Celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week!

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1. homelesseducator says:

   May 8, 2018 at 4:44 am

   I think this is a first, Diane! I can’t recall there ever being no posts in response to a topic you raised here, let alone one specifically regarding teachers –AND the day after you posted it.

   So I’ll bite. I regret that I’m too cash strapped to send a monetary gift, though. I’d like to take the opportunity to celebrate teachers anyways. I was looking at quotes today, so I could send one to a current teacher of mine who I adore and, though I’m not including the one I sent to him, I found a lot that I like, such as this:

   “Discover wildlife: be a teacher!” ~Author unknown

   and this:

   “Summer vacation is the time when parents realize that teachers are grossly underpaid.” ~Author unknown

   as well as this:

   “When all else fails, pray for a fire drill.” ~Author unknown

   But seriously, I know you don’t think of yourself as a teacher, Diane, yet over the years, I have enjoyed learning so much from you, so this one is in honor of you:

   “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” Albert Einstein

   Thanks so much for awakening so much joy in me! (I truly love my work!!)

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   • dianeravitch says:

     May 8, 2018 at 8:01 am

     Thank you, HE.
     My wish for you is that you have a home and Security.
     Thanks for being part of my living room, which doubles as a classroom.

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     • homelesseducator says:

       May 8, 2018 at 6:37 pm

       Thanks so much, Diane!

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2. homelesseducator says:

   May 8, 2018 at 5:25 am

   BTW, I didn’t realize that it was Horace Mann who let politicians off the hook for ameliorating poverty when he said this: “Education…beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men –the balance wheel of the social machinery…It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.”

   If that was true, I don’t think that I would know so many Early Childhood Educators today who, like me, have long struggled with poverty despite all our degrees. I suppose Mann was talking about public education though and, since PreK and K are not compulsory in most locations, that happened to us because our strengths are working with little ones, so we were employed for a long time in private Preschool & Kindergarten programs, which are typically not unionized and pay very low wages. So now our SS checks are unlivable, we can’t really retire and, in order to survive, we still have to work –though most of us are not teaching young children anymore. (I teach college, where there are similar wage issues for the educated. But I still feel very fortunate because I’ve had a long intrinsically rewarding career in education!)

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   • dianeravitch says:

     May 8, 2018 at 7:35 am

     Mann lived in a different time and was trying to persuade businessmen to pay taxes for public schools.

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   • Charles says:

     May 8, 2018 at 8:50 am

     Politicians must take the lion’s share for the poverty in this nation. President Johnson declared “war” on poverty in 1965. $20 Trillion dollars and all these year later, there are more people living in poverty, than before the “war” was declared. ~78% of black children are born to unmarried females. Government policies, like the minimum wage, make unemployment for lower-end workers impossible. Pathetic inner-city schools, do not prepared poor children for college nor careers. see

     https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-war-on-poverty-turns-50-why-arent-we-winning/282832/

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     • dianeravitch says:

       May 8, 2018 at 8:56 am

       LBJ was right to start a war on poverty. Nothing degrades our country more than the shameful disparity in income and wealth that cripple the lives of millions of people. You forget, Charles, that after LBJ came Nixon, Reagan, and two Bush presidencies. Don’t blame LBJ for persistent poverty. Blame the trillions wasted on useless wars. We have to stop throwing money at the war machine and invest in the future of our society instead. LBJ’s tragedy was that the War on Poverty was replaced by the useless War in Vietnam. As reader Michael Fiorilli wrote a couple of days ago, we should stop throwing money at the Defense Department.

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     • dianeravitch says:

       May 8, 2018 at 9:26 am

       Charles,

       For future information, I don’t post links to the Heritage Foundation or ALEC, and we don’t acknowledge “national charter school week” on this blog.

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     • Charles says:

       May 8, 2018 at 9:31 am

       Fair enough. The fact is that the USA has spent about triple the amount on poverty programs in the last 50 years, than we have spent on all of our wars combined. (in constant 2012 dollars). The war on poverty is lost.

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     • dianeravitch says:

       May 8, 2018 at 1:00 pm

       I guess that every European nation must be much smarter than we are. They do not have our high poverty rates. How come they solved the problem and we can’t?

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     • Charles says:

       May 8, 2018 at 9:57 am

       The war on poverty was started with the best of intentions. The expansion of the program continued under Republican administrations, no doubt. There is enough blame to go around for all of the responsible individuals. LBJ stated, that he wanted to transform poor people. Q He declared, “We want to give the forgotten fifth of our people opportunity not doles.”[18] He claimed that his war would enable the nation to make “important reductions” in future welfare spending: The goal of the War on Poverty, he stated, would be “making taxpayers out of taxeaters.” END Q

       We all know where the road that is paved with good intentions leads.

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     • dianeravitch says:

       May 8, 2018 at 10:01 am

       LBJ saved us from becoming a third world nation. If only he had not jumped into the War in Vietnam, the war on poverty might have had a chance. Instead we embarked on endless wars and devoting trillions to killing.

