My website is dianeravitch.com. I write about two interconnected topics: education and democracy. I am a historian of education.
Diane Ravitch’s Blog by Diane Ravitch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at dianeravitch.net.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good morning! Our district is pushing professional learning communities/common assessments as solutions for all of our so-called educational woes. I’m wondering what information is available regarding PLC’s and the parent company of our version, Learning Tree (I believe).
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I want to correct my earlier comment…the parent company of our proposed professional learning community program/mandate is Solution Tree, not Learning Tree. Any information you can give me is appreciated. Thank you!
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The great PLC guru Rick DuFour publishes with Solution Tree Press. The third edition of “Learning by Doing: Professional Learning Communities that Work,” 2016, is excellent on the steps to take to create effective, productive learning communities, collaborating well, not “coblabborating,” as DuFour terms it. I use this PLC guide book in my online courses on developing PLC’s. Teachers love it. Your district is smart to have faculty focus on PLC work and common assessments. Of course this work should center on the national standards for best learning. Kayscheidler@hotmail.com
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Is anyone listening to the podcast “Sold a Story?” (about the teaching of reading and what’s “gone wrong.”)
I’m not done with all the episodes but I would be interested in hearing feedback from others.
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I just listened to the first one. My school district is very heavy on phonics. We. still have many struggling readers. We have a Harcourt reading series.Buffalo Public Schools.
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If was my experience for thirty years as a public school teacher and also all the studies I’ve read that repeat that most children living in poverty that are behind in their grade reading level will stay behind unless they also read 30 minutes or more at home every day, seven days a week. Reading at school during school hours usually doesn’t do it.
This is what worked for me as a child growing up in a family living in poverty. My mother was told when I was seven that I would never learn to read or write. That would have been true but my mother decided to teach me at home and asked my first grade teacher, my second year in first grade, what she could do and my mother followed through, but a bit tougher than the teacher suggested.
Most parents living in poverty do not do what my mother did. One mother of several thousand students I taught over a 30 year career as a public school teacher followed my advice (the same thing my mother did) and her daughter caught up closing a five year gap in one year. I lost count of the number of times I recommended parents do this at home. Only one listened.
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I find it hard to believe that NY teachers haven’t been teaching phonics for the past decades. Teachers aren’t that dumb to think direct instruction on phonics shouldn’t be taught. While there is diversity in instruction at every level (something the good literacy national Standards has tried to correct), primary grade teachers know enough to make sure children learn letter-sound connections and basic phonics. To state that NY teachers have blindly followed a phonics-free program is misleading, to say the least.
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Kay, you stated,
I find it hard to believe that NY teachers haven’t been teaching phonics for the past decades. Teachers aren’t that dumb to think direct instruction on phonics shouldn’t be taught. While there is diversity in instruction at every level (something the good literacy national Standards has tried to correct), primary grade teachers know enough to make sure children learn letter-sound connections and basic phonics. To state that NY teachers have blindly followed a phonics-free program is misleading, to say the least.
Kay, teachers have been teaching phonics but not via direct teaching. Information is not retained with direct teaching. Direct teaching refers to teachers telling students something and later quiz them on what he/she told them.
Before CC, New York had State Learning Standards which did not change the curriculum; it gave a new way of teaching. They build on prior knowledge and made learning fun, a component of John Dewey’s philosophy.
John Dewey, an American philosopher, educator, progressive thinker … maintained that when teaching, start with the child. The curriculum has to be tied to the child’s experiences. Informed teachers teach phonics through children’s experiences. Use a word from a child/children’s sentence to teach a phonetic element. Take words from a story the students are reading. Read a poem that the children like e.g.
My Cat
My cat rubs my leg
and starts to purr
with a soft little rumble,
a soft little whirr,
as if she had motors
inside of her.
I say, “Nice kitty”
and stroke her fur,
and though she can’t talk
and I can’t purr,
she understands me,
and I do her.
Aileen Fisher
Instead of just telling the students the sound of the murmur diphthong, have them highlight all the er, ir, ur words and then list them. They will remember the sound because of the interaction but not if just told to remember.
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“They will remember the sound because of the interaction but not if just told to remember.”
I disagree.
Some students will remember, but not all. Not all children learn the same way. Some are auditory learners. Some are visual. Some are tactile. Others kinesthetic. Deaf children certainly do not learn by the sound of a letter.
I am dyslexic and learning by sounds doesn’t work for me.And according the research, I’m not alone.
“Between 5% and 15% of Americans, which represents 14.5 to 43.5 million kids and adults, are dyslexic.”
“Phonics is the name for the process of matching letters to sounds. Kids with dyslexia have a hard time with phonics and need to learn it in a slow, structured way. A teacher can help kids move from simple patterns of letters and sounds to more complicated ones.”
https://childmind.org/article/how-to-teach-kids-with-dyslexia-to-read/#:~:text=Phonics%20is%20the%20name%20for,sounds%20to%20more%20complicated%20ones.
“Types of Learning Styles”
“These are the four main types of learning styles:”
“Visual (learn through seeing)
Auditory (learn through hearing)
Tactile (learn through touch)
Kinesthetic (learn through doing and moving)”
https://abilitypath.org/ap-resources/childrens-learning-styles/
When I was teaching, California required ever public school teacher to take approved classes, seminars or workshops annually to retain our teaching credentials. I still know younger teacher who are teaching and one friend told me he still has to meet those annual requirements.
It was from one of the approved workshops that I learned about the four main types of learning styles. I was interested in how the human brain works, how it learns, how it retains knowledge (memories). I was reading about those topics and looking for approved classes, workshops and seminars that focused on that.
That was back in the 1980s when I was still teaching at a middle school before transfering to the local high school in the same district in 1989. where I continued to structure my lessons around what I was learning.
After I learned about those four learning styles, I started planning all my lessons in the grade level english classes I taught (with students reading at all grade levels) so there were elements in every lesson that appeals to all four learning styles. With 34 or more students a class (most of the time I only taught five classes a day and sometimes six) and only one hour a day with each class, there was not enough time for one teacher to individualize instruction for each student that fit their needs, so I included all four learning styles in each lesson.
According to district administration that was monitoring the annual standardized test results that included essays, my students were scoring way above the district average at the same grade level (not reading level, grade level). The district matched those scores with their English teachers at each grade level and created a chart with numbers in place of the teacher’s names and the schools they were teaching at in that district.
My students, even students that did little or no work but only warmed a seat, still scored WAY higher than the average for all other students in that distract at that grade level. That district had three high schools and two middle schools plus more grade schools than the upper grades.
Then there is this fact: “Also, autistic children are often visual learners. This might be because visual information lasts longer and is more concrete than spoken and heard information. It might help autistic children to process information and choose how to respond. You can help your child learn by presenting information visually.”
“That’s more than 75,000,000 people, according to researched conducted by the CDC. 1 in every 100 children are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Around 1 in 44 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the U.S. according to the CDC.”
When we add the dyslexic and autistic children together, that’s a lot of children that are not going to learn easily from an auditory phonic method.
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Kay,
I don’t believe it either but I note that Joel Klein (Bloomberg’s chancellor for 10 years) mandated Balanced Literacy.
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So much evil emanating from the oil barons of Texas; using indigenous children as pawns is a new low, though.
In this landmark case, the Brackeens — the white, adoptive parents of a Diné child in Texas — seek to overturn ICWA by claiming reverse racism. Joined by co-defendants including the states of Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, and Indiana, they’re being represented pro bono by Gibson Dunn, a high-powered law firm which also counts oil companies Energy Transfer and Enbridge, responsible for the Dakota Access and Line 3 pipelines, among its clients. This lawsuit is the latest attempt by pro-fossil fuel forces to eliminate federal oversight of racist state policies, continue the centuries-long genocide of America’s Native populations, and make outrageous sums of money for energy magnates, gaming speculators, and fossil fuel lawyers. The story below may seem unbelievable, but it is 100 percent true.
https://lakotalaw.org/news/2021-09-17/icwa-sovereignty
The case is before SCOTUS now:
Reminds me that Betsy DeVos is connected to Christian evangelical adoption agencies who may have received custody of children stolen from their parents at our border.
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Most if not all Fundamentalist Evangelicals are Christians in name only, and they preach and practice the opposite of Jesus Christ’s teachings.
For sure, most if not all of them do not practice what Christ taught about this one:
“So, we all have probably heard of that Golden Rule of “treat others as you want to be treated.” Even Jesus commands us to do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. Matthew 6:12 is just one bible verse that basically tells us to treat others how you want to be treated.”
Most if not all of them also don’t practice all of the 10 Commandants with a focus on ignoring these:
You shall not covet.
Covet means to want something that belongs to someone else. A person who covets may be led to break all most all the other commandments.
Thou shall not bear false witness.
This means do not tell a lie. Do not tell stories that are untrue about people. When you tell a lie, you hurt yourself as well as others. Soon people will not trust what you say
Thou shalt not steal.
No one is permitted to take something that belongs to another. Not only is it God’s law but it is the basic law of the society we live in.
Thou shalt not kill. — God wants us to protect human life.
Thou shalt not commit adultery. — This means husbands and wives should be faithful to one another.
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Since the current conservative movement is so good at projection, perhaps they want to be treated badly…
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I suspect the extreme right MAGA RINO movement wants to be treated badly, like they’ve been doing for years to those they dislike, so they can capture it on digital, edit it to make what happened look worse, and then rage about it as they work up the anger to start a shooting civil war, mowing down children, seniors and anyone else they can shoot at that isn’t armed and ready to shoot back.
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I like your succint points and remarkable comebacks! I have attempted to call out the religious fundamentalist, as they often just shut down the conversation by calling me a socialist, elitist, e.t.c I think I will take your points if you don’t mind. I can’t think of any other way to reason with them.
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Feel free to borrow. But don’t expect most fundamentalist’s extremists to ever admit their thinking is wrong. Their thinking is a programmed mental illness.
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Lloyd Lofthouse, if there are Biblical dictates not to covet the goods of one’s neighbor and to not steal from them, that makes all of these people who claim to be religious and who vote democrat out to be hypocrites.
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Your ignorance is noted through your ignorant unsupported opinion.
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Thank heavens Betsy DeVos is history. Her only qualification for head of the US Dept. of Education was that she was a big trump contributor.
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I’m afraid Devos isn’t history. She’s just seeking other ways to screw others. She remains very active in the privatization grift. She might be more dangerous now.
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Isn’t DeVos a member of ALEC?
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DeVos and most big corporations fund ALEC
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The ever incisive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the mid term elections. Seems like the loss of the House could be attributed to Andrew Cuomo’s strong governor model, and the shutting out of progressives. As to new House leadership:
RG: And one of the key players in that kind of real estate/charter school/state party apparatus that you talked about is [House Democratic Caucus Chair] Hakeem Jeffries. Do you think that there ought to be a reckoning for what his role is in this? It looks like he’s going to make a bid for party leader if Pelosi steps down. What do you think the repercussions are of how New York played out for that?
AOC: Well, you know, I think what we should really do is — I think there are quite a few figures who really affirmed and really pushed this playbook. And it’s not even just this year. I think there has been a multiyear strategy to try — it’s essentially been a campaign within the Democratic Party — to undermine progressive politics and try to mischaracterize it as toxic. And I think a continued insistence on that is going to hurt the party. Because I think one of the big things that we learned last night is that not only is it not true, but that candidates who refuse to overcompensate and overly tack right were actually rewarded for sticking to their values, and while doing their best to represent their communities.
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Sorry to say that Hakeem Jeffries is a favorite of the Wall Street-charter industry crowd.
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One of the profound failures of Nancy Pelosi has been her efforts to keep “the squad” in their place instead of helping them develop their legislative chops. In spite of this, AOC has become one of the most effective Democratic participants in Congressional hearings. The great credit to the progressive wing of the party in Congress is that they have worked hand in glove with the Biden administration on legislation passed and have bent over backward to compromise in all cases. The Democratic Party, to their detriment, continues to allow national media to paint these dedicated legislators with the broad and inaccurate brush, “radical.” It has created a false equivalence with the far more boisterous and destructive Freedom Caucus in the Republican House membership. It’s about time Democrats defended their own.
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The progressives that I follow said that he was hostile to progressives. The fact that he is a big supporter of the charter industry proves their point.
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I had no idea Milton Friedman played a role in the student loan debacle. There are some typos in this post, but it’s well worth a read.
A key part of the discussion was whether to accept Senator Clay Pell’s thesis that “student aid is a right.” Many disagreed. One of those people was Milton Friedman. He felt the private sector should replace gov’t in the financing of higher education. In fact, he said that society didn’t benefit enough from public higher education to justify government subsidies.
This thinking gained steadily in popularity over time (ahem, see ISAs today) and especially once Reagan took office. His budget director, David Stockman, saw NO problem in loading students up with debt if they wanted college. This is 1981.
https://saragoldrickrab.medium.com/the-student-debt-crisis-was-intentional-a37b5ca037bb
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If I had access to a time machine, I’d go back and make sure Milton Friedman had never born born, and economies would not have been added to the Noble.
But Friedman wouldn’t have been the only one.
Before I returned to the future (2022), every Republican that ran for or was elected to office, that keeps supporting Trump’s big lie, would vanish from history. None of them would have been born. Not any in the so-called (fake) Freedom Caucus. There’d be some Republican governors on that list, too.
I’d also buy a lot of stock and then sell it all when I returned.
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I could live in that world!
No Raj Chetty or Emily Oster either.
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Found us another economist to hate on, Lloyd:
Last year, a federal court addressed the question of whether California could ban such guns. The state was one of eight, along with the District of Columbia, that had a prohibition in place. Multiple plaintiffs, including a handful of gun-rights groups, argued that the statute was useless, relying on the statistical expertise of an economist named John R. Lott Jr.
Lott, who is 64, with wispy gray hair, authoritatively delivers blizzards of empirical conclusions in an unthreatening Midwestern monotone. In a sworn statement to the court, Lott summarized his research on assault-weapon bans, writing that there is “no credible evidence” that such laws “have any meaningful effect of reducing gun homicides and no discernable crime-reduction impact.”
https://www.thetrace.org/2022/11/john-lott-gun-crime-research-criticism/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=trace-branded&utm_content=edit-promo
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Helen Ladd is a trustworthy economist who is highly respected by her peers and understands education. There’s one.
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Well, Diane, proving that Ladd is an exception, here’s Tom Kane, in the Boston Globe pontificating on how the NAEP can predict the future earnings of school kids:
Learning time lost during the height of the pandemic could cost Massachusetts students more than $21 billion in future earnings, according to a new pair of analyses from education researchers at Harvard and Stanford.
The analyses show that on average, Massachusetts students lost 75 percent of a school year’s worth of math learning and 41 percent of a year of reading. Boston Public Schools students fared slightly worse, losing 85 percent of a school year in math and 41 percent in reading.
Without major intervention, that decline in math achievement would mean a 1.6 percent decrease in the lifetime earnings of current Massachusetts students — or about $23,840 per student, according to a state-level analysis performed for the Globe. Collectively, students across the United States could lose nearly $1 trillion in future earnings.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/11/06/metro/pandemic-learning-losses-could-cost-massachusetts-students-21-billion-future-earnings/
Would the Globe publish a letter to the editor from you dispelling this garbage?
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This is garbage. NAEP predicts nothing. Nor are there individual scores.
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The whole problem with contemporary analytics is that it is primarily used to perpetuate confirmation bias. From political polling to sports probabilities there are a growing number of bean counters who have convinced themselves that such information tells the future when such data is more like an autopsy report.
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NAEP, like any standardized test, is a snapshot in time. Unlike state tests, no student takes the full NAEP test. NAEP itself is a sample. Anyone making predictions based on NAEP is doing it for political reasons. The latest NAEP results show one thing: the pandemic affected academic performance on standardized tests. Why should anyone be surprised?
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The Economic Policy Institute: date posted 2015 but still true
… These questions cannot be answered by two years of data, even relatively reliable data like NAEP scores. We should be looking at longer-term trends—this decline may be a blip, even if it was across-the-board. We also need to disaggregate the data and look at not just how the average student performed, http://www.canadianpharmacy365.net/. Perhaps most important, we should always consider these data in a broader context.
Looking at this year’s scores as part of a longer term trend, we see that the past decade (post-No Child Left Behind) delivered much smaller gains than the years prior. Fourth graders gained substantially more in math between 1992 and 2003 (15 points) than in the twelve years since (nine points between 2003 and this year’s 2015 results). In eighth grade, the difference is even more striking—a gain of 15 points from 1992–2003, versus just four since. And while overall gains in reading have been much smaller, the ratio is similar—fourth graders gained five points from 1992–2003, but just one point in the past twelve years. …
https://www.epi.org/blog/disappointing-naep-scores-and-the-questions-they-raise/
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If I can go back in time, the Demokkkrat party would never have started.
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If you mean by going back to 1828 when the Democratic Party was founded, I’d agree with you.
But, since that Democratic Party of mostly racists died a quick death after LBJ signed the Equal Rights act on July 2, 1964, prohibiting discrimination in public places, providing for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal, I’d disagree with you.
Because starting with Republican President Nixon and Reagan, the GOP focused on seducing the racists in the Democratic party to become Republicans, and they succeeded.
“In presidential elections, the Bible Belt states of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas have voted for the Republican candidate in all elections since 1980; Oklahoma has supported the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1968, with Republicans having carried every county in the state in …”
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Lloyd Lofthouse, I find it to be rather amusing how politicians like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and the like all swear upon the holy Bible to uphold and defend the Constitution do everything in their power to destroy it. It may not be obvious to you, however, left-leaning politicians who claim to read the Bible and yet advocate fre redistribution of wealth clearly have not read the commandments to not steal and to not covet the goods of their neighbor.
Diane Ravitch, you talk about how college in places like Finland is tuition-free. When I look into the eyes of people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and so on, I can tell that they are full of the same level of b.s. as Alex Jones is. They want to buy votes only and won’t deliver on any of their fantasy land promises..
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When I look into the beady eyes of Trump and DeSantis, I see duplicitous men claiming to be Christian who are filled with hatred and loathing for their fellow men. They love the unborn, despise the born.
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Your amusement of elected Americans who stand behind their oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, only proves to me that you are a supporter of the same fascist thinking behind Traitor Trump’s attempted coup to take over the government back in 2021.
“Trump says that if he’s reelected, he won’t use the powers of the presidency to punish his enemies, but adds that he’d be ‘entitled to a revenge tour'”
https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/world/news/trump-says-that-if-hes-reelected-he-wont-use-the-powers-of-the-presidency-to-punish-his-enemies-but-adds-that-hed-be-entitled-to-a-revenge-tour/articleshow/97560663.cms
“Trump, Vowing ‘Retribution,’ Foretells a Second Term of Spite
In a speech before his supporters, the former president charged forward in an uncharted direction, talking openly about leveraging the power of the presidency for political reprisals.”
“Trump calls for the termination of the Constitution in Truth Social post”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/03/politics/trump-constitution-truth-social/index.html
Trump denies he (Traitor Trump) suggested ‘termination’ of Constitution, without deleting post – On Truth Social on Saturday, he repeated false claims about election fraud, which he said “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/05/trump-terminate-constitution-00072230
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I’ve read enough to know there are rational, trustworthy economists but Friedman wasn’t one of them.
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John R. Lott Jr. must have cherry picked the facts he used in his study to support the NRA.
All we have to do is compare two countries to find out Lott was wrong and probably lied.
The UK vs the US:
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/United-Kingdom/United-States/Crime/Violent-crime
And this study compares the US to more than one country. It’s a long report but scroll down to the first graphic and Lott is revealed as a paid stooge for the NRA.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-gun-policy-global-comparisons
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Yes, it’s a long article, but The Trace does delve into Lott’s advocacy for and benefit from the NRA.
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For Exhibit Infinity on what a two-faced, awful person Cory Booker is, check out page 76 of this file. He actually quotes Bryan Stevenson to make a point of how “innocent” she is.
Click to access gov.uscourts.cand.327949.1642.3.pdf
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“Thus, although our communications have been more limited in recent years, I continue to consider Ms. Holmes a friend.”
In Southern Yiddish, I think that’s known as Hoots-Paugh.
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Correction: Chutzpah.
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You’ve obviously never been to a Mississippi bris.
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No, not Mississippi. But Many others
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Two excellent LTEs in today Akron Beacon Journal that sum up why Ohio in 2022 closely resembles Louisiana in 1990. It’s hard to get excited about any progressive victories around the country when you live a state that welcomes authoritarianism.
https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/opinion/letters/2022/11/30/readers-speak-up-on-republican-maneuvers-in-ohio-statehouse/69677363007/
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Greg,
Those letters to the editor are informative and depressing. This actions are tyrannical, the actions of a party that sees the future, in which they are a minority.
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Ohio has become the model of what the US might soon look like. And it ain’t pretty.
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It could be argued that the South has now infected much of the West and Midwest with what many of us in this region have struggled with our entire lives. Trump loves Alabama.
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It gets predictably worse. Imagine if the republicans had put up a bunch of smiling, seemingly benign candidates like DeWine, Portman or Youngkin instead of the nutcases they had. That red wave would have knocked the nation over. Anyone still feeling good about the fate of public education in Ohio?
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2022/11/gov-mike-dewine-supports-bill-to-strip-state-school-board-of-control-over-ohio-department-of-education.html
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Mehdi Hasan on Moms for Liberty; he’s got their number.
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Too bad Mehdi isn’t a world class sniper with a CheyTac M200 Intervention.
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I don’t remember ever posting anything directly about the Idiot before, but just seeing all these things put together on a list is breathtaking. We should all have printouts handy to give to anyone who tries to normalize this person and the cult he created out of an existing political party.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-president-things-you-forgot_n_63890ec3e4b0d17409602b90
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I think it would be a waste of time to attempt to educate anyone about Traitor Trump. The country is divided. The majority already knows he’s an untrustworthy, total creep, and the MAGA RINOs that represent less than 10% of the total population, do not care, because corpse eating vultures tend to hang out together.
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Not a Trump lover by any means, but the economy was a loooot better under him, until covid hit of course. Biden is an absolute complete disaster. This country became more divided under Obama when you get down to it.😞
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Harry says: “This country became more divided under Obama when you get down to it.”
Do you think such divisions came from Obama’s or more generally from democratic policies; or do you think perhaps divisions occurred because a black man’s presence in the White House brought forward the fact that our country is still awash in racism? Just wondering . . . .
I think it’s so nice that you are not a Trump lover (tra la). CBK
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CBK,
You are so right. The racists were appalled that a Black family was living in the White House. Remember how outraged they were when Michelle Obama wore a sleeveless dress? Did you hear them complain when Melania’s totally nude photos were all over the Internet?
So outraged that they elected a clown who said it was okay to be “politically incorrect,” to say rude and offensive things, like his language about women, and his cursing at rallies.
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Diane Trump and now Trumpism as, in good part, racist backlash. CBK
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Everyone who pays their taxes should be angry at The Great Charlatan who insisted he couldn’t release his taxes because he was”under audit.” Another lie. Most years, he paid nothing or less than $1,000.
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Diane Yes . . . all eyes on the U.S. Justice Department. CBK
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The one thing that might have enraged the right more than Zelensky’s wearing his fatigues to meet Biden might have been if he’d worn a tan suit.
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I have nothing against Obama’s race, just some of his policies. He was not the great messiah that the lefties think he was.
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Surprise, Harry. There are no messiahs in politics. Only mortals. Some, however, like Trump are frauds, charlatans, and con men.
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Diane. I would describe Trump as a sometimes arrogant prima donna, but it’s the demokkkrats that are the frauds/cons living high and mighty in their latte limousine liberal lifestyle.
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Harry,
Do you think Trump is not living “high and mighty” at Mar-a-Lago? What about that genuine gold-plated ballroom? Can you afford the admission fee of $200,000?
Did you notice that the Saudis gave Jared Kushner $2 billion after he left office? For what? Dr yo see that Trump paid less than $1,000 in taxes most years?
What Democrat lives higher and mightier than Trump?
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Diane, have you traced Harry’s IP address? If Harry is using an app that hides that IP address, it should often change to different locations all over the world. Another truck trolls of every stripe uses is to hide their actual location.
I think “Harry” is a narcisistic, mostly one-slogan troll that thrives on attention, without a shred of reliable, primary sourced evidence to support his taunts about leftists, liberals, and Democrats.
The advice I’ve read from many sources about the “Harry’s” of this world, including Traitor Trump because he is cut from the same Trollism cloth that Harry comes from, is to not feed the trolls.
There is no evidence, no matter what the source, that Harry ignores with another slogan that can easily be found on most if not all extreme right opinionated, conspiracy theory spreading, lying, extreme-right talking head shows: Tucker Carlson, et al.
No one may debate a troll, who is someone that’s not willing to debate.
What are the basic rules of debate? Rules that Harry the Troll ignores just like his/her favorite extreme right talking head.
“Important rules
Harry has broken the four primary rules of debate in every comment he/she has made.
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Lloyd, I have deleted comments by Harry that consist solely of insults. That is, about eight he left today.
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Come on, Harry. You are a racist. You proved it in your earlier comments. Obama was a good president, though his education policies were a disaster. I criticized him frequently for the failed Race to the Top, which was no different from George W. Bush’s NCLB. But he was honest and appointed capable people, except Duncan. Eight years without a scandal is breathtaking after four years of Trump.
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Your use of the word “lefties” smear you with an extreme bias that cannot be trusted.
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Like I said in one of my other replies to your obvious ignorance and bias, provide evidence to support what you think and include the links to reliable sources.
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Diane. Scandals on Trump? None of which were ever proven. The thing I have against Trump, is he’s an arrogant prima Donna. Now if you want scandals, google in the Clinton’s, Hunter Biden, the Pelosi’s insider trading, on and on and on. Plenty of career politicians that got rich screwing over the taxpayers. Dems and Reps both guilty. They’re all enjoying that latte liberal lifestyle.🥂
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Harry “Diane. Scandals on Trump? None of which were ever proven.”
We’re done here. I do hope your check is at least in the mail . CBK
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Harry, you are an ignorant and a boor.
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I think all of these trolls coming out from under their bridges is proof that we are hitting some nerves. Keep up the good work Dianne Ravitch!
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Thank you, Paul!
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The only reason Trump’s scandals haven’t made it through court yet is because the traitor has been doing this for decades and he knows how to work the legal system in his favor.
Do some homework and learn something, Harry, about how Trump manipulates the justice system and the courts. He has his lawyers appeal until they can’t appeal anymore and the primary goal of that is to bankrupt the other side so they stop taking him to court or to run the clock out since many financial crimes have end dates. He also files frivolous lawsuits against the people and organization suing him, again with the goal of bankrupting them with legal fees.
When all that fails, Trump almost always settles out of court with Non Discloser Agreements so no one can read what the settlement was.
“Donald Trump: The Most Sued President In US History
Donald Trump’s got more on his mind these days than Obamacare, building his wall, his approval rating going in the toilet, and Randy Newman writing a song about his penis. As The Boston Globe reports, he may also be the most sued president in American history.”
https://upliftlegalfunding.com/donald-trump-lawsuit-litany/
Donald Trump’s Three Decades: 4,095 lawsuits
https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/trump-lawsuits/
I don’t need to hear a guilty verdict from a jury or judge in court to know he’s guilty as sin. All the feds and states coming after him have to do is get a case in front of a jury and judge and then reach the last court of appeals before the clock runs out or the traitor dies.
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Lloyd I think in the law, they call all that a “pattern.” CBK
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I think from what I’ve been reading, there’s another pattern in his tax returns.
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Lloyd The law puts a lot of stock in patterns; commonsense says that, if it quacks, and doesn’t know any other way to communicate, its probably not a dog. CBK
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If Traitor Trump doesn’t end up in prison for his crimes, this country is doomed, because that will encourage others like him to run for president, thinking they will get away with it too, if their coup fails like his did.
The only way the US can escape that fate is if the traitor has a massive stroke and ends up on life support and brain dead before all the investigations and lawsuits end so he can’t crow.
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Lloyd If Trump and his cronies don’t go to jail, everything will change, and I, for one, will be a very unhappy U.S. Citizen. CBK
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If you haven’t listened to Rachel Maddow’s “Ultra”, I highly recommend it. It’s about a series of failed seditious conspiracy trials that took place during World War II concerning avoud American Nazi’s who schemed to overthrow the US government with the assistance of Nazi Germany. Despite significant evidence and support from elected members of Congress, none of the trials ended with conviction. The big difference in those trials and now is that the elected officials alleged to have participated all eventually lost at the ballot box. Today, not so much. It strikes me that we are being reminded how difficult it is for a democracy to rebuff sedition, especially if certain representatives have ways to obstruct the process. We are now entering a two year period where Republican malfeasance will be in full display through a thoroughly corrupt set of players in the House. I hope, but do not expect, that the DOJ is quietly investigating the behavior of the Jim Jordan et al and will be ready to indite their conspiratorial behavior once Trump is indited. One of the former prosecutors from the Mueller probe said he found it curious that none of the “lower level” conspirators have been charged yet. In Watergate, Haldeman and Erlichment had faced criminal charges even before Nixon resigned. This conspiracy that resulted in the insurrection of January 6th had a plethora of players who gleefully participated in the planning, including many of the representatives who voted not to certify the election. The fight for democracy is far from over.
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Yes, the fight to keep the U.S. Constitution and the freedoms and protections it provides will not be over for generations. Those behind the attempted coup may have to all die off, if they don’t program another generation to carry on the fight to end the United States as it has been for 246 years.
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If “Harry” was only a troll, that’s to be expected these days. There indie trolls, Russian, Iranian, North Korean, et al. trolls.
But what if “Harry” really believes the BS he spews? Now that would be tragic. Every individual, not a troll, that believes BS like this is a tragedy of the first order. And there’s millions of them out there.
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I happened across this ad for Texas State Technical College, a two year program, whose funding seems to be based on job placement for its graduates. I’m not sure whether this is a scam or might be a good idea, but it’s Texas, so…
Funding Through Accountability
TSTC is the only college in Texas that operates on a 100% outcomes-based funding formula. With its “Returned-Value Funding Formula,” the College is not funded on contact hours, but rather on the employment outcomes realized by our students. The College relies on the placement of its graduates in great-paying jobs to receive funding from the State.
https://www.tstc.edu/88session/
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Christine and Diane I wonder if the colleges get anything for their students becoming good citizens, like for instance, voting and knowing something about the U.S. Constitution. CBK
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They don’t teach common sense in college. Thank god I went to trade school.
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Harry I went to college and learned that, as good as “commonsense” is and can be, it regularly stands in need of a curative for its many biases which fuel a bunch of common nonsense.
One example is a bias against colleges and, generally, higher education and those who partake in it which, in my view, isn’t named “higher” for nothing.
But before you get on your high horse, that’s nothing against the trades (I was a florist for a long time and was damn good at it). It’s just that many who don’t attend college tend to set up false oppositions . . . I think in many cases, because they didn’t go themselves.
BTW, I didn’t attend until in my 30’s and, before that, I thought like you did about college . . . until I didn’t anymore. In my view, lots is good about commonsense; but there is no one who cannot benefit from further learning and from being in such an environment, especially in our time. CBK
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“They don’t teach common sense in college. Thank god I went to trade school.”
Ah, common sense should have been taught to you by your parents before you were five years old and started school. If you learned what you think common sense is in trade school, then you must have had horrible parents.
And I don’t remember any classes or major in college that were called “Learning Common Sense, when I was there (1969 – 1973) on the GI Bill after serving in the US Marines and fighting in Vietnam. I joined the Marines right out of high school.
Let’s see, what kind of classes did I take: lots of math and science for the first two years. Then during my last three years most of my classes focused on the major I selected of my own free will, that taught me a specific skill, sort of what trade schools do without the electives.
And two year community colleges offer two tracks: one for going on to the finish four or more years of college and one that teaches a trade of your choice. Every medical doctor, nurse, engineer, lawyer et al, earned degrees after spending four or more years in a college or university. You better damn well hope your doctors or surgeons learned common sense from their parents before they went to college to learn their profession.
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RE: Diane’s comment – “Paul Bonner, you are so right! The extremists in every religion warp the world, promote fanaticism, and retard progress.”
I think this may also help explain what contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire and what followed, The Dark Ages. Was the Dark Ages triggered by the rise of Christianity?
China on the other hand, survived and thrived for 1,500 after Qin Shi Huang, the founder of the Qin dynasty and the first emperor, unified China. During that era while Islam, Judaism and Christianity arrived in China, they never had a dominate political influence as in the West.
During that 1,500 years China was the wealthiest and most technologically advanced civilization on Earth.
Then in 1513, the first Europeans arrived, and with those expanding colonial empires, China stopped being the wealthiest and most technological advanced civilization on the planet. China’s emperors resisted open trade and limited it to one port. They also did not allow Christian missionaries in to spread the word.
Then the first Opium War (1839–42) was fought between China and Great Britain, and the second Opium War (1856–60), also known as the Arrow War or the Anglo-French War in China, was fought by Great Britain and France against China.
This was the beginning of the end of Imperil, China that would end in 1912.
After China lost both of the Opium Wars, the Emperor was forced to let Christian missionaries in to go wherever they wanted and build their churches wherever they wanted in addition to removing all restriction from European opium merchants to sell their drugs anywhere they wanted in China.
Americans were also involved in the opium trade in China establishing the wealth of many very rich and powerful families today in the United States.
I’m sure some will disagree with me here based on programmed bias, because the Chinese Communist Party has been demonized in the western media for decades, but if the Nationalists in Taiwan had won the Chinese Civil War 1925 – 1949 (with a break to fight Japan during World War II), China would not have the middle class (about 600 million with middle class lifestyles equal or better than the middle class in the US) it has today or be the industrial power it is.
