2013 Travers

While I was busy trying to get my things put in a UHaul trailer in Reno Saturday, Will Take Charge took charge of the Travers field and won the race:

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The Pressure Really Should Be on Congress to Impeach Him

I am referring to impeaching Arne Duncan, not his boss, though it sure as hell wouldn't break my little heart if a movement to remove the president were to start. The GOP wouldn't do it to Obama anyway because despite all of the posturing and rhetoric, Obama by and large is doing exactly what they and their gangster backers want. He is, after all, the gangsters' puppet and always was. He's the first "Manchurian candidate" we have had elected to the presidency in the history of the United States.

Getting back to Arne, this movement to pressure for his removal is one avenue and maybe the one with the greatest chance of success, assuming this would-be dictator were to ever voluntarily step down.

Arne Duncan, a mental lightweight despite--or perhaps because of--his Ivy League pedigree, is an individual with an insane desire to operate as a national school superintendent despite his miserable track record in Chicago and his total lack of qualifications. Worse than that, he displays the worst tendencies of school district administrators: He not only thinks he is above the law but that he IS the law. He doesn't follow the U.S. Constitution.

It's long overdue for him to leave Dodge.

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Miscellaneous News

Obit: Muriel Siebert, 80, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, has died from complications from cancer.

It wasn't that long ago women weren't allowed there:

Siebert, who was born in Cleveland and moved to New York in 1954 at age 22, started her career as a trainee in research at Bache & Co. earning a $65 a week. She went on to become an industry specialist in airlines and aerospace and later became a partner at brokerages including Brimberg & Co.

She bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in December 1967 after months of struggling with the male-dominated business world that initially resisted her efforts to join. She established her investment firm the same year and transformed it into a discount brokerage house in 1975.

Her achievements at the time were something to be proud of.

These days, being a member of Wall Street is a sign of disgrace.
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When you don't have talent, you resort to raunchy nonsense.

Just so I don't sound too sexist, Robin Thicke is every bit as untalented as Miley.

Both of them prove connections have a lot to do with financial "success" rather than talent.
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While somebody like Miley Cyrus makes millions of dollars on the skimpiest of talent, millions upon millions of us who are considered "baby boomers," especially those of us unemployed or underemployed, are having our lives destroyed thanks to deliberate inaction by Congress.

I am still technically "employed," but I don't make enough money at this juncture to be able to get a place to live.

Here is the study mentioned by the blogger, but of course the situation now is even worse.

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Ed Etc.

As we know, or should know, the whole point of vouchers is to circumvent Brown v. Board of Education. Milton Friedman came up with that voucher nonsense in the 1950s.

No surprise the feds believe they are illegal.

Until, of course, Obama and Duncan override it.
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Obituaries

Actress Julie Harris, 87, noted for her many stage and screen appearances, has died of congestive heart failure.

She was always somebody who always looked much younger than she was.

I remember her best opposite James Dean in the 1954 film East of Eden.

Harris won her first Tony Award for playing Sally Bowles, the confirmed hedonist in "I Am a Camera," adapted by John van Druten from Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories." The play later became the stage and screen musical "Cabaret." In her second Tony-winning performance, Harris played a much more spiritual character, Joan of Arc in Lillian Hellman's adaptation of Jean Anouilh's "The Lark." The play had a six-month run, primarily because of the notices for Harris.

The actress was something of a critics' darling, getting good reviews even when her plays were less-well received. These included such work as "Marathon '33," ''Ready When You Are, C.B.!" and even a musical, "Skyscraper," adapted from an Elmer Rice play, "Dream Girl."

Her third Tony came for her work in "Forty Carats," a frothy French comedy about an older woman and a younger man. It was a big hit, running nearly two years.

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No Blogging This Weekend

I am going to be out of town to get the rest of my stuff out of Reno, Nevada. It may be the last time I ever go there. I hope not, but the way things are financially for me, I can't even think of a return visit.

It will be hard, not just because of all of the goddamned stuff I have and having to drive the truck to Oregon, but it is also the third anniversary since my beloved dog Tony died.

I also dread the thought of seeing the house that once belonged to my neighbor friends, both of whom died 12 days apart.

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Etc.

Oregon is trying to do something about aging manufactured homes, which are abundant in the state.
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It sounds like the Penn State "scandal" has turned into a McMartin Pre-school-type mess. I wrote a long time ago I had doubts any of the "scandal" was true.

Pretty convincing evidence here.
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User Fee America

Thanks to neoliberalism's twisted "philosophy" to justify unbridled greed and parasitism of the tiny elite at the expense of everybody else, the "public good" isn't even mentioned anymore though it is absolutely crucial for a stable society.

Reich's paragraph sums up the decline of the United States in the last paragraph:

We’re losing public goods available to all, supported by the tax payments of all and especially the better-off. In its place we have private goods available to the very rich, supported by the rest of us.

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Time to Impeach Obama and Duncan

over their completely unconstitutional intrusion into the system of public education. They aren't just stopping with K-12--now they want to put NCLB/RTTT in higher education.

It won't be the tiny number of elite schools like the Ivies--this is a naked assault on state universities and community colleges where the vast majority of American students attend college.

Just wait until they start to sack tenure in higher ed--which IS a lifetime appointment unlike the civil service protections misnamed tenure in K-12--and professors no longer have academic freedom.

Folks, we don't have a "left-right" division or a "Democratic-Republican" division in this country anymore. There is literally a class war declared by the tiny number of elites (billionaires, Wall Street hedge fund crooks, and neoliberal policy makers and politicians) against everybody else, and they will stop at NOTHING until every last dime is pilfered from the American people.

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NYT Journalistic Malpractice Number 10,897

At least Maureen Dowd isn't president of the United States. She's been caught--again--committing journalistic malpractice, but because she won a Pulitizer, she gets away with murder.

People who have done far, far less have their careers ruined, but ol' Mo just keeps plugging along with one ethical breach after another.

Dowd is now in trouble with selectively quoting and twisting the meaning of the words of someone who was critical of NYC candidate Christine Quinn. That is bad enough, but the poor candidate ended up taking Dowd's account at face value, thus compounding the mess much further.

It's not the first time she's messed up:

Dowd has plagiarized. She has filed columns with inaccurate datelines. Both of those incidents involved Dowd passing off the writing and reporting of others — friends and assistants — as her own, uncredited. There was also the time — still, as far as I know, never explained — when an insulting and effeminizing description of Barack Obama was mysteriously scrubbed from the online version of the column.

That's only one paragraph of the article, but Dowd has done much, much more.

Poor old Jayson Blair had his life ruined because he messed up, but that's because he didn't win a Pulitzer. He was expendable.

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This Can't Be Real

I thought this may have come out of the Onion, but unfortunately this is a real standard and being discussed at the Facebook BAT board.

First graders are aware only of their own neighborhoods. As the years go on they learn more about their communities, then their states and regions including some pioneer history, then about the United States (traditionally that was fifth grade) with some U.S. history thrown in, their hemisphere (traditionally sixth grade) with some Latin American history thrown in as well as some look at ancient civilizations in Europe, and then U.S. history and the constitution would be taught in middle school and world history being introduced. It becomes greatly expanded into high school and beyond.

But our "reformers" think first graders ought to know all about Mesopotamia and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers! That is strictly high school-level world history.

This is obviously an attempt to fail all kids--even those in the 99th percentile--in order to make the teachers look bad and give the privatizers an excuse to close down all public schools and turn them into charter scams.

This is New York, by the way.

