StickWithANose

One of the tragedies of this most current era of globalization is the degree to which exploitation remains hidden from those who benefit from it. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploited workers often lived in close proximity to the middle and upper classes who accumulated wealth from their labor. The exploitation of [...]

We have a long tradition here in America of celebrating the cut-throat capitalists of the republic as innovators, humanitarians and philanthropists, and there is no better example of this dynamic in the early 21st century than the accolades showered upon Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation. Gates and his peers [such as the Broads & [...]

As the Obama administration began to coalesce in 2009, I knew that there was trouble ahead. In methodical fashion Obama jettisoned many of the prominent experts advising him throughout the campaign for the same old goons that have driven the republic into the ditch, for example ditching Paul Volcker for Rubinites like Larry Summers and [...]

The clearest picture of what an individual stands for cannot be identified in an examination of what that individual says nor necessarily in what s/he does but can be identified only in the correspondence between the two. As Anne Geiger notes, when this principle is applied to the Obama administration’s education reform policies and the [...]

As someone who is not only working the adjunct chain-gang of contractual labor but is also supplementing his meager income with online teaching, I share both Ed’s resignation and contempt for the inevitable growth in online education at both the tertiary and secondary levels. The growth in online “education” maybe couched in the language of [...]

The latest scuttlebutt appears to be the news that Rep. Judy Chu [D- CA] has unveiled her proposal for school improvement legislation as Congress takes up the issue of NCLB Mach II. While EdWeek snidely informs us that Randi Weingarten is pleased and Schools Matter appears to be on board, you’ll have to color me [...]

As we watch our infrastructure crumble around our feet and our very serious leaders tell us that there’s nothing we can do but destroy the very institutions that made the American system possible [ie. public schooling, Social Security, etc.], it is important to remember that we currently have over 700 military bases in 50 countries [...]

This weekend’s must read comes from the always sharp Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism. Yves builds off of this piece by Simon Schama in the Financial Times to discuss the possibility of a societal backlash against the [on-going] greatest transfer of wealth in human history from ordinary citizens to the financiers of Wall Street [...]

The National Assessment of Educational Progress released its urban reading scores yesterday with predictable results across the knowledge industry. Education Week did its level best to put a happy face on stagnate scores with the headline “Urban 8th Graders Make Reading Gains on NAEP“, however digging into the article quickly demonstrates that there is little [...]