StickWithANose

One of the most frustrating aspects of education policy is the pre-dominance of ‘free marketeers’ driving public discourse on schooling despite the fact that the world economy continues to struggle after an economic meltdown brought about, in large part, by ‘free market’ ideology. While a small subset of economists and political economists are attempting to [...]

Team Obama floated its first trial balloon on how to pay for Education Jobs without touching Arne’s precious Race to the Top funding… Take the money from food stamps! That 55% of Americans believe Obama to be a socialist speaks volumes about how far down the rabbit hole we’ve gone…
We were told we have to [...]

Posted without comment: The Big Picture
I continue to see the Austerian movement in the United States as thinly disguised partisan politics. These are people who will say anything to keep the subsidies and tax benefits flowing to their electoral base. They will say anything –regardless of whether they actually believe these things — to thwart [...]

I have on many occasions pointed out that much of the impetus behind the charter school and school choice movements has very little to do with student learning and everything to do with the private sector tapping federal and state education dollars for its own enrichment. However, this trend is by no means exclusive to [...]

My intention for today’s post was to focus on the news that several states are seeking federal waivers to cut special education funding in response to budget crises. I intended to discuss the impact that these kinds of cuts have on poorer urban schools that have higher proportions of students classified as having learning disabilities [...]

This subject is somewhat off topic for me, but the ideology behind the proposals of Stanford economist Paul Romer is part and parcel with a dangerous trend in elite circles that is attempting to [literally] turn back the clock to the age of colonialism.* The idea goes as follows:
Romer is peddling a radical vision: that [...]

Between propagandistic “documentaries” scaring the uninformed and economically illiterate and a President who willing adopts right-wing narratives as being responsible and “post-partisan”, it is becoming increasingly clear that the next big fight in the American republic will center around our ballooning debt and the ill-advised austerity proposals being bandied about for addressing that debt. Looks [...]

The public intellectuals inhabiting what passes for the Commons here in the U.S. are, for the most part, a pitiful group. They display not only a shocking lack of research and analysis skills but also an almost complete inability to think outside of their own perceptions and ideological dispositions. Digby coined the term ‘The Village’ [...]

Last week, I pointed readers toward this tragic story of Chinese laborers committing suicide en masse in which I attempted to link those suicides with the concept of Alienation. This week, Bloomberg has published an article that does a far better job at making that connection… albeit unwittingly.
Ah Wei has an explanation for Foxconn Technology [...]

Yves Smith appears to be channeling Immanuel Wallerstein in this insightful discussion of the disconnect between policy-makers in D.C. and the economic realities of the nation.
[T]he real problem may be that all these approaches [Keynesian and Austrian economic theory] are past their sell-by dates, helpful around the margin but insufficient to provide lasting relief to [...]