Will Wikipedia Replace Your Kid's Teacher?, The “Blue Screen Of Death” For Education Options Rating

[Jon Awbrey]

Lawrence Davidson • “Taking on the Teachers” • Truthout (23 Mar 2011)

Consortium News Editor’s Note: The American Right has fully embraced Ronald Reagan’s mantra that “government is the problem” — and that dogma is being applied in a wide variety of ways, including a nationwide assault on the pay and job security of public school teachers.

Republican-controlled state legislatures and Republican governors are in the forefront of this campaign, advancing under the cover of parents’ concerns about their kids' schooling and behind the idea that standardized tests can be a cure-all. In this guest essay, Lawrence Davidson challenges the assumptions behind this effort …

[Jon Awbrey]

Sorry I don't have time to connect all the dots and coms for you right now — a whole lot of things are happening way too fast in the real world — but just by way of an exercise for the reader, you might try asking yourself what's the connection between ALEC and that other smart alec, Jeb Bush, mentioned in passing by HK at the head of this thread.

e-dios …

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

You can get anything you want at ALEC's Restaurant …

I'll post some links on ALEC here.

I'll try to keep this thread focused on education, but I'm rushed for time right now so I may be posting mass quantities of random surf that I'll have to sort out later.

The ALEC site itself has been off and on quite a bit lately. They are just now getting a lot more national attention and they may be oversighting and whitewashing a bunch of the more incriminating stuff. Moreover, I'm not sure I trust exposing my IP addresses overmuch to these folks. So I'll post a lot of Internet Archive links to their pages.

21 May 2009 • ALEC • Model Legislation • Education

Current Page • ALEC • Model Legislation • Education

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

Readin'™, Ritin'™, and Hangin' Chads™ …

Those who can, teach …
Those who can't, legislate …

Oh, oh, oh, see Jeb run …

ALEC's Report Card on American Education

Report Card on American Education:
Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform

by Dr. Matthew Ladner, Andrew T. LeFevre, and Dan Lips

Press Release: State Education Ranking Shows Vermont #1, South Carolina Last

ALEC’s 16th edition of the Report Card on American Education contains a comprehensive overview of educational achievement levels (performance and gains for low-income students) for the 50 states and the District of Columbia (see full report for complete methodology). The Report Card details what education policies states currently have in place and provides a roadmap for legislators to follow to bring about educational excellence in their state.

With its foreword written by the former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, this completely revised Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform examines the reforms enacted under his tenure and how Florida has risen from consistently earning near-bottom scores to ranking third in the country.

[Jon Awbrey]

Stan Karp • “Who’s Bashing Teachers and Public Schools and What Can We Do About It?”

[Jon Awbrey]

Detroit Free Press • Request for Professors' E-mails on Labor Strife Sparks Outrage

[Jon Awbrey]

Duh Foocher Of Eddication

The Education Industry really needs to be completely privateered on a modren corporate business model. Teachers should be working out of stalls in the malls like optometrists and ear-piercers. Todays plugged-in students can easily learn everything they need to know about being e-gaged citizens and productive worker bees while slurping red-dyed Slurpees™ in the inter-missions between hanging out (of their pants) at the Arcade and chirping with their Bird-Brain-Buds on Twitter™. Yeah, that's the Ticket, Master™.

— Jonny Cache • Facebook Note

April Fool !!! (Except for R.I.P.ublican Voters, who are Fools Every Day)

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

Relevant Research —

National Education Policy Center

• Gates Report Touting ‘Value-Added’ Reached Wrong Conclusion

Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice

[Jon Awbrey]

Washington Post • “What Jeb Bush Doesn’t Like To Admit”

[Jon Awbrey]

Mike Klonsky • The Gates Foundation and the Future of US “Public” Schools

[Jon Awbrey]

The Nation • Teachers Aren't the Enemy

[Jon Awbrey]

The Nation • Teachers Aren't the Enemy

If these Corporate Education Privateers spent just half the money they spend trying to bust teachers' rights to collective bargaining on actually fixing the real problems — well, who am I kidding? — that would involve talking to teachers and other people who actually know anything about the realities.

