Mitzi was rescued from a kill shelter.
Archives for the month of: April, 2013
I don’t know how to import photos to the blog. Maybe someone will tell me how. So I took her picture, emailed it to Twitter, and copied the link.
Here is Mitzi, the new member of the family. http://t.co/5iGB0oJEUh—
Diane Ravitch (@DianeRavitch) April 05, 2013
What happens in Louisiana is definitely different from what happens anywhere else.
It is not Louisiana culture, which is definitely unique. It seems to be something about John White, who is not a native. With the support of Governor Jindal and the state board of education controlled by Jindal, John White answers to no one.
When there are no checks or balances, as we have learned again and again, strange things happen.
Read here about the deputy who came and went in five months. I hope we learn more about the back story.
A group of Republican legislators in North Carolina decided against introducing legislation that would allow the state and its counties to establish an official religion.
They planned to argue that the Constitution prevents Congress from establishing a religion, but not states or counties.
There was enough outcry to persuade them to hold off.
Yesterday I participated in the first day of Occupy the DOE, where parents and teachers spoke out against DOE policies that demand high-stakes testing and school closings. In my own presentation, I urged the DOE to stop its punitive policies and instead to follow the positive agenda of the Network for Public Education.
According to an account I read later, an earlier speaker used offensive language, calling Michelle Rhee an “Asian bitch.”
I was not there to hear it, but I was appalled when I read about it here.
I want to make clear that this kind of language is unacceptable and intolerable. No one should resort to racial, ethnic, gender, or cultural slurs to express their views. It is just plain wrong.
I don’t use that kind of language, and I encourage others to have a high personal standard of civility.
We must be able disagree about ideas and policies without getting personal.
Anthony Cody read Bill Gates’ article in the Washington Post, in which he said it is time to reduce the emphasis on high-stakes testing.
Anthony wondered if Gates means it.
Anthony writes:
“No one in America has done more to promote the raising of stakes for test scores in education than Bill Gates….You can read his words…, but his actions have spoken so much more loudly, that I cannot even make sense out of what he is attempting to say now. So let’s focus first on what Bill Gates has wrought.”
Anthony documents the destructive programs that Gates has funded (read the list, and it is only the tip of the iceberg), and he concludes:
“This amounts to an attempt to distance the Gates Foundation from the asinine consequences of the policies they have sponsored, while accepting no responsibility for them whatsoever.
“This is a non-starter, as far as I am concerned.”
Believe it or not, the Chicago Tribune published one of the best articles I have read about the disaster that is called education “reform,” but in fact is education destruction.
I say, believe it or not, because the Tribune has been one of the nation’s loudest cheerleaders for the policies that this column decries.
Robert C. Koehler is a syndicated columnist, not an education specialist, but he sees clearly the damage that the education destruction movement–NCLB and Race to the Top–is doing to students and our society.
His column is titled “The Warping of Public Education.”
He writes:
“…high-stakes testing, in tandem with “zero tolerance,” militarized security and sadistic underfunding, has succeeded in warping public education beyond recognition, especially in low-income, zero-political-clout neighborhoods. And the result is kids in prison, kids on the streets, kids with no future.”
And he concludes:
“The time has come to declare an end to this entire era — of militarized racism, violent solutions to everything, the ever-widening schism between “us” and “them.” Any politician who kowtows to this simplistic agenda, or “bargains” with it, has made himself or herself irrelevant to a sustainable and healthy future, and should be declared thus.
“We have to undo the damage that has turned public education into a crisis. That means dumping the pretend science of high-stakes testing and valuing rather than criminalizing students of color; it also means moving from punishment- to healing-based systems of maintaining order, taking police and armed security guards out of the hallways and learning to value and respect young people more than we value metal detectors and surveillance cameras.
“Before we can do anything else, we have to get our future out of the pipeline.”
This smart blogger read all the investigators’ reports from the Atlanta cheating scandal.
He or she realized that Atlanta was doing everything that reformers say is important.
The educators there were focusing on test scores above all else.
The teachers who got higher scores got bonuses and those who did not, got humiliated.
Incentivizing the workforce, yes?
The teachers had no tenure, so whistleblowers had no job protection and were easily fired.
The blogger writes: “So what rank-and-yank, cash incentives, all that leadership, and high expectations got Atlanta public school children was test scores so gamed that the schools lost Title One program improvement money, and children who needed special education services were disqualified from them because of their remarkable testing prowess.”
Atlanta is a textbook case of the corporate reform approach to education. What makes it different from other districts following the corporate reform textbook is that the governor sent in professional investigators.
Back in the early 1990s, when the charter school idea first began to spread, there was a simple way of explaining the concept. The charter schools would be accountable for results. If they didn’t get the results, they would close. Period. The deal was called “accountability in exchange for results.” Advocates said it was impossible to close a public school that didn’t get results, but it would be easy to close a charter school.
This is not the way things are working out.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently announced the closing of 54 public schools in Chicago. Mayor Bloomberg has closed well over 100 public schools. Parents, students, and teachers have objected loudly, but they are routinely ignored.
As Karen Francisco reports in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, it is not easy to close charter schools. One authorizer realizes they are failing to deliver results and withdraws sponsorship, and the charter schools goes shopping and finds another sponsor. These, she says, are “zombie schools.” They are failing but they will not die. They refuse accountability, but some other sponsor picks them up.
It turns out to be easy to close public schools; the mayors don’t care what poor black and Hispanic parents say. But it is hard to close charter schools because they have powerful political friends and campaign contributors.
Thomas Jefferson famously said in a letter to John Adams in 1815, “I cannot live without books.” (Ever the worker bee, he added, “but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.”)
Neither can I. Yes, yes, I know we are supposed to read everything online, download books, and so forth, but I have a problem with that. When I use my Kindle, I turn the page and find that I have turned 40 or 80 pages, and I can’t get back to the place I left off.
But it’s more than the bother of learning a new technology that is a problem for me.
I like the feel of books in my hands. I like to mark the books I own. I underline phrases and sentences. I put asterisks next to wonderful lines. I handle my books. I like to touch them.
I like to buy new books, old books, rare books.
But there is something else I realize that I cannot live without, and that’s a dog.
I always had dogs, and for about ten years I had two dogs. I loved having two of them, walking them together on the streets of New York City. One was a Tibetan Terrier and the other was a cocker spaniel. They were both blondes. People used to ask me if they were sisters, and I would say, “Yes, but they had different parents.”
Molly, the Tibetan, died in 2010, after a long and terrible bout with lymphoma. Lady, the cocker spaniel, died in 2011 after three years of diabetes.
I thought I would not get another dog and would try to be happy with a cat. The cat is lively, and I never have to walk him. When it rains or snows or gets bitter cold, I am glad to stay indoors.
But guess what? I have a new puppy. She is a huge mutt, a mix of Newfoundland, Lab, Akita, and a few other breeds as well.
My family thought I was spending too many hours at the computer, and they conspired to make me get out.
The answer: a dog. She makes me get out and walk. A lot..
The new girl is all black with white paws. Her name is Mitzi, short for Mittens, because her paws have mittens.
She has a thick, almost waterproof coat. She is big and growing. She will one day be 60-70 pounds, maybe more.
I never had such a big dog.
The dog and the cat play together constantly, never hurting one another.
If the dog gets too rough, the cat jumps to a higher plane.
Mitzi has a gentle and calm disposition. At the moment, her job is to chew.
She chews bones and hooves and anything else that catches her eye, such as my arm and wrist.
As I said, I cannot live without books, and I cannot live without a dog.
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