Here are the details for posterity:

Locate the area known as Mesopotamia on a world map or globe and identify it as part of Asia;
Explain the importance of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the use of canals to support farming and the development of the city of Babylon;
Describe the city of Babylon and the Hanging Gardens;
Identify cuneiform as the system of writing used in Mesopotamia;
Explain why a written language is important to the development of a civilization;
Explain the significance of the Code of Hammurabi;
Explain why rules and laws are important to the development of a civilization;
Explain the ways in which a leader is important to the development of a civilization;
Explain the significance of gods/goddesses, ziggurats, temples, and priests in Mesopotamia;
Describe key components of a civilization;
Identify Mesopotamia as the “Cradle of Civilization”;
Describe how a civilization evolves and changes over time;
Locate Egypt on a world map or globe and identify it as a part of Africa;
Explain the importance of the Nile River and how its floods were important for farming;
Identify hieroglyphics as the system of writing used in ancient Egypt;
Explain the significance of gods/goddesses in ancient Egypt;
Identify pyramids and explain their significance in ancient Egypt;
Describe how the pyramids were built;
Explain that much of Egypt is in the Sahara Desert;
Identify the Sphinx and explain its significance in ancient Egypt;
Identify Hatshepsut as a pharaoh of ancient Egypt and explain her significance as pharaoh;
Identify Tutankhamun as a pharaoh of ancient Egypt and explain his significance;
Explain that much of what we know about ancient Egypt is because of the work of archaeologists;
Identify Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as major monotheistic world religions;
Locate Jerusalem, Israel, and the area known as the Middle East on a map;
Define monotheism as the belief in one God;
Identify the Western Wall (or the Wailing Wall) as associated with Judaism, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with Christianity, and the Dome of the Rock with Islam;
Identify the Hebrews as the ancient people who were descendants of Abraham;
Explain that followers of Judaism are called Jewish people and the term Jewish is used to describe practices or objects associated with Judaism;
Identify the Star of David as a six-pointed star and a symbol of Judaism;
Identify the Torah as an important part of the Hebrew scriptures;
Identify that a Jewish house of worship is called a synagogue or temple;
Identify Moses as a teacher who long ago led the Jewish people out of Egypt in an event referred to as the Exodus;
Explain that, according to an important story in the Torah, Moses received the Ten Commandments from God and that the Ten Commandments are rules that tell people how to behave or live their lives;
Identify important Jewish holidays such as Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Hanukkah;
Explain that Christianity developed after Judaism;
Explain that followers of Christianity are called Christians;
Recognize the cross as a symbol of Christianity;
Identify the Bible as the Christian holy book;
Identify that a Christian house of worship is called a church;
Identify that Christians believe Jesus to be the Messiah and the son of God;
Identify important Christian holidays, such as Easter and Christmas;
Recognize that both Christians and Jewish people follow the Ten Commandments;
Explain that Islam originated in Arabia;
Explain that followers of Islam are called Muslims;
Identify the crescent and star as symbols of Islam;
Identify the Qur’an as the holy book of Islam, containing laws for daily living and many stories that appear in Jewish and Christian holy books;
Identify that a Muslim place of worship is called a mosque;
Identify that Muslims believe that Moses and Jesus were prophets but believe that Muhammad was the last and greatest of the prophets;
Identify important Muslim holidays, such as Ramadan and Eid-ul-fitr;
Use narrative language to describe (orally or in writing) characters, setting, things, events, actions, a scene, or facts from a fiction read-aloud;
Identify who is telling the story at various points in a fiction read-aloud;
Ask and answer questions (e.g., who, what, where, when), orally or in writing, requiring literal recall and understanding of the details and/or facts of a nonfiction/informational read-aloud;
Answer questions that require making interpretations, judgments, or giving opinions about what is heard in a nonfiction/informational read-aloud, including answering why questions that require recognizing cause/effect relationships;
Identify the main topic and retell key details of a nonfiction/informational read-aloud;
Describe the connection between two individuals, events, ideas, or pieces of information in a nonfiction/informational read-aloud;
Ask and answer questions about unknown words and phrases in nonfiction/informational read-alouds and discussions;
Use illustrations and details in a nonfiction/informational read-aloud to describe its key ideas;
Compare and contrast (orally or in writing) similarities and differences within a single nonfiction/informational read-aloud or between two or more nonfiction/informational read-alouds;
Listen to and demonstrate understanding of nonfiction/informational read-alouds of appropriate complexity for grades 1–3;
With guidance and support from adults, focus on a topic, respond to questions and suggestions from peers, and add details to strengthen writing as needed;
Make personal connections (orally or in writing) to events or experiences in a fiction or nonfiction/informational read-aloud, and/or make connections among several read-alouds;
With assistance, categorize and organize facts and information within a given domain to answer questions;
Use agreed-upon rules for group discussion (e.g., look at and listen to the speaker, raise hand to speak, take turns, say “excuse me” or “please,” etc.);
Carry on and participate in a conversation over at least six turns, staying on topic, initiating comments or responding to a partner’s comments, with either an adult or another child of the same age;
Ask questions to clarify information about the topic in a fiction or nonfiction/informational read-aloud;
Ask and answer questions (e.g., who, what, where, when), orally or in writing, requiring literal recall and understanding of the details and/or facts of a fiction or nonfiction/informational read-aloud;
Ask questions to clarify directions, exercises, classroom routines, and/or what a speaker says about a topic;
Describe people, places, things, and events with relevant details, expressing ideas and feelings clearly;
Add drawing or other visual displays to oral or written descriptions when appropriate to clarify ideas, thoughts, and feelings;
Produce complete sentences when appropriate to task and situation;
Identify real-life connections between words and their use (e.g., note places at home that are cozy);
Learn the meaning of common sayings and phrases;
Use words and phrases acquired through conversations, reading and being read to, and responding to texts, including using frequently occurring conjunctions to signal simple relationships (e.g., because)
Identify new meanings for familiar words and apply them accurately;
Prior to listening to an informational read-aloud, identify what they know about a given topic;
Share writing with others;
With assistance, create and interpret timelines and lifelines related to an informational read-aloud;
Demonstrate understanding of literary language such as setting;
While listening to an informational read-aloud, orally predict what will happen next in the read-aloud based on the text heard thus far, and then compare the actual outcome to the prediction; and
Use personal pronouns orally.

I am sure if you asked a group of first graders what "Tigris" means, they'd say it is a big cat with stripes.

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Ed Etc.

The Broad cancer continues in Los Angeles.
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"Manypeeplia upsidedownia" is a good description of the "common core."
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"Gangsterism" may be a more appropriate word than "disruption."
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I am hoping they do this with doctors and lawyers next.

This is pure madness and gives principals even more power than they already have.
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It appears Louisiana teachers have a victory. They will continue to have more protections than Nevada's, at least that's what I take from this post.

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Like Lambs to the Slaughter

Evidently there are a number of jobs at Washoe County School District still open although the school year has started already.

Naturally they aren't the "good" classroom jobs in elementary, or they used to be the "good" jobs before the Broadies and other "reformers" started running roughshod over the state. Those jobs are reserved only for internal hires or for somebody's spouse or kid.

There are lots and lots of special education jobs, as the article notes. Applicants are like lambs to the slaughter, but people will clamor to get a chance because, after all, it is a job. Special education teachers, especially, are treated like dirt by this district. If you aren't already an experienced special ed teacher, you will find yourself thrown into the class with little in the way of guidance on how to do your job so you have to improvise and work with what few materials you have. The kids and the parents are the easy parts of the job. Then you may get a principal who will approach you to cheat so those test scores look good, or you will have no decent mentor at all to show you the ropes because the mentor you get stuck with is a headcase who misses work a lot. To top that off, you may work in a school where you are not treated as a colleague but as the hired help or are bullied by certified support help who are actually certifiably nuts but have connections and still manage to have jobs. They throw their weight around because the principal is too busy out gallivanting around playing big shot and ignoring his or her leadership duties. The principals love these little cretins because they do their dirty work for them. They will lie, cheat, and steal for them while at the same time holding those principals and other administrators in total contempt. They will perjure themselves or engage in character assassination in bogus due process hearings. Not an easy environment to risk your career and every single thing you ever worked for.

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Etc.

Good. NO private outfit has any right to spam a public agency's email system with anything, let alone propaganda.