But that’s another topic.
Christianity was involved in China’s downfall after 1513, sided with the Nationalists because Chiang Kai-shek became a Christian to gain their support, and continues to be a pestilence on China today but nowhere close to the damage extremist religious sects, claiming to be Christians, are having on the United States.
Chiang Kai-shek has one thing in common with Mao (other than being Chinese). Chiang was also a brutal dictator for life who ruled Taiwan with an iron fist crushing all resistance, until he died the same year Mao did. It still took almost two decades before Taiwan held its first democratic elections.
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Thank you for your service Lloyd. I’m surprised you aren’t going to be censored for serving in an unjust war. I served as well, US Navy, 75’-80’. I was raised well by my parents, who also served. I’m referring to many of today’s college “grads”, many of which are not being prepared for the real world. Spoiled and coddled by soft parenting and radical brainwashing. Google it in. Do the research. How the education system is failing in this country. You don’t have to like it, just understand the problem. 🇺🇸
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“many of which are not being prepared for the real world. Spoiled and coddled by soft parenting and radical brainwashing. Google it in. Do the research. How the education system is failing in this country”
First of all, the education system is not failing the United States. That trope is propaganda, mostly from the theofascist, libertarian, anarchistic, extreme right that have been running a campaign since the 1970s to destroy not only the public US education system but also labor unions, including teachers unions, and professional teachers.
If there is anything wrong with the US public education system it is because of them and people that swallow that misleading BS they feed fools, with shovels.
No, I’m not going to waste my time Googling this issue. I lived it for thirty years as a public school teacher 1985 – 2005, and have been following it since, not only on Diane’s Blog but by reading books on the topic that are not written and published by the Destroy Public Education Crime Syndicate mentioned briefly in a previous paragraph.
If Americans want to save this country’s public schools, a majority of us have to stop movement to destroy those same schools that are responsible for everything that’s wrong with K-12 education today that includes the real public schools, the private sector charter school industry, virtual schools, and public vouchers for religious schools.
So far, the toxic rot from the extreme right hasn’t damaged most of our colleges and universities.
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Teen Vogue does an excellent job here of looking at the pressures our young activists are exposed to, when they ought to just get to be kids. The focus is on school shootings because we are sadly coming up on the tenth anniversary of the murders of Sandy Hook elementary children and staff.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/delaney-tarr-youth-gun-violence-activists-december-2022-special-issue?utm_medium=social&utm_brand=tv&mbid=social_twitter&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter
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Hi Diane, I’m a very,very popular K-5 theatre teacher with LAUSD. On Sept. 7 this school year I was removed from my school and told that I was under investigation. Yesterday, on my 60th day of “teacher jail” I was told the allegations against me, and they were incredibly flimsy. I should have never been sent to jail. My removal caused over 1000 students to lose the arts this semester. The vast majority of students love my class and it outrages me that a few spoiled students could disrupt an entire program because they didn’t like me. I want to shine a flashlight on this ugly situation in order to effect change and cause the district to think twice before they investigate teachers and discipline them. My union rep tells me that the odds are that the district will find me guilty of the accusations because that’s what they always do whenever anybody makes a complaint. I’m reaching out to you to get advice on how I can get advice on how to best fight back against the district.
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First, use every legal staff that the union has. Second, if the union lawyer is not willing to fight for you, get your own lawyer and start a GoFundMe page. Find the lawyer who defended Rafe Esquith.
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What about the ACLU?
Maybe this organization would help, too.
Los Angeles Education Legal Aid & Pro Bono Services
https://www.justia.com/lawyers/education-law/california/los-angeles/legal-aid-and-pro-bono-services
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Thanks Diane and Lloyd for your advice. I can only get 30 mins of advice from my UTLA lawyer. Just to clarify, my union rep predicts that I will be reinstated, but that there will be a file saying that I acted inappropriately with the class. One of the Arts union reps said that lots of teachers are being sent to teacher jail this school year at LAUSD. Is it any wonder that there is a teacher shortage? The accusations were inappropriate looks, making physical contact (I touched no one for that lesson, and generally avoid touching students like the plague), making students do activities they are not comfortable with, inappropriate curriculum (The lesson was from the K-5 Arts Instructional guide for theatre.) The classroom teacher was present during the entire lesson and said that “it was very funny” at the end. Feel free to email me Diane if you would like more details. I will look into finding that lawyer and contacting the ACLU.
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California may be known as a Blue State, but some areas of the state, like LA Unified, are more Red than Blue thanks to millions in out of state money flowing from autocratic, extreme-right, theofascist donors that are bankrolling school-board elections, following a strategy to conquer from the bottom up.
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Last year, 89% of Boston voters approved an elected school committee (a campaign that owes much of its organizing to a presence on Twitter, by the way). Now the process is underway, as the state would have to approve such a move.
This morning, the Boston Globe has published a disgusting editorial, calling for the abolition of any school board in the capital city. Reed Hastings would be proud. Who cares what citizens want, when the billionaires hellbent on privatization want something else?
There are certainly problems with the city’s current school governance system, in which the mayor appoints all members of the seven-person school committee. But if the city is to overhaul school governance, the way forward shouldn’t be to switch to a popularly elected school committee — an antiquated way of managing schools in the 21st century. Instead, Boston should get rid of the body and centralize control of the schools in the mayor’s office.
And while the Supreme Court looks to originalism to undermine our rights, The Globe (or more likely the Barr Foundation, to whom the newspaper of record outsources its education coverage) would through out centuries of history of governing public schools in Massachusetts:
Ending a school committee may seem radical, since local school board elections are so ingrained in American tradition. But the local school board, and its considerable power over the education of children in a geographic area, is a particularly North American phenomenon, and something of an accident of history. The colony of Massachusetts required towns to establish and pay for schools in 1647, in a law known as the Old Deluder Satan Act, and local control of schools — and local responsibility for funding them — has endured since.
Funny, I doubt the same people would call for dissolving all school boards across the state, especially not in those wealthy towns where these writers likely live, and whose elected school boards they serve on.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/12/11/opinion/dont-reform-boston-school-committee-scrap-it/
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“would through out centuries of history”
– throw out, of course
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Correction, it was 80% of voters who approved this, not 89%. 99,000 people who actually live in the city of Boston.
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Editorials are opinions and not to be trusted since there are tricks a good OpEd writer uses to fool people into believing them. Stick to the news, real news follows rules that doesn’t allow opinions from the reporter.
The Destroy Public Education Crime Syndicate (ALEX, et al.) doesn’t care about teachers, children, parents, or people. They only care about power, money, and freedom from laws to make as much of that money as possible.
Money buys power and power is addictive, corrupting almost everyone that has it.
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The problem , Lloyd, is the the Glob loves to position itself as liberal, even progressive. The fact that billionaire fauxlanthropists have taken control of their education reporting is lost on many.
A couple of weeks, they ran a long story about how the numbers of Black kids enrolled in the schools has dropped. While true, we’re undergoing rapid gentrification and longtime residents are being forced out of the city. To drive home the argument, the post featured three Black women. Each has monetary ties to the privatizers. None has children in Boston schools, and one lives in a wealthy suburb, yet her daughter attends a private school.
Here’s a thread I posted:
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Robin Lithgow, my old boss at LAUSD Arts Branch, has written a book about Shakespeare’s School. It sounds fascinating. I know people will find this hard to believe, but in Shakespeare’s school there was no standardized testing. Imagine that! There was a big focus on rhetoric because the educators of the time believed that language was a powerful tool that could be used to affect change. Anyone who is fascinated with Shakespeare should buy this book. https://www.robinlithgow.com/2022/12/endorsements-for-lessons-from-shakespeares-classroom/?fbclid=IwAR22jTl7LNwKBG89t3E63ov_-5hxM60ZRSbCBZTqCFXAVeuDslpImZZ-hhM
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Reading and writing are powerful tools that leads to literacy and a life-long love of reading. Standardized tests do not do that. Instead, Standardized tests and teaching to the test are leading to children hating school, hating learning and hating reading because they are being forced to read teach-to-the-test crap that someone outside of the classroom things they should know, instead of literature that has proven itself through the ages to capture audiences that fall in love with good stories.
But those tests and the programs designed to teach to the test profit big corporations and greedy, power hungry CEOs, so they are not going to go away even if all they do is harm children, parents, teachers and our civilization.
Instead, teachers should be teaching what inspires them, good stories the teachers grew up loving; then the teachers’ enthusiasm will spread to their students.
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Buckle up, folks. It’s open season on teachers and public education and it won’t stop until the last qualified teacher is driven out of the field.
https://crooksandliars.com/2022/12/marge-pinpoints-who-blame-school-shootings
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What is in the water in Texas?
But this was not an ordinary rabbi, nor an ordinary school board meeting. Keller is the district that, earlier this year, had ordered its libraries to remove all copies of a 2018 graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary from shelves. And “Rabbi Griffin” is Mark Aaron Griffin, a Messianic Jew who last year was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault…
“We then realized why the school board was letting [Griffin] pray, because he was praying to Jesus,” Hawes said.
Hawes claimed that after the meeting, she asked two board members if they had known about Griffin’s indictments, and that their response was that he had not yet been convicted.
Hawes also said she asked the board “why they weren’t allowing members of other faiths and beliefs to participate” in the opening prayer, and said she was told that the prayer was intended only for the school board trustees, who all believe in Jesus.
https://www.jta.org/2022/12/13/united-states/texas-school-board-that-banned-anne-frank-book-invited-messianic-rabbi-charged-with-sexual-assault-to-open-meeting-with-prayer#.Y5kRIQTzqCs.twitter
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This is nuts. Evangelicals gone wild. I doubt Griffin is a “rabbi ,” or any other kind of religious. Phony.
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A small bit of good news today in a Massachusetts court ruling:
His order also noted that while parents have the option to send their children to public schools, they do not have constitutional rights to dictate how those schools educate children. An attorney for the school system, David S. Lawless, applauded the judge’s decision in an area of law that continues to be challenged across the country.
“Given the novelty in particular, he addressed both the legal issues in the complaint that was in front (of him) and that it’s an evolving area of the law,” Lawless said Thursday after the ruling came down. “School districts are put in a very difficult position; this is one more guidepost for them along the way.”
https://www.masslive.com/news/2022/12/federal-judge-rules-in-favor-of-ludlow-schools-in-lawsuit-over-treatment-of-transgender-students.html
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Someone ought to check on Secretary of Education Cardona:
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I think Secretary Miguel Cardona should add this: “Every student should become a lifelong learner and avid reader with the skills to learn how to earn a living in almost any industry they want to try out until they find a job that they actually enjoy and gain something from.”
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About Cordona’s quotation (below):
Let me see if I have that right: In terms of context, the recent U.S. election revealed that almost 50 percent of the voting public in the United States have little or no knowledge of history, what democracy is about, some openly even want to replace it with an authoritarian system, and are demonstrably “Trumpist,” . . . (lying, self-serving, mean, vindictive, hateful, dangerous).
In that context, Secretary Cordona says nothing about the teaching of history, what democracy means to all of us and how it actually works, or about not only the freedoms but the responsibilities needed to live in a democratic and civilized culture (via the humanities) . . . he talks about education for industry jobs (corporate America/world), and a developing workforce.
I think we need to look at not only what our educational leaders say, but what’s missing from it. But that’s just me. CBK
“Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.”
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Excellent CBK
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Cardone’s quote sounds like something the Robber Barons probably thought back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when they all but ruled the US.
But the Robber Barons in the US are not alone. History is full of autocrats (emperors, pharaohs, czars, kings, dictators, Trump, Musk, DeSantis, Abbott, Greene, Gates, Walton, Koch, et al.) that think everyone else was put on Earth to serve them and what they want, only what they want. Outside of their orbit, the rest of us are expendable if we won’t or can’t serve them.
To them, we should act like we love our suffering, our hunger, our lack of security, our lack of health care…
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Lloyd First, don’t forget the fake/pretend-religious people who have highjacked “Christianity” and the name: The Bible when their actions have nothing to do with either and are even opposed to anything their Founder purveyed, e.g., need I mention the poor and the eye of a needle.
But second, I think you have also put your finger on the problem (aired elsewhere on this site) that poor, threatened, Stephen Miller apparently thinks white males are an endangered species (being replaced).
Who knows what Stephen Miller actually feels when faced with the power of, say, women, dark-skinned people, gays, etc., or whatever. But if he or other white males actually feel something, my guess is that, like so many white men still, it’s not the “threat of being replaced” that they are feeling; but rather having their centuries-old hegemony come apart while we speak.
I for one don’t want to replace white males. (Some of my best friends are white males, after all (<–tongue-in-cheek alert!). What I want is for thems that still feel superior to everyone else to consciously step off their self-made, fake, but feeling-infused pedestals and join the rest of us as equal partners in whatever we are doing.
BTW, I’m 76 and it took me a very long time, up from the 50s/60s/70s to understand how much I, myself, was involved in the same kinds of inherited biases, even against other women. That said, I think Stephen Miller is just a class-A jerk (<–a nice way of saying what I really think) who probably joins Elon Musk in having avoided getting a full education in his earlier years. CBK
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I don’t think of Evangelical Fundamentalist as Christians. Evangelical Fundamentalists are religious but not Christians. They are a religious sect, a dangerous one.
Have you heard of or seen “Alpha House” produced by Amazon Studios?
Alpha House is a series on Amazon Prime that revolves around four Republican Senators that live in one house that belongs to a Mormon Republican Senator from Utah. Three of the Republican Senators pay the owner of the house to live there.
Without going into more detail, there is one episode, about 30 minutes each, where other members of congress from both parties show up to take part in a wake after another long serving extreme-right Republican Senator dies in his office on Capital Hill in DC. What he was doing when he died, is revealing about who he really was? No spoilers! If you want to find out, you’ll have to watch the series. :o)
Well, back to the wake, held in, I think Alpha House. The Republicans start a prayer circle. One of the Democratic Senators in attendance (I think she represents Nancy Pelosi but doesn’t call herself Pelosi, another name) is part of the prayer circle because the Republicans are the majority in that house and said everyone had to take part. So, she gets her turn to pray out loud so everyone hears.
Her prayer by itself is worth watching the series for. As she went ballistic about religion, I wanted to get up and cheer, but since I was alone at home, the only audience was my ears.
Basically, she ends up telling the Republicans through her prayer they are not Christians. They can have the Old Testament since that’s what they practice and preach in Christ’s name, and the Democrats will keep the New Testament and continue to practice what Christ preached.
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Lloyd No, I hadn’t heard about those programs. But the prayer at the end of your note is exactly the point . . . they put on the robes of Christianity and are nothing of the sort. It’s no wonder so many love Trump . . . they recognize one another . . . their morally and spiritually degenerate compatriots. CBK
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Anyone who is a MAGA RINO that still supports Traitor Trump, would vote for him again, or vote for Deranged DeSantis, or A-hole Abbott, are programmed/indoctrinated to think they way they think by years or decades of following Qanoon, Fox FAKE News, et al.
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Lloyd Ah, yes, Fox News. On that: I doubt there is much that is coincidental about (1) the recent downward trend in Trump’s popularity, and (2) the Fox people turning their backs on him. I guess we can guess who’s actually running the country?
Operative king of the United States, thy name is Murdoch. CBK
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Murdock is responsible for a lot that is going wrong in the US today. I’ve read that he is a neo-conservative. Rich and powerful people like Traitor Trump, Charles Koch, Musk, and Murdock are four of many reasons why the wealthy should pay a 90% wealth tax on earnings and a 50% annual owners fee for every house, corporate jet, stock share, and yacht they own/hold and/or live in ( for those narcisists and psychos).
A 90% tax on one billion dollars still leaves them one hundred million.
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Fundamentalism is a disease not limited to a particular faith. I highly recommend “The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam” by Karen Armstrong. It is a political strategy imposed by a minority to handcuff any meaningful progress in nation states and beyond. Israel is now teetering on a precipice as a failed democracy due to the efforts of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim radicals. ISIS and AL Qaida are actually reincarnations of the Jewish Maccabean’s prior to the common era. Nazi Germany used such tactics as did Mussolini in his fascist one man as superior ruler dictum. Putin uses the Russian Orthodox Church for the same purposes. In the U.S, we experience this through the organization that runs the annual prayer breakfast and the rampant grift we call televangelism. What these have in common is the desire of a minority to have control and wealth. I wish we could divorce the conversation from the Christian moniker, but the goal of such corruption is to misrepresent a savior as the answer. This is the ongoing archetype of the “anti-christ” against salvation. In spite of our technological and intellectual advances we seem unable to escape this threat to mankind.
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Paul Bonner, you are so right! The extremists in every religion warp the world, promote fanaticism, and retard progress.
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How about today’s global community?
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Diane I have had another note placed in moderation. Was it something I said? (rhetorically speaking) CBK
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There is no rhyme or reason to why WordPress puts comments into moderation
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WordPress, Facebook, Tweety-Musk-Land, et al. rely on apps to catch keywords and phrases that are then put into moderation or censured. Moderation means eventually human eyes will check it eventually. Censured means no human eyes ever check to see if it’s okay to let through the curtain into view.
The big tech companies Google, Amazon, WordPress, Facebook and all the others in world-wide-web land, can’t afford to hire enough humans to check everything. I’ve read that China has ten of thousands of people on payroll checking what their apps catch. And probably everting the app catches ends up with eyeballs looking at it so they can identify who must be invited to tea where they are politely warned what will happen to them and their families if they do it again.
But in the US with cutthroat capitalism worshiping profits every second of the day, they can’t afford to pay that many humans to check everything. So what, if the app censured someone that didn’t say anything offensive. They’ve also made it almost impossible to complain and challenge the corporate censorship online. If you find a contact/help number or link, most if not all of the time you end up with a automated robo-system with menus you have to listen and respond to and seldom if ever end up talking to a real human. If you hit the letter O for operator, the robot disconnects the call.
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It’s got something against me today! As was written above, no logic to this whatsoever, usually associated with some written name.
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GregB About the seeming arbitrariness of being placed in “moderation,” I’ll wager a bet that it’s one of two things:
(1) a preset product of algorithms (as in mindless and meaningless in both the real perpetrators and their expressions/activities) giving the impression of some blind, deaf, and dumb intoxicated person taking pot shots at beer cans on a porch; or
(2) a deliberate effort by some sort of hateful, vindictive gremlins whose governing principle is if I can, then I will, to inject bad timing and so disorder into the flow of discussions, and also to create distrust, and frustration in contributors.
Nevertheless, Happy Holidays to you and yours. CBK
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I find it impossible to stay logged in on WP. Every time I post, I have to submit credentials again, even though my user name comes up okay. No clue!
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Christine My comments do the same thing . . . until today. Also, for some reason, and for a long time, I never got notified when new comments came in to a thread I had contributed to, even though each time I checked the boxes for “notify” at the bottom of my post. To see other comments, I had to go to the site by calling up the original post from my files each time. Now I notice there is a little black box added to my note that says: “Log in to use details from one of these accounts.” I don’t know what that means, but the field for my information appears, again, below this post as I write it. CBK
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Christine, have you tried restarting and/or updating your device: desktop, laptop, tablet, or smart phone?
That sometimes fixes problems like you are experiencing with WP.
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Christine, I have never understood WP.
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Calling Justice Department. Someone wake up Merrill.
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Traitor Trump did not start lying when he ran for president and as president. The Traitor has been lying since he started speaking. Because he is addicted to the media spotlight, most of his lies have been public for decades. The ones that aren’t public were locked away back when he was a student (the traitor’s student records), and many others during his years of crime are protected by NDAs.
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All the while Biden is running the country into the ground.
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Please tell me what Biden has done as president through legislation passed by Congress that is running the country into the ground after you explain in detail what you mean by running the country into the ground.
And once you explain in detail with links to reputable sources that will defend your OPINION, please defend this guy, also with links to reputable sources:
“The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office.”
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/population-development/2020/08/06/color-coded-life-expectancy-people-in-blue-states-are-living-longer-than-people-in-red/
If you do not know what a reputable source is, let me help you with this link to a list of the least-biased news sources. To see the entire list, you may have to spend several minutes scrolling. And you won’t find FOX News on that list.
Here’s the link to the LEFT BIASED list, avoid that.
Then there’s the link to the RIGHT BIASED List, also avoid that one.
And then there’s the worst list to get your fake news and lying opinions from:
One last thing, even the best sources have opinions pieces and opinions are just that, they are not the news. Even from the most reliable news sources, opinion pieces are always biased, one way or the other, making them unreliable sources to learn what’s going on around the world.
Do NOT let someone else’s opinions tell you what to think. That’s the same as accepting what someone else claims the Bible means.
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The stock market is higher than it ever was when Trump was in office.
Unemployment is less than 4%—full employment.
The price of gasoline is the same or less than a year ago.
Biden is a GREAT president!!
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Diane. The market skyrocketed under Trump. My investment portfolios prove it. Inflation under DT averaged over 1%, under Biden, it’s in between 7 & 8%. Border is a mess, crime shooting up, leftist radical DA’s releasing thugs out on the street, the market is struggling, no longer oil/energy independent.
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Wrong again, Harry.
“Biden’s Stock Market Returns Continue To Trounce Trump’s”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2021/08/28/bidens-stock-market-returns-continue-to-trounce-trumps/?sh=3fb775f61cd8
Forbes has been rated to have a “RIGHT-CENTER BIAS”
“Overall, we rate Forbes Right-Center biased based on story selection that favors the right and the political affiliation of its ownership. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting rather than High due to some misleading or false stories related to climate science.”
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Begins around 17:00.
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And here is the most important, fundamental message of the speech.
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Old news for everyone here. But check out the pop up ad when you click the video.
https://crooksandliars.com/2022/12/teacher-shortage-or-not-theres-teacher
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This is what our members of Congress can do for their constituents. Diane, I think Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico deserves a spot on the blog’s Honor Roll. Stansbury took Deb Haaland’s seat in a special election when Haaland was named Secretary of Interior.
Over the past few weeks, as lawmakers scrambled to get their priorities into the $1.7 trillion year-end spending bill, Stansbury says she spent “every day, all day long,” dogging House and Senate appropriators, Hill leaders and administration officials to include money for the school. She didn’t know until Tuesday morning, when the bill was publicly released and she pored over its text, that her efforts had paid off.
“We’ve been working so hard on this, for so long, I literally woke up … and bawled my eyes out,” Stansbury told HuffPost in an emotional interview on Tuesday. “I invested everything I had to get funding for this school. The To’Hajiilee community is only a short distance from Albuquerque, but the people out there have so much need, and the community hasn’t had its needs and priorities met. It’s just so huge for this community.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/melanie-stansbury-tribal-school-funding-construction_n_63a1fe41e4b04414304b9f12?ske
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IDEA, IEP’s and the requirement for FAPE mean little when there’s no state oversight for students with disabilities assigned to a private school. What’s documented here in Washington state is appalling.
This isn’t true in Washington. While the state tracks isolation and restraint incidents in public schools with a goal of reducing their use, it doesn’t at private schools that receive public money.
The only institution with the complete picture is the private school itself, but Northwest SOIL claims it doesn’t have to disclose the restraint and isolation reports because it’s a private company. The Times filed a public records lawsuit against Northwest SOIL’s parent company after the school denied a request for those reports and other records typically available from public schools. The lawsuit is pending.
https://www.propublica.org/article/therapeutic-schools-northwest-soil-invisible-washington?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=twitter
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A battle over private school vouchers is heating up in Illinois. https://www.thedailyline.com/end-invest-in-kids-program
The $75 million tax credit scholarship program enacted in 2017 as part of a backroom deal is supposed to sunset, but its supporters are quietly lobbying to extend and grow it without any public discussion. Illinois Families for Public Schools has found that private schools that benefit from this program are discriminating against students, families & employees on the basis of LGBTQ+ status. #GameOverILVouchers #SunsetInvestInKids #InvestinSOMEKids Most legislators know that public dollars shouldn’t be diverted to support private schools that discriminate and aren’t accountable or transparent, but they are pnly hearing from the organizations that feed off the program. Public school champions need to speak up.
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Another teachers strike brewing:
https://www.cleveland.com/akron/2022/12/akron-public-schools-teachers-union-issues-10-day-strike-authorization-district-to-deliver-learning-online-if-strike-occurs.html
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I follow on TikTok Stephen who is an education public policy analyst in Georgia. His posts are very thoughtful. He is also an evangelical Christian who on the side has this new blog basically defending public schools from a faith perspective
https://commongracecommonschools.substack.com/
His TikTok is stephenjowens_
He wrote this opinion in Atlantic Constitution Journal Opinion: Vouchers prop up private schools with public money
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Karla, thank you for this recommendation. I will look for this interesting blogger.
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Here’s another very vocal proponent for public schools who is worth a follow on Twitter; she regularly takes down the privatization myths.
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I started following her. She is good.
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For those of you who breathed a sigh of relief after the election, time to tighten up the sphincter for the coming year and beyond. Buckle up, it’s going to be a very bad legislative year, one in which chaos will be the guiding principle:
https://www.republicanwhip.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1540
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And according to many reports, to protect Santos–for at least as long as he can vote for McCarthy–they will either eliminate the Ethics Committee or make it completely superfluous.
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The composition of the House Ethics Committee will be changed so that it contains only one Democrat. There will be no ethics violations by Republicans.
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I read yesterday that the so-called (fake) House Freedom Caucus in the GOP is demanding that:
Click to access hfc_rules_reforms_proposal_7.25.2022.pdf
If you click the link and read what the HFC is demanding, the power they want may make you ill, especially #5 where they want to control how money is spent throughout the federal government, cutting off funding for anything they don’t like. For instance, cutting off funding for all investigations into Traitor Trump and January 6, 2021
The HFC should be called “The Take Your Freedom Away Caucasus.” If the HFC does not approve of it, you don’t get it, and that includes the US Constitution.
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I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some discussion among moderate democrats and Republicans fed up with the clowns. Surely there are Republicans who see the demise of the party if it continues down its current path.
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There are Republicans who see the demise of the party or even the United States as a Constitutional republics/democracy, if the GOP allows the MAGA RINOs in its ranks to continues leading the party down its current path.
Many of those Republicans are now out because they lost their primaries in 2022.
Some of them are calling for a new party.
Some of them started the Lincoln Project.
At least one high profile Republican family I’m aware of is probably struggling to survive being torn apart because of what’s happening in the GOP: George Conway and Kellyanne Conway. George is a Never Trump Republican and can’t stand the MAGA RINOs, but his wife is one of the enemy, not aligned with her husband.
George Conway was one of the founder of the Lincoln Project.
Then there are the cowards in the Republicans Party that are afraid of the elected MAGA RINOs so they do not speak out and hold their noses while voting to make sure the MAGA RINOs don’t paint targets on the back of their heads.
Getting rid of Traitor Trump isn’t going to change that because the likes of DeSantis, Abbott, et al, are already competing to take the traitors spot as the leader of the MAGA RINOs.
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Lloyd and Paul Bonner The vote just now seems to reflect your thought on the presence of truly moderate republicans who understand the danger of the extreme right screaming from the corners of the U. S. Congress.
But I am also wondering where the lobbyists are on this, and the background (recently, not so dark) money, e.g., Koch and company, aka: the bloodstream of slime ball politics. CBK
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My guess is that Koch and ALEC are also competing to win over the MAGA RINOs and program them to support the Koch-ALEC agenda. I wonder how much money Koch/ALEC has donated to the campaigns of Republicans like DeSantis and Abbott.
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Lloyd The power HAS shifted . . . with Trump out of office and in the rearview mirror with all of his foibles. But I think we’ll see how far, and if it’s enough to make a difference.
Certainly, the present flow (with the arch of history) has offered some Freudian courage to those Republicans who feel deeply the shift of power and who would be filled with debilitating fear if they were asked to step out there, like Lis Cheney did.
We talk about Koch and ALEC, but let us not forget the Murdoch family. It’s thready, for sure. However, one of the strongest and most sustained threads goes back to Fox’s Kingmaker influence on the prophylactic thinkers among us. CBK
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Is Murdoch a paying member of ALEC? From what I’ve read, there are about 2,000 dues paying members.
Bill Gates once belonged to ALEC, but when he realized he wouldn’t be in charge, he left, so he’d make the decisions how he’d use his wealth to subvert the United States, instead of Koch.
https://alec.org/membership/
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I think in a sinister way, ALEC is smarter than the nuts in the House. Their style is to allow the noise elsewhere to keep the public’s attention while they quietly pay off state representatives nobody knows. This has been the greatest danger to our Democracy for over a decade.
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To learn the ALEC strategy—capturing the states—read Gordon Lager’s ONE PERCENT SOLUTION.
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The danger ALEC presents has been around since the 1970s. ALEC started out with long-term goals to achieve what is happening now. ALEC’s members must be holding their breaths to see if they are finally going to get what they want, the end of the U.S. Constitution replaced by a corporate state they control.
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All of this sound and fury is a boon for Oligarchs who continue to pillage our economy with little notice. They have the so called Congressional moderates in their back pockets because they funds their campaigns through dark PACs. I doubt anyone in the Republican Party will step up.
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One or two might step up.
But it will take six republicans with the courage to vote with the 212 Democrats to elect a trustworthy Republican moderate that will not let the House Unfreedom Cult have its way.
At the same time, the Democrats seem unwilling to do that. They keep voting as a block for the same Democrat to be speaker of the House even though here is no way in hell that’s going to happen in the next two years.
So, in the end, this stubbornness and/or cowardice on both sides of the aisle will probably play into the hands of the Unfreedom Cult.
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If six moderate Republicans vote with the Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries will be speaker.
If six Democrats vote with the McCarthy Republicans, they should not support McCarthy. He has already given away the store to the Freedom Caucus. He has agreed to give them the power to fire him with a majority of one or two. He has agreed to put Marjorie Taylor Greene on the powerful Oversight Committee (she is voting for him). He’s agreed to kick all the Dems except one off the House Ethics Committee.
Who could the Democrats support among the Republicans?
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Liz Cheney. From what I’ve read, she doesn’t need to be an elected member of Congress to be the Speaker of the House.
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I continue to watch this car wreck. It seems to me that moderates should give the radicals a dose.of their own medicine. Find a candidate that can garner 218 votes from both parties and take committee leadership positions away from the ones holding the process hostage. That could help deflate their power precipitously. I know, no one seems to have the guts. McCarthy is in this because he has no principles.
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I hate to agree with you, but I think you are right.
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Lloyd and Paul As an aside, and three-layers away, one of the unnamed McCarthy resisters said he would never vote for McCarthy because (1) McCarthy lied to him and (2) McCarthy lied about him. What else is there to say? CBK
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I thought Trump made lying a requirement for Republican membership…
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Paul Yes (sigh. . .) McCarthy read the playbook which includes this principle: what’s good for the goose is not allowed for the gander. THEY can lie and get away with it with impunity, but others cannot without suffering dire consequences. It’s Putin all over again, who can invade his next-door neighbor; but when they resist and fight back, Putin is totally offended by it. It’s what you teach your five-year-old.
What do you guess about Trump refusing to endorse McCarthy? I think he smelled the political air and decided he didn’t want to be blamed for losing again. CBK
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Trump did endorse McCarthy.
It did not move his 20 hard right tools.
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Diane MSNBC reported that Trump didn’t endorse McCarthy, in the last couple of days. He DID awhile back, long before this vote, but the news quoted him as saying something like, we’ll see what happens (paraphrased). Doesn’t matter, though. If he stays true to form, he will throw McCarthy under the bus anyway, just because that’s his pattern. Quack quack, waddle waddle. CBK
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But… Republicans, especially MAGA RINO republicans, do not call them lies. They call them alternative facts.
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Well. There were a good number of republicans who made it clear they were exhausted with “fighting” and preferred someone who would lead the House to legislate for their constituents !
Did you read what McCarthy offered as a compromise to the ‘freakin’ freedom caucus? ? It would gut the rule of law.
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From what I read, the so-called House Freedom Caucus wants to hold as much power as possible ending the balancing act between Congress, the White House, and the justice system.
I think what they are doing is attempting another coup.
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If the Freedom Caucus prevails, they can fire the Speaker with a one vote margin. They also insist on term limiting the House Ethics Commission, leaving only one Democrat on that committee. The caucus of nut-jobs will control the Republican agenda.
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The House Un-Freedom crew is going to make so much noise, many won’t notice all the damage they are doing to the country.
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Satire, but not too far off the mark:
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I wonder if the House Unfreedom Crew (I just read there’s 20 of them) are all election deniers and Traitor Trump supporters.
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I should have fact checked how many members the House UnFreedom Cactus Crew has.
(cactus started out as a was a typo but I liked it so much I left it)
If Wiki is correct, there are 54, and Jim Jordon is in charge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Caucus#Membership
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There was a bi-partisan caucus established in the last Congress. I’m wondering at what point they figure out that this could be their opportunity to put the “Freedom Caucus” away? There are threats by some Republicans to do this, resulting in a Democrat as Speaker. What I think would be more tenable is to put a moderate Republican up who could be tolerated by Democrats with the agreement that Republicans would place committee chairs that would not include the bomb throwers and insurrectionists. This could be the opportunity for the House to get itself in order if the responsible have the foresight to see it, but alas…
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Paul Bonner On Morning Joe this morning, Republican member of the House, Mike Lawler from New York, said he was 1,000 percent certain that the larger group of Republicans (circa 203 people) were (paraphrased, but close) *not going to let the hellbent handful of far right people overrun the conference of circa 203 people. They know, he said, that everyone knows, again, 1000 percent that, if they allow it this time, they would be held hostage to that group for the next two years. Music to my ears. CBK
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The 19 or 20 people in the Chaos Caucus will control whoever they allow to become speaker.
