Ravitch’s criticism extended beyond conservative Republicans. She doesn’t like the “Race to the Top” program pushed by the Obama administration because it relies on standardized testing. She doesn’t care for reforms pushed by philanthropists who know little about teaching, such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad or New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Ravitch said the hot ideas in education – vouchers, charters, virtual charters, merit pay, standardized testing, school A-to-F grades – have not improved education but have distracted the nation from improving the basic dynamic of learning, a process as old as Socrates: teachers teaching.
It wasn’t a debate this week, but Ravitch’s views must win the argument. We should back teachers with better pay and public support. If we want children to learn, we must enable and entrust their teachers not to teach to tests or compete for bonuses but to do what they love and, particularly in pay-stingy North Carolina, what they do out of love – teach.
All true, of course, but it is hard for lawmakers to say no to the gangsters out to pilfer the public treasury.
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Why are civil rights lawyers asleep at the switch at the obvious class war being waged on public education?
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It's nothing short of sadism for companies to string desperate job applicants along by forcing them through a series of interviews and tests only to not bother to fill the jobs at all.
This is the NYT article Hightower is referring to:
The hiring delays are part of the vicious cycle the economy has yet to escape: jobless and financially stretched Americans are reluctant to spend, which holds back demand, which in turn frays employers’ confidence that sales will firm up and justify committing to a new hire. Job creation over the last two years has been steady but too slow to put a major dent in the backlog of unemployed workers, and the February jobs report due out on Friday is expected to be equally mediocre. Uncertainty about the effect of fiscal policy in Washington is not helping expectations for the rest of the year, either.
“If you have an opening and are not sure about the economy, it’s pretty cheap to wait for a month or two,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University. But in the aggregate, those little delays, coupled with fiscal uncertainty, are stretching out the recovery process. “It’s like one of those horror movies, an economic Friday the 13th, where this recession never seems to die.”
Employers might be making candidates jump through so many hoops partly because so many workers have been jobless for months or years, and hiring managers want to make sure the candidates’ skills are up to date, said Robert Shimer, an economics professor at the University of Chicago.
But there’s also little pressure to hire right now, so long as candidates are abundant and existing staff members are afraid to refuse the extra workload created by an unfilled position. Employers can keep dragging out the hiring process until they’re more confident about their business — or at least until they find the superstar candidate.
Translation: Employers are being sadistic assholes because they can.
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Some nitwits in North Dakota think they can ban abortion by putting in a declaration that "life begins at conception" when in fact any proposal would have no teeth. Roe v. Wade, after all, is still the law of the land.
Texas is pulling a similar idiotic stunt:
The bill would require abortions, including those induced by drugs, to be performed in so-called ambulatory surgical centers. The regulations for such facilities include specific sizes for rooms and doorways, and additional infrastructure like pipelines for general anesthesia and large sterilization equipment._____
The Senate Committee on Health and Human Services approved the bill on Tuesday, sending it to the full Senate for approval.
“There’s no recent spike in risk or safety incidents that this regulation is responding to. It’s pure politics,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, which operates four abortion clinics throughout the state and an ambulatory surgical center that performs abortions. “The thing we need to worry about is, when you take away women’s access to safe abortion, then what’s going to happen?”
I forgot to play the Powerball lottery last night.
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