They will lose on appeal as well.

If there is anything I know about public agencies, it's that they are extremely particular about their email/internet policies.

School districts are the pickiest of all, and for good reason.
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"Stand on Children" is a good nickname for Rhee's "reform" group.
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Joseph Naso, the man accused of the "double initial" murders from the 1970s and 1990s, was convicted today on all counts.

He may get the death penalty, which is kind of stupid at his age of 79. He's likely to croak long before all of the appeals are exhausted if he gets death.
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Lois Weiner has a brief piece discussing the growing pushback against all of those idiotic privatization schemes.

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Of course charter schools aren't public schools, propaganda to the contrary. They are private schools designed to pilfer taxpayer dollars, but that doesn't make them public entities.

There is plenty of case law to back that assertion.

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Thank You, Bill Clinton,

for your stupid, shortsighted triangulation bullshit that began the irreversible slide into extreme poverty faced by millions upon millions of people who have little recourse now.

It was more important to you, Mr. Clinton, to beat the GOP at their own game and use the poor as pawns in your welfare "reform" scheme rather than actually stand up for what was right. In your cynical calculation, the poor had nowhere else to go in terms of voting, so why not screw them over, even though many in the middle class would eventually wind up in the same boat?

Now since the economy has tanked and has NEVER recovered because Congress and Obama won't do shit about it, the misery index* (a term that was used a lot during the Carter years of high inflation but appropriate here) has now reached into the stratosphere.

The report also explores long-term unemployment and the increase in extreme poverty. There were 4.8 million workers in the US in 2012 unemployed for more than six months. That year, half the unemployed in Michigan were in this category.

The report’s authors note: “While the Great Recession era has ushered in a prolonged period of high unemployment, its real legacy may prove to be the unprecedented duration of unemployment spells: the average spell was 38.1 weeks as of December 2012.” This has increased the number of people in the US in extreme poverty, struggling to survive on practically nothing.

The researchers also point to the trend to shift already drastically inadequate government-funded income support from the unemployed to those working low-wage, part-time and temporary jobs—most of the new jobs being created in the US. The minimum wage is a poverty wage, still $7.40 an hour, about half what has been computed as a living wage.

The report mentioned in the article is here and will make your blood boil.

*--Since we really haven't had much in the way of high inflation over the past thirty years, a new definition of the "misery index" is in order. I would define it as human misery going way up when our elected officials do absolutely nothing to correct a worsening economy.

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Etc.

With stories like this, it's almost too late to stop the school privatization juggernaut.

Once public ed is gone, the country is gone as well.
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Any survey sponsored by the Joyce Foundation is automatically suspect in the area of education, for it is one of the leading proponents of education "reform" including charter schools.

Obama was once involved with the outfit, which should tell you everything you need to know about him.
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Batshit crazy is the only way to describe the governor or Pennsylvania.

The entire country is in meltdown mode.

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Everything Old is New Again

I am definitely getting Claire Conner's new book on the John Birch Society.

A video:




She has many videos on her own YouTube channel.

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Nixon Wasn't This Brazen

Lots and lots of discussion around the education blogs about this pile of crap whinefest by a former Department of Education official in anticipation of Diane Ravitch's new book on education reform. The book is due out next month, I believe, and it must be fairly explosive for anybody to make such a complete and total jackass of himself on behalf of his former boss's boss, meaning Obama.

People are finally waking up to this privatization scam and the bigger scammers in Washington who have RUINED the Democratic Party brand on behalf of the gangsters calling the shots (billionaires, hedge fund crooks, neoliberals). Public education is seen as a cash cow to loot and make these people even more rich. This has nothing to do with the kids, teachers, teaching, or learning. It certainly has nothing to do with the concept of the public good.

The privateers are really afraid their scam will be exposed to millions of people.


The Ravitch critic is probably upset she flunked his boss, also known as Obama's flunky, in this piece from last year:

Does Duncan respect the limited role of the federal government in education, which all previous secretaries have recognized?

No. Duncan has expanded the role of the federal government in unprecedented ways. He seems not to know that education is the responsibility of state and local governments, as defined by the Tenth amendment to our Constitution. States and local school districts now look to Washington to tell them how to reform their schools and must seek permission to deviate from the regulations written by the U.S. Department of Education. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) created the template for this growing federal control of education, but Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top has made it possible for Washington to dictate education policy across the nation. Grade: F.

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Has Duncan followed the law in his education policies?

No. Duncan has issued waivers to states that want to be relieved from NCLB’s impossible mandate of reaching 100 percent proficiency by 2014, but replaced that law’s demands with those of his own devising. Duncan says his waivers allow “flexibility,” but they serve simply to impose his own ideas about evaluating teachers, “transforming” low-performing schools (by firing staff or closing the schools), and adopting national standards in reading and mathematics. While very few people defend NCLB, which will write off almost every public school in the United States as a failure by 2014, it is still the law. Duncan has no authority to replace it with his own rules; cabinet members are not allowed to change the laws. Under our Constitution, Congress writes the laws, and the executive branch must enforce them, even as it seeks to change those that are onerous and misguided. Grade: F.

That's just two of her grades of Duncan, who gets an impressive "F" overall.

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The Only Math Program Worse Than Everyday Mathematics

is Saxon Math, and both are very similar in concept. Lots of spiral nonsense and less of math concept mastery.

I taught both, especially Saxon, and I HATED it.

However, what was covered was very close to what the standardized test questions had.

EM is University of Chicago, which really says it all.

Make sure to watch the video of multiplication and division.

The lattice method was the worst damned thing ever devised. There was a reason why the old method was ditched long, long ago.

It could well be the reason programs like this are forced in public schools IS to force kids to fail in math concepts.

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Greetings from Charlotte

I found this YouTube from the current CMS superintendent bragging about those graduation rates going up since he took over a year ago.




Where have I heard THIS before?

Too much Broadie business lingo for comfort and saying very little of substance in the process.

"Every child, every day, for a better tomorrow."

Gee, that sounds like this: "Every child, by name and face, to graduation."

Eli Broad Superintendent Academy must teach its "students" meaningless slogans that sound alike.

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Another Day, Another Hack

No matter what, Nevada teachers are going to be screwed big time. A new hack has been appointed as state education superintendent to replace the hack who previously held the job before he upped and left.

This Dale Erquiaga is completely unqualified for the job, but being qualified isn't what Governor Sandoval wants. He wants a yes man in the role:

“It’s a tough one,” said Melcher about the need of a superintendent to have classroom experience. “We are moving out of the traditional norm that people are used to. I know when we were hiring a new president at Great Basin College, the faculty was adamant: ‘Boy, they better have some classroom instructional experience.’

“Then there were people on the other side who said, ‘Well, how important is that?’” Melcher said. “(They said,) ‘We need a leader to lead this institution.’ That is a fair debate that will continue for years to come.”

This is why "reformers" are fucking up the education system--they don't know any goddamned thing about education, teaching, or learning, but they are motivated solely by ideology.

Oh, and greed for themselves and their backers.

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Etc.

Everything the neolibs propose is full of lies in their attempt to seize control of public assets.

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Shades of Heritage USA

I can't imagine anybody wanting to have his or her remains, let alone any family member's remains, interred out in the middle of nowhere.

This smacks of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's time share scheme for Heritage USA back in the 1980s before it all went down in scandal:

The estimated $2 billion effort to build the massive cross just west of Lovelock off Interstate-80 near Toulon Road will be funded by people purchasing fees for interment, Nowland said.

“We only need a little bit of construction to get started,” said Nowland, who estimated the effort lasting about 30 years. “Then as people pay, we continue compacting earth, adding concrete over shell and building up the steps and walkways.”

According to Nowland, the cross will hold 600,000 niches as compartments for cremations. Each compartment can hold up to two people. Stairs will lead up the cross to observe names of buried loved ones. According to the Great Cross Alliance website, prices range from $4,000 to $30,000, depending on exterior or interior, single or double cremation vaults.