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But, if Democratic House members are not willing to compromise and joing those Republicans and vote for a moderate Republican, then the House Unfreedom Cult may yet still became what they want to be, the tail that wags the GOP. For the GOP to have their own speaker, someone the Democrats might trust, Democrats are going to have to vote for him or her, too.
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McCarthy has offered the extremists whatever they want. Nut job MTG will get a seat on the important Oversight Committee. Buckle up, it’s going to be a wild ride. Will they start with impeaching Biden or investigating Hunter’s laptop in search of his father’s financial crimes?
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The House Un-Freedom Crew has arrived.
Traitor Trump doesn’t know it yet, but their noise is going to replace him as the host of the most despised show on earth.
Dear god, we’re getting rid of him and his replacement is them. Instead of one, we now have a ton of windbags.
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Trump has always been the convenient symptom. This has been building at least since Gingrich. Morning Joe Scarborough even acknowledged that he represented the first generation of nut jobs and its been going downhill since. The House has not been a representative body since before WWII. When members of congress represent, on average, 750,000 citizens, the average American has little influence on governance and people like MTG have over sized power. The House of Representatives needs to be at least twice its current size and the Senate should be selected by rank choice voting adding seats according to the size of the state. This would make legislation a tough slog, but it would also require less opportunity for radical kidnapping. I know, this will never happen, but wouldn’t it be nice?
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Paul Bonner I think the case isn’t closed about the American Citizen (and voter), even in the face of so much carelessness about the moral depravity of those who supposedly represent them/us.
As an aside, then I recorded and finally watched the series “Yellowstone.” I enjoyed it, as many apparently do, even while holding my nose over the redneckery that flows through it, at least the disgusting aspects of it, because some of it I truly love. (The replay of The West Wing was also a political hoot . . . many episodes were written and/or produced by Lawrence O’Donnell.)
But I had to wonder, however, about how the “American Citizen” and specifically Trumpers, thought about a “Yellowstone” ranch family who regularly murders and “disappears” people who “know too much” about their (what I would call) tribal ways. Despite some good, much of it reeks of a defunct lone cowboy self-aggrandizing nihilism which is hard to distinguish from being “mobbed up.” Even “the Indians (native Americans) are mired in a calcified but recalcitrant past, that they ride in on with their morally defunct desires and fears to boot. What are our Trumpers to think?
A big truth of it all, however, is the import of big money. So what else is new? Or I should ask: who would dare question it, OR better, what else is there?
Such is democracy in the 21st century, which apparently is now merely code for predatory capitalism. It strains any of us to hope for some sort of transcendence, and yet, I do. CBK
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In 2012 my family moved to Alabama and I finally gave in to having cable. I soon discovered the plethora of “reality TV” shows that seemed to romanticize stereotypical White Male culture (Duck Dynasty, Pawn Stars, The Apprentice et al.). I was amazed that it was so popular. My Aha! moment came when Trump rode down his escalator. Too many Americans seem to see the world this way.
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Paul Bonner You write: “I was amazed that it (male stereotypes) was so popular. My Aha! moment came when Trump rode down his escalator. Too many Americans seem to see the world this way.”
. . . ahem . . . speaking of education. But regardless of his across-the-board degeneracy and lack of education, Trump knew it all too well . . . I am often reminded of how Hitler got so many of his ideas from American sociologists, artists, and politicians. There is no accounting for bad taste (or for bad interpretations and applications).
But here is is a salutary note from a philosopher I have studied for a long time, which mirrors the “arch of history” that bends towards justice quote from Martin Luther King:
“People that cannot be persuaded by the suddenness of intelligence and reason are easily convinced by the slow but inevitable gradualness of time.”
What is K-12’s time frame . . . 12+ years, and then on to university? It doesn’t mean certainty, but it does hold a tacit imperative with historical meaning, aka: hope.
The philosopher (Bernard Lonergan), however, was writing in the context of science and scientists today. He followed that quote with this which, if you have read Kuhn, should spark some resonance: “So it is in the sciences.”
(Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 2000, p. 549) Back to work.
CBK
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“We now know that up to 90 percent of the decisions we make are based on emotion. Take a minute and read that again; almost every decision we make is based on emotion, not rational thought and measured consideration.”
https://brandingstrategyinsider.com/how-emotion-drives-brand-choices-and-decisions/
I think ALEC and others outside of ALEC on the extreme right know this and set long term goals to take advantage of this serious human flaw by influencing emotional decisions with long-term propaganda style campaigns designed to manipulate people. That’s what Fake Fox News does, sends out an unending stream of messages not based on facts but designed over the long term to manipulate/control emotions.
When a mob lynches someone they think is guilty of a crime, that victim may not have committed, that mob is not interested in the evidence or facts, that mob is reacting to its angry, roiled emotions. That mob does not trust the justice system to do what they think is right.
Traitor Trump’s BIG LIE was his attempt to influence an emotional mob that would do his bidding on January 6, 2021. It worked but than God it failed on that date.
But it might not fail in the near future. I think some of the members of the House UnFreedom Cult is going to attempt another coup.
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What did Steve Bannon say? Fill the zone with… Right now that seems to be working.
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Too many Germans saw the world that way back in the 1930s before Hitler’s rise to power and World War II killed tens of millions of innocent people.
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The one area where we were lucky during the Trump debacle was that his team was so incompetent that they couldn’t implement their nefarious grift. My hope is that all of loud moths will suffer from the same effect. The will be a lot of sound and fury, but little law making. Let’s just hope than some voters finally get fed up and derail this clown car in 2024.
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Agreed. With the very slim majority the Republicans have in the House, they need every vote and the GOP is going to be blackmailed and bullied by about 30 Republicans that call themselves the so-called (FAKE) House Freedom Caucus.
But yesterday, one GOP House member (I don’t remember his name but for sure he’s under attack now, with death threats, by the extreme right) stood up and said he was going to work with Democrats and urge other moderate Republican to do the same thing to stop the so-called (FAKE) House Freedom Caucus from getting what they want, control of the country.
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What all of us need to understand is that in the new political world, a one vote majority is about as good as a 100 vote majority. Just more venal because they know they need to the biggest bang for their malignant buck.
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They have no shame !
Their behavior is not merely reprehensible and shameful, it is the opposite of what a governing body must do for the people they represent. They behave like a high school fraternity!
History will tell the tale.
It makes me very sad.
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Sadly, the Republican Party has not been about governance since Gingrich.
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More like “Tragically”.
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I agree, the Democrats must compromise, reach across the aisle, and join with at least six republicans to vote for a trustworthy, moderate Republican to be Speaker of the House, a Republican’s who will ignore all the noise the Unfreedom Cult makes, even though the US media will not ignore those freaks. The media will report everything the Unfreedom Cult members do and say, and the more outrageous they are, the more coverage they will get.
But this may turn out good in the end and we’ll see a voter backlash, the GOP losing the majority in both houses of Congress in 2024.
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If the recent allegations of Matt Schlapp groping the crotch of a Hershel Walker staffer are true, the Schlapp jokes will write themselves!
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Matt and Lindsey sitting in a tree, G-R-O-P-I-N-G
Beards for Schlapp and Graham!
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We may not have Matt to Schlapp around much longer!
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Hmm, I think some of those potential jokes have already been in use for some time. All that may be needed is a slight revision.
https://urbanthesaurus.org/synonyms/groping
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Lloyd About the jokes, very funny regardless. But the deeper problem is that so many Americans seem not to care and even hate the idea of woke which, in other times, could double for the mission statement of any authentic educational institution in a democratic culture.
Or perhaps there are so many paid hacks who will work for the highest bidder to threaten and make so much troll noise that we think there is much more to it.
But then there are the close-calls of the actual voting, which speak more to real voters than to hacks. I cannot, for the life of me, reconcile the “not caring” thing . . . CBK
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If we know the number of MAGA RINOs that still support Traitor Trump, then we also may know how many dangerously ignorant fools hate the idea of WOKE, a cult that worships being uneducated, while hating the educated.
I do not see any difference between these MAGA RINOs, that includes the malignant House Unfreedom Chaos Cult, and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia.
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Lloyd Exactly that (Pol Pot, etc.). I don’t see education as a cure-all, but it is certainly a cure-some. And from my experience teaching (college, mostly), I think there is a basic lack of intelligence, but more, a laziness . . . an unwillingness to develop it, first and foremost, in and for oneself, but also as the ground for everything else we care about and want to do.
And with that in mind, I think it will always be the case that the unintelligent, as well as the intelligent but undeveloped, once within adult range, will fade away, or be too loudly stupid, but always to be existentially allergic to thinking, to anything new or complex, or ambiguous, or “diverse,” or to anything that pushes them out of their already arrived-at comfort plane (soap-opera, or reality-TV horizon, or whatever) and will, from there, automatically embrace charismatic and vindictive authority figures who, they think, can do all their thinking for them. It’s naivete combined with optimism looking for a group to gang up with, to hide in, and to break things with.
Education takes time, an army of good teachers and other kinds of leadership (certainly not a corrupt-to-the-core president). And we can lay many of our present problems at education’s door in the U.S. However, in the long run, education can (and must) lead the way, but we seem to be pretty-much past anything that can move the normal needle in the short run, except maybe for the likes of Leghorn, not to mention the Roadrunner and Coyote? CBK
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It’s easy to blame the public education system and it’s teachers for what’s happening, alleging that teachers are not doing their job, but there is a simple formula that explains how the public education works.
ONE: The teachers teach, they do not learn for the students. They teach.
TWO: the students do the learning and to do that they must cooperate with their teachers, do the work, and pay attention.
THREE: parents must support the teachers and their children when it comes to cooperating with the teachers to learn and doing the classwork and homework that’s required as part of the learning process.
I taught for thirty years in the public schools working with almost 6,000 students over that time period, and it was my experience that more students do not do the work necessary to learn or cooperate than those that did.
The failure rate was always higher than the small number of students earning Bs and As.
When I use the word EARN, I mean it. My students were not judged by test scores but by the work they turned in and more than half never turned in even half of the work.
A student not learning what they are taught is often not the teacher’s fault.
However some admins, more than once, called me to their offices and tried to convince me it was my fault students were not doing the work required to learn and earn a passing grade, but I refused to accept that BS when the idiots threw it at me. I was not passive-aggressive and seldom was called by the same admin again, probably because of the look on my face that may have clearly telegraphed that I was thinking how easy it would be for me to get rid of one of those admin pukes without a weapon, just with my hands and teeth right there and then. And yes, I was thinking exactly that in those few BS meetings. After one such meeting with one of the nine or ten principals I worked with over the decades, my expression must have scared him so much that if he turned a corner and saw me walking his way, he’d spin around and walk faster in the opposite direction to avoid me.
I made more documented phone calls home than all of the other teachers combined at the high school where I taught (100 teachers), and most of the time, nothing changed after I talked to the parents/guardians.
At parent conferences the few parents that showed up were mostly the parents of A and B students. We seldom met with the parents of students that were failing our classes because they were not doing the work, and when we called many of these parents, no one answered or the phone was disconnected.
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The students are neither stupid nor lazy they are alienated from the institution. This is common amongst working class people and escalates amongst the poor. They have a belief system that tells them this is a rigged game and they are not entirely wrong. Marx understood alienated workers, these are alienated students. It a monumental task to change this but keep this in mind. Education does NOT cure poverty. The elimination or serious mitigation of poverty makes education POSSIBLE. The USA asked the PISA OECD people why they kept coming in around 17th in reading math and science. All these Scandinavian and west Europeans were ahead not to mention the Asians . The answer was “you have too much poverty and your poverty is heavily concentrated in some states and cities. Conclusion: Only small but important gains will be made until the poverty in America is solved, not before.
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Living in poverty, by itself, affects a child’s ability to learn in EVERY country, not just the United States. And among developed country’s the US has the 2nd highest child poverty rate. I think Romania is in first place.
“Because in every country, students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution.”
https://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing/
Yet, when it comes to teaching children living in poverty, teachers in the United States do a better job than most.
From the same study (link above): “Disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases, substantially better) than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as comparable students in similar post-industrial countries.”
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The problem of course is that all “developed” countries have some poverty, usually defined as income less than half of the national median. There are differences, however, Finland has a child poverty rate of about 5% and that 5% is not all piled up in Helsinki or even amongst the sami (AKA Laplander) group, it is spread out. Canada is down to about 8% child poverty and this means higher PISA scores than USA by itself This may be dated but last time I looked, USA was about 18% child poverty. That is a mountain to climb.
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Yes, it is a mountain to climb, and we are not going to reach the top with all of our toes and fingers broken by the extremists and their endless efforts to sabotage everything that works.
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…And yet this is never reported. The sole purpose of the report “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 was to delegitimize public education. The media took their lead hook, line, and sinker. This initiative of the Reagan Administration provided the footprint followed by Republicans and so called “moderate” Democrats alike for the next four decades. We have no meaningful strategy to deal with poverty in this country because our culture has defined it as a shameful character trait rather than a problem to be resolved with resource allocation that enhances opportunity. Our economic model praises and rewards dominance while demeaning the under privileged as an underclass. When North Carolina first implemented high stakes testing it used a growth measure that not only rewarded lower performing schools for improvement, but praised them. Once NCLB became the law of the land and the testing industry convinced states to grade schools, growth was no longer the priority. I was told by the Superintendent at my last school in Alabama that although we had made significant progress over the last two years from a low “C” we remained just short of a “B”, thus our progress was not satisfactory. It became an excuse to see me out the door. We were improving at a rate of 3% per year with real progress among struggling students. There are many warts with the Public Schools, but those in the building have always worked hard to make progress, and at the school level moved to improve. If the country doesn’t provide the human and material resources needed then underprivileged populations will continue to suffer. Even within districts, schools with middle class populations received greater funding than impoverished populations even after accounting for Title One funding. Many more schools fail to make the unreasonable percentages required for Title One and suffer from even greater resource depletion. Heroic individual efforts you describe, Lloyd, become harder because communities add more challenges to the handicaps teachers such as you have to overcome. It is not only poverty that is the clear determinant for school performance, but our unwillingness as a society to provide resources to overcome it.
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Paul, recognizing the role of poverty in depressing school performance is like a light bulb that goes on in your head. Read Richard Rothstein’s book, Class and Schools.
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Thanks you for the reference!
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Doug Little,
I agree. Every test result show the heavy influence of family income.
Diane
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Lloyd I referred to education, but I do not “blame” teachers; though I understand why you might think that I do.
The whole movement in education has had corrupt threads running through it, developmentally, intellectually, philosophically, and politically. Though many movements have recognized the flaws, and tried to change its direction over the years, the whole of it has stayed the course following along with the powers-that-be.
And at its core, the corrupt threads are “corrupt” because they fail to understand or even care about (and to systematize the closing of) the gap that emerges so regularly between (a) children’s inborn wonder about everything, which translates into self-motivation, and (b) the institutions and practices of education as a quasi-twelve year+ experience.
Many individual teachers, writers, parents, and scholars have found ways to push back, but it doesn’t show up in our cultural or political consciousness as the thrust that it could and should, which is much too influenced by transactional wink-and-nod capitalism.
One of those threads comes forward as “education is only for getting a high-paying job,” and now: anti-woke movements. People can change and learn, but in a democracy we need leaders who understand and embody the principles that will attract most if not all who come after us. CBK
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I understand what you mean.
I fought back for most of the thirty years I was a public school teacher.
Without job protection called tenure, admin would have fired me because I refused to obediently follow top down edicts to do it their way. Instead, I taught what and how I wanted and learned how to avoid any traps admin set so they could not legally fire me.
Then admin hired a principals with orders to rid of me and some other teachers. He was given a hit list and my name was on it. One of the VPs pulled me aside and warned me. He also said not to let anyone know he warned me because he was afraid for his job.
I wasn’t alone in fighting back. That’s why other teachers were on that hit list, too.
In my case, this principal that attempted to set me up failed. Instead, his plan backfired in his face making the district’s leadership look bad.
So, admin got rid of him two years into his contract and had to pay him six figures to buy out the other three years.
He was too aggressive when he attempted to set me up. What he did angered students and parents, because he pressured some of my journalism students to be witnesses against me. He failed and overnight the entire student staff of the high school paper and their parents unified and became my allies. When they weren’t around, we plotted how to resist and it worked.
It was apparent this principal also wanted to get me verbally on the record defying him. Instead of reacting as he was bating me, I turned to the unions lawyers, followed their advice to be very passive aggressive and avoid the use of specific words and phrases. I also contacted the ACLU, and another nonprofit legal group that fights for student journalists and their advisers, who both expressed interest, and then a story hit the pages of The Los Angeles Times about what was going on.
A few years later, I turned 60, finished my 30th year of teaching and retired willingly. I think admin breathed a sigh of relief when I left. Of all the teachers that refused to follow that districts top-down crap, I was one of the most outspoken.
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Lloyd First Rule: Don’t mess with journalism students, at least while democracy is still breathing. (I laughed out loud when I read that in your note. Think: Mama Bear.)
I’ve heard this kind of story over and over again (when I taught teachers doing their masters degrees). I thought one teacher was going to have heart failure when she realized in our evening class that she had left a copy of her paper, which criticized the principal and the entire school, in the copy machine at that school.
Then there was the teacher who came to our program in California from having taught in the mid-west (cannot remember the state) and who was going back after finishing the program. The class was about diversity, racism, sexism, etc. She said that she had no problem about racism in her small town . . . because there were no black people living there. Oh . . . . well . . . . we had some very nice class discussions on THAT one.
So many of my teachers, however, had wonderful stories about children truly learning in leaps and bounds. And your experience, even the bad parts of it, were probably formative in a good way across the board, and will never be forgotten by those students. And as a teacher, I think there’s nothing better in my whole life than knowing the intimate ins and outs of those experiences. CBK
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LOL!
The first student the principal called out of an earlier class than journalism, to pressure and break, had been with me for three years, first year as a student in my 9th grade English class where I recruited her into the one journalism class I taught. I sensed she was smarter than she thought.
She was black. The principal was white. Well, I’m also white. Her parents told me I was the first teacher that treated her like she was smart (she did go to college later and graduated. the last time I heard form her she was married and living somewhere with her husband in the Caribbean, I think). Before that, Tori’s parents were worried she was going to drop out of school and go the wrong way. She was head strong, street smart, but also very bright. When she first challenged me in English, I joked with her instead of cracking down and over time that turned into a game of sorts. Eventually no more joking and she shocked parents by earning her first A since starting school. Then all her grades started to pick up.
I don’t remember who it was that warned me ahead of time, what the principal was planning. I called Tori in her class before the principal was going to call her out. I warned her what was going to happen and how to handle it.
She followed my advice and the principle got nowhere. Her parents were tough people who had worked hard to escape poverty and they came down like a ton of bricks on top of that principal and the district’s admin, and also contacted the ACLU (I provided the contact info) to represent their daughter
That high school had a 70% child poverty rate, with several, dangerous, multi generational street gangs in attendance, and the smallest minority on campus were Caucasians, about 8% of the total.
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As a teacher, I learned a great deal from my students. I too taught in high poverty schools during my tenure as a teacher. As time passed, this middle class privileged white dude learned that authenticity was the best tool I had to run an effective classroom. When I began teaching I wrote far too many referrals that did nothing to reign in misbehavior in the classroom. I soon learned that preparation and the ability to exhibit expertise with empathy for students produced the best results. I was once told by an assistant principal, after the fact, that it was heartening that in spite of the disciplinary struggles experienced throughout the school there were classrooms like mine where students were not only cooperative but productive. I had no idea about this when I entered the profession and learned it. I learned later that one of the key tenants of IB is that we are all learners. Understanding this helped me connect in ways otherwise not possible.
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Yes, we are all learners.
Even students that don’t do most of or no work in school and only warm a seat will still learn, when lessons are designed to reach them too, because they still have eyes and ears. There is a lot a teacher can do to plan lessons that teach even when students are not actively cooperating to learn.
The high school where I taught had a BIC, Behavior Improvement Center, a classroom where students were sent for a period time out, when they wouldn’t stop disrupting the learning environment in one or more of their classes. The teacher that volunteered to take BIC taught in BIC, too. He had worksheets for history, math, reading/English, and if the students didn’t finish the worksheets, they’d land in Saturday school, with him, where they had to finish the worksheets that he corrected.
We, including the students, all called him Mr. D. His last name was long so staff and students shortened it to the first letter. He was also a coach for one of the high school athletic teams.
Mr. D kept records in BIC, and would write up a report at the end of each school year. Those reports seldom changed much, and 5% of the students that landed in BIC repeatedly earned more than 90% of the referrals, in class after class, that sent them to BIC. Some he saw everyday for more than one period.
5%
That high school had about 3,000 students. So, about 150 were earning more than 90% of the referrals on an annual basis, and Mr. D also referred the 5% to our grade level counselors in the main office for counseling regarding their disruptive behavior.
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Sounds very familiar. My first encounter with In School Suspension as a teacher was observing teachers who could do nothing else simply charged to keep students from doing damage. My years as a teacher and administrator found that such semi-solitary arrangements were very ineffective. I hope I don’t sound too cynical when I say that students who are disciplinary challenges when they reach secondary levels are often beyond help. When I began working in an elementary school as a Principal I discovered that it was the lack of interest and motivation that brought on disciplinary problems often due to limited exposure to the wonders of the world. I was a bit of a disciplinary problem in elementary school, but I went on vacations, camping, fishing, and had woods all around my house that raised my creative curiosity. My privilege allowed me to grow out of my early anti-establishment tendencies and by the time I reached 6th grade, I valued learning in school. I have witnessed many children who don’t get to see their world before they are expected to understand it. This creates a stigma of disregard for something misunderstood. As they face the same consequences for misbehavior along with a learning environment that tells them they are insignificant, the rebellion becomes rampant. The problem we often write about on this thread about too much phonemic reading and rudimentary math focus comes about because so many of our students never get to experience the wonders of learning beyond regimen. If we want to improve outcomes for underprivileged students we need to expose them to wonders and not redundancy while they are very young. Otherwise, high school teachers will continue to face the same disruptive challenges that make outcomes predetermined.
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Teachers should have the training and freedom to teach as you say, but a bunch of billionaires that got rich selling pillows, cheating the IRS, cheating customers, lying, pumping oil, fracking, polluting, selling computers, silly putty or some other toy, et al, think they know it all and won’t let teachers do the job the way it should be done.
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Much of the struggle we observed in the House this past week is about that very legacy. These people don’t want an effective government, they simply want to turn the coffers over to those who want it all. The corporate world wants to spend more on defense because it means more money for the investment class. They don’t want too spend money on education and health care because it would mean less money for the 1% and more opportunity for everyone else. The fact that the so-called Freedom Caucus has once again reared its ugly head is because they like to pretend this is about fiscal discipline when in fact it is about more subsidies for the well-healed. If they succeed in their ransom demands, the deficit will explode once again and services for everyday Americans will continue to shrink. This has been the same gameplay since Reagan, yet the electorate never seems to catch on to the grift.
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The grift works. Middle-income and working class people keep voting for people who want to take away their benefits and cut taxes for the richest.
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The electorate that keeps voting for Republicans never catches on because those voters are too dumb to know they are being used.
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You betcha Paul.
When Harvard studied 60,000 successful teachers to find what “Principles of Learning” were present in those classrooms in which EVERY STUDENT LEARNED THEY DISCOVERED WHAT YOU DID!
Those of us who have THE GIFT TO LEARN WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE IN EVERY STUDENT WHO IS sitting before US , are the ones who enable kids, because WE know what they need..
I was the NYS Educator of Excellence after Harvard studied me, and discovered what I did that worked so well. Obviously, you know how to do this too,
How sad that we, experienced, professional educators must use the crap that we are told to use.
Imagine telling surgeons or engineers or attorneys what they need to successfully do the job
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What the Destroy Public Education Crime Syndicate (think Koch’s ALEC, et al) is doing is the same thing Mao did with his bare foot doctors program.
During China’s Cultural Revolution, real surgeons and doctors were not allowed to practice medicine or do surgeries. Instead, anyone that wanted to particle medicine and do surgeries could, even illiterate peasants.
Training was watching a film or reading a comic book showing each type of surgery, before the barefoot doctor operated. Films and comic books were because many of the bare foot doctors were illiterate.
There was a very high failure rate, a lot of patients died.
Imagine, a bare foot doctor cutting out a kidney, doing heart surgery, and stopping to go watch the film or look at the picture sin a comic book again to make sure they were doing it right… sort of.
The only area the bare foot doctors were successful was teaching their peasant peers how to wash their hands often and clean their homes to avoid diseases.
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In the words of Foghorn Leghorn, “Lighten up, son, it’s a joke!” The hypocrisy, not the behavior, of the gay-bashing party of Mark Foley, Larry Craig, Dennis Hastert, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and the Idiot is what the jokes point out to me, regardless of where they may have come from.
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I want to see a creative list. We had lists like that about the traitor.
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I still crack up at The Three Stooges, so that’s probably part of the problem.
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Why not use Three Stooges jokes with a little revision that might work?
https://bestcleanfunnyjokes.com/tag/three-stooges/
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Katie Porter wants to take her whiteboard to the Senate.
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I love Katie Porter.
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I would love to see Katie as veep acting as a quasi-Minister without Portfolio, allowing her to do in executive branch what she does in the House.
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You seem nice.
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Buck Fiden switched first letters for Fuck Biden. This is a fascist troll. Even if he or she is an ignorant, hate -illed, FOX fake news programmed MAGA RINO, they are still a troll.
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Lloyd, he is a troll and he has been deleted.
If he comes back again, I will delete him again.
What an idiot, and a hateful one too.
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Lloyd – that’s because Diane has banned vulgarity from her living room.
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A sneaky troll to get around profanity and vulgarity.
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You won’t see him again here. I was late to the table, busy posting new things for tomorrow.
I can’t read the comments 24/7.
That filthy ignorant dope has been permanently blocked.
He will likely come up with a new name.
And I will block his IP address.
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Such an original use of consonants on your part…
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I read once that Traitor Trump was the first one to use the term Libtard and his worshiping loyalists use it all the time.
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What happened when a reporter from NPR’s Planet Money podcast brought Dr. Seuss’ book The Sneetches to a third grade Ohio classroom to discuss economics tells a lot about schools censuring what kids hear in their classrooms.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/education/2023/01/09/olentangy-schools-halts-reading-of-dr-seuss-book-during-npr-podcast/69791362007/
Here’s a link to the podcast; if you don’t want to listen to all of it, the pertinent audio begins at 18:25.
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/05/1147069942/kids-books-economics-lessons
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One story that seems to be getting no play anywhere, or at least I haven’t seen it addressed, is the name change from the House Committee on Education & Labor Committee to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Before the committee name implied jurisdiction over the Education and Labor departments and their obvious linkages. Now it is overt, the purpose of education is to train workers. Check this out for Orwellian language like, “The Left prefers the term labor because it creates a sense of enmity between employees and employers which union bosses and left-wing activists seek to stoke for political gain. This word also fails to capture how deeply intertwined workers and job creators are in their contributions to our economy. Though the Left likes to treat employers like predators, we know that most job creators have their employees’ best interests in mind. Our economy would not function without the earnest cooperation of both employees and employers” and “Language matters. Using outdated terms like “labor” creates an overt bias towards union bosses while widening fissures created by Big Labor between workers and employers. If we want a modern workforce, we should say as much.”
https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=408756
The idea of education children to be citizens and educated to do jobs and adjust to changing times is a thing of the past. The achievement of the privatizer’s agenda is within reach.
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Greg Nice catch. I am relieved to know these two things for my future understanding of how things work in the world of really-nice capitalist thinkers:
(1) “Though the Left likes to treat employers like predators,” (2) “we know that most job creators have their employees’ best interests in mind.”
Oh . . . I almost forgot. The below might be related, but maybe not. It appeared in the Los Angeles Times this morning:
“Exxon Mobil publicly denied global warming but quietly predicted it”
“New research suggests Exxon Mobil Corp. had keener insight into the impending dangers of global warming than even NASA experts but still waged a decades-long campaign to discredit the science on climate change and its connection to the burning of fossil fuels.
“Despite its public denials, the major oil corporation worked behind closed doors to carry out an astonishingly accurate series of global warming projections between 1977 and 2003, according to a study published Thursday in Science.”
I guess they and so many other corporations and “bosses” really didn’t mean it and, BTW, have nothing to do with those Maga-Morons we keep hearing about on MSNBC. Or maybe they do. Whatever. In any case, I’m glad to be informed by such changes and corrections in the language of the relationship between two groups of people. But wait, ARE they people? I’m so confused. CBK
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Greg,
Even worse than changing the name of the committee is changing the rules to allow Rep. Virginia Foxx of NC to have a fourth term as chair of the committee. She is no friend of education.
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For further proof that Ohio is now officially a fascist state. Blueprint for America:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ohio-redistricting-maureen-oconnor-supreme-court-republican-gerrymandering_n_63c7106fe4b04d4d18daf68d
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Coming for the librarians in North Dakota:
Books containing “sexually explicit” content — including depictions of sexual or gender identity — would be banned from North Dakota public libraries under legislation that state lawmakers began considering Tuesday.
The GOP-dominated state House Judiciary Committee heard arguments but did not take a vote on the measure, which applies to visual depictions of “sexually explicit” content and proposes up to 30 days imprisonment for librarians who refuse to remove the offending books.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/north-dakota-weighs-ban-sexually-explicit-library-books-rcna66271?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma
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The Boston Globe continues its attempt to undermine Boston’s public schools by publishing this opinion piece written by Mary Tamer. Tamer was once an appointed school committee member, and failed in her last 2021 attempt at elected office as a citywide City Councilor. During that race, she darkened the skin of her opponent in campaign flyers. As a consolation prize, she was given a job heading up DFER Massachusetts.
There’s no mention of the gentrification that has driven numerous families out of the city as rents become unaffordable. She does not account for inflation in talking about costs rising. The polling mentioned by MassINC is a push poll funded by the privatizers who fund the Globe’s education reporting.
Recent MassINC polling showed that Boston families are open to, and often prefer, alternatives to BPS, including Catholic, private, and charter public schools. Huh.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/01/17/opinion/with-fewer-students-boston-there-should-be-fewer-schools/
Yesterday, The Glob published this report:
BPS officials said the term sexual assault implies criminal conduct, something the legal system must determine, not the district. The district instead determines whether the action violated BPS policy and is classified as sexual misconduct.
“We continue to clarify the difference between sexual assault and sexual misconduct,” said Max Baker, a BPS spokesperson. “Each year, only a handful of cases end up with any criminal charges.”
So there isn’t much there there, but it inflames the notion that schools – and those attending them – are dangerous.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/01/20/metro/how-many-sexual-assaults-are-reported-bps-answer-is-murky-heres-why/
It’s part of a concerted effort. Four City Councilors want metal detectors and police returned to our schools. Not one of the disturbing incidents they cite occurred inside the schools.
Metal detectors are security theater, as school buildings have multiple doors and windows and a student will stash a weapon somewhere, not bring it through screening. Police do not increase safety, as shown by this research: https://t.co/BXNCCEyLrD. But hey, what people want to believe trumps research, amirite?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/01/10/metro/city-councilors-call-police-metal-detectors-boston-public-schools/
For once in a long while, we’ve a competent experienced, superintendent and a mayor committed to our schools, whose two young sons are students in the district. Seems a lot of folks don’t care for that.
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All of the public schools where I taught in California were scattered out and covered a lot of land. I think the high school covered at least 40 acres.
There are always places along the fence where someone could climb over unseen or slide a weapon under the fencing where the weapon wasn’t easy to spot. Or another kid was waiting inside to take the weapon handed under or over the fence to him or her.
Or someone could slip on campus at three in the morning when no one was there and hide a firearm anywhere they wanted that would be almost impossible to discover.
The CPO’s at the high school where I taught were not allowed to carry firearms. The district feared a student might take one way from a CPO and shoot someone else leading to law suits.
One of the CPOs chased a student off campus during the lunch period. That student, a hardcore gangbanger, was on expulsion and wasn’t supposed to be on campus all.
When that CPO chased the student out of the lunch area and off the campus he followed him until the kid turned around and pulled out a pistol and aimed it at him. That took place on the sidewalk outside of the school’s fence.
The CPO gave up the chase, held up his hands in surrender, and walked back on campus hoping he wouldn’t get shot in the back.
Those metal detectors are decorations that are designed to fool parents into thinking they will make their kids safer.
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Our safest schools are those where the students feel able to confide in their teachers when something is up. These 4 councilors aren’t really interested in safety. They don’t like public schools.
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Does anyone in the voucher and charter school “NOT AN EDUCATION INDUSTRY” like public schools? There are in it for the money, not the children.
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Our friend of the blog, Professor Maurice Cunningham, on the Boston Globe playing footsies with the education privatizers who wish to destroy public education in the city of Boston:
ERN’s major local supporter is the Barr Foundation the foundation of Amos Hostetter the fifth largest dark money donor ($2,000,000) to the losing charter schools privatization ballot campaign in 2016. Barr funds some of the Boston Globe’s education coverage.
Barr is a privatization interest group. Its $600,000 donation to the Globe for 2019-2020 marked “the dawn of philanthro-interest group journalism.” Barr re-upped with another $400,000 for the Globe’s Great Divide coverage according to Barr’s 2021 Form 990 tax return.[4]
That’s right. Barr funds both DFER and part of the the Globe’s education coverage.
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I have a question:
Does the Boston Globe also publish opinion pieces that support public education to balance out an issue?
Or, are all the opinion pieces in the Boston Globe about K-12 education only supportive of the fascist privatization of the public sector?
Who gains when taxpayer funded public sector services are turned over to for profit corporations?
ANSWER: the wealthiest 1%; everyone else loses. Corporations can’t make profits without cutting services we once took for granted.