— Jon Awbrey (22 Apr 2011 @ 12:40pm)

[Jon Awbrey]

Universal Free Public Education

The principle of Universal Free Public Education is fundamental to the proper functioning of our democracy, as the Founders of our Nation well understood. Provisions for charter schools have long been in place, and there is no problem with that in principle, but it becomes a problem when charter schools are used to undermine the right to Universal Free Public Education. Parochial, pay, and private schools do not operate on that principle and they should not be subsidized by public funds.

[Selina]

It is an interest thought to consider how our brains are evolving around these unnatural objects and what happens when we are unplugged.

Well, speaking as one of the new generation n all that, I honestly think teachers and parents are pretty much the only chance for good rolemodels now.............

Most people growing up don't have contact with other adults who do genuinely good stuff in their day-to-day life, and people like police, emergency services, doctors, medical scientists/neurosurgeons, etc etc get barely any media coverage as individual people because, well, good people doing good things every day is not exciting and a novelty enough, so.... people with money and power are what get the attention, however they 'earned' (especially in the case of most celebrities) it.

A lot of fictional characters are better rolemodels than ones on television lol, I try to avoid watching it except for the occasional thing on iPlayer - and of course, no ads there, it's kind of surreal when friends make jokes/references based on advertisements, makes me feel kinda like I'm living in the set of 1984 but with companies running the world instead of governments.

[Jon Awbrey]

It is an interesting thought to consider how our brains are evolving around these unnatural objects and what happens when we are unplugged.

Well, speaking as one of the new generation n all that, I honestly think teachers and parents are pretty much the only chance for good rolemodels now …………

Most people growing up don't have contact with other adults who do genuinely good stuff in their day-to-day life, and people like police, emergency services, doctors, medical scientists/neurosurgeons, etc etc get barely any media coverage as individual people because, well, good people doing good things every day is not exciting and a novelty enough, so …… people with money and power are what get the attention, however they 'earned' (especially in the case of most celebrities) it.

A lot of fictional characters are better rolemodels than ones on television lol, I try to avoid watching it except for the occasional thing on iPlayer — and of course, no ads there, it's kind of surreal when friends make jokes/references based on advertisements, makes me feel kinda like I'm living in the set of 1984 but with companies running the world instead of governments.

So you noticed. Well, it's not happening by accident or evolution, at least not in the US, and, from what I've sampled on the Uncut pages for other countries, not there either. There is a concerted, organized, obscenely well-funded blitzkrieg in progress to replace our barely democratic governments with totalitarian corporate rule.

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

Diane Ravitch • The Outrage of the Week

What I think from reading the comments is that many people get it, the same caring, hard-working, and wise people who have always gotten it. But let's face it — $$$ for the sake of making more $$$ speaks far louder in the U.S. today than all the caring, hard work, and wisdom put together. You are talking to people who just don't care, who simply laugh out their asses at the sorts of saps who would actually spend their evenings grading papers and preparing lesson plans instead of working their portfolios on e*trade™. Wake up and smell the TEA, you will have to strike early, strike often, and strike nationwide. You are going to have to throw a Corporate Armada full of money-grubbing privateers out of your schools while you still have a profession left to call your own. That's what I think.

— Jon Awbrey • 3 May 2011

[Jon Awbrey]

Diane Ravitch • The Outrage of the Week

Richard DeVos' family “made” their millions as founders of Amway (some have called Amway a Ponzi scheme, but we can just call it a “multi-tiered” scheme). His brother-in-law is Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater (now called Xe).

See related story ► Blackwater In-Law DeVos Outlines “Stealth” Plot Against Public Education

[Jon Awbrey]

Daily Kos • Kenneth J. Bernstein • The United Gates of America

[Jon Awbrey]

If The People Rule, The People Must Be Wise

Education is not a privilege. Education is a duty and a right. At least, that's the way it must be in a democracy, if that democracy is to succeed, if that democracy is to remain a democracy. Those are the lessons that my teachers taught me in school so long ago. I cannot say why others have failed to learn those lessons, or maybe they just forgot them, but I know that I learned them and I know that I will not forgot them.

Thinking that education is a privilege for the privileged — I know where that sad idea came from — it came from the Old World that we fought to form this New Republic. I do not know what spells have raised that old ghost from the grave of history, but I think it's time to call it “Riddikulus!”

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Thinking that education is a privilege for the privileged — I know where that sad idea came from — it came from the Old World that we fought to form this New Republic. I do not know what spells have raised that old ghost from the grave of history, but I think it's time to call it “Riddikulus!”