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     • Charles says:

       May 8, 2018 at 2:42 pm

       Check out this article. We start out ahead, and wind up behind. Our poverty programs actually exacerbate poverty. With the AFDC program, women are dis-incentivized to marry. Single women earn less, and are more likely to wind up on welfare. This starts a vicious cycle.

       Q The War on Poverty crippled marriage in low-income communities. As means-tested benefits were expanded, welfare began to serve as a substitute for a husband in the home, eroding marriage among lower-income Americans. In addition, the welfare system actively penalized low-income couples who did marry by eliminating or substantially reducing benefits. As husbands left the home, the need for more welfare to support single mothers increased. The War on Poverty created a destructive feedback loop: Welfare promoted the decline of marriage, which generated the need for more welfare.

       Today, unwed childbearing and the resulting growth of single-parent homes is the most important cause of official child poverty END Q

       see

       http://www.slate.com/business/2018/05/the-unemployment-rate-is-historically-low-and-meaningless.html

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     • homelesseducator says:

       May 8, 2018 at 7:25 pm

       Thank you, Diane! Makes a lot of sense.

       Just so you know, the link Charles provided that supposedly goes to Slate is deceptive. It ends up being a bogus 404 page at Slate, not an article there, and a search of his last quote resulted in evidence that it came directly from an article at the Heritage Foundation website. So it looks like he tried to circumvent your rule and posted Heritage Foundation’s right-wing propaganda here anyways.(The nonsense about minimum wage is fake news, too.)

       And when are RWNJs going to wake up to the fact that welfare was dramatically reformed under Bill Clinton, so for decades now, to get cash assistance, which is called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), people have to work or attend a job training program, there’s a 5 year lifetime limit and it’s only for families with dependent kids living at home..

       I know a lot of homeless people who have no family (including me) and who would have probably been able to stay in our apartments if we had qualified for TANF, for at least the five years so we could get back on our feet, but we couldn’t get it due to strict enforcement of those rules. (At the time, I had been working two jobs but my first job was at a school that closed.) Even though we are all retired seniors who still work, we don’t qualify for TANF because we have no minor dependents at home. Personally, I’m glad that children are a priority. I do wish though that politicians would recognize that struggling seniors have no safety net and, despite our declining health, it looks like we have to keep working until the day that we die.

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     • dianeravitch says:

       May 8, 2018 at 10:09 pm

       I censor the comments that I know have fake sources but I can’t catch them all.

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     • homelesseducator says:

       May 9, 2018 at 3:06 am

       I think you were intentionally deceived…

       The Atlantic article seems off base to me, too, due to assumptions made that, in these times, people take part time jobs only because they don’t want to work full time. I’ve heard reports stating this, too, but nothing could be further from the truth for people like my colleagues and me, who struggled for years to find full time jobs but were only offered work as part timers and, even worse, as independent contractors.

       It suddenly became the rage to hire people as independent contractors because that enabled employers to circumvent taxes and labor laws and to provide no benefits. So, between 2006 and 2012, when I got my current job (as a genuine employee), I was offered three jobs in a row and they were all working for schools as an independent contractor. I took them to pay the rent because I had no other choices. I worked in those positions for 3 years, 4 years and 8 years respectively. Except for complaints filed by people hired like this that were made to me personally by IT and triple A workers, as well as public complaints filed by workers at Uber and Federal Express, I’ve heard nothing about how this has been going on elsewhere, such as at schools. For me, it included working an 8:30 to 3:30 job in schools for my public school district (including summer school) and at two private non-profit colleges, one of which hired ALL faculty as independent contractors (they referred to us as their “1099 employees”). You’d think IRS would have noticed something hinky was going on there! Maybe it hasn’t become common knowledge, but I think it really should have been. (I don’t know if it’s still going on because I’m disabled and my health has deteriorated, so I’m glad to have just my current job now.)

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     • Charles says:

       May 9, 2018 at 8:57 am

       This link works OK for me. (I had to hit it a couple of times) :

       https://slate.com/business/2018/05/the-unemployment-rate-is-historically-low-and-meaningless.html

       Try getting it through google.

       (NO attempt at deception, this is really a good article!)

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     • homelesseducator says:

       May 9, 2018 at 4:16 pm

       The Slate link may be working now but the quote provided comes straight from the Heritage Foundation and it’s not included in the Slate article –neither of which was mentioned– so it’s still deceptive and appears to be intentional.

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     • dianeravitch says:

       May 9, 2018 at 4:34 pm

       I think that happened because I warned Charles that I would not post anything that came straight from the Heritage Foundation, which is not a reputable source. So he copied the quote and inserted it as his own.

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3. Charles says:

   May 8, 2018 at 9:39 am

   Off-topic, but I think it’s important. New tech-savvy librarians are leading the way, to assisting students and teachers in the tech revolution. see this amazing article:

   https://www.eschoolnews.com/2018/05/07/the-new-librarian-how-to-lead-a-tech-integration-revolution/

   “Technucation” is the wave of the present!

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   • Charles says:

     May 8, 2018 at 10:01 am

     If any of the readers here , know of a child who needs a home computer, and their family cannot afford one, please contact:

     http://www.laptopsforkidz.com

     The organization gets re-conditioned computers to families, who cannot afford them. Please check it out.

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