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Ed Briefs

The cancer of neoliberalism needs to be removed from the Chilean system (hell, from the US and all systems plagued with it) of education for children to have a decent chance.
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Could the "reform" movement crash like Wall Street did?

The problem is the attempt to destroy public education in the United States is pretty far along and almost to the point of no return.
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Another state ed bigwig resigns in order to stir up more trouble.
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The Florida Bennett scandal points to how much corruption there is within the "reform" movement.
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Appalling

Whatever happened to the neighborhood school, which brought together children, parents, and other citizens together to work toward a common goal? Why is that considered anathema these days?

When I read bullshit like this article, it is taking me back to a time to pre-Brown v. Board of Education. You don't have a neighborhood school for all students; instead, you have segregated schools or "academies."

“There’s an ongoing debate across the country on kindergarten through middle school models,” said Paul LaMarca, the school performance officer for Washoe County School District.

“The program at Mount Rose is unique because of its language academy,” he said. “We saw these students fitting in vertically with some of our high schools like the World Language Program at McQueen High School.”

What in the HELL is with this "academy" garbage? The term "academy" has been used in the South, for example, for their all-white private schools set up in response to integration. The school is Mount Rose Elementary School, period. Are we just going to sit back and allow the balkanization of neighborhood schools, which are supposed to bring communities together and cater to ALL students? This is private school-sounding nonsense in preparation for the dismantling of WCSD into networks of lousy charter schools. These kind of articles are appalling because this is about destroying public education for eventual private takeover. It doesn't work because education is not a for-profit endeavor; it is a public good. This "academy" crap is a way to get around the law which I believe is still in effect in Nevada which bars turning public schools into charters. What do you expect, people, when your district's board continues to hire Broad Superintendent Academy people?

Remember the other district Martinez went to apply, Philadelphia Public Schools? They're being dismantled as I write this. I strongly suspect Martinez has the same outlook for WCSD as William Hite has for Philadelphia.





Speaking of WCSD, they haven't updated the executive cabinet page, but both of those TBA positions have been filled. One was filled internally while the other was filled by somebody from another Nevada agency.

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Training for Careers That Don't Exist

Of course the ONLY sectors of the economy benefiting from students going into massive amounts of debt are educational institutions and student loan lenders. Because the economy is in the absolute shitter thanks to our "elected" officials in Washington who refuse to do a goddamned thing about it until we are all living in shacks and making a dollar day to compete with China, employers are "requiring" everybody have a college degree. People who refuse to get one find they can't find much in the way of work, but those who get suckered into the game and go into monstrous debt to get a degree find that they can't get work anyway. Then they default on the loans, which can ruin their chances of EVER having a life.

But it's a win-win for the debt collectors because student loan debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy.

It's all going to come to a head, I'm afraid.

And it isn't just young people: Mid-career changers find themselves in a pickle to the point they have to worry about some of their Social Security being garnished in their "golden years."

Taibbi:

Obama had already set himself up as a great champion of student rights by taking on banks and greedy lenders like Sallie Mae. Three years earlier, he'd scored what at the time looked like a major victory over the Republicans with a transformative plan to revamp the student-loan industry. The 2010 bill mostly eliminated private banks and lenders from the federal student-loan business. Henceforth, the government would lend college money directly to students, with no middlemen taking a cut. The president insisted the plan would eliminate waste and promised to pass the savings along to students in the form of more college and university loans, including $36 billion in new Pell grants over 10 years for low-income students. Republican senator and former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander bashed the move as "another Washington takeover."

The thing is, none of it – not last month's deal, not Obama's 2010 reforms – mattered that much. No doubt, seeing rates double permanently would genuinely have sucked for many students, so it was nice to avoid that. And yes, it was theoretically beneficial when Obama took banks and middlemen out of the federal student-loan game. But the dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It's not the cost of the loan that's the problem, it's the principal – the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.

The whole point of those skyrocketing rates was to limit college access. Really, that's what it is about.

The same is true with the ridiculous prices of houses--to force more people into becoming renters.

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Just What This Country Needs

That title, of course, is sarcastic since I am referring to the New Jersey election Tuesday night that propelled the godawful Newark mayor Cory Booker to the October special election.

He's as blatant a fake as there has ever been in American politics, and he is backed by the usual suspects who don't give a shit about the 99.99 percent of Americans.

Booker’s actual policies place him on the right, even given that the official political spectrum that has moved steadily to the right in recent decades. The mayor boasts of his ties to Wall Street and went so far as to criticize the Obama campaign in 2012 for daring to make an issue—even if only for political purposes—of Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s role as the founder of a private equity firm that had destroyed thousands of jobs.

The Newark mayor has also championed charter schools and is known as a supporter of vouchers, the most extreme tactic used in the attack on public education. He has called Michelle Rhee, the former head of the Washington DC school system notorious for her demonization of teachers, “a friend of mine.”

Booker typifies a selfish and privileged layer of the middle class that has been encouraged by the decades-long utilization of affirmative action and identity politics. In the closing days of the primary campaign, some reports hinted at evidence of corruption in Booker’s career, something that would come as little surprise. The mayor has increased his net worth by about $1 million through his connection with an Internet startup, Waywire, a video aggregator that appears to have almost no current business. Booker has also been receiving equity payments from a law firm with which he was associated before he became mayor, although he has not disclosed the amounts of those payments.

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News, Etc.

Obituary: Columnist Jack W. Germond, 85, has died shortly after completing a novel.

Germond was a familiar television face having been a regular on The McLaughlin Group.

Germond got his start covering national politics in 1961 for Gannett, where he had worked for several years. His first presidential campaign was the 1964 race between President Lyndon Johnson and Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater. He left Gannett in 1974 to join the Star, first as political editor and later as assistant managing editor.

He and others in his generation typically generated leads during after-hours, off-the-record chats over drinks - sometimes with the candidates themselves. As campaigns became more scripted, the candidates more insulated and paranoid about gaffes, Germond bemoaned the lost opportunities to see beyond their public personas. - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/rgj/obituary.aspx?n=jack-w-germond&pid=166427535#fbLoggedOut

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Another obit: Jimmy Carter associate Bert Lance, 82, has died.

Bert Lance, who coined the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” advised politicians from Zell Miller to Jesse Jackson, and was director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Jimmy Carter, has died.

A self-described “country banker,” Lance became a protégé of Carter’s when the future president was a state senator, and encouraged Carter to seek the White House. Lance’s meteoric career in business and politics climaxed in the early months of the Carter presidency, when he was known as the “deputy president” because of his close relationship with his fellow Georgian.

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European countries aren't immune to class warfare, either.
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Chicago continues to live up to its reputation as Corruption Central, only this time the victims are the students.
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The "common core" shit needs to go, and the left/right crap doesn't work anymore anyway since the REAL political division is with the elites having declared war against everybody else.

This is literally a fight to the death.

Obama and Duncan and their backers are the enemies of public education. I knew that right off the bat, but few listened.
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A scab by any other name is still a scab:

Teach For America is a big recipient of corporate philanthropy – no surprise about that either, as nonprofit organizations and the deep corporate pockets that sustain them have played indispensable roles in the drive to privatize public education from the beginning. It's only logical that with the elevation of Barack Obama, the first president to emerge from the bowels of the foundation sector, the influence of these outfits has been omnipresent. Consultant tentacles of the Gates, Joyce, Boeing, Broad, Bradley, Walton Foundations, to name just a few of the top players, have been allowed to write federal program guidelines, to define criteria for assessing individual schools and entire districts, to invent their own instant-principal programs, with all salaries, overhead and expenses paid for by tax-exempt donations. Bosses during the last Great Depression usually had to pay for their own scabs, there was no way they could unload that on all the rest of us.

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News, Etc.