“One of the most famous and historically important examples of privatization occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s form of government was communism, where everything was owned and run by the state; there was no private property or business. Privatization began before the collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, its then-leader, who implemented reforms to hand over certain government enterprises to the private sector. After the Soviet Union collapsed, there was mass privatization of previous government enterprises to a select portion of the populace in Russia, known as oligarchs, that dramatically increased inequality within the nation.”
Now, thanks to what has happened in Russia, we know what happens when a country turns over its public sector to for-profit businesses controlled by a few oligarchs like Charles Koch and the Walton family.
Those countries end up controlled by one of the oligarchs and in Russia that oligarch is Putin who holds total power over everyone. When someone dares to publicly speak out or text against Putin’s policies, they often end up in prison or dead.
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Hello Diane: I’m happy to post (with permission) a note from J. Eyring, who writes on the AAACE-NLA list serve (National Literacy Association), in response to a thread of ongoing conversation about the slow migration of civics education out of K-12, and the question of its ongoing programming in Adult Foundational Education:
From: aaace-nla@googlegroups.com aaace-nla@googlegroups.com on behalf of Eyring, Janet jeyring@fullerton.edu
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2023 11:32:15 AM
To: Catherine Blanche King aaace-nla@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: How should the Adult Foundational Education field address Civics Education? Hi David and all,
I agree with you all that civics training in the entire US population is needed. The fact that it was gradually removed from K-12 curricula in the past couple of decades and that instruction in civics is uneven across the US is a shame. CIRCLE is a non-partisan research center at Tufts University that focuses on improving and widening civics instruction in the US. There might be useful information here applicable to all of our adult programs.
https://circle.tufts.edu/our-research/equitable-k12-civic-learning#education-standards
Equitable K-12 Civic Learning | CIRCLE – Tufts University
Overview. A robust civic education for all youth, particularly in K-12 schools, is vital to the health of our democracy because it can prepare young people to be informed and engaged members of their communities. circle.tufts.edu
Since more than half of our adult learners are ESOL learners and non-native English speakers, it would be well for the entire Adult Foundational Education field to look into the large number of civic materials for adults that have already been written. English Language (EL) civics has been an important part of the ESOL curriculum for decades. I agree with Catherine, referring to the US Citizenship and Immigration resources webpage is a good start, since learners must understand the information required for them to know to pass the US Citizenship test.
https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship
https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/find-study-materials-and-resources
https://lincs.ed.gov/professional-development/resource-collections/profile-997
DHS published a notice in the Federal Register announcing plans to conduct a trial of proposed changes to the current nationalization test with volunteers from community-based organizations (CBOs). USCIS will hold an initial virtual engagement on Jan. 12, 2023, to provide an overview of the proposed changes and the trial test. You may submit any comments on the trial test to natzredesign22 … http://www.uscis.gov
Also, the Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System (CASAS) (originally developed for California) provides materials and assessments for civic participation, citizenship preparation, and integrated English Language (EL) Civics for workforce preparation.
https://www.casas.org/training-and-support/casas-peer-communities/california-adult-education-accountability-and-assessment/california-el-civics
Civic Participation: This program supports the design, creation, implementation and delivery of instructional activities that integrates civics education content with ESL instruction. This program connects literacy to the lives of learners and reflects their experiences as community members, parents and participants in the workforce. Through these programs, adults understand and deal with social issues through community research projects, collecting and analyzing information, and interpreting findings in ways that connect school-based learning with personal knowledge and community experience. This program is funded under Section 231 of WIOA.
Citizenship Preparation: This program uses ESL methodologies and citizenship preparation material to prepare learners to take and pass the USCIS (formerly INS) written and oral citizenship test. The program includes outreach services, skills assessment, curriculum development and instruction, professional development, naturalization preparation and assistance and program evaluation. This program is funded under Section 231 of WIOA.
Integrated EL Civics (IELCE): This program connects literacy to the lives of learners and reflects their experiences as community members and parents with an emphasis on participation in the workforce. It gives learners the opportunity to concurrently participate in literacy instruction, workforce preparation activities and workforce training. This program is funded under Section 243 of WIOA.
Here are other sites that provide useful ESL teaching materials that could be adapted for other adult learners.
https://elcivics.otan.us/
https://elcivics.com/
https://www.elcivics.com/civics.html
This site by the Center for Adult Language Acquisition (CAELA), which existed from 1989 – 2004, provides some good resources, although now a bit dated.
https://www.cal.org/caela/esl_resources/collections/civics.html
Anyway, I obtained much of this information by a simple search on the internet. There is much more that is already available that could be used or adapted by AFE educators but there is certainly room for more development as well!
Best,
Jan
Dr. Janet Eyring
Emerita Professor
CSU Fullerton
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“Overview. A robust civic education for all youth, particularly in K-12 schools, is vital to the health of our democracy because it can prepare young people to be informed and engaged members of their communities. circle.tufts.edu”
This is exactly why the libertarian/theofascists want to get rid of K-12 civic education and are assaulting it in colleges and universities, too. These ALEC, Walton, DeVos type of thugs do not want a democracy where a highly educated population that thinks for themselves, votes.
They want easy to manipulate voters or no voters at all. The dumbest voters so far are the MAGA RINOs that still support Traitor Trump.
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A glimmer of optimism in times that are turning very dark very quickly.
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Sadly, Diane you don’t know the meaning of the word “woke” as being used by conservatives versus some made up nonsense you project into your own brain. Woke means CRT. CRT means “equity”. Equity means getting that which you have NOT EARNED on the belief that ALL WHITE people are “oppressors” whether they know it or not (ridiculous) and that people of color “cannot” be racist (ridiculous; bigotry isn’t limited to the color of one’s skin) and I use the word “garbage” because the extreme Left thinks it’s OK to INSULT and HARM the beliefs of those that do not agree with them. This is not about skin color. Martin Luthor King Jr. envisioned a word that was BLIND to color. CRT is the opposite. It demands PUNISHMENT/REVENGE and reverse-racism for those it deems oppressors (white people) even though no one alive had a darn thing to do with slavery. It doesn’t acknowledge the real history that the very evil slavers didn’t invade Africa to get those slaves. African tribes SOLD out rival tribes into slavery, something rarely mentioned in history class. Why? It’s about culpability.
You cannot purely paint the white man as pure evil when the black man was sold out by his own kind. It also utterly utterly ignores all the white men who died in the Civil War to FREE the black man from slavery. Their lives didn’t matter. Only BLACK lives matter because white people are ALL 100% SYSTEMIC RACISTS according to CRT! Yet you left-wing clueless cannot see or comprehend how RIDICULOUS such a statement is. Not all white people grow up privileged and not all people of color grow up in poverty and without support. My dad left when I was 1 year old. We were dirt poor. Are you going to tell me that children of rich doctors of people of color are worse off than I was growing up? No, it’s not all black and white. Privilege isn’t defined by skin color for god’s sake! It’s defined by CLASS!
CRT makes it all about skin color, exactly the opposite of what Martin Luthor King Jr. wanted. He wanted a COLOR BLIND society where your skin color didn’t matter one iota! Prejudice/bigotry against someone whose skin color doesn’t match yours is the REAL problem, not some magical “inherent” oppressor/oppressed system BASED ON SKIN COLOR!!! The fact most of you CANNOT or WILL NOT tell the difference is what is so darn scary! Opponents of CRT don’t have to be racists. They simply don’t agree with that ridiculous theory that puts ALL white people (who aren’t LGTBQ at least) into the oppressor camp and ALL people of color into the oppressed camp (even if they’re if they were the President of the United States!!!)
The LEFT demand tolerance for their beliefs, while offering zero tolerance in return to other ideas. If you disagree with CRT, you’re a bigot and a racist, even though the theory is absolutely flawed. For another issue, don’t “discuss” climate change. Just say the “science” has been “settled” and anyone who disagrees is a complete utter IDIOT that is destroying the planet. Call them names (because you can’t harm “evil”) but throw a fit if they call someone a name. The sad thing is the Left cannot or will not see the sheer HYPOCRISY of their actions and beliefs. Everything they say or do is one-sided. Censor those who disagree. Block them. Cancel them!
We shouldn’t discuss alternated theories because we KNOW they’re WRONG!!! This is exactly how the Catholic Church thought in the Middle Ages about the Earth being the center of the Universe! We KNOW it is so imprison, torture or kill the HERETICS!!!! Reality doesn’t matter. We have the distortion field of knowing we are always right and every one else is always wrong!
Don’t “discuss” racism in the 21st century. Just “tell” people they’re inherently “racist” and need re-education on the matter (brainwashing). They should be CANCELED and CENSORED and free will, free speech and free beliefs should be outlawed in favor of the the ONLY “CORRECT” view in the minds of left-wing morons. In other words, it’s a push for COMMUNISM because that’s how Communism works.
The STATE tells you what you can think, how you can think and if you don’t, they punish you. Just looks at the social point system in China with government surveillance and enforcement. This generation (Z in particular) seems to think Communism is cool because that’s what the infiltrated schools systems have apparently been teaching . Think like the state tells you or else! Everyone should earn the same money whether they’re a doctor or a whopper flopper! Yes, what incentive is there to work hard when everyone is paid the same regardless of effort? Effort is becoming a bad word. “White” people demand perfection! “White” place too much emphasis on performance and effort! Yes, we should all be lazy and play with our phones at work and in school instead of actually doing the work we’re paid for or getting an actual education while China, South Korea and Japan all are making their standards HARDER because that’s the actual real world where we are competing for jobs and resources! Children are getting an eye opener when they go to get a job. “You expect me to actually have to use my hands!?!?” I know. I see it every day at work now that we’re hiring Generation Z. Millennials were lazier than X, but Z is a whole new level of privileged lives, regardless of race or gender.
Math is “too hard” for people of color, they say. White people made the tests unfair to people of color! Ridiculous. Asians are smarter than white people and hold a majority of jobs in Silicon Valley as a result and now there’s racism appearing towards Asians and it isn’t coming from whites, for the most part. It’s funny how black on Asian crime is listed as oppression by Asians because they hold a majority of those jobs so they’re oppressors. But tell me this. Who do you want doing your heart surgery? The guy they had to PUSH through the system who scored poorly (to get “equity outcomes”), but it was rounded up to match the smarter students or the guy who actually studied and knows what he’s doing? You see all these “elite” white people who claim to support CRT in all its stupidity would NEVER choose the dumb doctor despite pushing to have him shoved through even if he fails. Notice how the people on Martha’s Vineyard EJECTED the poor ILLEGAL ALIENS within ONE day of them being dropped off there! Oh, I don’t want them in MY BACKYARD! I meant let them overwhelm and take out EVIL Republican controlled Texas!!! HYPOCRITES!!!!
This isn’t about raising up the man or woman of color to be equal in outcome to other groups as it should be. It’s about LOWERING THE STANDARDS to make it APPEAR to be equal even when it’s not! They’re saying people of color CANNOT do math. They CANNOT pass the BAR exam! They CANNOT get an academic scholarship! They CANNOT pass the fireman’s exam! So LOWER THE STANDARDS until they CAN rather than address the shortcomings so they CAN. It’s almost unbelievable that Left-Wing people CANNOT SEE how the former is absolutely WRONG and the latter is the right approach.
You don’t make everyone dumber to get the same outcome. You educate the people falling behind to bring them up! And if they don’t WANT to be brought up, I’m sorry, but you cannot force people to study. You cannot force people to obey the law. You cannot force people to come to works and to do a good job. You cannot force people to NOT RUN when being arrested for a crime. Instead, blame the education system. Blame the evil police. Blame everyone but the actual criminals! They just let them right back out the same day in NYC now! But if a white person commits a crime, throw the book at them! They’re EVIL! They’re racists! They’re oppressors! Burn down the city! Burn down the businesses in that city. Loot them! STEAL what you want! It’s only a crime for white people! That’s what the new laws in NYC are saying. Beat up the weather man on the subway! It’s a misdemeanor. They’re back on the streets the same day with ZERO punishment while he’s in a hospital (see recent news). That’s because they’re black and he’s white. He was an oppressor trying to save the elderly man from being mugged and beaten!!! He got what he deserved according to the WOKE.
Crime is increasing geometrically as they apologize for their cars being in the way of the guy who stole it. Here’s the keys! I’m a racist! You deserve this car I worked for and paid for, not me! Take it! That’s EQUITY! Give me free stuff I didn’t work for and didn’t earn! Take it from Whitey! He’s evil.
I’m sorry, but Martin Luthor King is rolling in his grave at all of this. The LEFT is NOT on the right side of history. They’re absolute morons and they will attack this post because they’re STUPID and cannot see how RIDICULOUS CRT and this cancel culture really is.
I’m NOT saying there aren’t bigots on the Right. I don’t like the extreme Right either. But there is no middle ground anymore. There are no moderate politicians and everything is ALL OR NOTHING. This country will tear itself apart with that kind of thinking. Here I thought when we elected Obama we had reached a turning point in race relations, but somehow it’s been distorted into making white people more evil than ever! I’m so glad my ancestors died in the Civil War because THIS RESULT was SO WORTH IT to have my race denigrated and labeled as OPPRESSORS for DYING to free the man of color from ACTUAL BIGOTS.
How many more people will be murdered in Portland or Seattle or NYC before politicians realize crime is crime, regardless of skin color and it’s unacceptable in a civilized society? How much time will we spend worrying about “pronouns” and “bathrooms” instead of Russia murdering people in the Ukraine? The Associated Press just said we shouldn’t say “the” anymore. “The college graduates”. “The educated”. “The rich”. “The poor”. The word “the” is de-humanizing, it says. OMG. The level of STUPIDITY on the Left knows no bounds. I can’t imaging these children having to fight a war like WWII. They would surrender instantly the moment the Germans called them a name and start crying…. Excuse me, Colonel, but where’s the unisex bathroom of inclusion??? We are a nation of crybaby wusses now and we’re proud of it! It’s sad. I was taught, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Now they teach, words can kill! Gather your Instagram and Facebook followers and come to the Land of 180 made up biological science ignoring “genders!” That’s WOKE. And they say the Right ignores science…. (sigh)
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WOKE means awake. WOKE means being knowledgeable about injustice and doing whatever you can to reduce and eliminate injustice.
I am very much concerned about Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. If you read this blog, you know that. Obviously, you don’t.
The outrage about pronouns is ridiculous. So is the outrage about bathrooms. When I first heard about it, I was attending a conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the legislature wanted to ban transgender people from going to the bathroom of their identity. At the hotel where the conference was held, there were men’s bathrooms, women’s bathrooms, and gender-neutral bathroom. Problem solved.
You seem to think that people of color commit crimes but are allowed to go free. This is obviously untrue, because the majority of incarcerated prisoners are people of color.
I never heard that the word “the” has been banned. News to me.
Read my book THE LANGUAGE POLICE to learn more about how sanitized our language is because of all sorts of pressure groups.
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I think Jake fed a bunch of buzzwords into a Chat GPT app and this rant he posted is the result.
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Bingo, Christine!
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Teachers don’t have time to be “woke”. They’re too pressed for time responding to whichever national crisis is playing out on our screens. Kids seek out trusted adults to help them make sense of our world.
Today and next week it will be the release of the video of the murder of Tyre Nichols and the death of Tortugito, the enviromental activist killed in Atlanta, and the series of mass shootings in California. It will be AP African American studies and drag shows and attacks on the bodily autonomy of trans people and of women. Under Trump it was pesecution of immigrants, family separation and the Muslim ban.
This isn’t new. I was in a classroom during the Challenger explosion, the Branch Dividians at Waco, the Jim Jones mass suicides, the Oklahoma City bombing, The Rodney King trial, the OJ trial, 9/11, our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Gitmo, Abu Grahib and birtherism.
Kids want to know what grown-ups think about the events that unfold around them. Responsible adults address those concerns, integrating them into the curricula as possible and press onward. Doing anything else would be a dereliction of our duty to those in our care.
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Columbine. I left out Columbine.
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Jake writes: “You cannot purely paint the white man as pure evil when the black man was sold out by his own kind. It also utterly utterly ignores all the white men who died in the Civil War to FREE the black man from slavery. Their lives didn’t matter. Only BLACK lives matter because white people are ALL 100% SYSTEMIC RACISTS according to CRT!”
Diane, I don’t think that way, do you? Nor do I understand CRT as Jake portrays it here. (My bet is that Jake interprets through the eyes of Fox so-called News.) I stopped reading at the above paragraph, however, because Jake’s interpretations, assumptions, and statements about what others think is so twisted . . . and, first, it would take too long to untwist the above, and second, I doubt Jake would listen if anyone tried to discuss in a reasonable way anyway.
Let me just say to JAKE: I don’t think that way, and I doubt Diane does either. If you cannot understand that, then no one here can help you, CBK
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I have no idea where Jake gets his opinions. Maybe Der Sturmer, or Breitbart. Nothing I have written accords with his strange views. I know what CRT.
He doesn’t. Too much FOX News.
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Let’s challenge this “Jake” to find evidence from the textbooks used in the college courses where CRT is taught, since it isn’t taught K-12, to support his allegations.
Also let’s hold this “Jake” responsible for properly citing those textbooks:
Here’s some help for this “Jake.” This “Jake” has a choice to make for the method he uses to cite evidence from those university textbooks used to teach CRT.
What is the most common citation style used in social sciences manuscripts?
APA Style
APA Style is the most popular citation style, widely used in the social and behavioral sciences.
MLA style is the second most popular, used mainly in the humanities.
Chicago notes and bibliography style is also popular in the humanities, especially history. Chicago author-date style tends to be used in the sciences
I am even going out of my way for this “Jake” to find one or more of those approved CRT texts.
CRITICAL RACE THEORY BOOKS TO HELP YOU MAKE SENSE OF ALL THE HUBBUB
https://bookriot.com/critical-race-theory-books/
If you are curious, the previous link leads to a post that also lists what CRT is NOT.
Just in case, this “Jake” is to ignorant and lazy to educate him or herself, here the list of what CRT is NOT:
CRT is NOT, culturally responsive/relevant/sustaining pedagogy
CRT is NOT, antiracist teaching
CRT is NOT, accurately teaching U.S. history, including the United States’s racist past
CRT is NOT, teaching for social justice
CRT is NOT, diversity, equity, and/or inclusion
CRT is NOT, making Juneteenth a federal holiday
CRT is NOT, Marxism
CRT is NOT, teaching children to hate the U.S
CRT is NOT, being taught to K–12 students
There’s also an explanation for what CRT is:
If this “Jake” does not respond with the proper cited evidence from texts on that list (use provided link to find that list), then I suggest this “Jake” be blocked from Diane’s site.
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Chrissy Stroop is an ex-evangelical who has written extensively about Christian extremism and nationalism. In anticipation of a $100,000 ad buy for the Super Bowl for their Jesus, Stroop was interviewed by CNN.
https://t.co/RjbtrY7iqd
She wrote about the dark money behind these groups (sound familiar?) in March of 2022:
https://t.co/oj0rMKgvGw
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Why did you send your kids to private school? As a parent I want to understand your rationale.
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I married into a family in which every child went to private school. My husband insisted that our children should as well. In retrospect, I’m sorry that they did. I think they would have benefitted by going to public school, as I did. We paid for their schooling. We didn’t seek government funding. Two of my grandchildren went to public school. Two went to religious schools. Their parents did not seek government funding to pay for their private choice. I believe in private choice. If you want your child to have a religious education, you have the right to do so. I do not believe that the public should pay for your private choices. Pay for your private choices yourself.
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Elections have consequences.
In supposedly progressive Massachusetts, we’ve had some of the most extreme forms of neoliberalism (Deval Patrick) and conservatism (Charlie Baker) in the governor’s office mucking about in our public schools. This has allowed state takeover of our most impoverished school districts, those serving large numbers of Black and Brown kids, and those who speak a language other than English at home. Those takeovers have all failed abysmally.
Now that the Waltons and Kochs don’t have Governor Healey’s ear, there’s a bill to end state takeovers and use a wider lens for measuring student achievement. It’s titled the “Thrive Act”. The business community objects and Democrats for Education Reform said such a move would “completely diminish” the value of a Massachusetts diploma of course, but educators and community groups are in support.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/02/02/metro/bill-seeks-eliminate-school-takeovers-by-mass-education-department/?event=event12#bgmp-comments
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Idaho Lawmaker Wants Children to Work for Those Free Lunches
https://www.thedailybeast.com/idaho-lawmaker-wants-children-to-work-for-those-free-lunches
Seriously, what is wrong with these people?!!
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“Republicans want to solve the labor shortage problem by putting children to work”
https://conversationalist.org/2022/02/09/republicans-want-to-solve-the-labor-shortage-problem-by-putting-children-to-work/
Maybe not all conservatives want to return to the 19th century (or even back to the late 18th century) but some do. How many?
End the child labor laws turning children back into the property of men.
End the statutory child laws.
Take away women’s right to vote and make them the property of men again
Only non-Jewish white men that own property will be allowed to vote.
No income tax
No sales tax
How many laws would vanish if we returned to the year the United States Constitution was ratified in 1788? Since the first amendment was added on December 15, 1791, all of the amendments would be gone, too.
Since the extreme right justices on the U.S. Supreme Court cited laws that existed while the colonies were still part of the British Empire when they overturned Roe vs Wade, they may want to take the U.S. back further when the King of England ruled over the colonies before the Revolution.
Or maybe they’d take us all the way back to the Middle Ages (before there were European colonies in the Americas) when only the powerful nobles and The Church ruthlessly ruled the Western world and the working class, when the peasants and slaves had no rights.
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Rob,
It’s the Dickensian work-house mentality. Work or starve.
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‘If they would rather die, they’d better do it, and decrease the surplus population‘ – E. Scrooge, Scrooge & Marley PAC
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The MAGA RINO extremist mentality is anyone that isn’t a MAGA RINO must work for poverty wages with no job protection, and no benefits until the day they die.
After death, any family (and maybe even friends) they might have will be billed double the cost of disposing of the body in a landfill since in a cutthroat capitalist society, the robber barons (multi-millionaires and billionaires that pay little or no taxes) must always make a profit off their working class wage slaves. All those private jets, yachts, and mansions cost a lot of money for upkeep, even at wage-slave prices.
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Teaching for Black Lives is running a campaign to donate their handbook to Florida teachers.
https://www.teachingforblacklives.org/donate-books-to-florida-educators/?mc_cid=f301324a98&mc_eid=069ab5f54e
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This critique of Boebert and republicans is wonderful and spot on:
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For anyone questioning the cognitive and political skills of President Biden, watch how, in the first three minutes of this video, he completely backs republicans in a corner on Social Security, Medicare, and support for older Americans. Not sure I’ve ever seen such a public negotiation and capitulation in public ever. Anyone who still questions if their vote for Biden was correct, watch it a few times. It’s a semester long political behavior class in three minutes.
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ProPublica takes a look at a tax loophole known as “wash sales”. Bernie’s right – those billionaires aren’t like the rest of us, not a speck.
Here’s a look at one of the school privatizing Waltons:
Take a look at the taxes of Jim Walton, the youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton and the 10th-wealthiest American, and you’ll see years of short-term losses, thanks to a tax-loss harvesting account at Northern Trust, a bank that specializes in managing the assets of the rich. (A representative for Walton declined to comment.) From 2014 to 2018, Walton grew $10 billion richer, according to Forbes, but reported only $111 million in long-term gains on his taxes. Since his losses easily overwhelmed those gains, he paid no taxes on them at all.
https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-files-taxes-wash-sales-goldman-sachs
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In Alabama? Can’t believe it.
https://crooksandliars.com/2023/02/you-wont-believe-what-students-were-told
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I’m never surprised or shocked when it comes to stuff happening in MAGA RINO, fascist controlled Red states.
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In December 2021, we all were horrified by deadly weather in western Kentucky. On a post back then (Google really does work!) I wrote:
I had never heard of James Comer before looking this up. Now he and Jim Jordan are arguably the most powerful congressmen today. He chairs the House Government Oversight Committee, which will be the tip of one of the major spears House republicans hope to use to politicize policy and bring the gears of governing to a halt.
Will the constituents who voted for him and demanded government relief for their climate changing weather-caused disaster continue to support the most malignant forces that would make such support hard to impossible for future such events? Perhaps even for Americans who are nothing like them?
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As if anyone needed any further evidence that the republican-led Florida state legislature is ceded its power and whatever was left of its sanity, here’s a fun one. Legislation heading to his desk to authorize a $10 million appropriation (read: slush fund) for the governor to spend on his discretion to transport planeloads of people coming to this country from the Mexican border from any state to any destination of his choosing.
For those of you clinging to “DeSantis is not a fascist” or “DeSantis is not making these decisions”, you’ve got nothing left. Please explain why the good citizens of Florida should be happy should these funds be appropriated (bets, anyone?) from their taxes and what benefit they get. What in their state is worth a potential $10 million cut?
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023B/6B/?Tab=BillText
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The Florida legislature is a blubbering jellyfish at the feet of DeSanctimious.
Whatever he wants, they give and kiss his feet.
What a pathetic, servile aggregation of people.
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“The fascist state seeks total control over all major parts of society. Individuals must give up their private needs and rights to serve the needs of the whole society as represented by the state. Rule by a Dictator: A single dictator runs the fascist state and makes all the important decisions.”
That definition of fascist reveals that a fascist state is the dictator.
That was who Traitor Trump wanted to be, tried to be, but failed, because he has been a dismal failure all his life, except when it comes to lies and fraud.
Dangerously Deranged DeSantis is not Trump, but he also wants to be a dictator that rules a fascist state that may still be called the United States, if that comes to pass.
Traitor Trump would change the name to Trumpistan or something similar. DeSantis might not change the country’s name.
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There are some who like to compare Desantis to Nixon, but I see more of Huey Long there. Brutal to his political enemies and quick to reward his friends. He even throws a few bones to the populous in forms of things like increased teacher pay to cover his authoritarian agenda. His personality is similar to Nixon’s, not very likable, but his tactics are more like Long, who FDR called “the most dangerous man in America” at that time.
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Good analogy, Paul.
I see him as a little Mussolini.
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George Wallace
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Now, if only what happened to George Wallace, happens to DeSantis, too, and all the other want-to-be fascist dictators infesting the GOP.
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I am also not against having what happened to Mussolini happen to all the want-to-be fascist dictators that are infesting the GOP.
On April 28, 1945, “Il Duce,” Benito Mussolini, and his mistress, Clara Petacci, are shot by Italian partisans who had captured the couple as they attempted to flee to Switzerland.
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Science of reading is the new cash cow in Ohio:
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/02/gov-mike-dewines-enters-the-reading-wars-with-budget-proposal-to-fund-change-to-science-of-reading.html
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If phonics alone were a silver bullet for poor reading, Texas should have the highest scores in the nation.
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There isn’t A silver bullet that explodes in the brain to make reading happen ~
Instead ~ it’s a MYRIAD of choices ~ taught by teachers ~ to ALL of their students.
Each student will rely/use/enjoy/understand the process of unlocking meaning through symbols with the strategy that works for them.
Phonics – repetition- picture clues – listening – context clues – shared reading – experience/content related and more.
Teachers know how to teach reading. They need the time to work together to make teaching and learning get ever better. They don’t need politicians to tell them how to teach.
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Judy Fay I have often thought that the conflict between different camps of reading is not about “what works,” but about the difference between method and motivation. By that I mean, stories mesmerize and motivate children (even adults) to love reading.
On the other hand, someone a long time ago told me to “sound out the letters.” Instantly, I knew more than my fellow students. CBK
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What worked for me?
Parents that were avid readers and a mother that made sure I learned to read after she asked my first grade teacher, the second year around, what she could do at home.
Why me?
When I was seven, no one seemed to know what dyslexia was. What the so-called experts told my mother after giving me bubble tests, when I was seven, was that I was so retarded, I’d never learn to read. That may explain why I HATE bubble tests and despise the testing industry that judges kids and teachers because on the results of those tests.
By the time I was ten, I was an avid reader, thanks to my mother asking that first grade teacher what she could do at home to help me learn to read and my mother doing what the teacher told her.
I do not remember what method my mother used or what that teacher told her. The only thing I remember was the wire coat hanger my mother always had ready to motivate me when I didn’t focus enough and whined or whimpered that it was too hard, that I was bored and wanted to go out and play.
It also helped that same teacher discovered I couldn’t see the words on the blackboard, my vision was so bad. Then that teacher told my mother to take me to an eye doctor. Those thick glasses brought out the bullies, that didn’t stop bothering me until I gave one of them a bloody nose at recess. Still, with those glasses I could see things. I remember the first thing I saw after I first those glasses on. I was in awe of the leaves on the tree outside the eye doctors office. I’d never seen the details before. Trees were blurry blobs.
When I was a teacher for thirty years, a few mothers asked me what they could do at home to help their children improve their reading skills. Only ONE did what I suggested and her daughter gained five years of reading skills by the end of that school year. It’s too much bother for most parents to get that involved in their child’s life at home. For those parents, it’s easy to blame the teachers and the public schools for their shortcomings as parents.
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Lloyd writes, after he got his glasses when he was a boy: “. . . with those glasses I could see things. I remember the first thing I saw after I first those glasses on. I was in awe of the leaves on the tree outside the eye doctors office. I’d never seen the details before. Trees were blurry blobs.
My sister told me, years later, of the same experience that occurred when she was just a little girl. She said that, before, she kept falling off curbs, and that the trees were “fuzzy” and after, that she was so excited she stayed glued to everything in sight, everything was so enchanting to her. I have a picture of her . . . about 4 or 5 years old, dark hair, smiling at the camera . . . with those clunky glasses on that she so dearly loved.
CBK
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I noticed you never mentioned the parents. Parents are more important than teachers when a child is learning to read… learning just about anything in their early years.
I’ve noticed over the decades, that parents seem to always get a pass when it comes to a child learning anything… unless they grow up to be a mass killer that goes on a shooting spree at a public school blowing the heads off of kids.
“Early reading experiences with their parents prepare children for the benefits of formal literacy instruction. Indeed, parental involvement in their child’s reading has been found to be the most important determinant of language and emergent literacy (Bus, van Ijzendoorn & Pellegrini, 1995).”
Click to access ED496346.pdf
A teacher might manage to teach a child to read that comes from a home where parents do not read (there’s no reading material around; the child never sees them reading anything), but t is at home that children learn to love to read. Once they love to read, they become lifelong learners.
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Well said, Judy Fay.
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I think the only way to bring about meaningful change is to vote Republicans out of office in every state.
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It looks like my time in teacher jail at LAUSD will be ending in a few weeks and I will most likely be reinstated. One of the issues that was debated among union reps was “does a teacher lose their right to communicate and/or investigate” while they are being investigated by a school district. One union rep told me that communicating with my fellow teachers and gathering testimonials was well within my rights. The one representing me said that doing so would be seen as “interference” and was not allowed. (I sent emails to teachers who were not involved in the investigation.) The union rep. who said I could gather testimonials cited this case as justification for my right to communicate during the investigation. https://www.dwkesq.com/perb-holds-that-blanket-directive-prohibiting-employee-discussions-during-ongoing-investigation-constitutes-unlawful-interference/ What do you think?
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That’s good news, ArtsSmart.
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Thanks Diane!
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I meant to say “my time in school jail at LAUSD”.
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I often write how Ohio is the poster child for how fascism will creep into American life and how it might look. It depends on bland, benign-looking and -sounding white guys and gals; I often point to Portman and DeWine as the archetypes. The disaster in East Palestine is a wonderful lesson for those of you around the country to see how it happens. Much as he did at the beginning of the pandemic, the outward appearance of DeWine is actually positive, regardless of one’s political affiliation. He was among, if not the first, governor to order a statewide lockdown when Covid’s uncertainty became clear. He has responded as well as a governor can be expected to do right now. In this case, he has made a point of praising the cooperation with federal authorities. But DeWine’s political instincts and operatives are skillful in their use of these type of disasters for venal behind-the-scenes manouvers to secure power and undermine the electorate so that majorities become minorities. And if that doesn’t work, he has a legislature and state supreme court to overturn or endlessly delay the will of elections they don’t like. Here’s a good example:
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/02/gov-mike-dewine-served-on-redistricting-commission-that-violated-ohio-constitution-now-he-wants-to-ban-politicians-from-the-process.html
There will be a lot more of this stuff, to get as much as they can achieve, in the coming weeks. Stories about them will be un- or underreported and minimized. But the glow of responding to disasters as elected officials are supposed to do will be all that most of the world will see and remember. Meanwhile, the authoritarian infrastructure surrounded by a seemingly representative paneling continues to gets stronger and more entrenched.
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They are a RED virus spreading a terminal cancer that will murder our democracy and replace it with some form of brutal theofascism that favors one religion, fundamentalist extreme-right MAGA RINO Tea Party evangelicals.
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Excellent coverage in Texas Monthly on the push for privatization.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/campaign-to-sabotage-texas-public-schools/
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I had almost forgotten what real journalism looks like. And from Texas no less! What’s so sad is that this is what it takes to counter mindless sound bites, but hardly anyone will read anything this long. Much less books. Truly excellent. The conclusion is just right:
“Day’s is the grief not of a sore loser but of someone who understands the larger consequences of what can appear to be, in the greater scheme of things, an almost insignificant defeat. One loss of a school board seat in a small town doesn’t seem like much—until that scene is repeated over and over, in towns and cities all across Texas.”
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I posted the link on twitter, where some folks have picked it up. No one seems enamored. People like us – teachers – who are aware are just like: oh, good summary, but it’s a revelation for some.
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The key to people voting rationally is reading. Avid readers are guaranteed to be life-long learners.
“The literacy rate in the United States is 99%, but just 79% of people possess literacy skills at level 2 or greater. As a result, 21% of Americans have problems finishing tasks where information must be compared.”
What percent of people are avid readers?
