Bill Heiser, the school’s president, who was off-campus at the time. “It appeared to be getting stronger.”

Several students and teachers reported difficulty breathing, Heiser said.

The school’s principal evacuated the building and the fire department was called. After arriving, the fire department requested a Hazmat team, which ran several tests for hazardous materials. All of them were negative, according to Baltimore fire spokesman Roman Clark.

………

Firefighters began to open all the windows in the building to air it out.

Then, Clark said, they located the source of the smell in a third-floor classroom: an aerosol plugin. Flavor: pumpkin spice.

F%$#ing pumpkin spice strikes again.

Now it’s not just polluting our Starbucks, it’s interfering with the education of our kids.

It must be stop.

Speaking of Fascism………

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The Ukraine has upped its slow-walked ethnic cleansing program, the Ukrainian parliament has passed a law banning non-Ukrainian language education after elementary school:

Timeya Leshko doesn’t see much of a future for her four children in Ukraine, where a Moscow-backed conflict still flares up in the east and economic opportunities seem few and far between elsewhere.

“There’s no way to earn a living here. Everyone knows that. All the young people are leaving,” Leshko told RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service in a recent interview. “And I don’t think it’s going to get better, only worse.”

The ethnic Hungarian in the sleepy village of Mali Heivtsi on Ukraine’s western fringes, not far from Slovakia and Hungary, is convinced that learning her native tongue is the ticket out for her kids.

But that may be tougher for Leshko and other ethnic minorities in Ukraine after the country’s parliament passed an educational-reform bill on September 5 that includes a clause making Ukrainian the required language of study in state schools from the fifth grade on.

Leshko is not a fan of the bill, which would roll back the option for lessons to be taught in other languages.

“I don’t like it. Why? Because, for example, I am a Hungarian. I was studying in a Hungarian school and I want my children also to speak Hungarian,” she explained. “Maybe they will move to Hungary or maybe they will go there to earn money. In that case, the Hungarian language will be more useful than Ukrainian, I think.”

They want you to leave.

This is what the Quebecois did in Canada, and they have been fairly successful.

I’m Sorry Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That

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What a surprise.

It turns that it is trivial to hack the most sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems by simply training them poorly:

If you don’t know what your AI model is doing, how do you know it’s not evil?

Boffins from New York University have posed that question in a paper at arXiv, and come up with the disturbing conclusion that machine learning can be taught to include backdoors, by attacks on their learning data.

The problem of a “maliciously trained network” (which they dub a “BadNet”) is more than a theoretical issue, the researchers say in this paper: for example, they write, a facial recognition system could be trained to ignore some faces, to let a burglar into a building the owner thinks is protected.

The assumptions they make in the paper are straightforward enough: first, that not everybody has the computing firepower to run big neural network training models themselves, which is what creates an “as-a-service” market for machine learning (Google, Microsoft and Amazon all have such offerings in their clouds); and second, that from the outside, there’s no way to know a service isn’t a “BadNet”.

Note that current high end AI models are not so much programmed as trained, and it appears that this provides an unprecedented opportunity to develop malicious software.

I’m thinking that you might see an AI drone that gets the whole Manchurian Candidate treatment in the not too distant future.

Why the Military Should Not Be Used to Build International Relationships

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………

Favoring the military over alternative tools of U.S. foreign policy remains one of the few consistencies within the current administration. Internal documents have proposed folding USAID into the State Department and “zeroing” out development assistance programs that do not advance specific U.S. political or strategic objectives. With few civilian appointees in either the Departments of Defense or State and unprecedented levels of “authorization,” the uniformed services enjoy tremendous operational discretion with few civilian counterbalances either inside or outside the Pentagon.

The trend of shifting foreign policy funds towards programs with an explicit security focus long predates the Trump administration. A third of all U.S. foreign aid funds, $17 billion, goes towards military aid and security assistance, making it on its own the fourth-largest foreign aid budget in the world. Moreover, management of this security assistance money has migrated away from the State Department to the Pentagon. A recent Open Society report shows that, whereas in 2011 the Defense Department directed only 17 percent of all security assistance (compared to the State Department’s 80 percent), by 2015 the Defense Department’s share had increased to 57 percent and the State Department’s had dropped to 42 percent. Officials wearing digicam rather than pinstripes are delivering an increasing percentage of U.S. assistance.

While the broad potential problems with this trend have been well–explored, in this article we focus on a concrete implication by looking at an important component of U.S. assistance: the training of other states’ militaries and security personnel, known as foreign military training (FMT). As in the case of Egypt, this training can empower its uniformed recipients to participate more in their home countries’ internal politics, up to and including coups.

………

According to the U.S. government, in fiscal year 2015 approximately 76,400 students from 154 countries participated in U.S. foreign military training, costing $876.5 million. Colleagues have recently argued that this sort of security assistance rarely achieves its stated goals of contributing to U.S. foreign policy objectives through “helping allies and partners improve their defense capabilities and enhance their ability to participate in missions alongside U.S. forces.” In contrast, we argue that in some cases, security assistance does have a profound effect, albeit in ways unintended by the donor. By strengthening the military in states with few counterbalancing civilian institutions, U.S. foreign military training can lead to both more military-backed coup attempts, as well as a higher likelihood of a coup’s success.