The woman must be related to Claudine Longet:

A woman in Arizona has told police that she accidentally killed her husband with his own shotgun after he insisted that she pick it up even though she told him she was uncomfortable around guns.

The Daily Courier reported that Prescott Valley police responded to reports of a shooting on Gentle Winds Road Monday afternoon, where 56-year-old Gary Wingate was pronounced dead at the scene.

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Something to brag about--NOT:

US employers added 162,000 nonfarm jobs in July according to the government’s Establishment Data Survey, an anemic number considerably below predictions. However, a closer look reveals another serious problem.

“Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,” said Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center quoted by McClatchy Washington Bureau. Hall was head of the US Bureau of Labor (BLS) Statistics from 2008 to 2012.

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Famed Tuvan throat singer Kongar-ol Ondar, 51, passed away July 25 after surgery for a brain hemorrhage.

I had never heard of "throat singing," which is something that doesn't even sound like a human voice but more like a woodwind instrument. It's incredible.

Ondar became world famous:

Mr. Ondar was a national icon in his homeland, where he started a throat-singing academy and was a member of Parliament. The “Liberace of Tuvan music,” as Dartmouth College ethnomusicologist Theodore Levin once called him, he played a major role in popularizing the Central Asian vocal art in the West.

Throat singing developed among the nomadic herders of Central Asia, whose close relationship with nature led them to musically mimic sounds like the rush of a river or the wind whistling over the steppe.

It is accomplished by a deft manipulation of the vocal cords and the structures of the mouth, including the lips, tongue and jaw, to isolate the different pitches that everyone produces but few can discern, and then combine them harmonically. The unusual approach was virtually unknown in the West before the late 1980s.

Example of his talent:

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Impeach Duncan

I am serious.

The guy is downright evil, stupid, and corrupt, and not in that order. He has done untold harm to the public education system in this country, flouting state and federal laws in the process.

He is a law unto himself.

He must go.

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WCSD Gossip

Here is the report of the proposed settlement with the parent who was arrested in June for trespassing on WCSD property:

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People Are Pissed Off,

but unfortunately that being pissed off isn't being put to good use. Thanks to the magnificent propaganda put forward by the elites to divert attention away from the grand larceny they are pulling on the American people, people are focusing on inconsequential social issues to the detriment of their freedom and standard of living.

It's worked for decades, and people still haven't figured out the charade:

When average people feel the game is rigged, they get angry. And that anger can easily find its way into deep resentments — of the poor, of blacks, of immigrants, of unions, of the well-educated, of government.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Demagogues throughout history have used anger to target scapegoats — thereby dividing and conquering, and distracting people from the real sources of their frustrations.

Make no mistake: The savage inequality America is experiencing today is deeply dangerous.

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The Right to Lie

One of our most cherished freedoms in this country, one of the few we have left, is the right to tell a lie. If we didn't have this freedom, there would be no politicians left, not that it would be any great loss at the rate things are going now.

But do publishers have the right to foster a con on American consumers and dress it up as an autobiography?

Of course I am talking about the New Jersey lawsuit against the publishers of two Lance Armstrong "autobiographies," It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life and Every Second Counts. The lawyer is suing on behalf of a handful of readers who he claims were misled into thinking what Lance said was true, but we all know now what a cheater and liar he really was and is. The plaintiffs claim the publisher knew or should have known what Lance said wasn't the truth.

It'll probably get thrown out of court.

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Cory for President?

I hope to hell NOT, but I will bet this is going to be the narrative we are going to be stuck with for 2016.

Hillary Clinton, already way long in the tooth, will be pushed as a historic candidate, but Booker, an outright fraud, will be the darling of the media, the same media that pushed another fraud, Obama, for the presidency in 2008. Like Obama, Booker will get NO serious vetting even as his far right/Wall Street connections are well known.

Glen Ford knows all about "Cory":

Once he steps into the U.S. Senate, to serve out the remainder of the late Frank Lautenberg’s term, Booker will immediately start running for president, staking out a position to the right of the current occupant and of Obama’s likely successor, Hillary Clinton. In the last presidential race, Booker infuriated the Obama camp by coming to the defense of Bain Capital, the Wall Street investment firm where Mitt Romney made his fortune. Booker said it was “nauseating” to see all those good people in high finance held up to scorn in an election campaign.

“The filthy rich have cultivated a true-blue believer in Cory Booker.”

Nobody can say that Cory Booker doesn’t take care of his friends in the 1%. They certainly take care of him. They have bankrolled all of his electoral efforts, most recently allowing Booker to spend almost three times as much as his top Democratic senatorial opponents, combined. Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerman’s $100 million gift to the Newark Public Schools made Booker look like an urban miracle worker – although the transaction was actually more like Booker presenting the schools as a gift to Zuckerman and his privatizing friends. Other Silicon Valley fat cats set Booker up as head of a start-up Internet company that made Booker a millionaire, at least on paper. Now that Booker is going to Washington, the start-up is going down the tubes. But, there are plenty more self-serving deals to be made on Capitol Hill.

He's a blight on American politics, and the real-life Manchurian (not that Obama wasn't one).

Like I said, if this man is anywhere on the presidential ticket in my lifetime, I am THROUGH with the Democratic Party.

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If You Want to Destroy the Country, You Don't Have to Rig Voting Machines

Instead, you can simply promote fakers posing as "Democrats," and you can get even more points if you have minority candidates as insurance against criticism. Calling critics "racist" goes far even when the minority candidate doesn't do SHIT for minorities. It shuts people up even as these fakes wreck the country and tarnish the Democratic Party brand in order to help their billionaire and Wall Street backers.

We have seen this with Trojan horse Barry; we are now about to be treated to an even bigger fraud in Cory Booker.

Tonight the Newark mayor whose career was initially bankrolled by the far right Bradley Foundation and Manhattan Institute won the primary for the U.S. Senate seat left vacant when incumbent Frank Lautenberg, a real Democrat, unfortunately died. Booker is expected to be a shoo-in this November, and you know what this means.

We are going to get a 24/7 buildup of this piece of shit from the media in hopes this fraud gets on the national ticket in 2016. So help me God, I am done forever with the Democratic Party if this shitbag gets anyway near the White House.

He's a hundred times worse than Obama, and Obama has come a long way to becoming the worst president in American history.

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WCSD Gossip

It appears the parent who was arrested at the district headquarters a couple of months ago got a settlement for $10,000, with an additional bit of money shelled out to the lawyer, for a total of $17.5 grand.

Not that the parent didn't deserve something for what he went through; after all, the poor guy was arrested:

The Washoe County School district has agreed to pay Larry Dailey, a parent arrested outside a school board meeting in June $10,000 and cover his legal expenses according to attorney Ken McKenna.

McKenna said the district agreed to drop all criminal charges and the trespass order.

Dailey has agreed to move forward and drop prior complaints, McKenna said.

"It's a little slap on the wrist," said McKenna. "But this wasn't about the money. This was about the district apologizing."

Of course the board will have to approve the settlement, and since this really DID happen, unlike the bullshit one where I was named all those years ago, there is no reason for them not to approve it.

Edit: They had the board meeting, and the matter was mentioned at the beginning. The proposed settlement will be voted on during the August 27 meeting.

They also had an introduction to the new principals for next year. A few might be good, but there are more than a few assholes including the one who fired me. She shouldn't even working there.

Unfortunately, her boss is rather a namby-pamby sort. He thinks he has a very high quality group of principals.

Edit 2: I am watching this thing live. Well, well. They didn't introduce her tonight, thank God.

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Nevada Teachers Are Screwed

Once again, Governor Sandoval picks a political hack and not an educator for the top education post in the state.

Guthrie was bad, but this guy will do exactly the same thing.

Teachers in the state need to polish their resumes when this wholesale assault on public education comes full force.

Erquiaga served as Sandoval’s senior adviser from 2010 to 2012. Prior to that, he was the executive director of government affairs at the Clark County School District, and worked as a consultant for clients including the district and the Nevada Association of School Superintendents.