“Five years earlier, the NEA ran a more detailed survey, and found that 23 percent of American adults were “light” readers (finishing one to five titles per year), 10 percent were “moderate” (six to 11 titles), 13 percent were “frequent” (12 to 49 titles), and a dedicated 5 percent were “avid” (50 books and up).”
Take a “wild” guess:
Who in those two pull quotes get the most attention from ALEC, the Walton Family Foundation, the MAGA RINO faction of the Republican party, Putin, fascist propaganda sites like OAN, Fox (FAKE) News, and Sinclar Media focus their attention on to influence their violent behavior and confirmation biased voting?
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I forgot to add this suggestion in my previous commen tin this thread: If The Network for Public Education wants to reach the people that the extreme right focuses on to influence (those that do not read a lot), it should consider launching a YouTube channel with short, info-packed videos similar to what The Lincoln Project and Vote Vets does, but with a theme and message that supports public schools.
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Meantime, The Boston Globe publishes this unvetted crap re: PDE
A national parent group has filed a federal civil rights complaint against Milton Public Schools, accusing the district of discrimination for using a math program aimed at supporting Black and Latino students.
The Washington, D.C.-based Parents Defending Education, which says it “opposes racial discrimination and political indoctrination in America’s schools,” filed the complaint Tuesday with the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights and argued the district is violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by using the program.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/02/17/metro/parent-group-accuses-milton-public-schools-of-discrimination/
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Excuse me for saying so, but PDE is an astroturf group aligned with the far right and funded by billionaires. Not an opinion. A fact. Read Maurice Cunningham, the expert on Dark Money in education.
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Yep, and the Glob is in their pockets. One million dollars worth, according to the Professor.
ERN’s major local supporter is the Barr Foundation the foundation of Amos Hostetter the fifth largest dark money donor ($2,000,000) to the losing charter schools privatization ballot campaign in 2016. Barr funds some of the Boston Globe’s education coverage.
Barr is a privatization interest group. Its $600,000 donation to the Globe for 2019-2020 marked “the dawn of philanthro-interest group journalism.” Barr re-upped with another $400,000 for the Globe’s Great Divide coverage according to Barr’s 2021 Form 990 tax return.[4]
That’s right. Barr funds both DFER and part of the the Globe’s education coverage.
From February 6, 2023:
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The price of betrayal and selling your soul to the highest bidder has gone up a lot since Judas sold Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.
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Here’s the link to the Truthout post that Mo Cunningham references:
https://truthout.org/articles/tax-docs-link-right-wing-parents-group-to-leonard-leos-dark-money-network/
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Christine, you did it again!
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Did what? I’m innocent! 😉
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You often find and post links to articles that I have written up and plan to post a few days later. But don’t stop. You have good sources.
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My best source is ravitch.net !
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Those lost school board elections that turns public school districts over to fascists is the results of billiaonres: ALEC, the Walton Family Foundation, et al, buying elections. They have the wealth and money buys votes through by misleading visual ADs to voters that do not read much or not at all.
“To quote the great political philosopher Cyndi Lauper, ‘Money changes everything.’ And nowhere is that proverb more taken to heart than in a federal election, where billions of dollars are raised and spent on the understanding that money is a crucial determinant of whether or not a candidate will win.”
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/
With the internet and individual data thieves collecting personal information on everyone from birth to grave it is easy to buy a list of voters that are easy to fool because the data shows they do not read well or at all. The internet may be a tool for good but it is certainly a tool for greed and evil.
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We all need to pay more attention to Mehdi Hasan. One of the few talking heads who actually says something:
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Also, incredible facts on Haley that need to be amplified about her and others like her:
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Great NYRB review! Any chance you can post entire text for others to read?
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OK, I thought this headline was clickbait, but it’s actually quite benign when you watch and consider a) he actually “thought” this through, he didn’t misspeak, b) he really believes this and likely speak for millions of fellow party/cult members and, c) he was comfortable enough with his views to state them out loud as “serious” and “legitimate.” If you watch this, sit down, because your head will swim and you may lose balance.
https://crooksandliars.com/2023/02/alaska-republican-sparks-outrage-death
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I clicked on the link. Then my screen froze and an AD popped up with no X to click on to get rid of it. I had to log out of that page, but it didn’t work at first. For a moment I thought I’d have to pull the power plug, like I’ve done before, to save this desktop from being hacked.
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Sorry! That has never happened to me with this site.
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I suspect your device (desktop, laptop, tablet, or smart phone that’s designed to make humans dumber) was infected by a virus of some kind. No telling where that virus was picked up. It’s happened to my desktop a number of times. I always study the screen that pops up like you described, to find any specific names or way to identify that specific virus and then Google those names/terms. That has never failed for me to identify the virus and then learn how to get rid of it.
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Diane Forwarded FYI . . . the picture of inside a classroom of the “Moonlight Schools” for “illiterate adults” in rural Kentucky circa early 1900’s is priceless, but the pictures wouldn’t copy to this blog. CBK
On Wed, Mar 1, 2023 at 1:37 PM David Rosen wrote:
Tom Sticht has in the past, in the NLA Google group and in its predecessor electronic lists, helped us to understand the history of adult literacy in the United States, and has called our attention to its champions. One of these, whom Tom has written about, is Kentuckian Cora Wilson Stewart. This article from the Lexington Herald Leader may have some information that I, at least, was not aware of, and includes the three photographs below.
Biographical Statement
Cora Wilson Stewart
Cora Wilson Stewart (CWS) was born on January 17, 1875, in Rowan County, Kentucky, a rural area populated in large part by farmers, woodsmen, and other country folk, many of whom were illiterate and unschooled.
Educated as a teacher in Kentucky, in 1911 CWS started the Moonlight Schools for adult illiterates in Rowan County, Kentucky, the first of a long list of innovations for adult literacy education that she introduced, including: the first newspaper designed especially for adult literacy students, called the Rowan County Messenger; the first reading series for adults comprised of three Country Life Readers; the Soldier’s First Book used during World War I, and the Mother’s First Book: A First Reader for Home Women.
Striking out in a crusade against adult illiteracy in Rowan County Kentucky, CWS went on to convince President Hoover to create the first National Advisory Committee on Illiteracy, she initiated a National Illiteracy Crusade, chaired for five times the Illiteracy Section of the International World Conference of Education Associations, advocated for adult literacy education at the national Democratic party convention in 1920, spoke at numerous meetings across the United States, reached hundreds of thousands of listeners through radio broadcasts, and inspired numerous other states to initiate campaigns to combat adult illiteracy.
In her approach to teaching adult literacy, CWS explicitly recognized the importance of not using materials for adults that were designed for children. All of her materials integrated the teaching of literacy with the teaching of important knowledge content in farming, healthy living, civics, home economics, financial management, parenting and other functional contexts. As she stated, ” …each lesson accomplished a double purpose, the primary one of teaching the pupil to read, and at the same time that of imparting instruction in the things that vitally affected him in his daily life” (Stewart, 1920, p. 71).
The instructional approach that CWS used in the Country Life Readers and in the Moonlight School classrooms followed functional context education principles in which much contemporary practice in adult literacy education is grounded:
First, she built new knowledge of reading and writing on the prior knowledge that learners brought with them thereby making it easier for adults to learn by relating new learning to old learning.
Second, she integrated the teaching of reading and writing with content related to the daily life of the adult learners outside the classroom to hold interest and maintain motivation to attend class.
Third, she facilitated transfer of learning from the classroom to the world outside the classroom by developing new knowledge that learners could apply in their daily lives.
Fourth, the latter, in turn, offered the possibility of further learning by adults to extend and sustain the development that they achieved while attending school.
Perhaps one of the most important things that CWS did was to develop a simple method of teaching adult learners how to write their names. She developed a special tablet that had soft paper into which students’ names were etched. Then the students used thin paper to trace their names over and over until they could write their names unaided.
Later this simple technique was picked-up by Wil Lou Gray of South Carolina in her initiation of campaigns to teach illiterate adults to write their names. In turn Gray taught this technique to Septima Poinsette Clark who used it in the Citizenship Schools of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Through this work, over 700,000 African Americans were taught to write their names for voter registration, and this political empowerment helped to stimulate the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s which would eventually transform the political and social landscape of the entire Nation.
In her later years, CWS became blind. Willie Nelms, one of her biographers, wrote: “The elderly lady gently took the letter that she had just dictated.
Because she was blind, she had to be shown where to begin her signature. Her hands trembled so that her writing, which had been so graceful earlier in life, seemed shaky and uneven. Determined to complete the task, she doggedly persevered; after carefully completing the signature, she rested her pen.” End quote. (Nelms, 1997, p. 3).
Only a few years later, in December of 1958, blind and infirm, Cora Wilson Stewart, founder of the Moonlight Schools of Kentucky “for the emancipation of adult illiterates,” passed away.
Her death came just shy of half a century after she had started the Moonlight Schools, which historian Wanda Dauksza Cook (1977) said ” might well be classified as the official beginning of [adult] literacy education in the United States.” (p. 13).
References
Cook, Wanda Dauksza (1977). Adult Literacy Education in the United States. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Nelms, Willie (1997). Cora Wilson Stewart Crusader Against Illiteracy. London: McFarland & Company.
Stewart, Cora Wilson (1922). Moonlight Schools for the Emancipation of Adult Illiterates. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
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A child felt unsafe at school. She told her mom, who called school. A school police officer started an investigation. The girl, an honor student (not that it should matter!) was suspended for 3 days and told she would have to attend an alternative school for the remainder of 8th grade. In Texas, and yes, she’s a Black child.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2023/03/02/how-a-texas-girl-scared-of-school-shootings-was-punished/
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Must be something in the water in Texas. It wasn’t there when I was a child.
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It is in the water and the soil and the air. It’s a political RED virus filled with hate, lies, conspiracy theories, and a ruthless love of theofascism that spreads like a terminal cancer destroying everyone, those that fight it and those that support it.
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Lloyd You write: “It is in the water and the soil and the air. It’s a political RED virus filled with hate, lies, conspiracy theories, and a ruthless love of theofascism that spreads like a terminal cancer destroying everyone, those that fight it and those that support it.”
Another way to say what you say here is that reasonable discourse (remember that?), an also-reasonable and deserved trust, and, frankly, a love of one’s neighbor, regardless of their color, religion, or actual geography, have left the building with Elvis; and the only things left to hear in and from some camps seem to flow up from an unconscious, uncontrolled surge, into a language din of careless, preconceived, and then projected duplicity.
(The people who study logical fallacies in speeches and blogs must be having a field day along with the fact checkers.)
Even with such unchecked poison, however, “spreading like terminal cancer” over all concerned, I still think the analysis doesn’t speak for all concerned. Not for me, and if we listen, we can “hear” the sound of reasonableness “spreading” around also. We cannot merely “play to the microphone” as if it were the one and only good thing to listen to.
Also, the poison cannot spread unless the extreme and bias-driven on all sides, who seem so all consumed by obsessive hate (think Marjorie Taylor Green or Ron DeSantis or, even worse, for instance, careless but paid propagandists, intimidation-ists, and crowd stirrers on school boards), are the only one’s with a microphone, who remain on stage screaming their oh-so-obvious thoughtlessness, grabbing whatever power they can for its own sake (or for $$), but also to drown out more temperate voices in the crowd or staying home who don’t hate anyone . . . on the contrary. The mob has no place for such people or voices. As with Trump’s diatribes, It’s a part of the method that those voices just get “tarred” with the duplicitous projections of the extreme, so there is nothing and no one left to speak BUT those who carry the torches of the extremes, and nothing to hear but the over-reactive electricity between them.
Another writer here (spedukr?) remarked about how insane things have become. It will remain so in those camps of ignorance until we can either think our way through it without malice . . . and that’s the call to the electorate in a democracy, particularly those whose minds are not free but are still captured by Rupert Murdoch and the Fox Inc. low-life agenda . . . or until it actually does commit political suicide.
It’s not that there is too much “woke” (whatever that means), but if it means critical awareness and a similarly obsessive drive to recognize truth and lies, including the dangerous workings of our own “gated” ideologies, when we hear them in others and in ourselves, then that’s exactly what the greater “we” need; and there’s not enough of it “spreading around” and grabbing microphones, even on blogs like this one.
We seem to hear a lot about freedom of speech, but not much about the responsibilities that come with having it. CBK
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“How many people needed for revolution? And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.”
How many people still follow Traitor Trump? To spread, to start a violent revolution, the traitor, Lake, Abbot, or DeSantis do not need the majority of the people to attempt or pull off a coup. All it takes is around 3.5%.
How many people did it take to spread COVID? All it took was one.
The polls consistently show 45% of Republicans want the Traitor back. About 24% of voters are Republicans.
“More voters (154.6 million) turned out for the presidential election in 2020 than in 2016 (137.5 million), the largest increase between consecutive presidential elections since the inception of the CPS voting supplement in 1964.”
45% of 24% works out to be almost 17 million people. And history shows most people will not stand up to violence. Instead, most people go to the slaughter like sheep. 3.5% of the U.S. population is less than 12 million
The Traitor’s 45% is the RED MAGA virus that could explode. He has to be stopped before that happens. Still, even with the Traitor gone, there’s still Lake, Abbot, DeSantis and others.
“On December 8, 2020, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in order to invalidate the results of the presidential election in those states; the lawsuit was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court as it has original jurisdiction over disputes between states.”
How many Republicans were willing to become the 2nd slate of Electors to pull of the Traitor’s coup?
https://www.justsecurity.org/81939/timeline-false-alternate-slate-of-electors-scheme-donald-trump-and-his-close-associates/
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How many Republicans have guns? How many Democrats?
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I could not find up-to-date data on that. The one site that may have had it was behind a paywall. Most of the data I found through a Google was out of date.
What I do know before the Trump White House era is that Republicans owned a lot more firearms than Democrats. but when Trump was president and after January 6, 2021, millions of Americans who never owned a firearm before were buying them in record numbers and going to gun ranges to learn how to shoot and maintain their weapons.
I didn’t think my daughter and her husband (both Stanford Grads), with two young pre school children at this time, would want my weapons when I died since they are more progressive than moderate like me.
I was wrong.
Last year, I thought I should at least ask them when I was putting together the paperwork for when I’m gone. I was surprised when they wanted all of my weapons, the big knives, too. I have six firearms in my weapons safe (rifles, shotguns, pistols, but no machine guns), I don’t know how many knives. I’ve been collecting them since I left the Marines in 1968.
I recall reading that the demand was so heavy in 2020, that stores that sold firearms ran out of ammunition for the first time ever and sold more firearms than any year on record.
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Lloyd Lofthouse Interesting note . . . perspective does help, however. I found the two articles below and others from NOEMA interesting counterpoints, and some others here:
https://www.noemamag.com/author/nils-gilman/
‘Authoritarian Regression’ In Mexico/Liberal democracy must show it can deliver for the constituencies of populism that would undermine it.
//www.noemamag.com/authoritarian-regression-in-mexico/
AND
Banks For The People: A movement is growing in the U.S. that seeks alternatives to traditional banks, replacing their total focus on profit with a devotion to community and justice.
https://www.noemamag.com/banks-for-the-people/?utm_source=CMnewsletter&utm_medium=email
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The best place to battle to spread of the RED virus is in the courts.
In court, the Trump administration was unsuccessful 192x vs its 54 wins
https://policyintegrity.org/trump-court-roundup
Another Court Loss for DeSantis but Who’s Counting
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/florida-playbook/2021/09/10/another-court-loss-for-desantis-but-whos-counting-494269
Still, to the willingly ignorant MAGA RINO base that doesn’t pay attention to reputable news sources or facts, while believing only alternative facts (the lies they love to hate), what counts to the MAGA mob is what their gods did, not what the courts ruled.
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Lloyd Yes . . . the courts . . . where the rules of evidence still hold sway.
But weird ideas about “woke” aside, where the electorate is concerned, I think MAGA is code of “Dead Minds,” or at least sleepwalkers. It was nice to see their numbers diminished at their conference.
But my thought is that perhaps those whose minds are still alive but who have not woken up enough yet, and who have been “too busy” to do anything but hear bits and pieces, some of which is from the Fox-in-the-Chicken-House Reality Show (and who have a grasp of history to some degree), hear DeSantis’ daily mandates and the Keri Lake et al screaming of election deniers as ridiculous, almost funny if it weren’t so serious, as I and as do the “Left-the-Party” Republicans, as well as many others who are quite “awake” to the problems and who still have power, again, like in the courts.
Interestingly, that article from NOEMA about Mexico’s present political situation reflects what Joe Biden is trying to do for those “populists” who feel abandoned by their government . . . show that the “government” belongs to all of us, and not just to dark-money politicians. The twist is that “abandonment” of the those same folks is the operating undertext of the movement to privatize everything under the sun. CBK
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Getting dark money out of politics will not be easy.
The Democrat might have to control both houses of Congress and the White House for several generations (with Repubs in the minority that entire time) to accomplish that.
The US Supreme Court at this time is also an obstacle, since the extreme right justices could rule against any legislation, as unconstitutional, that the Democrats passed to get rid of dark money.
That’s why I think it may take several generations so as the extreme right justices die off, the Democrats, holding the White House and the majority in one or more houses of Congress replace them with rational, sensible people.
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Besides, I don’t think Democrats like Manchin and Cinema mind dark money. Even Pelosi blocked the bill to regulate congressional stock trading while in office because she believed she had the right to participate in the “free market.” Money has a stranglehold on Washington.
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What party has been strangled by more dark money?
What party relies on conspiracy theories, hoaxes and lies more than the other one?
What party has more violent protestors than the other one?
What party is represented by (means they vote only for extreme candidates in that Party) the most mass killers?
What party was responsible for passing election finance reform and when did that happen – Hillary was a co-signer?
What party is supported by Fox News, OAN, Sinclair Media, et al?
What party gets the most support from extreme right justices on the US Supreme Court – start with Citizens United and compare the date with the answer for the fifth question?
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Yes, Citizens United is proving to be the nightmare many of us thought it was going to be.
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Paul Bonner I don’t pretend to know all of Pelosi’s argument about participating in the markets, much less her thinking. However, in the best possible world, those who participate in the market would be assumed NOT to take advantage of others or their positions just because they can (as we know some on SCOTUS do as well as many Congresspeople are full of such doings).
This idea of the good where market influence is concerned, however, is built on the idea that self-mastery (aka “self-control”) built on moral principles, is a do-able state of mind that can manifest in our lives, rather than self-indulgence and self-serving.
That’s not just my idea . . . nor is it ONLY a religious ideal, though it is a shared principle in some religions. Rather, it goes back to Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and in a different form, Homer, and then more novels, poems, and writings than you can shake a stick at.
My thought is that the question is not should-we/shouldn’t we stop the process but rather, at least moderately regulate . . . as in reporting whether, how, when, and for whom, abuses occurred/(s). In the meantime, the ethics committee and institution as a separate body (from the three parts of Government), in my view, is the answer to that question aka; accountability with concrete results for abuse. CBK
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Nancy Pelosi defended the right of members of Congress and their families to trade in stocks because her husband Paul was a stock trader.
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While her premise was that all should be allowed to participate in a “free market” that represents a profound oxymoron given the access her husband has to such largess through her influence..
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Paul and Diane I think the idea that, in such situations, even it it LOOKS bad, but isn’t, that people in such positions should at least “abstain.”
I can remember when the referee for my son’s soccer game didn’t show up and they asked me to ref the game (I had a license.) I did, but was extremely uncomfortable doing so. Whatever call I made or didn’t make, someone on one side or the other doubted my fairness. CBK
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In “safe” Republican congressional districts in the South, I have spent most of my adult life in three of these, Republicans running for Congress made bumper stickers attacking Pelosi, they never bothered with their Democratic opponents. I don’t know what tactic would work against this, and it effectively kept the Democratic Party out of power.
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Paul You write: “Republicans running for Congress made bumper stickers attacking Pelosi, they never bothered with their Democratic opponents. I don’t know what tactic would work against this, and it effectively kept the Democratic Party out of power.”
There’s something so terribly neurotic, even dystopian about that. CBK
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The national GOP has it Democratic targets that they love to hate and attack, attack, attack: Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop, Hillary and Benghazi, AOC, Pelosi, et al.
Pelosi is old news now soon to be retired, but that will not stop the Republicans from attacking her even after she’s gone… gone.
The tactic is to lie big and repeat those lies relentlessly with simple and easy to remember slogans just as Hitler’s Nazis did during their rise to power and after they were in power all the way to the end. Traitor Trump isn’t the only one using the Nazi rule book.
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I am old enough to remember President Eisenhower. He would never stoop to the gutter tactics of today’s GOP.
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Paul,
The modern GOP is devoid of ideas so they need enemies: Pelosi, Soros, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden. Five minutes of hate every day, like Goldstein in 1984.
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“I just keep hoping the ongoing clown show we are now witnessing in congressional committees will wake Americans up.”
Most Americans have already “woke” up. It’s Traitor Trump’s theofascist loving, hard-core MAGA RINOs that haven’t “woke” up. They are in a FOX induced coma that puts critical thinking and problem solving skills in hibernation. MAGA RINOs are ditto heads that do not have to think because someone else like Trump, Hannity or Carlson tells them what to think.
You may think or ask, where’s the evidence that most Americans “woke” up?
I’m glad you’re thinking and/or asking that.
ANSWER:
The results of the 2022 election.
The results of the 2020 election.
Even the 2016 election offers proof through the popular vote.
The United States is the only democracy in the world where the loser of the popular vote can still win through the Electoral College.
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The good news is that many continue to fight back. Our electoral results have been mixed, but provide some hope. 2024 is critical.
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Agreed, 2024 will be critical but I also think elections for the next couple of decades will be critical too. Until the extreme theofascsit right is soundly defeated and swept into the dustbin of history, every election is critical.
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And when it comes to ethics, the GOP has already revealed with that means to them.
This is an OpEd – A good Op-Ed includes relevant facts in whatever case they are making.
“GOP Destruction of House Ethics Committee Tells You Everything You Need to Know – Free from any oversight or accountability for breaking House ethics rules, what comes next for this distinguished Republican-controlled body?”
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/house-ethics-committee-gop
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The fact that the GOP won’t expel George Santos tells you who they are.
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The Democrats have the MOD (moderates) Squad.
Republicans have the MOB Squad known as the freedom caucus. Thinking one day, Greene and the other few lunatics will hold all the freedom and power to do they want with everyone else: rob them blind, shoot them, gas them, et al.
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I just keep hoping the ongoing clown show we are now witnessing in congressional committees will wake Americans up.
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Paul Bonner I’ve had this wrong idea for so long . . . I have always thought that becoming “awake” was what the entire field of education is about, not to mention life itself . . . as in, questioning and understanding all we can about ourselves, the world, and others; and that being open to understanding is the attitude to foster in ourselves and our students and children. . . . and that the more we understand the better off we all are in life. Wow. Was I wrong. CBK
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You are not wrong.
Between 1975 up to 2001, when GW Bush signed No Child Let Behind, teachers were learning and then focusing on teaching children how to think for themselves. To develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. To turn children into readers and life-long learners.
Then the Common Core crap, high stakes rank and punish standardized tests, Charter Schools and Vouchers changed that after 2001 when the race to the bottom was launched.
2001 marks the beginning of the end of teaching children to think for themselves and grow up to be avid readers and lifelong learners.
2001 was the US returning to the past, to the early 19th century and Horace Man introducing the Prussian model of education to the United States, a model that was outdated after the end of WWII.
The Prussian model teaches children to be obidenit to the state. Teaching children to think for themselves and become life long learners, threatens a system that is ruled by the few instead of the many.
In 1900, the U.S. started to shift away from the Prussian education model after President Theodore Roosevelt broke the Robber Barons strangle hold on our government while supporting the birth and growth of labor unions. In 1900, 40% of Americans lived in horrible poverty, 7% finished high school and 3% finished college.
Thanks to that, the U.S. today [on the cusp of returning to the Prussian education method and the threat and a return to the era of the Robber BArons thanks to organizations like ALEC, the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation] has an 11.6% poverty rate, the national high school graduation rate is currently 85.3%, an all-time high, and 61% of male and 67% of female students graduated from four-year colleges; 32% of male and 35% of female students graduated from two-year colleges in 2021.
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Lloyd,
If you look at the graduation rate for 25-year-olds, it is the highest in history. The four-year rate counts only those who graduated in exactly four years. It does not include those who graduated in August of their fourth year or in five years. See full explanation on my book “Reign of Error,” where I demonstrated with Department of Education data that test scores and graduation rates were highest ever.
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Thank you for reminding me of that. I knew it but I didn’t think of that fact when I was writing my comment. That memory didn’t surface.
What you say is correct. Many who do not graduate on time do go on and finish earning their high school degree after they leave high school. Two year college and adult schools offer programs to earn an equivalent high school degree after leaving high school as a non on time graduate.
The public school district I taught in had one smaller alternative high school that offered a program for students that couldn’t graduate on time so they could graduate later. That alternative high school had day care for the children of their students and allowed students to attend classes at night and on weekends if they had jobs. The area where I taught had a very high poverty rate and many children in poor families had jobs early on while still in K-12, to help the family survive, put food on the table, to pay the rent.
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I believe the percent of adult college graduates in the mid 1960s was around fifteen percent. It’s now well over 30%. Democrats get about 65% of the college educated vote, which means the math is in the favor of the “know nothing caucus.” I often tried to dismiss the idea that a significant number of our politicians wanted to keep the electorate ignorant for their purposes. I think the contemporary Republican Party has proven me wrong. When Trump said he loved the poorly educated, he meant it.
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All of the want-to-be Trump replacements for MAGA voters also love the ignorant and easy to fool: DeSantis, Greene, Abbott, et al.
Has anyone compiled an up to date list of theofascsits battling for the MAGA vote?
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Paul, those numbers are for the entire population. Graduation rates among younger cohorts are much higher.
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Good to hear. I hope this bodes well for the future.
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Also, just because someone doesn’t have a college degree, does not means they are automatically a MAGA RINO theofascist voter
If you look at this Report out of Politico, you may notice that the least educated vote does not all go Republican. The GOP may get more of that vote, but not all of it.
In fact, comparing the seats Democrats took in the least educated districts vs the seats Republicans won in the most educated districts, Democrats have a small lead.
When the dust settled, the national popular vote favors the Democrats.
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2022/midterm-election-house-districts-by-education/
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Lloyd I think you know I had my tongue in cheek when I wrote that “I was wrong” about education. In any case, I’m glad the commentary sparked your informative and waked-up response.
Nostalgia being what it is, however, I remember when people thought it the worst think to be called “closed minded.” But now that term has become a working definition of “MAGA,” and they are proud of it. Also, methinks they protest too much. CBK
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Yes, the term WOKE is a battle cry against open minds that reason, that question, that think.
MAGA is a term that means closed minds that are not allowed to think as an individual.
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I am not trying to attach “equivalency” to the behavior of the two parties. Yes, the Republican grift is so open that it is mind blowing. What I am trying to articulate is that there is enough corporate influence within the Democratic Party to make meaningful change in regard to opportunity and equality. I think Pelosi was a great Speaker because she was so deft at the possible. However, she also showed that she didn’t always have her finger on the pulse of middle and working class Americans which allowed division to win. Did she face profound political headwinds? Of course, but the Democratic Party as a whole has not demonstrated an ability to roll up its sleeves and get into the heartland. Simply look at their inaction in regard to the public schools and the willingness to promote privatization. This has made them an easy target for the moniker of “elite”.
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Simply, at this time in history, the Republican Party is an empty cup that doesn’t hold water. The Democrats are about half full with slow leaks.
The lesser of two evils.
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I sometimes wonder if I would behave any differently than wealthy Americans if I had their largess. I hope I would. The human condition pendulum seems to swing between the gullible and sociopathy, sometimes closing the loop. We’re smart enough to get into trouble, I hope we’re wise enough to get out.
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We are born to die. Life is a crapshoot. We never know what numbers will appear when we wake up each morning to throw the dice again.
Still, if we know how to tilt the odds in our favor, we have a better chance to achieve our daily goals. I learned that from my dad who was a closet gambler since my mother didn’t approve of gambling. My dad’s choice of gambling was horse racing. When he was 14 during the Great Depression, his first job was mucking out the stalls at Santa Anita. His gambling passion was born there.
When my dad died at 79, my mother knew where he hid his gambling money. He thought she didn’t know he was still at it. Because he knew how to play the horses like a scientist, not an economist, my mother lived off my dad’s poke for more than a year, the wad of hundred dollar bills was that thick.
In the 1980s, in an attempt to find a way to get out of teaching as a career, I decided to give gambling a try and trained myself to count cards and play by the scientific rules of blackjack. That worked great for a few years but eventually I decided being a professional gambler was more stressful than being a public school teacher, and I stopped.
What I’m getting at is that we should not expect a political party or a candidate to be perfect. Instead as voters, we have to use a critical thinking, problem solving method to determine who is a cup half full instead of an empty cup that will not hold any water.
Most of us if not all of us are never going to get a full cup of water from any candidate or political party. I think that people that think that way, that want candidates that represent them 100% is naive, foolish and ignorant.
The powerful and wealthy members of ALEC are examples of those nieve, foolish and ignorant people that want it all their way, so they do all they can to corrupt the political system to make that happen. In the process, ALEC has become a prime example of what corrupts our political system. ALEC isn’t the only example of individuals that have so much wealth and the influence that wealth buys that they became what they may have hated at a younger age, corrupt in every way. There’s Bill Gates, the Walton Family Foundation, and so many more feeding and endless stream of toxic poison into our political system.
When the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United, they made that monster bigger and much more dangerous than it was before Citizens United. No individual citizen like a member of the Koch, Walton or Gate family should have that much power over the rest of us.
So, as one voter, I vote for the cup half full knowing I won’t get everything I want while hooping I’ll get something instead of nothing.
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Well put. I try to convince myself that largesse has its limits and so many of these greedy folk tend to go too far and fall. I just keep keeping on.
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Regarding ALEC. The Koch brothers started building their Kochtopus back in the 1960s and launched it to seriously change the United States into what two brothers wanted the United State to become.
Charles and David Koch set long-term goals and have worked for almost 80 years to achieve those goals.
At first, it was to get elected officials that are loyal to their goals elected to office.
When that wasn’t happening fast enough, they started a bill mill churning out legislation that their elected minions would submit to state legislatures and Congress for votes.
When that wasn’t happening fast enough, they started pouring money into local and state elections with the goal to end up controlling enough states to vote for a Constitutional Convention and have their minions rewrite the US Construction as David and Charles saw fit.
A few years ago, the Kochtopus added FOX (fake) News to ALEC and FOX became ALEC’s official propaganda machine. This happened about the same time that Hannity, Carlson, and a few other talk show hosts had their very early opinionated morning talk shows (between midnight and three in the morning) changed to what was once prime time for news on FOX, between 8:00 PM and 11:00PM. The voice of ALEC’s propaganda replaced prime time news on FOX.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/23/david-koch-death-kochtopus-legacy-right-wing
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/climate-koch-brothers-lobbying-biden-build-back-better-1234815/
David Koch is dead, thank God, but his wife carries on his toxic legacy.
Charles Koch raised his son to take his place and spent a lot of parenting time programming his son to fill that job. In an interview i read, the won said he and his sister would come home from school and their father made them watch documentaries that supported the Koch political agenda.
Charles daughter, on the other hand, has come out that she is a liberal and doesn’t want to support her father’s world of hate.
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The Koch legacy of illegality and environmental negligence make Donald Trump’s efforts look civil…https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/inside-the-koch-brothers-toxic-empire-164403/. They openly flaunt the law, get caught and convicted, yet continue to act with impunity.
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This is what happens when wealthy, powerful individuals like Charles Koch hides behind LLCs and other corporate identities. When caught breaking laws, the business and/or corporation is punished with fines and not the individuals in the company that were behind breaking those laws.
In addition, the bean counters for those businesses, like Koch Industries, factor in those potential fines as part of the cost of doing business. In the end, upper management still grows their wealth and buys more corrupting power.
This is also the road map Traitor Trump used to run his family criminal corporate empire, that and the fact that the Trump family criminal empire has so many different corporate identities (hundreds, I’ve read), that it is mind boggling how one IRS auditor would ever find the time to unravel them all and audit them.
I read this morning that Trump’s defense lawyers for the case in New York against the Trump corporate empire said the prosecution has so much evidence that the defense lawyers don’t have time to go through it all before the trial date.
I wonder how big the prosecutors team was that worked on this New York case? New York’s AG must have hired dozens of bean counters to sift through all that evidence to find what was needed to go after the traitor’s criminal empire.
When Trump’s casino business in Atlantic City was going bankrupt more than once causing US banks to lose more than a billion dollars, and the traitor was still listed as the CEO, he was giving himself seven figure raises annually while the casino/hotel couldn’t pay all the bills.
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Lloyd, you never cease to amaze me.
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I love history, yet I am far from a scholar. I’m afraid that my knowledge of philosophy is lacking as well. What I observe, and have experienced in my career as an educator, is an American culture that is dominated by greed as a motivating force. I posit that the bootstrap philosophy of conservative politics in America would be far more possible were we to make investments in family and education that would drastically reduce the level of dependence of our citizenry in America. The greed that grows from contemporary market forces discourages empathy for those who are not fortunate enough to encounter and profit from privilege. Bernie Sanders frequently cites the statistic that around 60% of Americans are unable to afford a $400 emergency. People making millions of dollars, even hundreds of thousands, exhibit an inability to understand this phenomenon. I believe that part of the reason for this from a perspective of responsibility is that our traditional reading and math focus as ends in themselves profoundly limits individual opportunity and meaningful learning. I think reading and math are vital, but students struggle with these subjects when they don’t see it as a tool toward inquiry and fascination. I believe Pelosi means well in her political initiatives, but she and most of the political establishment struggle understanding what is needed to democratize opportunity. The simple reality its that Adam Smith’s market has never been free and our contemporary capitalism doesn’t seem to want to help with the burden required to improve circumstances. That being said, capitalism historically shows itself to be the most resilient economic force that, when practiced along with civic responsibility, can result in the common good. We just have to collectively decide this is our purpose.