………

This might seem counterintuitive since the training provided to these officers is designed to encourage liberal values including respect for civilian control, a norm central to the U.S. military’s own identity. Moreover, the United States normally cuts security assistance when a coup occurs, which should deter military officers from attempting a takeover.

We argue, however, that the norm most likely to be transmitted by U.S. training is one to which foreign military officers are already receptive: a professional identity independent from that of their own government. The U.S. military’s distinct professional culture is largely based on Samuel Huntington’s notion of “objective civilian control.” This ideal precludes military interference by in politics, but it also generates a strong, separate corporate identity. Huntington himself recognized that, in countries that are not solidly established democracies, the more professional the military considers itself, the higher its temptation to intervene in political affairs.

This has been known for years.  The unsavory reputation of the School of the Americas, which led to its renaming in 2000.

I Have Heard This Story Before

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Because what is going on in student loans looks a lot like the dodgy documentation that have been a feature of mortgages over the past few years.

This all very similar to the clusterf%$# that is MERS that I have been writing about for years:

Tens of thousands of people who took out private loans to pay for college but have not been able to keep up payments may get their debts wiped away because critical paperwork is missing.

The troubled loans, which total at least $5 billion, are at the center of a protracted legal dispute between the student borrowers and a group of creditors who have aggressively pursued them in court after they fell behind on payments.

Judges have already dismissed dozens of lawsuits against former students, essentially wiping out their debt, because documents proving who owns the loans are missing. A review of court records by The New York Times shows that many other collection cases are deeply flawed, with incomplete ownership records and mass-produced documentation.

Some of the problems playing out now in the $108 billion private student loan market are reminiscent of those that arose from the subprime mortgage crisis a decade ago, when billions of dollars in subprime mortgage loans were ruled uncollectible by courts because of missing or fake documentation. And like those troubled mortgages, private student loans — which come with higher interest rates and fewer consumer protections than federal loans — are often targeted at the most vulnerable borrowers, like those attending for-profit schools.

At the center of the storm is one of the nation’s largest owners of private student loans, the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts. It is struggling to prove in court that it has the legal paperwork showing ownership of its loans, which were originally made by banks and then sold to investors. National Collegiate’s lawyers warned in a recent legal filing, “As news of the servicing issues and the trusts’ inability to produce the documents needed to foreclose on loans spreads, the likelihood of more defaults rises.”

National Collegiate is an umbrella name for 15 trusts that hold 800,000 private student loans, totaling $12 billion. More than $5 billion of that debt is in default, according to court filings. The trusts aggressively pursue borrowers who fall behind on their bills. Across the country, they have brought at least four new collection cases each day, on average — more than 800 so far this year — and tens of thousands of lawsuits in the past five years.

………

In her defense, Ms. Watson’s lawyer seized upon what he saw as the flaws in National Collegiate’s paperwork. Judge Eddie McShan of New York City’s Civil Court in the Bronx agreed and dismissed four lawsuits against Ms. Watson. The trusts “failed to establish the chain of title” on Ms. Watson’s loans, he wrote in one ruling.

………

Judges throughout the country, including recently in cases in New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas, have tossed out lawsuits by National Collegiate, ruling that it did not prove it owned the debt on which it was trying to collect.

………

National Collegiate’s beneficial owner, Mr. Uderitz, hired a contractor in 2015 to audit the servicing company that bills National Collegiate’s borrowers each month and is supposed to maintain custody of many loan documents critical for collection cases.

A random sample of nearly 400 National Collegiate loans found not a single one had assignment paperwork documenting the chain of ownership, according to a report they had prepared.

(emphasis mine)

People who say that our financial industry must be free to innovate need to look at sh%$ like this.

To quote Paul Volker, “The only thing useful banks have invented in 20 years is the ATM.”

*Saroff’s Rule: If a financial transaction is complex enough to require that a news organization use a cartoon to explain it, its purpose is to deceive.

Why J-School Sucks

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In the old days, someone would become a journalist by working as a copy boy or a cub reporter and working their way up, and they saw themselves as tradesmen.

Now, they get a Bachelors in Journalism, and they fancy themselves professionals, and the contrast is both striking and depressing:

I was talking to this person whom I’d just met. They told me about their job and where they worked. They asked me about mine. I told them I’d worked in public media in Alaska before moving to the Lower 48. I was a couple of months from wrapping up my time as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford. They asked about what I worked on and I explained my research around collaboration in journalism and that I intended to continue working in this space after the fellowship ended.

“Well, what does your husband do?”

“He’s a truck driver and a mechanic.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah, right now he drives for a trash company.”

“That must be…an interesting perspective to have around.”