He's not an educator.

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The Future of US Education

can be found in the mess in Chile, which was the laboratory for the neolibs who wanted to destroy society for some kind of crackpot "libertarian" utopia.

There have been attempts to reverse this hideous state of affairs there, but the country has a long way to go in education.

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While I Am Trying to Survive

the next few weeks until the school year starts again in Oregon, the test-taking machines, once known as students, once again jump on the treadmill at Washoe County School District. This year could be the watershed year where teachers and administrators are kicked to the curb if they don't meet the impossibly high standards set forth by not just the district, but by the idiotic national "common core" bullshit peddled by Duncan and Gates.

Nobody dares to come forward and call b.s. on the whole charade. Certainly don't count on the fake "unions" to say anything against it; after all, they work for the district while taking money from its members.

Superintendent Pedro Martinez was making the rounds yesterday welcoming the test takers back to another year of pain and suffering. He even wrote a "welcome back" letter to "colleagues" (also known as "lambs to the slaughter") and signed it "Pedro."

Here it is:

With our school doors opening for the 2013-2014 school year this morning, I wanted to officially welcome you back! I know how much work goes into preparing for today and the excitement involved in the first day of school. Thank you for all that you have done already to make today successful and so welcoming for our students and families.

Staff from the central office will be at schools across the District today to support you and the opening of school. We will be there to help troubleshoot any problems that may arise and provide any assistance you may need. We are excited to get this school year going!

I also wanted to share with you some of the exciting plans we have for this year (watch this video with a short welcome back message). This is the fourth year under our strategic plan, Envision WCSD 2015 – Investing In Our Future. We will be updating the plan this year and will want to hear from you in the process. What do you see as the next steps for us to continue to progress as a school district? What is working or needs to be changed? This update will not be a new plan, but a reflection of what has been accomplished and what still needs to be done. Like any effective plan, we need to make sure ours is reaching its intended goals. We want to continue to become a better school district, and we will be using this opportunity to reflect and continue to forge a path for our future. Be on the lookout for ways to get involved in this conversation in the upcoming months.

In the next few weeks, you also will be hearing about how students across WCSD are doing academically. Our latest proficiency scores and graduation rates highlight the growth we have made as a school district and also show where we must continue to work to ensure that every child graduates high school ready for college and highly-skilled careers. I am proud of what we have accomplished so far and am excited to share the latest news.

New beginnings are always exciting and the 2013-2014 school year is no exception. It is a great time to be a part of the WCSD community. I am very excited to be doing this work with you and am eager to see what we can achieve together.

Thank you for your continued commitment and dedication to our students,

If he can shitcan that asshole who illegally fired me five years ago, I can die happy. I may die penniless because of her, but I will die happy.

I am going to closely watch the administrator comings and goings this year. I note that the person who used to be the Lemmon Valley E.S. principal before she was yanked out is no longer in the staff directory. Either she was demoted all the way to teacher or else she resigned.

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Good

How dare they take it out on the dog:

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I Always Knew "Nanook of the North" Was Fiction

rather than a straight documentary (I also have the DVD), but I had no idea what a mess of a personal life its director had.

Flaherty was a deadbeat dad, too, according to Wikipedia:

Melanie McGrath, a writer, writes that, while living in Northern Quebec for the year of filming Nanook, Flaherty had an affair with his lead actress, the young Inuit woman who played Nanook's wife. A few months after he left, she gave birth to his son, Josephie, whom he never acknowledged. Josephie was one of the Inuit who were relocated in the 1950s to very difficult living conditions in Resolute and Grise Fiord, in the extreme North (see High Arctic relocation). According to McGrath, Flaherty knew of his son's difficulties, but took no action.[9] Corroboration of McGrath's account is not readily available and Flaherty himself never discussed the matter.

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Take a Look At What the Neolibs Want for Our Country

Look no further than what Chile has gone through since Pinochet and Miltie's minions took over the government 40 years ago. It isn't pretty:

Public school enrollment has dropped (and keeps dropping) from 80% in 1980 to 37% today. Aside from 7% of students in fully private schools, public and private institutions compete for the coveted per capita voucher.

Now, get this: two thirds of the 56% of private voucher (charter) schools are for profit, and they can charge on top of it to parents. Therefore, the richest ones mix their sons with their socioeconomic peers, the middle class with the middle class, and so on down to the poorest which go mostly to free public schools. Subsidiarity by the book. Until now, anyone can set up a for-profit subsidized charter school anywhere, without any quality requirements whatsoever.

Teacher training also became fully unregulated. Today some universities and institutes “sell college degrees” (for a profit) to students who do not understand what they read when they enter to Schools of Education, and generally do not understand what they read when they obtain their college degree. National certification and examination of teachers is, of course, voluntary. Freedom. Freedom. The market will solve everything.

It's a goddamn mess down there.

The comments following the post are very important to read.

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Too Much Money

When an individual has more money than the GNP of many countries, he or she has WAY too much money. It serves no purpose other than bragging rights to fellow filthy rich.

That money came from someplace, and that someplace was from the 99.9 percent because they have to make up the difference so these parasites can live better. The money came from tax policies granted to them by the politicians they own or else they have outright stolen it from their employees through low wages and few or no benefits.

The parasites in turn can continue to buy the politicians and even public opinion in order to preserve the wealth they stole from everybody else.

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The Morrison Miracle Strikes Again

This report is good for many belly laughs considering his graduation rates at WCSD were as a result of creative accounting:

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Reputation in Tatters, Embarrassment to the Rogue Valley, Business Possibly Damaged

Yeah, I'd say the fool has a lot of apologizing to do. However, I don't think he has a chance in hell of avoiding jail time for his reckless and illegal antics:

In a statement released Sunday, Martin said he has retained legal counsel. He apologized to his staff for the damage the incident has caused them. He also thanked friends and family who have stuck by him during the difficult time. To the public, Martin said in the letter, "I would ask that you withhold judgment at this time and let the legal system and due process decide the truth."

The only "judgement" I am going to withhold is the "e" incorrectly put in behind the "g" in the word.

Otherwise, throw the book at him and the woman involved.

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Miscellaneous Reads

I'd rather celebrate ALEC's funeral rather than its birthday.

Billionaires buying influence have got to go. To say nothing of the class of billionaires to begin with.

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Obituaries.

It happens to all of us sooner or later: Singer Eydie Gorme, popular in the fifties and sixties and was married for millions of years to fellow entertainer Steve Lawrence, has died at the age of 84:

They married in Las Vegas in 1957 and later performed for audiences there. Lawrence, the couple's son David and other loved ones were by her side when she died, Bragman said.

"Eydie has been my partner on stage and in life for more than 55 years," Lawrence said in a statement. "I fell in love with her the moment I saw her and even more the first time I heard her sing. While my personal loss is unimaginable, the world has lost one of the greatest pop vocalists of all time."

Although usually recognized for her musical partnership with Lawrence, Gorme broke through on her own with the Grammy-nominated "Blame it on the Bossa Nova." The bouncy tune about a dance craze of the time was written by the Tin Pan Alley songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

Actually it was more the Brill Building than Tin Pan Alley (which refers to the earlier 20th century in popular music).

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"Triangulation"

was the worst damned thing that ever came down the pike for Democrats, and that's because during the Clinton era, Clinton wanted to undercut the GOP on crime and welfare "reform."

In the short run, it may have helped his chances for re-election, but in the long term, it was nothing but a goddamned disaster to shred the safety net in the event of an economic downturn.

I very nearly didn't vote for Clinton in 1996 because of his idiotic, punitive welfare "reform" crap.

Obama is attempting to imitate Clinton's triangulation by trying to gut public education and Social Security and Medicare.

