One million people watched the birth of a baby to April the giraffe as her mate Oliver watched.
It was thrilling to see!
Scroll all the way to the bottom of the story for the full video.
Archives for the month of: April, 2017
You are not likely to hear anything more about DTS, which Trump used to mean DRAIN THE SWAMP. Remember when he used to complain about the lobbyists and moochers who filled the swamp of D.C. Politics?
He has filled an even bigger swamp with creatures from the depths.
“President Trump is populating the White House and federal agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who in many cases are helping to craft new policies for the same industries in which they recently earned a paycheck.
“The potential conflicts are arising across the executive branch, according to an analysis of recently released financial disclosures, lobbying records and interviews with current and former ethics officials by The New York Times in collaboration with ProPublica.
“In at least two cases, the appointments may have already led to violations of the administration’s own ethics rules. But evaluating if and when such violations have occurred has become almost impossible because the Trump administration is secretly issuing waivers to the rules.
“One such case involves Michael Catanzaro, who serves as the top White House energy adviser. Until late last year, he was working as a lobbyist for major industry clients such as Devon Energy of Oklahoma, an oil and gas company, and Talen Energy of Pennsylvania, a coal-burning electric utility, as they fought Obama-era environmental regulations, including the landmark Clean Power Plan. Now, he is handling some of the same matters on behalf of the federal government.
“Another case involves Chad Wolf, who spent the past several years lobbying to secure funding for the Transportation Security Administration to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new carry-on luggage screening device. He is now chief of staff at that agency — at the same time as the device is being tested and evaluated for possible purchase by agency staff.
“There are other examples. At the Labor Department, two officials joined the agency from the K Street lobbying corridor, leaving behind jobs where they fought some of the Obama administration’s signature labor rules, including a policy requiring financial advisers to act in a client’s best interest when providing retirement advice.
This revolving door of lobbyists and government officials is not new in Washington.
“Both parties make a habit of it.
“But the Trump administration is more vulnerable to conflicts than the prior administration, particularly after the president eliminated an ethics provision that prohibits lobbyists from joining agencies they lobbied in the prior two years. The White House also announced on Friday that it would keep its visitors’ logs secret, discontinuing the release of information on corporate executives, lobbyists and others who enter the complex, often to try to influence federal policy. The changes have drawn intense criticism from government ethics advocates across the city.
“Mr. Trump’s appointees are also far wealthier and have more complex financial holdings and private-sector ties than officials hired at the start of the Obama administration, according to an Office of Government Ethics analysis that the White House has made public.
“This creates a greater chance that they might have conflicts related to investments or former clients, which could force them to sell off assets, recuse themselves or seek a waiver.”
Dana Woldow of San Francisco was a fighter for healthy school lunches and a fighter against corporate for-profit schooling.
She died at home at age 65. Her three sons were graduates of the San Francisco public schools. She is credited for having gotten the junk food out of school menus and having led the battle against Edison schools in California. She also fought to remove the stigma from children who received free lunches.
“Soda, potato chips, snack cakes, ice cream, french fries,” she liked to say, rattling off the old snack bar menu at the San Francisco middle school her children attended. “Garbage!”
To learn more about Dana and her crusade for healthy meals in schools, read this tribute to her.
I wish I had met her. I know there are many heroes out there, fighting for the well-being of children, families and communities. Dana was one of them. I am adding her posthumously to the honor roll of the blog.
Indiana legislators intend to introduce virtual pre-K as part of their expansion of preschool for the state. It is no doubt a way to save money for the state, just plopping babies in front of a computer, supervised by a parent, and calling it “pre-school.” Would they do it to their own children? Peter Greene wrote about this UPSTART program here.
The news report says, in all seriousness:
“It’s really attractive because it involves the parent specifically in providing the program for the kid and many times the issue with children who are not ready for school is unengaged parents,” Senator Luke Kenely, R-Noblesville, said. “This really engages the whole family. I just believe it’s a much more wholesome approach that will have a better lasting effect.”
The UPSTART online curriculum calls for parents to spend 15 minutes a day with their child five days a week. The program started in Utah and lawmakers hope to bring it to Indiana to reach low-income families in rural counties that might not have access to pre-K education otherwise.
