StickWithANose

This is what public looting looks like… EdWeek

Questions have been raised about some of the companies chasing the $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement Grants to target the bottom 5 percent of America’s schools, and now Congress is jumping in the act.
As The New York Times pointed out in a recent story, some [...]

Today’s “Answer Sheet” features an article by Justin Snider of Teachers College that demonstrates the circularity of educational debate. The issue Snider addresses is the concept of academic rigor, but all that he seems to accomplish is to demonstrate the ways in which education policy has been going in circles for the past three decades. [...]

Despite my propensity for publishing posts that take, let us say, a bleak view of education policy, economic issues, and politics, I really don’t consider myself to be all that cynical. [Although my friends might beg to differ...] I find joy in the small stuff like enjoying the roar of cicadas in the early evening [...]

Noted “progressive” think tank hack Matt Yglesias got his panties all in a bunch the other day after Jeffbinc at Open Left made the observation that crowding minority students into segregated schools built around a teacher-centric militaristic pedagogy that middle and upper class families would never accept for their children just might be, well, racist. [...]

It doesn’t take a genius to discover that, despite the rhetoric of reformers, the driving impetus behind current trajectories in education reform is a simplistic narrative of neo-liberal market ideology. At the core of the reforms being pushed by Team Obama is an un-critical belief in the power of market competition and external accountability systems [...]

One of the truly depressing characteristics of contemporary news media is its inability to call ‘bullshit’. In order to maintain the false appearance of neutrality, reporters and talking heads alike will allow all manner of patently false statements to be propagated without so much as offering a challenge to the ideologue being “interviewed” [with the [...]

Now that Tennessee has taken its bribe money the children of the urban poor are being set up for yet another un-controlled experiment in quasi-privatization and the intellectual bounty that is “drill and kill” test-prep academies. In my own little slice of the Southern Appalachians, the first institution to get the ax is a school [...]

One moment that will forever stick in my mind is the night that “Shock & Awe” was unleashed upon Iraq. Our fearless leader stood before the camera in the White House and announced that we were, in effect, going to war to ensure peace. It was a moment of both clarity and cognitive dissonance that [...]

Today’s cheery theme is brought to us by Glenn Greewald… Salon
Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights — or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance [...]

Well, it looks like a “rob Peter to pay Paul” plan made its way through the sausage grinder. Considering the 38,000 local and state government jobs lost last month [most of which was education related], it is welcome news that Congress was able to actually do something to stem the bleeding at the local level. [...]