Allowing the states to freelance their welfare programs has resulted in some particularly cruel policies and inequities. Minnesota spends $50 million a year on child care for single mothers receiving welfare benefits who are working or looking for work. New York spends $54 million to serve a population six times as large. Clinton and Gore repeatedly touted the approach taken by Indiana, where welfare reform was instituted by a Democratic governor, Evan Bayh, and his successor in the governor’s mansion, Frank O’Bannon. The pair presided over the shrinking of the welfare rolls in the Hoosier state by 30 percent. There’s no way to know if those people actually found work. It’s possible that the conditions of supervision of welfare recipients simply became unbearable and they left the program and perhaps the state. Under Indiana’s scheme, one missed job-training course means the loss of a welfare check for two months. A second infraction means loss of benefits for a year. A third strike and you’re out for good.

I am sick of the fakers who have undermined the Democratic Party.

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Movie of the Week

This documentary is on YouTube, and it is powerful:




Texting while driving should be treated the same as a DUI. Prison terms should occur in the event of death.

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Junk Bond Crook "Schools"

If you're a convicted felon, you are not allowed to teach in any public school district in any part of the United States. However, if you're a convicted junk bond felon, you can actually create a sham "school" business and be allowed to steal taxpayer money in the process.

K12 has as one of its co-founders convicted felon Michael Milken (I believe former ed secretary Bill Bennett is also a co-founder). Somehow this "school" has been allowed to flourish even when teachers and students don't:

How is ONE teacher supposed to give adequate, individualized attention to 287 students? “I asked how I would manage that many students, especially in a school that advertises itself as providing individual support,” Melony said. COVA administrators told Melony that the hours a traditional teacher would spend creating lessons and attending meetings would be her time to grade student work.

That's because this "teaching" job is actually nothing more than a call center job with "customer service" skills more important than teaching skills.

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Loco News

This embarrassing story about a southern Oregon vineyard owner and a woman has made national and international news:

Federal investigators accuse the owner of Troon Vineyard with engaging in repeated sex acts with a woman while they sat together in airline seats in front of aghast fellow passengers on a June flight from Medford to Las Vegas.

A criminal complaint filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Nevada identifies Grants Pass vintner Christopher Martin as exposing his genitals and twice joining a woman identified as Jessica Stroble in oral sex and other acts despite warnings from Allegiant flight attendants

More is here.

Even The Smoking Gun got into the act and published the complaint.

Idiots. The couple I mean, not The Smoking Gun.

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Cartoons of the Day

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Something Is Wrong With This Picture

and it has nothing whatsoever to do with alleged racism.

There is something awfully wrong when a $38,000 handbag that probably cost pennies to make is seen as a discretionary expense.

That is more than what millions upon millions of Americans make in a YEAR.

And the bag in question?

The item at the center of the Winfrey dispute was reportedly a Tom Ford Jennifer bag — named for Jennifer Aniston, a fan of the American designer. The version on sale at Zurich’s Trois Pommes was one of the higher-end models, priced at 35,000 Swiss francs ($38,000).

You can buy a cheapie version at Neiman Marcus for a bit under $3,000.

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Anything Bill Gates Wants Is No Good

That's who bankrolled this Common Core crap in the first place. It will be an uphill battle to pressure politicians, especially those in D.C., especially Obama and Duncan, to give up that bullshit of "national standards."

They're a monstrous mistake, but that won't stop its advocates at all. When the goal is to destroy public education and turn the public sector into a cash cow, anything to achieve that dubious aim is okay.

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Gaming the System

Billionaires and their ilk are exploiting loopholes in the tax code to create "foundations" that are actually lobbying organizations designed to affect policy.

The most outrageous of these foundations are Eli Broad's and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with their insane education "reforms" that they and others want in order to feed from the public trough in their parasitical quest to own EVERYTHING.

Since these people own the politicians, nothing is going to change in the tax code to prohibit these obvious political outfits.

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You Bet They're Scams

401(k)s were never designed to be retirement vehicles in the first place, but good ole Congress made sure there were enough loopholes around that companies that had pensions could simply dump them in favor of these scam accounts.

And most of them did. The ONLY reasons they did so was to save money on pensions and to shift the risk of investments from them to employees.

What a goddamned outrage, but people thought they'd get rich over these scams.

A few people did, in fact, profit: the financial services industry.

Everybody else has pretty much gotten screwed.

We need to have an alternative, and preferably a return back to pensions.

Snip:

The United States is on the verge of a retirement crisis. For the first time in living memory, it seems likely that living standards for those over the age of 65 will begin to decline as compared to those who came before them—and that’s without taking into account the possibility that Social Security benefits will be cut at some point in the future.

The culprit? That same thing Mathisen celebrated: the 401(k), along with the other instruments of do-it-yourself retirement. Not only did they not make us millionaires as self-appointed pundits like Mathisen promised, they left very many of us with very little at all.

You might be tempted to ask “what went wrong,” but a better question might be “why did we ever expect this to work at all?” It’s not, after all, like we weren’t warned. As early as 1986, only a few years after the widespread debut of the 401(k) and the idea that American workers should self-fund their own retirement accounts based on savings and stock market gains, Karen Ferguson who was then, as she is now, the head of the Pension Rights Institute, warned in an op-ed published in the New York Times, “Rank-and-file workers have nothing to spare from their paychecks to put into a voluntary plan.”

But her voice, and that of other critics like economist Teresa Ghilarducci, who is now at the New School and described our upcoming retirement crisis as “an abyss” in 1994 congressional hearings, were drowned out by the money and power of the financial services industry, combined with their enablers in the personal finance media who proclaim even today that if we don’t have enough money set aside for retirement, it is all our own fault.

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Miscellaneous Reads

I tend to think Milton Friedman's nutball economic theories have more of an impact than Krugman supposes.
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A book for my wishlist is one about a woman who writes about the John Birch Society from the vantage point of being a daughter of two of its early activists.

The crackpot outfit should have died out in the 1960s, but instead it ended up seizing control of the Republican Party.
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Obituaries

Five Easy Pieces star Karen Black, 74, has passed away from cancer complications:

Known for her full lips and thick, wavy hair that seemed to change color from film to film, Black often portrayed women who were quirky, troubled or threatened. She was a prostitute who takes LSD with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in 1969's "Easy Rider," a breakthrough that helped get her the role as a waitress who dates an upper-class dropout played by Jack Nicholson in 1970's "Five Easy Pieces." Black won an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe Award for that performance.

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Wizard of Oz "Munchkin" Margaret Pelligrini, 89, died yesterday after having suffered a stroke on Monday:

With her death, only two of the original 124 Munchkins in the movie are still alive.

Pellegrini has said she was 16 when "The Wizard of Oz" was filmed. She played one of the "sleepy head" kids and wore a flowerpot on her head in the movie.

Later, Pellegrini was a guest speaker at grade schools across the Phoenix metropolitan area for many years.

The last two "Munchkins" still alive after 74 years are Jerry Maren, 93, and Ruth Duccini, 95.
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Puppeteer Cosmo Allegretti, remembered for his work on Captain Kangaroo, died July 26 of emphysema. He was 86.
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Country and western producer and songwriter Jack Clement, has died at the age of 82 after declining treatment for liver cancer:

Born in Memphis in 1931, Clement picked up music in his late teens and continued to perform after joining the Marines at 17. He picked up the nickname "Cowboy" for his role in a radio show while attending college and soon built a garage recording studio.

He took the first records he made to Sun to master and was hired on the spot by Phillips. He also served as a producer, engineer and talent scout in Nashville for Chet Atkins during some of country music's most important years.

Along the way, he boosted George Jones' career with his composition "She Thinks I Still Care" and had songs recorded by Ray Charles, Waylon Jennings, Tom Jones, Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner and Elvis Presley.

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Smart Women, Stupid Shrinks

I've written on this blog about a billion times about how it is that when the economy goes into the ditch, there suddenly becomes all of these articles and "studies" to show how "smart," meaning those in the top one percent of income earners, are jettisoning their traditional roles because they are "selfish" and will live to regret it.