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Paul, capitalism without a sense of social responsibility is fatally flawed and doomed to produce a cruel society based on survival of the fittest.
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Diane and Paul Paul mentions Adam Smith; but many don’t realize that, along with his famous economic text, he wrote a companion text on the Moral Sentiments. The implication from that idea of “companion” is that the hand is not so invisible as it may seem, even to him. CBK
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“I think reading and math are vital, but students struggle with these subjects when they don’t see it as a tool toward inquiry and fascination.”
K-12 students living in poverty struggle with reading and math in all countries.
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/10-barriers-to-education-around-the-world-2/
“Schools in low- income neighborhoods will have a concentration of children in poverty who run the risk of having a lower level of school achievement and motivations for achievement. For example, the inability to read is correlated with a number of social problems that affect society’s children such as poverty.”
https://www.grin.com/document/953696#:~:text=Schools%20in%20low%2D%20income%20neighborhoods,society's%20children%20such%20as%20poverty.
Among developed nations, the United States is 2nd to last for the highest ratio of children living in poverty.
“Childhood poverty is a tragic problem affecting millions of children in America. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, over 11 million kids in the United States live below the federal poverty line.”
The family I was born into lived in poverty. Soon after I was born, our dad, with help from a close friend, was hired into a union job and that income lifted our family out of poverty into the lower middle class.
My brother, 14 years older than me was a product of that poverty and he died at 64, illiterate, after having seven children, five of whom also grew up illiterate. They still struggle to earn an honest living. My brother spent 15 years in and out of prison (once for a robbery he was involved in at 18, and after that, mostly for drinking and driving) and some of his children followed in his footsteps into poverty wage jobs and jail sentences when they crossed the line the rich draw in the sand between them and the poor.
The legal system is brutal to the working poor while its very forgiving for the wealthy for financial crimes that are much worse (not counting murder).
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What is a MAGA RINO definition for an alternative school?
Look no further than Eva Sarah Moskowitz’s abusive Success Academies where children are treated worse than Marine Corps recruits in Boot Camp.
“Success Academy is a racist and abusive institution that practices illegal and shameful acts that traumatizes students and staff while performing a white savior complex of claiming to “save” black and brown children.” …
https://www.change.org/p/department-of-education-abolish-success-academy
While Googling these facts to write my comment, I ran into this and shuddered.
Does this Success Academy in California belong to Eva Moskowitz?
https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/california/success-academy-275977
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Paul Bonner My reply to you went to moderation. CBK
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Last surviving member of White Rose dies:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/traute-lafrenz-last-white-rose-survivor-dead_n_640b8bf1e4b0653e296bb2dd
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Since White Rose was an Anti-Fascist, I wonder if MAGA RINOs like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the rest of the so-called [theofascist] freedom caucus, will go out and celebrate, chug a keg of beer, and maybe dance in the streets drunk, shooting their AR-15s at the sky.
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Speaking of fascists, today in Iowa:
https://twitter.com/MidlifeMisfit/status/1634267887744569353?s=20
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I saw the film “Sophie” and fell in love with these wonderful students. I wish I had an ounce of their courage.
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Probably one of the most difficult movies I’ve ever watched. Have had since it was released on DVD and only seen twice. Every scene sticks with you. I think you’d like Kästner and Little Tuesday which is, I think, available on Prime.
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Excellent post here, no paywall:
Pride and reckoning feel especially pressing now that we are just three years out from the nation’s semiquincentennial in 2026, marking 250 years since the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. The toxic partisanship and bad-faith ideologues poisoning our politics threaten to turn an occasion for civic solidarity into yet another issue with which to demonize each other. Those who benefit from the intense divisions have little interest in a nation that hews more closely to its professed ideals. Instead, they are more than happy to pit pride against reckoning — which pits Americans against one another.
https://wapo.st/3JvSMkn
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Starting at 6:15, the Nation At Risk lie is connected to it all. Public education is the key.
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This cabal of Milton Friedloaders knows that public education, particularly the progressive movement, was what catapulted American society into the the prosperous 20th century. A Nation at Risk was devised to bring democracy down so an age of oligarchic feudalism could return for the well healed.
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Well… I can’t argue with that since I pretty much think exactly the same thing.
Still, I’m not sure those fascist and theofascist billionaires are totally freeloaders since they have literally spent billions of dollars starting as far back as the Nixon era to destroy our democracy as defined by the U.S. Constitution.
Maybe some of their money came from the public but not all of it. The Waltons have Wal-Mart for the source of their wealth, and ALEC’s founders the Koch brothers money came from Stalin first and that money from Russia ended up funding the Koch oil empire in the U.S.
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Lloyd Lofthouse Speaking only from my own experience, if a wealthy person gives what others consider a sizeable amount of money to some cause or other, you can bet they plan on getting back that amount or its equivalent at least tenfold.
That said, I still think there are those out there who give for what I would consider the right reasons, and who have not wholly embraced transactional capitalism as their one and only way of life. CBK
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I agree. We can’t blame everyone that’s wealthy for what the rich on the extreme right have been doing for decades. Not every millionaire or billioanre is an autocratic loving fascist or theofascist.
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There are good millionaires. Most belong to a group started by Abigail Disney called Patriotic Millionaires, which advocates for higher taxes on themselves.
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If by chance I became a millionaire before I check out, I will join the Patriotic Millionaires, which advocates for higher taxes on themselves.
“Eisenhower’s presidency did see some tax rates above 90%, but that figure only applied to the individual income taxes of top earners. For married people filing jointly in 1953, for example, any income above $200,000 was taxed at 90%, above $300,000 at 91%, and above $400,000 at 92%.”
I’d dance, rather badly I’m sure, on the sidewalk in front of my house if I earned enough to reach the 92% bracket, because after those taxes hit, I’d still have a lot more to spend or save on an annual basis than I have ever had in my entire life.
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I think their efforts to keep their money, not always so well earned, out of government coffers is another form of subsidies. I once had a debate with a dorm mate in college around 1978 when he declared there should be a revolution of the rich. I suspect he is quite happy how things have turned out.
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Mao started his cultural revolution in China to get rid of the wealthy class and divided their land up among the poorest people in China.
The opposite happened in the U.S. The cultural revolution started by Reagan and maybe Nixon was to destroy the power of the middle class, increase poverty, and make the rich wealthier. And every president since (Democrat and Republicans) those two has helped the rich win their cultural revolution. Democrats by mostly doing nothing to stop the Republicans.
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Lloyd,
The super-rich fund politicians in both parties.
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I’ve read that.
They are hedging their bets, and from what I’ve read, they invest more in the party that’s closest to what they think.
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As I became more aware of politics in my young adult life it was quite the revelation that companies fund both parties in an effort to successfully hedge their bets.
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Public educaiton is the biggest domino the autocratic theofascist and fascists want to topple, so it will knock all the rest of the public dominos down until there is a very small and easy to control middle class (about 5% of the total scared to death they will be next) and about half, or more, of the people live in horrid poverty, crushed, and easy to keep down.
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This opinion piece from the Kansas Reflector hits all the notes on vouchers.
No teacher goes into the field for the money. No teacher goes into the field to indoctrinate. No teacher goes into the field to do anything other than teach children and build a future filled with knowledgeable adults. No one who signed this letter did so for the clout. They did it because they care and because they want to improve the state of Kansas.
The wealthy who would benefit the most from these voucher programs don’t give a flying fig about Kansas. Not really. Not when they have so little at stake.
If the state tumbles down the rabbit hole of underfunded public schools, with teachers fleeing in droves, the richest among us can simply pack up and leave for another state. They can employ private tutors or start a school of their own. They will consider the tax savings worth the moderate trouble. Meanwhile, poor or middle-class families using vouchers will find that $5,000 a year doesn’t go nearly as far as advertised.
https://kansasreflector.com/2023/03/13/kansas-legislators-war-on-the-poor-opens-worrisome-new-front-school-vouchers-and-tax-avoidance/
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Who couldn’t use a good laugh? The Onion delivers!
https://www.theonion.com/gop-maintains-solid-hold-on-youth-that-already-look-lik-1819595704
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At the March 15 rally, SEIU Local 99 announced dates for their three-day Unfair Practice Charge strike: Tuesday, March 21, Wednesday, March 22, and Thursday, March 23. UTLA will strike in solidarity and UTLA’s elected leaders are encouraging all 35,000 UTLA educators to join SEIU 99 in a solidarity strike. SEIU 99 members have been working under a contract that expired in 2021 and are among the lowest paid employees in LAUSD — $25,000 a year on average. In December, they declared impasse with the district and in February, SEIU 99 members voted 96% yes to authorize a strike.
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May they crush and flatten the greedy autocrats, all of them.
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Hello Diane: EDWEEK online magazine had this article titled:
**After 50 Years, a U.S. Supreme Court Decision on Educational Equity Is Still Debated . . . There is no federal constitutional right to equal education, the U.S. Supreme court ruled 50 years ago this month.”
“The court’s decision, issued March 21, 1973, crushed the hopes of many parents, children, educators, advocates, and theorists when it rejected a federal legal challenge to Texas’ school funding system. ‘The poor people have lost again,’ Demetrio P. Rodríguez, the Mexican-American father of five children who all eventually attended the chronically underfunded Edgewood Independent School District covering a section of San Antonio, and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that had challenged inequities in the Texas system, told The New York Times the day of the ruling.”
Maybe when a bunch of yahoos storm the Supreme Court, breaking up the furniture, defecating on their desks and in the hallways, and threatening to hang them . . . maybe THEN they’ll realize WHY, regardless whether education is a formalized right, in a democracy it is essential for ALL of our yahoos to get the best education they can . . . so they’ll have a chance to understand the value of the political system they live in, including the importance of the separation of powers, as long as they actually live in it. CBK
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A good look at Paul Vallas’ disasterous career running school districts. I thought I knew a lot about the topic, but I had not realized the extent of his fascination with militarized schools for Black and Brown kids. This charlatan really ought not to be elected Chicago’s mayor on April 4.
https://thetriibe.com/2023/03/paul-vallas-trail-of-school-privatization-chicago/
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Representative Jamaal Bowman, of New York, a former teacher and middle school principal on the topic of gun violence in schools had this exchange with Rep. Thomas Massie today, in their workplace. A shining example of what happens when regular people get elected to represent the rest of us.
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And about that other profile in courage Congressman, Tim Burchett, John Leguizamo had some (a bit vulgar, but less vulgar than dead children) thoughts:
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This is fun:
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In the wake of the murder of 6 people at the Covenant School in Nashville, there was a massive protest at the Capitol. The right has tried to portray this lawful protest as an “insurrection”. In truth, every person went through security and all they were permitted to have in their hands was an 8.5″by 11″piece of paper, on which many wrote their protest. There was no damage to the building or its grounds when the event was over.
Here’s a long video of that event:
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“The right has tried to portray this lawful protest as an ‘insurrection’.”
The extremist right (a polite way of saying “fascists”) have been doing this for years if not decades. During the BLM’s peaceful protests, the fascists were painting all of the BLM protestors as violent when the vast majority were peaceful protests and when there was violence it was caused by the (extreme right) fascists or criminal gangs using the protests as cover to break into stores and steal stuff.
If the news bleeds, it leads, so the fascists have been getting their lies out there while the rest of us, who are not fascists, are mostly ignored by the traditional media and deliberately ignored by FOX, AOL, et al. who are in league with the fascists to crush everyone else.
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Quite true, Lloyd. I’m old enough to remember that when the Berrigan brothers protested the Viet Nam war (which, of course, the Vietnamese call the American War) they were called communists. Under Nixon, they were indicted for a plan to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up heating tunnels under DC. Acquitted, they went on to spearhead protests against nuclear weapons.
Worthy causes.
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Diane,
I received an email from MomsRising.org for a virtual call about Debunking the “Parents Bill of Rights” on Thursday 4/6 at 7:30-8:30 EDT.
Here’s the link to the event;
https://www.mobilize.us/momsrising/event/557482/?rname=Joshua&share_context=event_details&share_medium=copy_link
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Thank you.
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I wonder how DDDD and TT are going to stop people in Florida and Texas from watching this latest truth, musical video. Thanks for sharing.
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Also, thoughts and prayers from Randy:
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Wonderful!!
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Biden’s representatives to other nations are touting the benefits of unionism in the face of globalization. Seems like quite the break from the recent past.
A day-long session in Zambia featuring a host of representatives from African trade unions illustrated another shift in U.S. policy thinking: A new focus on the importance of organized labor in the life of democracies, and its role in bolstering them. “Unions are essential to democracy,” said Thea Lee, deputy undersecretary for international labor affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor, during her virtual address to those attending the gathering in Zambia. “If we believe in democracy, we need strong labor movements.”
That’s a message that has been delivered by President Biden as well, who has cast himself as the most pro-union leader in U.S. history bent on pursuing a “foreign policy for the middle class,” an agenda involving industrial policy and subsidies that has led some critics to accuse the administration of engaging in a regressive form of protectionism. “In a simple word, a union means there is democracy,” Biden said in 2021. “Organizing, joining a union — that’s democracy in action.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/31/biden-unions-democracy-summit/
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Great to hear that Biden is pro-union and pro-middle class.
I think this will be a signal to the extreme-right Federalist Society and ALEC billiaonres along with the Walton Family Foundation and Bill Gates who will then be upping their dark money donations during the run up to the 2024 elections, to support gun loving, labor union hating MAGA-RINO fascists running for office at every level.
For sure, Dangerously Deranged Despot DeSantis will reap a harvest of extreme-right dark money donations to finance his presidential run.
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Tourist tips for Marjorie Taylor Greene:
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Thanks for sharing.
Before I watched all of that “welcome Marjorie Taylor Greene” to NYC video (LOL!), I thought it might be about MTG being invited to visit Bakhmut, Ukraine (without a helmet and flak jacket). Of course, we’d let her take her AR-15 with her and make sure she was carrying a huge American flag on a 10 foot pole.
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10 foot pole. So many thoughts and old jokes conjured up. All inappropriate here!
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I saw this moniker applied to her; it seems to suit: Empty Greene.
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Politicians like Santos, Ogles, and now Ohio state Rep. Dave Dobos actually have figured out how to solve the student debt crisis. You can claim an education and degree from any university or college by just doing it, Nancy Reagan-style. No tuition, no debt, no moral quandaries. And the public has no clue!
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2023/04/04/state-rep-dave-dobos-never-got-mit-diploma-as-hes-claimed-for-years/70081345007/
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Today, in Uvalde, students were kept in the school auditorium to prevent them from walking out and participating in the national school protest about gun violence. A parent, Ana Rodriguez, went to school to get her son and this is how she was received. Rodriguez’ daughter Maite died in the shooting of May 24. Uvalde is a small town, but note the officer demands her ID. He damn well knows who she is.
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And in Colorado, a “fusion center” is surveilling students who participate in these school walkouts. Fusion centers were authorized under the Patriot Act. They are regional centers where local, state and federal official share information to deter terrorism.
“The Students Demand Action (SDA) has coordinated a nationwide school walkout amongst students throughout the country with similar trends to those seen in Colorado,” stated the situational awareness bulletin dated April 4, which was issued by the Colorado Information Analysis Center. CIAC’s mission is “preventing acts of terrorism, taking an all-crimes/all-threats approach,” according to the agency’s website. It’s not clear how the student walkouts relate to this mission. Experts have long criticized fusion centers like CIAC for operating with broad authorities and little oversight.
So children, acting to save their own lives from a gunman’s (almost always a male) bullets, are treated as if they were the dangerous ones.
I’m old; I know protestors have long been surveilled in our country, but it’s really tipping over into a very dangerous time to believe in civil liberties.
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Missed this. Despicable. Like the Parkland parent who was manhandled at a House cult hearing. This is another sign of fascism, extraordinary interpretation of laws to intentionally cause a narrative to appeal to their cult. Translating victims into perpetrators and vice versa. It’s on the news and in the paper every day, almost everywhere. And not going to post it, but check out the doozy of a press conference a Bull Connor-wannabe from Ocala, FL did yesterday on teenage gang murders that seem at first glance to be an internal squabble gone wrong. Fits into this pattern.
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Found this today, what a joy! A celebration of American pluralism’s ups and downs. Great way to kill some weekend time:
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What I absolutely love about this is that I’ve explained to non-southerners how to think about speaking southern dialects, one rule was paramount: virtually all monosyllabic words are spoken in two syllables. Love hearing it here.
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FYI, Diane:”Collapsing roofs, broken toilets and flooded classrooms: Inside the worst-funded schools in the nation” https://www.rawstory.com/collapsing-roofs-broken-toilets-flooded-classrooms-inside-the-worst-funded-schools-in-the-nation/
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Requiring 2/3 voter approval means that the legislature can effectively throw up its hands and inappropriately claim the voters don’t want it. Representative government shouldn’t mean you only represent the people you want to represent.
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Excellent points, Paul! Requiring 2/3 voter approval IS selective representation, not democracy. Except in primaries, in order to whittle down the choices so there will be a winner with a majoruty of the votes in the final election, I’m surprised it’s even legal anywhere in the US. What a travesty!
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“Such a willfully stupid country.”
https://twitter.com/BettyBowers/status/1646679207781490689?s=20
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You can indicate your support for free meals at school here:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/add-your-official-comment-help-hungry-kids-access-free-school-meals
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Can anyone interpret this attempted explanation by Rick Hess for teacher evaluation by tests should continue?
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/opinion-teacher-evaluation-policies-have-flopped-where-did-they-go-wrong/2023/04
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The VAM model was a disaster.
Some of us said so at the start, a decade ago. So did the American Statistical Association.
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Using the results of high stakes tests taken by students to judge if a teacher is good at their job will never work. NEVER!
There is a simple formula/explanation:
Teachers teach. Teachers can not do the learning for the students.
Students are responsible to learn what a teacher teaches them. If students do not pay attention, do the class work, do the homework, read outside of class, study for tests, if there are classroom tests, the teacher is not responsible for that.
Parents are responsible to support the teachers and the students, or, in most cases, where parent support is missing, remembering what the teacher taught does not always happen.
Learning also depends on how the human brain learns and retains what it learns. Since human brains do not work like a computer, even the children doing the learning have only a little control over what they remember in the long run. When humans sleep, the brain decides, without much direction from the sleeping child/adult, what is important to remember. If what a teacher taught that day is not important to the student, the odds are against it ending up in long term memory. That’s the simple explanation. The human brain is a lot more complex than that.
And even when something a teacher taught does end up in long term memory, if the student doesn’t use that information on a regular basis, the human brain tends to disconnect from that memory, and it is no longer part of the data base (long-term memory) that is assessable.
Repeat, the human brain does not remember the same way a digital computer does. High stakes tests treat students as if they are digital computers. It doesn’t work unless the student is one of the extremely rare humans with an eidetic memory.
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I just thought of an excellent example. The one and only grade school lesson I vividly remember but I do not remember all the details.
I remember filling out a map of the United States. The teacher had us write the name of each state and its capital on that map.
It was an easy assignment. it was classwork and not home work.
I filled that empty map out with all the names of the states and capitals, and since that information was in our textbook, it was easy to do. I vaguely remember more lessons to support learning that information. But we didn’t do it over, and over, and over. That was one lesson and the list of what teachers are expected to teach for each grade level is REALLY long!
Still, I do not remember the names of every state capital. And while I could probably identify the correct location of most of the states, I might get a few wrong and put them in the wrong spot.
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A rare lesson in civic education:
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Fabulous! Thanks, Greg.
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It’s as if they never ever learn. over at the Shanker Institute they’re on about teacher evaluation being the driving force to improving student performance (I suppose on tests!).
No mention of the social upheaval since the Trump presidency, natural disasters, covid, poverty, gun violence, police violence, virtual schooling, the on-going coup attempt, defunding of public education in favor of vouchers, ESA’s, money to religious schools, teachers stampeding for the exit, book banning, rising autocracy.
Overriding all, though, is the sense that evaluation is a thing to be done TO teachers, like sticking an oven thermometer into a turkey breast to gauge how much longer it needs to cook.
We talked so much about teacher quality for 15 years, surely we’re not going to walk away now that we’re getting good evidence about how (or how not) to improve it.
A pox on their heads.
https://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/rise-and-fall-teacher-evaluation-reform-empire
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In my twenty one years as an administrator, the most effective way to instructional growth for teaching was through collaborative planning. The check list or script taking policies I had to follow made the post observation process too one sided. I learned so much about teaching as an administrator just going into classrooms and watching teachers work. The informal conversations were always more productive.
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The high school where I taught the last last 16 of thirty years as a public school teacher in the same 19,000 student school district in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley did just that for two or three years when Nogales snagged a limited grand. The grand funded Social Studies and English classes to team up and work together to link literature with history. That project also came with a class size reduction to 20 students per class.
Those few years were incredible teaming up with 20 students in a class. Before that, my class loads were always 34 or higher.
My 1st period would be the history teacher’s 2nd period and his first my second… We each taught five classes, but my fifth class was journalism, I was the teacher and advisor for the student produced high school newspaper for that one period. We coordinated our lessons.
Two or three years later, the grant ended, the class size reduction ended and so did the partnership between English and History.
I repeat, those few years were incredible. The student learning soared, the reduced workload made it easier for us to create much more rewarding lesson plans coordinating history with literature.
Still, like so many great ideas that actually worked, it came and went with the grant money, but the attacks on public education and micromanagement from administrators/politicians at the state, federal and district level, many who never taught a day in their lives, never ends.
I’m still in touch with a few teachers who are still in the classroom nearing their retirement date that say it is much worse than when I left in 2005, with an emphasis on WORSE!
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I guarantee your students benefitted significantly. My daughter taught 8th grade social studies in a Title one school. She got involved with Freedom Schools in the summer. Her first principal saw what she had and allowed my daughter to teach debate. This was the only public school in Charlotte Mecklenburg that participated in Mock UN competition. One of my daughter’s students won the whole thing. A high poverty low reading school. A new principal arrived my daughter’s last year. A TFA alum. Ended the debate class and ignored the success of a dedicated veteran staff. Covid hit. My daughter went to an independent school that is helping to pay for her masters. It hurts that she is no longer in public schools, but when district leaders don’t appreciate what they have. The teachers leave and students lose.
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Most TFA administrators are there to sabotage the public schools so those districts become ripe for charter schools to take over. TFA admin and those trained at the Broad Academy are traitorous back-stabbing vermin.
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I think what TFA represents, and for that matter those thrown into administration way too early, is a total misreading of what it means to lead. Accomplishment as a student in the classroom does not mean you are qualified to lead. When I began my masters in school leadership I just missed out on a new fellowship started by North Carolina for aspiring administrators because I was just short of the required 3.2 GPA. However, the university where I began that degree saw through my interview that I had the experience and understanding of schooling that could compete with the Fellows. As I took classes with those students who were much younger than me and far less experienced in the classroom (Only 3 years teaching experience was required for the fellowship) I discovered the hubris that came with their self importance at such a young age would hinder their effectiveness as leaders. It didn’t help that those left to prepare them for the principalship so intentionally fed the egos of these young adults. TFA, Broad, et al act with the same idea in mind. The prospective leaders are encouraged to believe they are superior to those they serve. This disease of elitism eventually results in an inability to understand that those doing the actual work of teaching are critical resources for institutional improvement. Earning one’s way through a mastery of theory devoid of experience is recipe for disaster.
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District Administrators in public schools should be required to also have a teaching credential from a reputable, accredited university, and to teach one class a day in one of the schools in the district where they work.
Other than teaching that one class, they should conduct their job as an administrator like they are an office manager. They don’t tell teachers how to teach. They make sure the teachers have what they need to teach.
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typo thanks to auto spell fix.
GRANT not GRAND.
There might be other typos… Use context to read past them, please.
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So aggravating, Christine. They will NEVER admit they are wrong.
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The worst part is that these corporatists think they are always right.
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To expand on thought above, money will never admit that it’s wrong and imply its superiority in all cases. One of the revolutions, innovations, if you will, American slavery caused was the first breakout of great wealth not associated with inheritance in history. Yes there were isolated cases of wealth in history, but it was arithmetically greater, not exponentially. The birth of capitalism in the slave markets of New Orleans, where they leveraged the supply of slaves produced as offspring in places like Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina to create the greatest fortunes the world has ever seen. Some of their plantations still host tourist today.
Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Coast States, and some others have elevated money as we have in this nation to become some sort of expertise. An idiot with a simple idea that gets the right patent that earns billions without much more effort is seen as more authoritative and successful than an academic who has devoted an entire live to an important idea. It’s one of the deadliest Americanisms around.
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Poverty, not teacher quality, is the leading cause of children not doing well in school. That applies to every country on the planet, not just the US. And the US has one of the highest child poverty rates among developed nations, next to last. I think Romania is the only developed country with a higher ratio of children living in poverty.
In fact, when we look at the two major factors for what gets in the way of a child learning in school, they are:
One: poverty
Two: lack of proper parental support
If they want to improve the quality of teachers, all they have to do is learn from Finland. Still, that won’t make them wealthy off public dollars.
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Okay, so you probably heard that Claudine Gray resigned as President of Harvard. This is a a victory for the vile Chris Rufo, he who became famous for turning “critical race theory” into a far-right buzzword. He can now add Dr. Gray’s scalp to his collection.
I was hoping that Harvard had the stamina to stand up to the coyotes but it didn’t. When there’s a national campaign to destroy your reputation, few people can stay standing. The only ones who can are those who have no honor, no shame, like Trump.
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I read that news this morning, that Claudine Gray resigned as President of Harvard.
My first thoughts: The extreme right got what they wanted in their war to take over education at every level as they dismantle the United States, toppling one domino after another, until nothing remains, not even them.
Who will replace her? A MAGA? A federalist? A libertarian? A Marjorie Taylor Green clone? A member of ALEC?
And Harvard is an elite private college. “More than 80 percent of Harvard faculty respondents characterized their political leanings as “liberal” or ‘very liberal,’ according to The Crimson’s annual survey of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in April.”
If what’s happening in Florida happens to Harvard, someone from the extreme right may take her place. Next step, turn Harvard into another Hillsdale.
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Lloyd,
Surely your tongue was in your cheek when you wrote that.
The Harvard Corporation will choose someone with impeccable credentials.
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I think you meant Lloyd, Diane.
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Bob,
You are right. I meant Lloyd, not you. I edited the comment. No MAGA president at Harvard. But people should stop thinking Harvard, Princeton, Yale indoctrinated students. Consider a few of their graduates: the abominable Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis.
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First of all, let us recall that Harvard is foremost a corporation, with a university attached to it. (Also a major landholder and real estate investor on both sides of the Charles River, but I digress.) The notion it is woke is laughable.
Diane, we were both dismayed by Ruth Marcus’ call for Gay’s resignation. The WaPo published this letter to the editor today, and I agree with its author:
Regarding Ruth Marcus’s Dec. 26 op-ed, “Harvard’s president should resign”:
Most of us know that the recent review of Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s doctoral dissertation was precipitated by her testimony before a congressional committee and condemnation of her response about antisemitism, for which she has apologized.
Ms. Gay received her PhD in 1997, more than two decades ago. At the time she wrote her dissertation, she was a student. The responsibility for closely examining and critiquing her dissertation rested with the tenured and distinguished faculty at Harvard who supervised her work. She was learning the craft of her future profession, supposedly guided by more learned people in research and academic writing.
Where is the accountability for Harvard? Since attaining her doctoral degree, Ms. Gay has led a distinguished career and has been recognized and rewarded with tenure by Harvard. She was selected presumably over many other distinguished academics to lead the university. Her credentials were checked and rechecked, and a favorable judgment was made.
I understand the motivation of the bomb-throwers incensed by her testimony — Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), billionaire contributors to Harvard, and others — who continued to look for and find a reason to punish Ms. Gay, a Black woman leading one of the most prestigious institutions in the country, but Ms. Marcus? What a disappointment.
Judith Winston, Washington
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/31/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism-allegations/
Giving into bullies merely empowers them. I wish Gay had refused to resign and forced the corporation to fire her.
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Christine, I agree! Ruth Marcus should know better than to cave in to the rightwing clique that targeted Dr Gay because she was a Black woman.
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Peter Greene pointed me to this post from Austin, in which the execrable Chris Rufo got his comeuppance at the hands of a few UT profs. You love to see it!
Rufo thanked Strong for her question but his words came faster and more insistent than before. He derided Dewey, saying it would have been better if he’d never been born, and dismissed his values. “Academic freedom, due process, neutrality – those are means, not ends,” Rufo said. “If you have an erasure of ends, what you get is sheer power politics, you get everything reducible to will and domination, and then you get an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” Rufo concluded by saying that academics who continue to adhere to Dewey’s principles, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”
Strong was completely unawed by the implied threat. “The ‘ends’ of academic freedom, due process, and shared governance is education for a democratic society,” she said simply. “That is the basis of John Dewey’s vision and many, many university professors believe that today.”
The audience was silent after Strong’s remark. It had become clear that Rufo wasn’t dominating his opponents. It got worse for him when Samuel Baker, a UT English professor, came to the mic. Baker reiterated that Rufo’s veneration of beauty and truth was meaningless if he provided no idea of what the concepts mean to him, and he criticized Rufo’s use of violent imagery like “laying siege” and deserving “what’s coming.”
https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2023-11-17/right-wing-activist-chris-rufo-calls-for-siege-of-university-at-ut/
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Why does the press find it necessary to cover Chris Rufo when he openly lies about the intentions of others. Rufo is obviously good at attacking entities that can’t fight back and the media plays along.
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From Peter again:
Maybe– I’m not sure how far I go along with Foser on this. But what I believe may apply is that, by announcing his latest propaganda idea as an explicit strategy, Rufo is able to activate the press’s horse race coverage mode.
We know this mode. A candidate or politician announces a particular idea, and rather than examine the idea’s accuracy or merit, the media focuses on the question of whether or not that idea is helping the team win. Don’t ask if it’s a good idea; ask if it’s a winning idea. What Rufo understands is that part of winning is getting the media to talk about it.
So when Rufo announces that X is his new strategy, he’s just cutting to the chase, signaling the media to gather around and watch to see how this lands (rather than, say, checking to see if Rufo is actually full of shit). “Remember that time I made got everyone to freak out over critical race theory? Come watch me do the same thing over DEI!
https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2024/01/rufo-horse-racing-and-bullying.html
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The same question may be asked of the press, why the media keeps repeating Trump’s lies, often without mentioning they’re lies.
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Christine,
What a great story! Thanks to the bold profs at UT.
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This is why so many on the extreme right refuse to debate, where the other side gets to reply and challenge. And why Reagan got rid of the Fairness Doctrine.
It isn’t easy for the extreme right to repeatedly lie at the same time and place that someone else is pointing out those lies.
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Charles Blow at the NYT explains it quite concisely:
Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard who announced her resignation on Tuesday after her problematic congressional testimony about antisemitism and mounting questions about missing citations and quotation marks in her published work, was, in part, pushed out by political forces beyond academia and hostile to it.
But the campaign against her was never truly about her testimony or accusations of plagiarism.
It was a political attack on a symbol. It was a campaign of abrogation. It was and is a project of displacement and defilement meant to reverse progress and shame the proponents of that progress.
As Janai Nelson, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., posted online, “The project isn’t to thwart hate but to foment it thru vicious takedowns.”
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I read that NYT piece. And I agree. This is the extreme far right, declaring war on everything they disapprove of that’s out in the open. Honest people living honest lives without shame.
Still, when members of the extreme right mafia does something they disapprove of, they’re doing it too, but in hiding. Dishonest people living dishonest lives with shame.
Like the man and wife M4L pair.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom gets right into it. I admire how she is able to synthesize disparate threads into a vivid tapestry. It’s genius; the folks at MacArthur think so too.
You do not have to take my word for it. You can believe Chris Rufo, a conservative activist who was one of the architects of the debacle, who celebrated on X this week for having “SCALPED” Dr. Gay. Distinct from the campaign waged against Penn’s former president Elizabeth Magill, the attacks against Dr. Gay have been cut from whole cloth, from a historical narrative about merit and diversity that is a hallmark of America’s higher-education prestige hierarchy.
Rufo explained his plan for ginning up controversy about higher education’s most prestigious universities in an interview on the heels of Dr. Gay’s resignation, explaining that it was a coordinated, strategic attack that used narrative, financial and political leverage. His partners included members of Congress, wealthy donors, journalists, media and a bloodthirsty audience. Riding high on success, Rufo said his strategy could push the conservative movement back into what he considers its rightful place: the top of America’s most powerful cultural institutions.
No paywall:
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I hope Rufo and his demonic extreme right cult of all lies and racist hate is stopped in their tracks.
Freaks like Rufo claim to be conservatives but are not what real conservatives are like, that existed before President Reagan started recruiting racists from the south into the Republican Party back in the 1980s.
I’ve read that Nixon started recruiting racists, but I think it was Reagan, with his failed trickle down economic crap, who succeeded in giving those racists a new home and seats at the table, after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act.
From that point, conservatism split into two branches.
Eisenhower conservatives, a threatened species that taxed the rich to pay down the national debt.
And the Reagan, Bush (2), and Trump conservatives, that rob the poor and the working class and give what they take to the rich, supported by fascist, racist, angry, hate filled MAGARINOs.
That is the type of conservative Rufo is.
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I agree with you Lloyd.