“I think it will be a huge benefit for about 60 counties in the State of Indiana that they have never had that chance before,” Senator Kenley, who serves as the Senate Appropriations Chairman, said.
Lawmakers are planning to allocate $1 million toward the program in its first year. Senator Kenley said the average cost per student is about $1,400 and the program could serve about 700 Hoosiers in its first year.
Peter Greene describes the program, which will be adopted in Utah and probably Indiana, and says:
Pre-K can be done in so many beneficial ways, but none of those ways are focused on academic achievement. What four year olds need to do is play, play slightly organized games, play unorganized games, play by themselves, play with others, and also play. If they feel inclined to explore reading or math or science or art or whatever, that should be encouraged. But enforced or required. No, no, no, and also no.
Supporters will say, “Lighten up– we’re only talking about fifteen minutes a day, five days a week.” And I agree that beats some Pre-K classroom where students are expected to sit and study academic subjects for hours, just as being hit in the face with a hammer is better than being assaulted in the chest with a jackhammer.
But UPSTART also gives tiny humans an early close connection with a screen, introduces them to the idea of learning as a chore that must be done to someone else’s satisfaction, and gets the whole family acclimated to being data mined. It’s a sweetheart deal of the Utah-based Waterford company which makes out well whenever it can get legislators to purchase its product in bulk. Is this good use of Indiana taxpayer dollars? I doubt it. If I were an Indiana voter and taxpayer, I think I’d seriously question the aims of any Pre-K program, and I think I’d want my tiny humans to be interacting with real live humans, not software.
The Los Angeles organization Great Public Schools Now has awarded grants of $750,000 to two successful public schools to replicate themselves in new schools. This corporate-funded entity wants to demonstrate that it favors “all” successful schools, not just charter schools. Alex Caputo-Pearl correctly called them out for “bait-and-switch.”
The assumption behind the grants is the same as the charter school theory: Some schools have a secret sauce and “high-quality seats” and they should be replicated.
Soon there will be chains derived from these two schools. This is truly the factory model of schooling, a product that can be built, replicated and brought to scale.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Sara Stevenson, librarian at the O. Henry Middle School in Texas, signed up to testify at 8 am in opposition to the Senate bill authorizing vouchers. She says she was the fifth person to sign up. She went to work and returned at 2 pm and waited until 8 pm to be called. She wrote an opinion piece in the Austin American-Statesman about the hearing. She maintained that people were called at random and it didn’t matter when she signed up.
Sara is already on the honor roll of the blog. She is a living example of the power of resistance, relentlessness, and readiness. The new Three Rs.
Politifact reviewed her claim and concluded that she was right.
The Texas State Senate loves vouchers, but the House of Representatives does not. The bill passed the Senate and went down to crushing defeat in the House.
From a reading of the Politifact report, it appears that the order was not very random. In fact, the order suggests that pro-voucher witnesses were called first, and that pro-voucher witnesses had a better chance to testify than those who opposed vouchers.
The lead witnesses, we found, included advocates such as a former Wisconsin gubernatorial aide and delegates from the conservative Heritage Foundation and Charles Koch and Goldwater institutes. Also, all but one of eight initial witnesses backed SB 3; Donna Corbin of Lubbock, president of the Texas Classroom Teachers Association, expressed opposition.
And how did Corbin land that spotlight? By phone, the association’s Lonnie Hollingsworth said Corbin wasn’t an invited expert. Rather, he said, the association had alerted a committee clerk that Corbin had to catch a flight.
Back to the video: In eight-plus hours of testimony after senators returned from a midday recess, people were called to testify mostly in groups of four.
And by our count, before Stevenson was called to speak, followed by 25-plus others, the people who testified included 45 individuals speaking in support of Taylor’s measure, 29 opposed and a few speaking “on” his proposal.
All told, according to the committee’s alphabetized list of individuals who testified, 67 witnesses ended up speaking in favor of SB 3, 40 expressed opposition and 12 testified without registering a position. In contrast, among 154 people who registered a position without testifying, 38 were in favor, 110 were against and six took no position, the list indicates.