I.Q. tests don't actually measure much of anything except help shrinks in diagnosing people who may need special education services or help them get disability. Furthermore, many of these elite women have "careers" only because they are trust fund brats to begin with and have a lot more freedom to do what they want than those of us out here who had to slave and work for every goddamned dime and STILL have our security kicked out from under us by sociopaths who call themselves "bosses." Unless you are in the financial elite, you don't have a lot of control over how your life turns out.

Getting back to this idiotic study. It sounds like the person who came up with this is scared the elites aren't having enough babies to balance out the kids of the riffraff.

Of course not, but the elite of the elite have the money, thanks to manipulating the law or stealing from other people outright, to control the masses.

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Take a Look At This Link

and the only question here would be is why the passing rate was so high for New York State students.

Most of these questions are developmentally inappropriate, but that is the point. Make students look bad, and in turn make the teachers look bad if the kids aren't cognitively ready to do algebraic equations in seventh grade (the earliest they should be taught is 10th grade). Weed those kids out so they can never go to college and force them into the low-wage jobs of the future and present.

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WCSD Gossip

It appears the district decided to back down and dropped the trespassing charges against a special education student's parent.

It's amazing what a little negative publicity will do to get the district to stop bullying people.

The school district is currently negotiating an agreement with Dailey's lawyer.

Hey, I wish they'd have done that with me when they screwed me over five years ago.

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Epic Fail on the Part of the Reformers--NOT on the Part of the Students

OF COURSE there is massive failure on the NYS exams--that is the POINT. Then these assholes like Andrew Cuomo can dismantle the entire public education system in the name of "reform."

When will people wake up to this massive robbery of the public sector?

More details are here.

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Cartoon of the Day

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American Workers Are Screwed

My dad would have been 106 years old today. When he started working as a young man, he made a dollar a day. If he were alive now, he'd see how we are reverting to those times before there were protections put in place for workers as a result of the Great Depression.

Congress and the various presidents are directly responsible for this current mess of dismantling the progress of the last century. They gave a tiny elite more tax breaks and more loopholes to exploit and made everybody else pay through the nose for it. It's been called "reverse Robin Hood."

Our D.C. politicians of both political parties have proven there isn't a two-party system anymore but one party in service to the parasitical class running things.

The result: America is looking increasingly like the third world with its proliferation of low-wage jobs:

Over the past four months, the US economy has added 791,000 new part-time jobs, but only 187,000 full-time jobs. This is despite the fact that part-time work makes up less than 20 percent of all existing employment in the US.

Sixty-one percent of the jobs created so far this year have been in low-paying industries, even though employment in these sectors constitutes less than 40 percent of total jobs in the US, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. The fastest job growth has been in retail sales, food preparation, freight and warehouse work, wait staff, and home health care—positions that pay less than $12 an hour.

Part-time work will be the new standard, especially when Obamacare becomes the law of the land.

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Bozo the Clown Purchases the Post

Yet another person with way too much money and too much time on his hands poses to create a lot of trouble. This despite assurances Bezos will be largely a hands-off owner of the Washington Post.

What he's done to the Amazon.com workers is unconscionable. What he is doing to publishing is equally as bad, with his eBook scheme making the ownership of books a thing of the past, since purchasers don't OWN the titles they download to a Kindle or a computer.

I only download free titles or titles of 1 or 2 dollars, while concentrating my book purchases to the real thing. Reading off a reader is an inferior experience to a real book.

About those Amazon working conditions:

His company, however, is notorious for paying poverty wages to its warehouse employees. The average warehouse associate starts at $11 per hour, or about $23,852 per year. The company has received major tax abatements in areas where it has set up warehouses. It has, for instance, received a sales tax waiver from the state of Tennessee for setting up a pair of fulfillment centers there, including one visited by President Obama last week.

Working conditions at the Amazon fulfillment centers are reported to be abysmal. The Financial Times reported in February that workers “might walk between seven and 15 miles” each day, and “must walk through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything” at the end of their shifts. The report noted that “a very large number” of workers are fired “frequently and with little warning or explanation.”

The Seattle Times on April 3, 2012 reported that Amazon workers were threatened and in some cases fired for reporting workplace injuries to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and a class-action lawsuit is currently pending against the company for short-changing workers’ paychecks.

Despite Bezos’ own claims that he will seek a “hands-off” role in running the Washington Post, the fact is that his purchase of the newspaper gives him control over one of the world’s leading news outlets and vastly increased influence over the flow of public information. It underscores the dominance of a small group of billionaires over all aspects of social and political life.

Bezos should pull out of the deal if he has a conscience. I am not counting on either thing happening, though.

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Too Many College Grads, Too Few Jobs

No surprise here whatsoever the job outlook for college grads dumped into this sinking job market:

Of course, the driving factor behind this new post-collegiate hardship is a very sluggish recovery following the great recession of 2008. Another facet adding to the problem is the fact that fewer people are retiring at 65, and are choosing to work longer to beef-up their retirement nest-eggs which were slammed during the financial crisis.

Most people aren't "choosing" to work later; they can't AFFORD to retire IF they still have jobs at 62 or 65 and are not like yours truly and trying to get back in.

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Yep. Let's Push Those Kids Out the Door.

That's what all of this push to make kids "college and career ready" is all about. Many kids do not have the capability or the desire to do college-level work, and this guarantees these kids will end up dropping out and be forced to do low-wage work.

Even those who CAN do the work and go on to college will find out that upon graduation, they can't find jobs in their field. They will be dumped into the low-wage jobs, if they can find them at all, and drive the pay down even further.

It's a win-win for the privatizers.

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A Lousy Superintendent Runs Roughshod Over Dallas

Teachers are fleeing, and this great "leader" is being investigated for corruption.

Of course this guy has Eli Broad connections.

Many teachers have had it, and more than a few risk being blackballed throughout the state of Texas because they supposedly didn't give adequate notice.

Breaching a contract is a major sin in education even if these teachers are justified in doing it.

Snip from the first link:

Honea has held the position that Superintendent Mike Miles has created a hostile work environment for teachers. “It seems like amid the chaos and turnover at the top level of the district, there’s really a lack of leadership,” she said. “I think it’s very sad that the district has taken this stand with the employees that have endured disrespect, fear and intimidation all year long… yet they continued to educate their students as much as they were able and allowed to do so.”

Dallas school district officials said nearly 1,000 teachers submitted their resignations in June and – this month – there have been more than 300 resignations.

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Too Truthful for Comfort

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Hint: It Isn't for the Kids

There's little doubt this scam Common Core is about slotting kids early, forcing the vast majority of them into lousy jobs in order to "compete" with the third world. The few allowed to go to high school and college will be servants of the elites in order to preserve the elites' status.

It's pretty obvious what is going on here.

At the same time these crooks promoting Common Core will make a shitload of money at taxpayer expense:

The CCSS furthers a process begun in 2002 with the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which mandated testing in all 50 states. According to the Pew Center on the States, annual state spending on standardized tests rose from $423 million before NCLB to $1.1 billion by 2008. This has continued under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, which has tied federal funding for schools even more closely to test-based performance standards.

Under the current administration’s education policy, “failing” schools compete for School Improvement Grants (SIG) of up to $2 million a year. In return schools have to agree to choose one of four “school improvement” models—“turnaround,” “restart,” “close/consolidation,” or “transformation.”

Under the “transformation” model, schools are required to replace the principal and make other broad changes, such as rewarding staff that increase student test scores and institute comprehensive instructional reform, and removing those who do not. According to the Department of Education, the “restart” model requires the district to “close the school and restart it under the management of a charter school operator, a charter management organization (CMO), or an educational management organization (EMO).”

The EMO is turning the dismantling of education into the new “growth” industry. EMOs can run charter schools, offer teacher professional development and other services for “school improvement.”

"EMOs"? They sound like HMOs.

A public good is being destroyed for private gain. It MUST be stopped if our country is to survive.

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