I meant to add that folks ought to read the comments on that article, sorted by most liked. There are a whole lot of NYT readers who see themselves as having merited everything they got, especially their SAT scores, which they seem to recall some 40 years after the fact. Might not seem to be Rufo’s peeps, and yet they are.
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The extreme right that rufo works for and/or represents lies, cheats, steals, bribes, destroys lives, does all they can to achieve their goals.
They are dark and dirty. They may even be working for Putin even if they don’t know it.
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There is that picture of General Flynn and Jill Stein sitting at a table with Putin that suggests that they are. Steve Bannon’s jet setting around the globe as a self-proclaimed “Leninist” would be another piece of evidence. Or Trumps plethora of meetings and phone conversations limited to Putin’s translators could be another clue…The list goes on and on…
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Trump has been a Russian asset for a long, long time. In the 1980s, the Russian ambassador arranged and all-expenses-paid trip to Moscow for Trump on a KGB airplane. Now why exactly would he do that?
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More importantly, why doesn’t the press call him out for it? Too much pretense toward civility when we can’t acknowledge what is right in front of our faces.
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If you are on ly reading the news, you may have missed all the Op Eds about Trump and Russia.
I just Goggled: OpEds about Trump working for Russia and Putin
And got 6,280,000 hits
Just on the first page:
The New York Times
1. Donald Trump: The Russia File
2. Trump and the Russians
CNN
37 Times Trump was soft of Russia
University of Connecticut
Op-ed: Trump’s Friendly Meeting with Putin Further Blurs US-Russia Relations.
San Francisco Chronicle
Editorial: How Trump works for the Russians.
The New Yorker
How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump
et al.
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Paul,
I think you and I are the only people who saw the picture of Mike Flynn and Jill Stein sitting at Putin’s table to celebrate the 10th anniversary of RT in Moscow. RT is the Russian government propganda statuon.
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I don’t remember if I saw those photos. I may have.
Since Traitor Trump rode down that escalator to announce he was running for president, an overwhelming chaos blizzard has replaced reason for way too many people in the U.S.
Media attention focused on tens of thousands of lies that never end.
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Nope. I saw those photos as well. Disgusting.
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If Smith gets Trump in court, I wonder if the next step will be to go after the other traitors sitting in Congress that were involved in January 6, 2021. I remember Guttermouth Greene was one of those.
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Ted Cruz appeared to be the leader of the pack in Congress attempting to keep the electors’ votes from being certified.
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I want Smith to go after Ted Cruz and the pack as soon as the traitor is found guilty.
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Don’t hold your breath. Remember that the law in the United States exists to go after the little guy. If you are poor and sell singles on a street corner, then you are in trouble.
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The law also punishes someone who gets rich, stealing from the rich.
Bernie Madoff
He should have made his fortune stealing from the working class. Then he probably wouldn’t have ended up in prison where he died.
Traitor Trump has stepped on a lot of powerful and/or rich toes, trying to crush them.
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Cruz and Hawley led the effort to prevent the certification of the electors’ votes.
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Hawley’s wife, Erin Hawley is a lawyer for the Leonard Leo outfit Alliance Defending Freedom. That group brought about the Dobbs decision, overturning women’s bodily autonomy, seeks to ban medication abortion, discriminate against LGBTQ people. It was Erin who litigated the fraudulent case at SCOTUS of the wedding designer who refused to work for same sex couples. It was fraudulent because the “plaintiff” had suffered no harm and was unaware his name was used in the case.
In July of 2022, she testified in a Congressional hearing, post Dobbs that medical termination of a miscarriage wasn’t an abortion. Perhaps her reasoning on that is due to her own miscarriage?
A real power couple.
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Well, sure. If Trump is an insurrectionist, so are they. If Trump can’t stand for election, neither can they. The gig is up.
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There were many. Jim Jordan and Scott Perry of PA were up to their necks in it. Liz Cheney told Jordan he was responsible as they escaped the chamber on January 6th. I think if Trump is convicted a number of dominoes will fall. However, all Trump needs is one MAGA stooge to get onto that jury.
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It’s breathtaking, isn’t it, that this many members of Congress participated in a plot to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States before it even took office. Seditionists, all of them. Vile. The lowest of the low.
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I just finished reading the books by Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson. It’s shocking how few in Congress or the administration were principled.
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Then Traitor Trump made a huge mistake not asking for a Jury in the felony trial where his crime family was found guilty of fraud.
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I find interesting , if not despicable, that the press never reminds us that the Trump Organization was found guilty along with Weiselburg. As if the Donald is not the sole progenitor of the company…
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I just Googled this: “Trump found guilty of fraud”
And got back 13,300,000 hits.
The first hit on the first page was from Reuters, the EU’s news service.
“NEW YORK, Sept 26 (Reuters) – A New York judge found Donald Trump and his family business fraudulently inflated the value of his properties and other assets, in a major defeat for the former U.S. president that could severely hamper his ability to do business in the state.Sep 26, 2023”
The second hit was from the AP, the North American news service.
“Judge rules Donald Trump Defrauded Banks and Insurers.”
And the list of news reports from major media sources goes ON, and ON, and ON, and ON. The first page of that Google searsch is filled with links to the major news sources in the world reporting that Trump has been found guilty of fraud.
Doesn’t do any good when MAGARINOs willingly only read and hear what Traitor Trump wants them to read and hear.
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Yes, there has been a great deal about the fraud case, but unlike the civil trial where the verdict should come down soon, the criminal guilty verdict of his organization has been rarely mentioned in regard to his culpability. At least not from what I have seen in The NY Times and other outlets.
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In the civil fraud trial, the NY Attorney General just asked the judge to fine the Trump Organization $370 million, not $250 million, due to the extent of fraudulent activity, in addition to revoking its right to do business in the state.
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It’s time for Democrats to go on the offensive and pull Rufo out of the shadows. Expose him as the grifter he is.
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If liberal professors have been brainwashing college students for decades, they have failed miserably, considering that Traitor Trump was elected in 2016, while losing the popular vote, and the Republican Party controls 29 of the 50 states, controls one House of Congress and close to half of the U.S. Senate.
Democrats control 20 states.
Just like all the other lying blame games, I think the real programmers of children and future voters are Republicans and not Democrats.
If a Republican alleges a Democrat did something, it’s a safe bed the Republican is the one doing what they accused a Democrat of doing, often without any evidence to prove that the Democrat did it.
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I hope Harvard picks someone honest and professional that doesn’t let the extreme right hijack their university.
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Lloyd’s tongue is always inside his mouth near a cheek.
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They are perfectly capable of learning — they simply have different goals than you. They have learned how to make the Big Bucks pushing commercial testing and they will stay hell bent to keep on pushing it.
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Dear Dr. Ravitch,
An article came out in the NYTimes entitled “Science of Reading ‘Revolt’.
Kids Can’t Read’: The Revolt That Is Taking On the Education Establishment
My response is: Not another reading revolt! The Phonetic approach is surfacing its ugly head again via neophytes.
Phonics is more important for spelling and writing.
As I maintain and posted on my reading web site:
Phonics has many short comings:
-Phonics only helps if the words are already in one’s hearing vocabulary.
-Every rule is broken at some time; e.g., I no sooner tell the children, “When there is only one vowel in the word and between two consonants the vowel is usually short.” The next word invariably will be kind, find, mind, wild, or mild.
-Phonics is a skill; readers occasionally use skills but constantly need to use strategies. For the emergent reader only the initial letter sound is needed.
-With so many varied speech patterns around the county, how can phonics be the primary approach to reading? There is a single spelling across dialects that pronounce words very differently. My son once stopped a Boston police officer for directions. He asked the officer to repeat it five times and finally gave up. My son couldn’t understand what the officer was saying.
-“And when the rules being taught do not match the learner’s own dialect, it is that much more confusing and that much harder to learn. Yet another barrier for far too many children! “ Take the words dog and log. They should be short o words But even the people from the Standardized English region pronounce the o in dog and log as aw as in law. But if it follows the rule, dog should have a short sound as in hot.
-How about the children with an auditory discrimination problem? They can not learn via phonics. Extra help in phonic lessons is a waste of time.
-There is no carry over. My grandchildren reinforced the fact that there was no carry over from what they learned in the structured phonetic approach to their reading
Familiar words can be read as fast as single letters. Under some conditions, words can be identified when the separate letters cannot be. Meaningful context speeds word identification. All phonics can be expected to do is help children get approximate pronunciations. Becoming a Nation of Readers p. 11
My 2 1/2 year old granddaughter revealed something amazing to me. I read her a story that her mother read to her many times-
Are You My Mother? When I got to the page with many animals, I did not read them in sequential order. I would just form my lips to indicate the first sound. Each time she could tell me what animal I was going to read by just looking at the formation of my lips.
Doesn’t it stand to reason an older child would be helped to figure out a word by just getting their mouth ready to pronounce the initial consonant or vowel as long as they are concentrating on the meaning of the story? Phonics needs to be kept in balance with syntax and semantic clues.
2/22/20 My grandson in second grade told me how he went to the Internet via the iPad and looked up how to train his dog to do tricks. He taught his year old husky to put his paws on a skate board to get ready to take off. He read a story above grade level and zoomed through it. When I isolated a few words, he couldn’t pronounce them much less know their meaning. In context he had no problem. Meaning is the name of the game- being able to relate to what one reads insures comprehension.
Keep up your support for sound education, Dr. Ravitch,
Mary DeFalco
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Thank you, Mary.
I believe the “Science of Reading” is pure bunk, even though I have always been pro-phonics.
The people pushing SOR cannot provide a single district where every student is reading at a high level after SOR was implemented.
And they never will.
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Teaching reading comes with tool, options like phonics. Teachers who are experts at teaching reading and understand how to use all those tools should be the ones that decide what tools to use in the classroom to help children to gain reading skills. What works for one child may not work for another.
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Lloyd writes: “What works for one child may not work for another.”
Yes. The teacher is the one who intersects with the individuality of each child, each day; and so is the one who is best able to not only choose “what works,” but the best timing, order, and context in which to teach that “WHAT.”
I also would say that, over the decades, there is probably a close but hidden relationship between:
(a) the migration of teacher authority (away from teachers and towards poorly understood testing and several other extra-classroom power sources) and (b) the loss of spontaneous wonder that children are born with and so the creative continuation of the love of learning.
Nevertheless, I think in most cases, teachers and students remain people of spirit; and so, they remain resilient where teachers still teach well, and children learn again to love learning, even in some of the worst case scenarios, and despite being inflicted with decades of over-filled classes and power grabbing people who can’t figure out why they cannot capitalize on education and who seem to know very little about education.
I also think that, as the movement is decades old now, while some progress still goes forward on the wings of that inborn spirit, we are also witnessing an overlapping downward spiral in those who have, in fact, grabbed power and so continue to stimulate across-the-board demise. CBK
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I want to see the “total” demise of the power grabbers before I’m gone.
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Lloyd, agreed! No magic bullet for teaching reading. Or anything else.
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To you who say that there is no magic bullet to teaching reading Ah but there is a “magic bullet”. Start with the child’s words. Take words from the child’s story to teach each skill and strategy. Through the grades find words in the story the class is reading to continue teaching skills and strategies. Skills includes phonics. Workbooks are a waste of time and money.
On my reading web site: https://maryidefalco.com/16.Guided_Rdg__Plus_At-Risk.html the process is exemplified.
Also, Family Reading: https://maryidefalco.com/12._Family_Rdg._Back_Packs.html exemplifies the importance of parents/surrogates reading to the children at home.
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Mary D,
Once you made your pitch to sell your product with links, you lost all credibility. You must be desperate. I didn’t even bother clicking the links just in case they were trollish traps.
If those products were free and will always be free, you should mention that up front and provide Facebook links, or another safe social media link, where they can be accessed. Links without your name attached.
If they aren’t free, I understand why you didn’t mention that.
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Lloyd, I don’t know what you are talking about. The two links I posted were from my web site that I spent over 20 years constructing and revising. I didn’t want any neophyte to have to search for answers like I had to. Through my 30 plus of teaching years I kept reading books, The Reading Teacher, going to conferences, observing, discussing, and implementing ideas that I encountered along the way.
I taught myself to read in 8th grade. I couldn’t learn to read in grade school because the reading program was anchored in phonics and I had an auditory discrimination problem.
I attended a two-room school house in the grades and a one room high school with two grades in one room and one teacher in a town of 78 people. With determination I eventually went to another high school to get my high school diploma. In another state I got my bachelors’ degree and went on for two Masters. My first Masters focus on education and especially reading.
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I want to suggest you include this personal history that explains why you think your method of how to learn to read is the best method… knowing that no matter what we think as individuals, it is always our opinion and will never apply to everyone out there. What works for one person, may not work for everyone.
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Lloyd,
You just said succinctly why I think “the science of reading” is bunk.
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In response to Lloyd who suggested that I “include personal history that explains why you think your method of how to learn to read is the best method… knowing that no matter what we think as individuals, it is always our opinion and will never apply to everyone out there. What works for one person, may not work for everyone.”
The program that always finds success is the Reading Recovery Program developed by Dr. Marie Clay from New Zealand. From that program stems the “Literacy Collaborative” program for the upper emergent reader. If Marie Clay’s guidelines are followed, teachers will find great success. If, however, teachers do not adhere to all her guidelines, they won’t find the success that is possible.
Learn more about Becoming Reading Recovery Teacher or Teacher Leader from the following link: https://readingrecovery.osu.edu/becoming.html
My web site has information about Reading Recovery. “Emergent Readers’ Strategies & Instructional Materials.”
https://maryidefalco.com/11._Emergent__Strategies.html
Previously I posted guidance for the Upper Emergent reader.
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You did not read or understand what I suggested in reply to your last promotional pitch. What I copied and pasted below is no different than your first promotional pitch.
I say again, there is not one program on the planet that works for everyone. Not one. No matter what someone claims. I still think this is nothing but a desperate individual that might believe what she’s writing, but is still trying to get some free promotional time.
If what you are pitching costs money, then your comment is a promotion, not a valid comment.
“The program that always finds success is the Reading Recovery Program developed by Dr. Marie Clay from New Zealand. From that program stems the “Literacy Collaborative” program for the upper emergent reader. If Marie Clay’s guidelines are followed, teachers will find great success. If, however, teachers do not adhere to all her guidelines, they won’t find the success that is possible.”
Note: I removed all the links that were included with this promotion pretending to be a comment. If that reading program is free and will not cost one cent, Mary D should make the clear, and she better be right.
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Of course it is my opinion that I write, Lloyd. It is anchored in research, data, multiple studies , learning theory and results of implementation. Nothing is wrong with opinion if you keep it in context.
The Reading Recovery program is expensive and that is why many districts don’t use it.
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Thank you for coming clean. Your previous comments blatantly promoted that one reading program. In social media sites similar to this one, it is best not to do that.
Maybe you do not know how to promote your work properly. There are traditional ways to promote programs like the one you are promoting, and they focus on brick and mortar book store events, reviews in traditional media, like newspapers and magazines, radio talk shows, et al.
I do not know if your work is being produced by a traditional publishing company or you are producing it independently. It’s hard to tell because authors, traditional or indie, all have to promote their work. Traditional publishers mostly focus any promotion budget they have on authors that have a track record with tens of thousands or millions of sales.
Indie authors that promote their work focus on social media, running ADs on Amazon, Facebook, Linkedin, and/or running Deal Site Ad campaigns for an Amazon KCD, et al.
When on a social media site the only time to mention your work is if someone is interested and asks. It’s rare that an author has that opportunity. If an author broadcasts that they have a program or book, most people ignore them because that is the wrong way to go about it.
On social media sites like this blog, the best way to promote your work is to never do it that way, but to engage in the conversation without promotion.
I have four blogs of my own and each one focuses on the genres and topics of the books I write/publish as an indie, but few if any of my posts ever mention my work — on my own blogs and I’ve written and published thousands of posts. I also run Amazon ADs for four of my five books and sometimes run Deal Site ADs to promote an Amazon KCD.
Please take note that I haven’t plugged the titles or my work with links in this comment. If anyone is interested to learn more about me, that can always Google me. If they aren’t interested, they don’t have to. It’s there choice. To be frank, I don’t care.
I don’t push my work like that. I prefer being engaged in the topic of a post — not jumping on a soap box in the middle of “this town square” and hawking me wares.
I’ve left hundreds if not thousands of comments on this site. I’ve also answer hundreds of questions on Quora and left many comments. I may have mentioned my work. I don’t remember, but I’m sure I must have. If I did that, I hope I never left a link to my Amazon author page unless someone asked me to do it.
“The Social Media Mistake That Can Damage Your Author Platform”
https://www.amarketingexpert.com/2021/05/04/the-social-media-mistake-that-can-damage-your-author-platform/
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Lloyd,I am late in responding to your comment in which you misjudged my intentions after I posted information about Dr. Clay.
You stated, “Thank you for coming clean. Your previous comments blatantly promoted that one reading program. In social media sites similar to this one, it is best not to do that.”
Lloyd you remind me of a male teacher on a school faculty I taught at. He told me that I had my skirt on backwards! He didn’t know the about the style just as you don’t understand the literacy component of education.
Furthermore, Lloyd, you have the mind of a business man- not an educator. I pay to post my reading site. Numerous times people have asked to have their product advertised on my site but I accept no ads. I constructed the site to share with other literacy educators. I find pleasure in giving for it is in giving I receive. I don’t make money explaining to neophytes Dr. Clay’s program. I am delighted if someone finds the site useful. As regards the links I posted in my responses, I shared the links to help you understand the philosophy and methodology of Dr. Clay’s program- not to sell a product.
Districts have adopted specific materials for their teachers; that can change if the teachers deem it necessary. Every reading program used in schools costs money. At one time I was in charge of ordering reading material for my school.
Teachers never stop learning. Insights come from may sources.
Even people like me who are retired.
Thank you for your time.
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Mary D. you lost all credibility with me, when you alleged that I, Lloyd, have the mind of a business man- not an educator.
in 1975 – 76, I earned a teaching credential through an urban residency program. That type of program lasts an entire school year where I was placed in a classroom full time with a master teacher. The university was Cal Poly Pomona, and the classes I had to take to earn that credential were after the school day ended and during the summer. That urban residency paid me a small stipend because I was working with students and learning in the classroom from my master teacher for an entire year. Just like the other teachers, I arrived early in the morning before school started and didn’t leave until it ended.
After that year, I taught for another 29 years FULL TIME in the same school district and retired in 2005. California requires teachers to take classes and attend seminars to keep their teaching credential.
I even wrote a memoir about one of those years. That teacher’s memoir came from a daily journal I kept during the 1995-96 school year. By the end of that school year, I had about 500 printed pages that were updated everyday before I slept so my memories were fresh. I also kept 3.5 cards in my pocket for note taking to help me get the facts right after I got home and updated the journal. More than a decade later, I used that journal for the teacher’s memoir I wrote and published.
My work weeks as an English and journalism teacher ( I was also the adviser for the journalism students, their teacher, an advisor for the high school chess club and an advisor for a hiking club the high school had) often ran 60 to 100 hours. There were days when I arrived at school soon after 6:00 AM when the gates to the parking lot were unlocked and opened. An those days, we left my classroom about 23:00 ( 11:00 PM) when the custodians came and told me and the high school students who were the editors for the high school newspaper, that we had to leave, they were about to turn on the alarms.
Real teachers who have been teaching for a long time think like teachers, like businessmen, like office managers, therapists, et al. Teachers wear a lot of hats. They don’t just teach.
When I retired, I started writing books and publishing them and learning how to reach readers that might enjoy them. All those skills I learned as a teacher I’m still using as a published indie author.
Before you allege anything else a bout me thinking like a businessman and not a teacher, you should Google my name and learn who I really am. If you are unwilling to do that, please do not waste my time by making more allegations about who I am NOT.
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Mary D FYI: I’ve been on this blog for years and have never thought of Lloyd as thinking like a businessman . . . (good grief! NO!)
On the other hand, (and, Lloyd, correct me if I am wrong here) my guess is that Lloyd was thinking OF YOU as probably operating through a business-only or almost-only model. If he was, then perhaps he had/has reason to do so, given the incorporation and pricing of programs, the capitalist-saturated times, and the dearth of a fuller explanation of your part in it. CBK
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I was thinking whoever put this “miraculous” reading program together, may have taught at the university level and tried it out in a lab school at that university, or taught in an exclusive private school or in a community where most if not all of the parents were involved with the education of their children.
Where I taught, the child poverty rate was 70% or higher, there were violent multi generation street gangs living in the community where I taught, there were shootings, we lost students to bullets almost every year (some were gangbangers and others were good kids that did not belong to gangs but were in the wrong place at the wrong time), and a year didn’t go by that some gangbanker asked me what I’d do if they jumped me.
About half my students in each class did not do the classwork or homework or bother to open a textbook if I put it on their desk. Once, I told one gangbnager if he didn’t write the essay that everyone else was working on, I’d call all his teachers so they’d know I was keeping him all day until he turned in at least tha tone assignment. he never turned an assignment in all year. I could go on for hours about all the things I did to get students to make an attempt to learn, some worked, many failed.
That bangbanger borrowed a paper and pencil (he never came with supplies) and wrote all period. On the way out, in a hurry, he dropped that paper off. It was filled with his gang’s signs graffiti, no essay. By the time i saw it, he was already gone.
When I called parents, and I was told more than once by admin that every school year I made more calls to parents than the entire staff of 100 teachers at the high school combined, and most of the calls were to numbers that were no longer in service or no one answered.
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Lloyd, our whole diatribe began because we are on the opposite ends of the spectrum.
You were a high school teacher and I retired as a reading teacher for primary although I taught from first through fifth in three different states. Through the years I came to the realization what should drive a s sound education. An education that is grounded in a Constructivist philosophy emphasizing the positive.
My grandson in fifth grade is a product of such an environment. As a fifth grader he was asked why he made a spread sheet about his future. He replied,” I don’t know. I have always been thinking about the future and college and what I will do when I am older, Love you”
He made a Power Point out of his spread sheet.
Starting from the bottom: Associate degree, Bachelors, and two Masters. He would receive his Associate degree at a community college; Austin, Texas for his Bachelors; Stony Brook U for his first Masters; and NYU for his second Master. He listed the cost of each school and where he would live.
He has accumulated six trophies. The last one for being the best support for his baseball team- not the best player. He plays the guitar and is in community plays. He is also bi-lingual. The power of a positive attitude was engrained in him since birth by his parents and reinforced by his teachers. His present teacher uses him as her helper especially if any classmate needs help with the computer. He received recognition for his kindness was exemplified by the Kindness Board posted in the main hallway of his school. Of course I made sure that his literacy component started off on the right foot and helped him wade through the harmful effects of Common Core and Covid.
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As I have said before in this thread to Mary D, what works for one doesn’t work for all.
I did not start teaching in high school. My teaching credential was for grade school where I started. My master teacher’s class was 5th grade where I spent my first full school year learning how to manage a classroom. If you can’t manage a classroom, you can’t teach, no matter how great the material you use to teach is and how well you know it.
If you do not know what an urban residency is for training teachers, it is one of many programs for becoming a teacher, but in an urban residency, you are put in a public school where the child poverty rate is very high. Because of the challenges teaching children that live in poverty, that program is the longest one with the fewest teachers in training. Instead of a few week, a few hours a day, like Teach for America (TFA) trains teachers with little or no actual experience teaching real students under supervision,
In an urban residency you spent an entire school year in a real classroom (no university lab school) with real students (most of them living in poverty) and a master teacher to show you how to teach the most challenging and difficult students to teach.
By the way, TFA made the same claims you make, that their method of teaching teachers how to teach was the best. It took decades to learn it was the worst while they kept repeating it was the best, and getting rich along the way.
I taught 5th grade for two years, then moved up to middle school for 12, finishing the last 16 at the high school where I taught mostly 9th grade English, journalism (only one class a day out of five), and reading near the end.
The high school had a reading lab and because district admin decided to do away with students being in English classes based on the reading level they were at and tossed all the students like salad/stew and threw them in the same class reading at all levels from totally illiterate through college reading level, learning out of the same 9th grade level textbooks, in the same class.
Us teachers weren’t allowed to use any reading material at any other reading level. They told us to throw all those books and materials away and even spied on us to make sure we did as we were told. Putin would be proud of the admin that ran that district. I’m still in contact with younger teachers who are still teaching there, and they say, district and site admin is worse now than when I left in 2005. It’s more autocratic than ever, micromanaged from the top down.
The only exception when I was teaching was the students were free to check out library books, fiction/nonfiction, at any reading level. That’s why I taught my students the five-word rule for the books they checked out for independent reading at home (that many of them didn’t read anyway).
Five-word rule: If there were more than five words on a page, after checking about five pages scattered through a book, that you don’t understand, do not check that book out.
The teachers had no say. District Admin forced the teachers to do what they wanted and most of District Admin had never taught a day in their lives.
Students that were reading below grade level would be assigned to a reading lab in addition to English at grade level.
With a 70% child poverty rate at the high school where I taught the last 16 years (the poverty rates were higher at the grade school and middle school where I taught) most of the students were reading below grade level or didn’t know how to read at all.
Most of the students that lived in poverty did not come from homes rich in literacy: books, magazines, newspapers. Their homes were mostly devoid of that. Most of our students also had parents that did not speak English. The streets in the communities around those schools were dominated by violent, dangerous multi generational street gangs.
Before a child learned to say mommy, if their parents had grown up in a gang, those toddlers were already learning the hand signs for the gang that dominated their area before they learned their first spoken words.
That is a world without kindness and a teacher that sees one of those children as a student for one period a day, since most children have several teachers and classes in different rooms on a daily basis, isn’t going to erase that with kindness. Being fair, kind, supportive, trustworthy, and soft spoken, isn’t gong to change the world they live in after they leave school each day. HOw do I know that, because that describes most of their teachers who were fair, kind, supportive, soft spoken and trustworthy. For a few hours a day, most of our students were in a safer place in their classrooms, than out in the streets and their homes.
“The child poverty rate (for people under age 18) was 16.9% in 2021, 4.2 percentage points higher than the national rate, while poverty for those ages 65 and over was 10.3%, 2.5 percentage points lower than the national rate.”
The United States has one of the highest child poverty rates among developed countries.
No reading program is going to change that. For real change to happen so children grow up in a better environment, at home, on the streets and in their classrooms, we have to get rid of poverty first. That will not happen overnight.
I repeat, one method of teaching reading is not going to work for everyone, especially for children living in poverty. Buying a program like that and expecting it to work magic without dealing with poverty is not going to work.
Oh, before I forget, there is class size. My class sizes almost always started at 34 per class. Imagine teaching five classes, 34 students a class, for a total of 170 students out of one textbook for the grade level you were teaching, but those students were reading in every grade level from totally illiterate to college level, all in the same room at the same time for about one hour for each class. Still, the students that read below grade level had one period a day in a reading lab. Most of the students reading below grade level went home where they never read anything because there was nothing to read or they didn’t want to read because they hated reading because they couldn’t read.
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5/1/23
Lloyd, my last comment: where there is a will there is a way.
The methodology and philosophy driving the RR reading program is applicable to all emergent at risk children.
As regards children not having books at home to read, I developed a Backpack program.
I had 117 thematic backpacks for parents to read to their children plus 24 small bags with thematic emergent books to correlate with the level they were being instructed on. Besides books for parents to read to their children, I included books for children to read to their parents.
If parents couldn’t read they were asked to just read the pictures to accompanying the story. I also included a tape recording of one of the books in the bag. I included a “Signature” page for parents to sign each night and return with the bag the following Mon. The bags were kept at home for a week. I got the idea from a teacher in another district when we had districts meeting workshops.
I picked up books from everywhere: warehouse, garage sales, discarded books at our local library, yearly book fairs….some I purchased from book stores.
Parents were delighted with the back packs
https://maryidefalco.com/12._Family_Rdg._Back_Packs.html
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You just can’t stop promoting your reading program can you.
You say you provide backpacks with reading material for parents to read to their children and have the parents sign to show they’re doing it.
Where do you live? I want to wake you up to a bitter reality.
Ah, a lot of parents living in poverty do NOT read to their children because they do not read themselves.
And this is the United States. We can’t force parents to take a backpack full of books/reading material home and then require them to read to their children and sign off on a form that they did it.
An idea like that would not work in most of the United States where poverty prevails and probably in middle class homes, too.
Unlike Finland, where most parents are very involved in their child’s education, way too many parents in the U.S. think that is the responsibility of teachers and not them.
The lower the education level of the parent, the less support teachers get at home.
In 30 years, I had some parents ask what they could do at home and all but ONE mother out of more than 6,000 students that I taught, did what I suggested. One mother, one parent out of thousands.
Most parents never ask what they can do at home, and would get angry if teachers told them what they should be doing.
Good example: parent conference nights. We had two mandatory for teachers parent conference nights a year. We taught a regular school day that ended at 3:00 PM and then stayed at school for parent conferences on those two nights that started between 5:00 – 6:00 PM.
On parent conference days, I was up at 6:00 AM to get ready for work and drive to the school, and parent conferences ended at 9:00 PM, sixteen hours later. Then I got to go home.
I taught 170 students or more in 5 and sometimes six daily classes. I called every parent with a child earning a failing grade or a D grade and left messages or talked to them about coming to parent conferences so we could talk about how their child could improve their learning and grades. If I couldn’t reach those parents by phone, I mailed a letter through the district mail in addition to sending a request to show up at parent conference home with their child to read and sign.
Most of those parents never showed up.
The few that did show up almost always had a child earning an A or B, and all we did was talk about what a great student that child was.
We had some failing students that never read and never worked, sign the parent conference reminder slips with their parents name, fogring the name. We had students removing report cards form the mailbox and hiding them so the parents wouldn’t see the poor grades.
I do not believe that you ever worked with that many students that lived in poverty and had to deal with that many parents working one, two, and three poverty wage paying jobs just to eat and pay rent, families that still lived in poverty no matter how many hours the adults and older children worked everyday, spompetimes seven days a week,
Most of our kids living in poverty and from middle class families were latch key kids who went home to a TV screen or to play video games, with no parents at home to monitor them doing their reading and/or homework.
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Lloyd Might I forward your discussion of education in America to the National Literacy Association’s blogsite? CBK
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Sure, but please clean up the typos. I type really fast and don’t always proofread. It doesn’t help that these little WordPress comment windows are so small and not always easy to navigate to proofread and revise.
On my blogs, I often write comments in a Word document and then copy and paste into these little boxes.
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Lloyd I will copy-edit. Thank you! CBK
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Lloyd, you might find Patricia Polacco’s account of learning to read, of interest. She is an author of 60 plus children’s books. She gives us first hand information of the power of a kind and understanding teacher. It also reveals the cruel world some children have to try and survive in if they don’t succeed in learning to read.
“Patricia Barber Polacco (born July 11, 1944) is an American author and illustrator. Throughout her school years, Polacco struggled with reading but found relief by expressing herself through art. Polacco endured teasing and hid her disability until a school teacher recognized that she could not read and began to help her. Her book “Thank You, Mr. Falker” is Polacco’s retells of this encounter and its outcome.” from the Internet.
The story of “Thank You, Mr. Falker” is read on YouTube.
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Thank you. I’m well aware of how cruel the world is to those that can’t read. My older brother never learned to read. He worked at back breaking jobs for most of his life, when he wasn’t in jail, earning poverty wages without many benefits. He had seven children with his two wives. While a few did learn to read, most of his children didn’t and they ended up following in my brother’s footsteps into poor paying jobs, crime, jail. Richard, I called him DiDi, died at 64, a worn out broken manchild.
The main reason I didn’t end up following in my brother’s path was because by the time I was born 14 years later, my brother was already running with street gangs and having trouble with the law.
When I was seven, my brother was 21 and in prison for his first incarceration. That was when my mother was told by incompetent and ignorant admins that worked in the school district where I was in first grade for my 2nd year, that I’d never learn to read or write, that I was too retarded. My mother refused to let that happen. She’d learn her lesson the hard way by not working with my brother at home so he’d learn to read.
It was my first grade teacher, the 2nd year in her class, that told my mother what she had to do at home, and my mother followed through. That teacher also figured out I needed glasses. My vision was so bad, I couldn’t read books if I did know how or what the teacher wrote on the blackboard during lessons.
My parents were avid readers but never graduated from high school, thanks to the Great Depression, and when I turned 7, we were still living in poverty.
By the time I was ten my parents had managed to work their way out of poverty and into the lower strata of the middle class where they stayed.
When I was teaching 1975 -2005, in the public schools before I retired, if a parent asked me how they could help their child improve in reading, I’d tell them what my mother did without telling them my story. I worked with at least 6,000 students over those 30 years and only ONE parent followed through and did what my mother did for me. Her daughter’s reading level gained five years in one year just be adding an everyday reading routine at home, with the TV of and no video game access, instead of relying on public school teachers to do everything.
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I taught in Charlotte in the 1980s and 90s during the spike in teen pregnancies. I once told an eight grader who had just found out that she was expecting that the best thing she could do for her child is read. She looked at me like I was crazy. The benefits of reading to a child are not just to prepare them for reading. I would never trade the evenings I had with my children reading to them. The practice developed a bond that will last the rest of our lives. It also encouraged creative intelligence and curiosity that planet the live time ambition to know more. My wife and I read to all three of our children through elementary school. I have written on this blog before that I used to plead with my parents of kindergartners to read to their children. For some reason it is difficult to get parents to understand the power of this practice. I have visited households where there is not a book or magazine in the home. Your story is very inspiring. I thank you for sharing it. How do we get the message out? I’m afraid your brother’s circumstance is far too common. Too often educators make judgements that cause too many to see us a callous, merely concerned with the “achievers.” This drive to get students reading by kindergarten only makes this worse.