An Ohio legislator has proposed lifting the income cap for private school vouchers, so that 74% of all families in Ohio would be eligible to use a voucher to attend a religious or private school.
The cost estimates of this proposal range from $70 million to $1.2 billion (if every eligible student were to use a voucher). The assumption–or hope–is that not every eligible student would use a voucher because there are not enough seats available in nonpublic schools. Presumably there would be an explosion of new private schools to take advantage of the money.
This is money that would be transferred from public schools to nonpublic schools. The public schools would essentially be defunded to favor religious and private schools.
The irony in this enthusiasm for vouchers in Ohio is that the voucher-friendly conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently released a study showing that students in Ohio who take vouchers to enroll in nonpublic schools actually lost ground academically as compared to their peers in public schools.
Does anyone in the Ohio legislature look at evidence?
Does Ohio want to destroy its future?
ProPublica, which just won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigative reporting, writes here that Betsy DeVos’ choice to lead the crucial Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education has a curious history for someone in that role. Jackson will run the agency on an acting basis until an Assistant Secretary is chosen. She will eventually be a Deputy Assistant Secretary, which does not require Senate confirmation. Based on her writings, ProPublica describes her as anti-feminist and anti-affirmative action. It is not clear what her definition of civil rights is, and whether they deserve protection.
As an undergraduate studying calculus at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, Candice Jackson “gravitated” toward a section of the class that provided students with extra help on challenging problems, she wrote in a student publication. Then she learned that the section was reserved for minority students.
“I am especially disappointed that the University encourages these and other discriminatory programs,” she wrote in the Stanford Review. “We need to allow each person to define his or her own achievements instead of assuming competence or incompetence based on race.”
Although her limited background in civil rights law makes it difficult to infer her positions on specific issues, Jackson’s writings during and after college suggest she’s likely to steer one of the Education Department’s most important — and controversial — branches in a different direction than her predecessors. A longtime anti-Clinton activist and an outspoken conservative-turned-libertarian, she has denounced feminism and race-based preferences. She’s also written favorably about, and helped edit a book by, an economist who decried both compulsory education and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Jackson’s inexperience, along with speculation that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will roll back civil rights enforcement, lead some observers to wonder whether Jackson, like several other Trump administration appointees, lacks sympathy for the traditional mission of the office she’s been chosen to lead.
Her appointment “doesn’t leave me with a feeling of confidence with where the administration might be going,” said Theodore Shaw, director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law, who led Barack Obama’s transition team for civil rights at the Department of Justice.
“I hope that she’s not going to be an adversary to the civil rights community and I hope that the administration is going to enforce civil rights laws and represent the best interests of those who are affected by civil rights issues.”
On Wednesday, DeVos formally announced Jackson’s position as deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights, a role that does not require Senate confirmation. The 39-year-old attorney will act as assistant secretary in charge of the office until that position is filled. DeVos has not yet selected a nominee, who would have to receive Senate confirmation. As acting head, Jackson is in charge of about 550 full-time department staffers, who are responsible for investigating thousands of civil rights complaints each year.
I kept going back to this tweet because it is surreal.
It is a teacher job fair at the University of Michigan.
The tables are around the room, staffed and ready to hand out fliers to prospective teachers.
But the hall is empty.
There are no prospective teachers.
Thanks, No Child Left Behind.
Thanks, Race to the Top.
Thanks, inventors and promoters of VAM.
Thanks, teacher-bashers.
Who will teach?
Oh, right. Computers.
Thanks to Jennifer Berkshire for tweeting out this article.
Rahm’s big idea about requiring that high school students have a college acceptance or a military enrollment or a specific job or they can’t graduate was not his own. It was suggested to him by…..guess…three guesses….one guess: Arne.
Between the two of them, they have had charge of the Chicago Public Schools for 16 years. How, exactly, have they reformed the schools and made them better for students? Other than closing public schools (Rahm did that to 50 in a single day, which ought to be the first line in his Wikipedia entry) and Arne was first to close public schools for turnarounds (some of his original turnarounds have also been closed), what has changed for most students?
Diane Ravitch's blog 