While they didn’t explicitly say it, the person was very much thrown off by the nature of my husband’s work. I was left with a very strong feeling they were expecting a more middle-class answer than a garbage worker. Their facial reaction has been stuck in my head for a while now. Surprise. A little confusion. And just enough distaste to notice. Obviously, this one instance isn’t representative of an entire industry. But it is a symptom.

The last two ‘graphs say it all:

If that conference interaction is how a journalist responds to my husband’s job while idly chatting, how do they cover the sanitation worker that ends up in a story they are working on? If talking about someone to that person’s spouse isn’t enough to cause one to mask aversion, how do they talk about people to whom they feel even more distance from? What does this mean for our audience’s ability to trust us?

 Our industry needs to think hard about the worlds we’re living in, the kinds we’re building with each hire we make and ones that we want to reach with our reporting.

It’s natural for professors to see themselves as professionals, but by inculcating their students in this mindset, they have created a generation of journalists who afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.

This is not a recipe for good or responsible journalism.

And Today in Charter School Corruption

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Kipp Schools, the star of the hagiography Waiting for Superman, has been caught ripping off poor parents by demanding illegal fees, and when caught they refused to refund them:

Charter schools claim they are public schools. They are not. What public school is part of a corporate chain? What public school operates for profit? What public schools charges fees for service?

The KIPP schools in Houston have been charging fees to poor parents. Now that the scam has been exposed, KIPP refuses to refund the money to parents who need the money far more than the multi-million dollar KIPP organization does. KIPP [should] ask its patron, the rightwing Walton Family Foundation, for a few more dollars, enough to reimburse the needy families that it ripped off.

Supporters of school privatization will claim that this is an aberration.  It isn’t.

This is a natural and foreseeable consequence of applying the for-profit business model to a public good.

It’s all about maximizing profit on while being paid by the taxpayers.

This is a feature, not a bug.

And Today in Charter Schools………

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We have a multi-state charter school chain facing allegations of systematic corruption.

This is not a surprise.  Charter schools as currently structured are a uniquely criminogenic enterprise.

Truth be told, the 18% management fee referenced in the article is rather larcenous in and of itself, since most of the managing is done by the staff on each campus.

If anyone believes that allowing charter schools to “unleash the market” will produce better results for less, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you:

The founder of an Akron-area charter school company is accused of using thousands of dollars parents paid for student lunches and uniforms and millions more from Ohio and Florida taxpayers to fund home mortgages, plastic surgery, extensive world travel, credit card debt and more.

Criminal charges filed last week in Florida against Marcus May also allege he improperly used private and public funds earmarked for students’ education to expand his charter school empire in Columbus, Akron, Cleveland and Dayton.

Florida State Attorney William “Bill” Eddins brought the charges of racketeering and organized fraud against May, the founder of Newpoint Education Partners and Cambridge Education, a Fairlawn company that manages about 20 charter schools in Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, Akron, Youngstown, Canton and Cleveland.

In a prepared statement provided to the Beacon Journal on Friday, Cambridge Executive Director John Stack said: “My co-owners and I asked for and today accepted Mr. May’s resignation as managing member of Cambridge. We are now in discussions to remove him completely from ownership in the company because we feel it’s in the best interest of our schools.

“Despite this distraction, my colleagues at Cambridge and I will continue to focus on our core mission and the students we serve as we have always done.”

Cincinnati businessman Steven Kunkemoeller also was charged in the First Judiciary Circuit, a regional court in Florida. Kunkemoeller is a longtime business partner of May, according to a Beacon Journal/Ohio.com report from December and a multi-state investigation that included help from the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office.

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The Florida prosecutor alleges that the men fabricated invoices, embellished enrollment, misappropriated public funds and created an elaborate network of limited liability companies in order to bilk the federal and state governments, as well as parents and students.

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School and business records obtained by the Beacon Journal and detailed by a forensic accountant working on the case show that May and Kunkemoeller marked up the price of services and supplies provided to the charter schools they managed in Ohio and Florida, sometimes more than doubling the cost of school uniforms, desks, computers, chairs and website design.

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Between 2010 and 2015, $350,000 was collected from students and parents for uniforms, and another $11,000 for school lunches, the Florida investigation found. Beyond Newpoint’s 18 percent management fee, millions more have been collected from inflated or allegedly fictitious invoices, according to court filings.

The Joys of Marriage

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I was coming home from the chiropractor today with Sharon* driving, and the song Don’t Stand So Close To Me by the Police came on, and she turned up the volume.

I asked her why she liked this song, but hated the Pink Floyd song The Wall, which she hates for what she sees as its anti-teacher message. (“We don’t need no education ……… Hey! Teacher, leave them kids alone”)

I replied that she just turned up the volume on a song about an affair between a teacher and a student.

She said that she was unaware of this, and then she quickly changed the station.

I then sung:

Her friends are so jealous
You know how bad girls get
Sometimes it’s not so easy
To be the teacher’s pet

And then she elbowed me.

I am amused.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.