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I do not remember my parents reading to me. After my mother made sure I learned to read after being told I was too retarded to ever learn to read and write when I was 7, I do remember my parents reading all the time.
My dad sat in his chair smoking his unfiltered Camels one after another (that eventually killed him earlier than a natural death would have), while reading paperback westerns and mysteries, while my mother sat on the couch at the other end of the room reading her sanitised (meaning no sex) romances. If she ran into any hint of sex, she’s stop reading and throw that book in the to-be-burned box (I’m serious – she burned those books).
Since I also knew how to read (I was 8 or 10 by then, I’d be reading my library books. My dad and mom bought most of their books from a sued bookstore. I relied on the library most of the time. I also have never burned a book. If I ever start, my first choices will be any books with Trump’s name on them as the author, who in reality never reads or writes.
After my parents could afford a TV, the TV was always on when we were home, but my parents and I weren’t paying much attention to I Love Lucy and all the other network sitcoms and game shows. All three of us were reading. My favorite books back then was Science Fiction and Fantasy. Later I’d get into historical fiction, then westerns, thrillers and mysteries. The romance genre has never hooked me like those.
So, reading to your children, starting at a young age, is the most powerful way to instill a love of reading in them, but in second place would be seeing your parents reading all the time, even if they didn’t read outloud to you.
Even better, reading to your children and then letting them see you reading from books when you are not reading out loud to them.
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The most maniacal aspect of standardized reading tests is the insistence that only blind passages are legitimate to determine reading proficiency. I was later dumbfounded at an introduction of Common Core English where the presenter insisted it was inappropriate to teach the Gettysburg Address with historical context. Without meaning, there is no reason to read.
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Paul Bonner regarding context-less and meaningless reading of, for instance, the Gettysburg Address:
It sounds to me like the influence of scientific positivism or scientism or some related but variably skewed philosophical foundation, whether known or unknown to the writers of any particular curricula.
Among the many problems that infect education (science, politics, ethics and culture, etc.) are the many problems associated with philosophical foundations, which (as its name implies) are present at the core of all. Sigh . . . CBK
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David Coleman, architect of Common Core, now president of the College Board, used The Gettysburg Address as an example of a passage that could be used on a test without background knowledge or context. He was never a teacher.
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That was David Coleman’s idea: context is irrelevant. Read a passage about Lincoln or the Civil War and interpret the words on the page with no context.
It’s insane.
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Diane Storytelling always has context. . . .and stories appeal first to the child’s wonder (a good teacher can do that with such readings as, for instance, the Gettysburg address) . . . as when they become enraptured in a story; and so their love of learning is fostered. Whereas teaching a word (how to write or spell it, etc.) without context is like a bird sitting on a dead egg; or like fertilizing the attitude of boredom.
My view is that with the right timing, we need the precision that phonics provides (if I understand it correctly); but again, without meaningful context, and optimally with a home-habit of story-time and so reading-with and loving stories (as Lloyd says earlier in this thread), it’s . . . well . . . meaningless (drab, dull, overly abstract and, again, boring). If children learn to read systematically without meaningful context, it’s in spite of, not because of, that absence.
The further point is that, as most teachers probably already know, storytelling (and later, history, biography, etc.) is about much more than merely learning to read. One could say that the proper context of phonics instruction is meaningful story telling. And BTW, a so-called science of reading that doesn’t take into account the full developmental aspects of children as human beings, is nothing less than faulty, like teaching MC2 without the E=.
The faster we go, the behinder we get. CBK
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Research tells us that Standardized testing is inaccurate and unethical in evaluating students.
Children learn actively- they have to move, use their senses, get their hands on things, interact with other kids and teachers, create, invent- not through rigorous instruction in phonics.Students need to be active learners – constantly bridging prior experience to the text being read.
Research has proven that reading is the interaction of the reader with visual /perceptual (text, pictures, and graphics) and non visual/conceptual which includes background knowledge along with knowledge of the language structure: semantic. syntactic, and graphophonics systems. Reading is a problem-solving process by which the reader creates meaning through interacting with fellow students, teacher, pictures, and text.It is through the interaction that new concepts are formed. Meaning is created as students brings prior knowledge and personal experiences to the page. Comprehension is not taught by asking questions about what is real; that is a testing mode, not a teaching mode.
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Not to mention that interactive meaning is what drives human progress.
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Also, “A Letter from the Birmingham Jail”.
With no idea why MLK was jailed, the letter is meaningless, like Rosa Parks told to move to the back of the bus without knowing she was a Black woman.
Incomprehensible.
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We have David Coleman to thank for this nonsensical idea that students can read without knowing the context.
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Diane and Christine I think (and you probably agree?) that there is a legitimate difference between (1) learning the alphabet, the letter-sound relationship, etc., that occurs in any text and that needs to be learned in order to read at all; and (2) reading comprehension, which is about slowly building a context for broader understanding and development to occur.
In my view, from having watched the “reading wars” for a long time, the problem that seems to hover around such discussions is one of an “either/or” viewpoint of those in the discussion. It’s a kind of an endless turf war, rather than everyone fostering the idea of curriculum around the highly variable developmental needs of children.
And again, one of the underlying philosophical issues is “scientism” on the part of one “camp,” or the idea that if you cannot treat children (humans) like data drawn from the natural and physical sciences, the data (individual children) are already corrupt, and the work is not “real science.”
But philosophical questions and concerns are hardly topical. Rather, they need to be addressed by going “back to the drawing board” so to speak, in teacher developmental programs and the theoretical work that underpins “the science of reading,” curriculum writing (and tests, pedagogical methods, etc.).
Though philosophical problems cannot be fixed on a blog (the front lines, so to speak), I wouldn’t dismiss them . . . they constitute a good amount of the cultural (economic, psychological, ethical/social, political, spiritual) poison that we continue to experience today . . . every day. CBK
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Coleman also said “no one cares” what you think. He was referring to essays where students wrote about their life experiences in some way. Most if not all of the essays I assigned to my students asked them to connect in some way to the stories or poems we read and talked about in class.
How was their life similar? My goal was to show my students that through literature we learn that we are not alone.
Coleman must be another narcisist to have the audacity to think he speaks for everyone, that if he doesn’t care, no one does.
I belong to four writing groups.
Two of these groups are through the VA. The VA groups I belong to uses our writing, poetry, essays, memoir, fiction, as a powerful form of therapy to help us manage our PTSD. One of the rules, what we share in those two groups must not go beyond our groups.
Some of what I’ve read/heard is eye opening and jaw dropping, what people experience in the military, in life.
The larger group is split between women and men, all former military. One of the women was a bomb disposal expert who served in Afghanistan often with Special Forces A teams. She said she got out after 12 years because she was tired of being blown up. I don’t think blown up, blown up, but being too close to a bomb when it went off causing stress to her brain. She hasn’t said. That is my guess. Many of the bombs they work on may be two dangerous to disarm so they blow them up with another explosive.
There is one issue the women all agree with, the abuse from some military men they served with never stops, even after they get married. Since I am not sharing names or details, you have no idea who or what I’m talking about. And that is the way it should be.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has long been on the trail of dark money. In a presentation before the Senate on the topic of Clarence Thomas’ corruption, he uses an excellent visual of a toxic dark money cocktail. Educators will recognize its ingredients.
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1mrxmknAbjqGy
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Christine, I listened to the entire speech. It was brilliant and deeply disturbing. Whitehouse is remarkable.
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Whitehouse has been at this for some time. Note that this is number 21 in his series called the Scheme.
I know you read Heather Cox Richardson’s blog, Letters from An American.
I was relieved to read these words of hers today; may they prove prescient:
Whether it comes from disgust at the excesses of those who are attacking our democracy or from fear of the law, that transparency reminds me of the pivotal importance of McClure’s Magazine in the early twentieth century. Reformers had expressed philosophical concerns about the concentration of wealth and power at the top of American society for decades, but those concerns could be ignored until the investigative journalists working for McClure’s began to explore the specifics of political corruption and its cost to ordinary Americans. Dismissed as “muckrakers” by politicians, those journalists nonetheless helped to shift the weight of social value from keeping secrets to spilling them.
When that shift happened, the walls protecting the country’s entrenched leaders crumbled fast.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-20-2023?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=20533&post_id=116236142&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
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Good grief – in Alabama, Kay Ivey has dismissed her director of early childhood education over a guide for teachers written by NAEYC (National Association for Education of Young Children). The stupidity on display!
.https://www.npr.org/2023/04/22/1171474014/alabama-governor-education-director-woke-book
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A legend, Harry Belafonte, passed away today:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/25/harry-belafonte-singer-dies-actor-singer-activist
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an article of interest to readers of this blog:
https://onlysky.media/tkrattenmaker/accepting-the-reality-of-a-less-literate-age/
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Alfred Giannantolio What a joy. CBK
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Thank you so much for sharing this! Many of the points sing to me, literally. I was lucky to be able to occasionally use music in my classes. It made things understandable, accessible, and relevant for many students. Plus they didn’t realize they were learning and enjoying it. Good to see thinking like this. Not a solution, but definitely part of it.
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The Spring Branch Independent School District recently canceled a field trip to the play “James and the Giant Peach,” citing concerns about the production’s “age-appropriateness.” A parent complained that actors were playing roles that didn’t match their actual gender. All it takes is one stupid parent…
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I read this and was floored. Eight actors are playing 20 roles. This is not a drag show.
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Many of the comments I read about this story went like this “I’m quite conservative, and I think this is ridiculous”. I’m livid that this school district didn’t stand up to these crazy parents!
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This attack on teachers unions really needs to be shared:
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For the first time ever, I think, a Democrat maybe be fighting back aggressively instead of playing nice and ignoring the other side as they spread lies and hate without much of an attempt by the traditional media or Democratic Party to stop them.
Governor Newsome of California launched an organization to do that and he’s been traveling to red states attacking the autocratic, fascist crap coming out of the MAGA RINO GOP.
https://www.kcra.com/article/california-newsom-launches-campaign-to-fight-gop-policies-in-other-states/43471508
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-30/newsom-launches-national-campaign-to-fight-authoritarian-leaders
https://apnews.com/article/california-governor-newsom-president-democrats-2024-843877ca6aca701a5a68b8cb022203a2
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Because when we fight, we win.
(Newsom was once married to Kimberly Guilfoyle, though!)
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That was 22 years ago. He was 34, and the marriage ended four years later.
There’s a lot of truth in what Friar Lawrence said in Romeo and Juliet about boys falling in love with their eyes. If a girl knows that, she can wrap a guy around her finger and control him like a puppet. The younger a man is, th emore enslaved they are to their libido.
The fact that they divorced a few years after the marriage indicates they both woke up and realized it was a mistake.
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Newsome must have had cataracts then.
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I sort of had a thought like that. But she was younger then and maybe he was attracted to how she looked back then and what kind of person she was back then.
People change. His first wife may have been a different person then. Not as dogmatic as she became later or he didn’t spend enough time to get to know here before they got married. I wonder how long they dated.
The first time I got married I was 23, still in the Marines, a heavy drinker and we dated for a month and then went to Las Vegas and got married.
That mistake taught me a lesson. And it was a HUGE mistake. We should have never married. We were not compatible in any way. Within a few months, that marriage turned into a nightmare for both of us. At one point, since I was raised Cathood, I considered suicide to escape the marriage since that damn Church didn’t approve of divorce, but in the end, I decided to totally divorce that Church and its rigidly instead and lived.
I was still drinking a lot when that marriage ended, but soon stopped drinking, and didn’t allow myself to date again for an entire year. I didn’t want to risk making the same kind of mistake again out of desperation so I forced myself to live like a monk that took a vow of abstinence.
My second wife was a lot better person than number one.
I wonder what Newsome’s mindset and lifestyle was like more than twenty years ago when he met and married a woman who would become one of President Traitor Trump’s most ardent supporters years later, after his divorce from her.
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Yeah, I guess I was being too judgmental. I bet Newsome is thankful he moved on.
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I’m sure he is. I just read that Newsome is dyslexic. I’m dyslexic. I wonder if that played a roll in why we both made such horrible choices in our first wives. We’re much slower learners.
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So how do we get Hochul in New York to grow a backbone?
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I don’t think that would be possible. How about a spine replacement like a knee or hip replacement, and while the surgeons are doing that, replace the brain, too?
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As long as her campaign gets big bucks from the financiers, she will dance their tune.
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You have to be kidding me. The auto-spell checker-changer changed my Catholic typo to Cathood
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In my mind three three things need to happen: 1. The Democratic Party has to change its tune around privatization and get thoroughly behind public schools while having substantial electoral gains in 2024 (I don’t know who is in the Governor of New York’s back pocket). 2. Teacher and school administrator pay need to be taken over by the Federal Government, which will not happen until the Democratic Party fully backs public schools. 3. This would allow teachers unions to nationalize no longer beholden to right to work states. I realize that all of this is a reach, but the only way to reintroduce job security to the teaching profession is through a national plan that is no longer subject to the whims of opaque state policy. The argument to bring along the states in this process would be that they still control facilities and curriculum, which in the current environment is shaky, meaning states would remain the principal arbiter for education. If we do not get to the point where teacher pay and tenure policy are stable then the demise of public schools will continue. Yes, this would be expensive, but it is an investment and needs to be promoted that way. The estimated 185 billion per annum owed, and not payed, in taxes by the top 10% would cover all of this and more.
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The debate I’m having with the phonics method believer/salesman in another post thread got me thinking, so I stopped exercising and hurried back to my desktop to do some Googling and may have found something important to know about children living in poverty.
How many autistic people live in poverty?
According to the report, over half of autistic children lived in low-income households and one in four was living in poverty, a higher rate compared to children without autism spectrum disorder.Apr 18, 2022
https://www.uclahealth.org/news/AutismIntersectionality2022#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20report%2C%20over,children%20without%20autism%20spectrum%20disorder.
Is there a correlation between dyslexia and autism?
It is very common for people diagnosed with autism to also be diagnosed with one or more of ADHD, Dyslexia or Dyspraxia. Autism is very strongly associated with these conditions, although you can have Dyslexia or Dyspraxia without having autism.
https://aspiedent.com/index.php/blog/relationship-dyslexia-adhd-and-dyspraxia-autism#:~:text=It%20is%20very%20common%20for,or%20Dyspraxia%20without%20having%20autism.
More sources on this issue:
https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/more-than-half-of-autistic-children-in-united-states-live-in-poverty/
“Surveys have indicated an autism rate between 1% and 2% across all countries. Rates of autism among the homeless population are 3000% to 6000% higher than in the general population – a percentage so overwhelming I don’t have words adequate to express my outrage.”
https://rootedinrights.org/autism-and-homelessness-the-real-crisis/#:~:text=Surveys%20have%20indicated%20an%20autism,adequate%20to%20express%20my%20outrage.
What is commonly correlated with dyslexia?
“Children who have dyslexia are at increased risk of having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and vice versa. ADHD can cause difficulty keeping attention. It can also cause hyperactivity and impulsive behavior, which can make dyslexia harder to treat.Aug 6, 2022”
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dyslexia/symptoms-causes/syc-20353552#:~:text=Children%20who%20have%20dyslexia%20are,make%20dyslexia%20harder%20to%20treat.
“In general, these findings seem to imply that people with dyslexia are at an increased risk of becoming either episodic or chronic homeless”
Click to access EJ1122799.pdf
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Obviously, mental illness is a prerequisite to be a policymaker in Texas. Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, Groucho Marx, George Orwell, move over:
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Those MAGA RINOs do not have just any mental illness. Their mental illnesses are lethal for all mankind, not just Texas.
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Would love to read Pasi Sahlberg’s take on this insanity. Or a Finnish teacher. Something like would have been previously inconceivable to them (or any sane person).
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From what I’ve read on Quora, there are a lot of people around the world, citizens of other countries, that are shocked with what the MAGA-RINOs and their mini-god Traitor Trump are getting away with.
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Today’s high schoolers have never gone to school in a pre Sandy Hook world. Here are the words of one of them; we must do better for our young people.
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FYI: “4-day school weeks, gaining in popularity, face pushback from lawmakers”
https://nordot.app/1026404879803908096?c=592622757532812385
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OMG, I really hate living in what has become a dangerously regressive country today. American kids deserve to be much better protected than what some have in store for them these days:
“10-year-old children were found working at a Louisville McDonald’s until 2 a.m.” https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/03/business/mcdonalds-child-labor-louisville/index.html
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Good grief! This misbegotten editorial from WaPo is so full of the deranged panic over NAEP test scores and fake solutions I want to throw up in disgust. I hope Valerie Strauss will give you a chance to rebut this nonsense, Diane.
The covid-19 pandemic brought on a flood of loss — of lives, of jobs and, in a less-discussed tragedy, of learning. Students are still suffering the effects of the months and even years spent away from the classroom. The longer schools dawdle in catching them up, the less chance they have of succeeding.
The problem was not just that some students lacked internet access; it was also that online learning, the evidence suggests, did not work as well as in-person instruction. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, an evaluation commonly referred to as the nation’s report card, came in last year with alarmingly low marks for the country’s children: Two decades’ worth of progress in math and reading among 9-year-olds was gone. Eighth-graders’ math scores fell in 49 of 50 states. Worse, those already the furthest behind fell behind further still. Black and Hispanic students, as well as students in high-poverty districts, suffered particularly. The longer kids took classes remotely, the worse the numbers look.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/05/covid-learning-loss-tutoring/
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I there anyway to get the NYTimes, WAPo, et al. to cover the NPE conference?
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Their heads would explode.
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Can I chip in for the TNT?
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Paul,
I wish it were possible. Generally they don’t cover conferences. Eliza Shapiro of The NY Times has blocked me on Twitter so I can’t invite her. Nothing so precious as an open mind.
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The fact that you Diane, of all people, are blocked says it all in regard to the national media. The NYTimes, at its core, is a corporate entity in a struggling industry. It depends on the largesse of profound wealth to stay in business. It’s obvious that the editors care more about the bottom line than the facts on the ground. Many of the pundits and reporters can talk a good game about the needs of the country, but when the big daddies say jump, the NYTimes asks how high. Bloomberg and Gates continue to get great press for one reason, they are two of the richest on the planet who could be the next sugar daddy that keeps editors on the job. Roy Wood put it well at the White House Correspondents Dinner when he said that most don’t get news now because it is behind a pay wall. Informing readers is now secondary. When Bezos and Murdoch are out there buying up media outlets you can”t get too carried away looking under the hood of that Maserati that’s getting you to work.
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Paul,
I don’t think Eliza Shapiro blocked me on the orders of the owners of the NYT. I wrote a post critical of a story she wrote about charters where she linked to a five-year-old press release from the charter lobby (National Alliance of Public Charter Schools) as “evidence” of a very long waiting list. We exchanged emails. I offered to meet for coffee. She refused and blocked me on Twitter. She did not want to hear dissent. Which is odd for a journalist.
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Required reading on the day after yet another mass shooting in Texas.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/uvalde-shooting-mother-grief-one-year-anniversary-gun-control/
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MAGA lunatics, allies of Putin, worshipers of Traitor Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, said antidepressants are behind all of the mass killings. Experts responded saying there is no evidence of that link.
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Lloyd “Anti-depressants” is just another diversion from the gun lobby. CBK
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I read another news piece about an hour ago quoting a “gun lover” who had been an officer in the military and then a policeman.
He said, mental illness isn’t killing these people. AR-15s (and he named another popular automatic weapons) are doing that and we need stronger gun laws to get these types of weapons off the streets.
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Lloyd When I was a kid, I took my single-shot, bolt-action 22 rifle up to Mount Diablo (in California) to target practice and shoot rattlesnakes. Me and my dog had a blast.
It’s not about that kind of enjoyment though, or for children, responsible learning. (I was just lucky, but I never did NOT know that it was dangerous and to be very careful.) AR15s, in today’s environment? I don’t think so. And by definition, every responsible gun-owner knows that as fact. CBK
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I own several firearms locked in a firearms safe, bolted to my house so that can’t be carried away by a thief (two strong thieves or one with a dolly could easily steal a lose firearm safe and open it later in their own home), with all the ammo and none of them are machine guns or automatic rifles. Two shotguns, a lever action rifle and three pistols. I’d have more in that collection but what I want to legally buy is expensive and I have other priorities.
Some of those weapons have never been fired and I’ve owned them for decades. I should buy a cleaning kit. Still, since most of them never leave the safe, maybe not. When I check, I haven’t seen any rust.
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Lloyd The smaller firearm safes are good for when children are living in the house or even nearby . . . they can give you peace of mind. Also, I happen to have a lifetime love of police dramas (not all of them); but they always have guns around and, probably, with their quasi-idolization, they have contributed to our present “gun culture.” Along the way, often their writers and actors are award-worthy, in my view.
But like your military friend says, we still need gun laws . . . duh . . . CBK
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The guy that said that isn’t my military friend. He was quoted in a new story that I read. Before I read that, I didn’t know he existed. It seems he was the first to arrive at that mall in Texas even before the local police, not counting the policeman in the mall that killed the shooter.
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Lloyd Correction noted. CBK
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Yes, the politicians like Gregg Abbott who say that guns are not the problem, mental illness is—-aren’t willing to spend money on mental health.
Plus, all this random gun violence causes mental illness.
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Blaming mental illness while letting anyone with a mental illness buy firearms, makes all the Republicans that allowed anyone with a diagnosed mental illness and a violent felony conviction to buy firearms of any kind, guilty of murder, too.
“An abettor is someone who helps another person commit a crime. If you drive the getaway car during a bank robbery, you’re an abettor. If you assist someone else in doing something wrong, offering any kind of support or encouragement, you abet that person.”
So, every surviving victim of these mass shootings, or the survivors that are their friends and family, should sue every Republican that blocks or votes against rational fire arms laws in civil suits, similar to what happened to Alex Jones, maybe when they start losing lots of money, their tune would change, too.
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Terrific video from More Perfect Union featuring our friend, Milton Friedman. Shareworthy.
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An excellent look at the student debt case before the Supreme Court. Readers of the blog will be unsurprised to see the familiar names of the billionaire class who’ve agitated to prevent forgiveness by the Biden administration.
So why and how did Brown and Taylor sign up for this abuse? That question brings us to the deeper aims of the pair’s lawsuit—and to the Job Creators Network Foundation, the murky group backed by billionaires that is funding it. Somehow, both Brown and Taylor were in contact with the Job Creators, whose mission is to amplify “the benefits of free market policies … as well as the consequences of over taxation, overregulation, and government overreach.” The JCNF, which supposedly exists to support small businesses and began seeking plaintiffs to challenge Biden’s program almost immediately after it was announced, was founded by Bernie Marcus, the billionaire conservative co-founder of Home Depot, and also receives funding from the ultraconservative Mercer Family Foundation. The organization may also have tenuous ties to the court itself. In March, The Washington Post revealed that Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, was leading a conservative organization that in 2019 hosted a presentation by a principal officer of the JCNF, Steven Hantler.
The complainants claim to be harmed by their exclusion. One of my kids took a years’ hazardous position in Afghanistan because the extra pay allowed for the payoff of her student loans. She hasn’t sued – she’s okay with others having their forgiven.
https://newrepublic.com/article/171713/rights-war-student-debtors-may-cost-us
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I just read this nonsense in the NYTimes:https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/11/opinion/pandemic-learning-losses-steep-but-not-permanent.html
Here was my response:
In response to: Parents don’t understand how far behind in school their kids are, NYTimes 5/11/23
These universities need to get their heads out of their rear ends. What data is gathered from 35,000 feet misses too many of the details below. First of all, what these professors, who have obviously spent little time in a public school classroom, refuse to acknowledge is that the testing instruments they cite are dramatically flawed and designed by corporate interests who are thoroughly imbedded in the “education industrial complex” that has cheered on the privatization of schooling for their own wallets. Second, because these college professors pour over data without personal experience with children, they miss students’ behaviors driven by the students’ personal interests. In other words, American students don’t care about these tests. The students who want to do well on these tests are the same students who get good grades. Many of the other students simply want to get them over with. NAEP is the most susceptible to this testing flaw because no results are ever reported to the students. For too many students, NAEP is just a waste of their day. Am I writing that there are no problems in our public schools? Certainly not! It is the ongoing defunding and redistribution of public school funds to failed strategies and misaligned foci that keep us from making schools better. We have been in three decades of this pabulum of “standards” that are profound evidence of our low expectations for our children. Reading and math are not foundational to learning, experience is!
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There is another dramatically false concept that “Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (recently revealed with his big mouth) that AI chatbots will help children learn to read and enhance their writing skills in just 18 months’ time. As CNBC reports, the billionaire philanthropist said at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego that AI will ‘be as good a tutor as any human ever could.'”
Many college professors that grew up in middle or upper middle income families, or higher up the economic scale, like Bill Gates, live in bubbles cut of from reality, clearly think that all children are hungry to learn and will do whatever it takes to learn academically, that the reason so many children are not learning has to be the fault of teachers that do not know how to teach.
They have not one thought that it isn’t the teachers, it’s the poverty.
Back in the 1990s, the high school where I taught, IBM donated an entire lab of IBM computers with reading programs on them to help kids learn to read at a faster pace. A couple of years later, those computers ende dup in storage and the teachers when back to paper printed SRA kits to work with their student that were behind in reading.
The high school where I taught at the time had a 70% child poverty rate. It’s 80% or higher now (last time I checked). Guess who sabotaged those IBM computers with their “fantastic, perfect, miracle” automated reading program?
ANSWER: The students
Who hated the step by step automatized program dominated by screen time. How did they do it? They stole the balls from the mice. They shoved wads of gum into disk drives. They stole keys from the computer keyboards.
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Lloyd quotes Bill Gates from the Times: “As CNBC reports, the billionaire philanthropist said at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego that AI will ‘be as good a tutor as any human ever could.’”
I have to get off this site . . . I’m dying of frustration . . . Gates is also missing the huge point that, from the beginning, learning occurs in a social context . . . the earlier in K-12 a child is, the more important that context is. Could it be that, as you say, they learn to hate formal learning, even though they continue to learn informally on their own?
THAT’s what Gates probably had . . . good early learning . . . but NOW he completely overlooks it . . . to the detriment of everyone in his educational orbit. (I think he’s still mad at “the government” for the lawsuits he had to undergo a few years back.)
Get over it, Bill; and get someone on your research staff who understands how ESSENTIAL the physical presence of a teacher and other students is (maybe Montessori?), SMALL CLASSES/adult attention/recognition; sharing, and the social/emotional/cultural elements that surround that relationship in children’s education.
The social realities don’t go away because GATES FAILS TO RECOGNIZE THEM. OR because otherwise intelligent people follow you. Education is not a cure for medical disease. My using that model, he’s doing more damage to education in this and other countries than he could possibly do by just shutting up. CBK
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Bill Gates attended an exclusive, expensive private school with class sizes of 12 or more and parents that had the money. Gates sent his own children to that school. Bill Gates and his children, form my knowledge, never attended a public school, and if any of the students at this private school came from a family living in poverty, that child was handpicked because of their motivation to cooperate and learn.
“Gates was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, and enrolled at Lakeside School, a private day school located on the shores of Lake Washington, when he was 13.”
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I made a mistake, a big one. The average class size of the private school Gates attended is TWELVE. Not more.
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Lloyd** Gates enjoyed class sizes of 12? What a surprise. CBK
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How much do you want to bet that there was never a student in any class Bill Gates attended as a K-12 child that disrupted a class, did not cooperate with the teacher and/or wasn’t motivated to learn.
Costly private schools like that have students that act like college students: motivated and cooperative.
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This article I posted identifies what I consider the most significant road block to effective change in our schools. Too many of those who impact policy have little understanding of a public school as an organism. Many on this blog seem to understand that the standardized test results cited reveal little about the needs and aspirations of children. However, people who seem to mean well, like Bill Gates, aren’t willing to take the time to check under the hood to see what children need. They don’t know how hard teachers work or the time required to build relationships necessary to build trust that encourages inquiry. Bill Gates got his start with computers because the parents in his school were wealthy enough to buy a main frame computer to place in his school building. The computer lab installed in your school was motivated by a computer company seeing profits without any consideration for community context and the district was willing to go along. Before laptops were ubiquitous in schools, there were empty computer labs collecting dust because there was little consideration for how they should be used. Microsoft and Apple certainly profited. In my district in Huntsville, the superintendent bought lap tops for every student in the district and simply used fees to act as insurance for all of the computers that would be damaged and hacked by family members. The fees didn’t cover the cost. The students who abused the computers didn’t have the prior knowledge that made these tools effective arbiters for inquiry. Meanwhile, the influence of big tech has provided an excuse for states to defund personnel in the schools. Nobody seems to want to tell the parents that their kids are behind, not due to the pandemic, but because of political malpractice with public education.
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Paul Bonner Well-said. Whenever I talk with anyone who qualifies as a geek, I realize the huge difference between field knowledge and learning it; OR: between being a geek and being a teacher; even and especially a teacher of any part of geekdom.
To the greater world: like firefighting, nursing, or tax consulting, teaching is a field in and of itself.
But so many technical experts are so inept that, first, they use technical language that another person does not understand (yet); and second, they put on the “I’m smarter than you” attitude. (Be aware: This gets worse as you get older.) CBK
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“Field” knowledge? Watch your language!
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Diane :o] Field Field Field Field Field Field Field AND Field. CBK
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Hahaha.
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I looked it up: What is Field Knowledge
“When a student studies all of the theories within a certain major, he or she begins to acquire an extensive knowledge of that field, and when that knowledge …”
https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/field-knowledge/33735
Really!?!
I never studied any of the theories of what it was like to live in poverty. I was born into a family living in poverty that by the time I was 10, my mother and father managed to climb into the lower strata of the middle class and managed to hang on.
After my parents climbed out of poverty, they moved to a border area between white, upper middle class neighborhoods and a town with a minority population dominated by poverty and street gangs.
Between Glendora and Azusa, California.
Their house, the one I spent most of my childhood in, was 1,000 square feet with three bedrooms, one living room, not two (the other is usually called a family room), a small kitchen and one and a half baths. The house I live in now is only 1,350 square feet but luxurious compared to that one.
Still, that street address was barely inside the Glendora Unified School district and the high school I ended up going to was Glendora High School on the other side of Glendora about as far as possible from the area where we lived. that was a block or two from Azusa, where the poverty and street gangs were located.
The houses around that high school were easily upper middle class and mansions compared to where we lived. A few blocks on the other side of the high school, even further from where we lived, there was a gate guarded community with even more expensive homes.
Who knows more about poverty — those that live/d in it or those that never lived in poverty but studied the theories about poverty giving them field knowledge?
The challenge with living in poverty (for most of the people that live there) is that is the only world they know. The same applies to those that never lived in poverty but took classes in some college to gain “field knowledge” of poverty. No theory is going to teach them what it is like to live in poverty.
So, I attended a top tier high school where I only saw white students who mostly had college educated parents. My parents never graduated from high school. My dad was blue collar. My mother worked at the laundry at City of Hope. My older brother was illiterate to the day he died at 64, and spent 15 years of his life in prison.
Now that I look back on my high school years, I’m beginning to understand why I didn’t do well like most or all of the other students. I was shy and quiet so I didn’t cause trouble. That probably explains why teachers let me sit in the back of the room where I wanted to be invisible, while most of the teachers all but ignored the student that seldom did any work. There must have been a lot of teachers that felt sorry for that little poor white boy since most of them passed me with Ds even though I did little or no work. My GPA at graduation was 0.95. I didn’t earn most of those Ds. Interesting though is that I live the high school library where I earned credit as a student helper, returning books to shelves and helping other students find books.
The librarian gave her student helpers grades and that was the only class where I earned straight As. During my senior year, I cut many classes but never the class labeled Library Science. I’d show up for that one by climbing the high block wall behind it and when my library period ended I’d climb back over the wall and take off. With all the classes I cut, I shouldn’t have graduated from that high school. Most of the teachers took pity on their poor little white boy. I may have been the only one there.
If it wasn’t for my mother, I would have never learned to read and I’d probably have died at an earlier age than my brother did.
If it wasn’t for the Marines teaching me harsh self discipline and also teaching me to believe in myself, I’d probably have been more wild and rebellious as an adult, and always in trouble like my older brother was.
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Lloyd Operative word: “Begins.” CBK
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I understand, as I near 78, I’m aware of how most younger people in this country think of people my age.
Still, I’ve noticed a change in attitude once someone reads one my my novels or my blogs. It seems that a miracle happens when they discover I’m not brain dead yet.
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Paul Well, now there’s an example of what privilege doesn’t look like.
Privilege, on the other hand, is when it’s already assumed, and you don’t have to prove it after digging through the skepticism, distrust, disrespect, and sometimes automatic disgust and, btw, with many men-to-women still, the question about whether they would want to sleep with you or not, or they run like rats or nod off when you start to speak. CBK
You wrote: “I understand, as I near 78, I’m aware of how most younger people in this country think of people my age. Still, I’ve noticed a change in attitude once someone reads one my novels or my blogs. It seems that a miracle happens when they discover I’m not brain dead yet.”
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“Nobody seems to want to tell the parents that their kids are behind, not du
e to the pandemic, but because of political malpractice with public education.”
People like Bill Gates live in an exclusive bubble. The fact that his parents had the money to send him to an exclusive private school and to live in an expensive upper class neighborhood, reveals a lot. If Bill Gates ever attended public schools before he was 13, those schools were mostly white with mostly college educated parents. It’s rare to find people living in poverty going to public schools that serve families living in expensive communities.
People like Gates and his parents that used their money to distance themselves from the “lower classes” do not want to learn what it is like to live in that world where billions are stuck and can’t break out.
The upper economic classes and the super rich do not want to learn or hear about what life is like outside their bubble. Since, Gates and many if not all that think like him hire people that also think like him, no on in that bubble learns what the world is like outside that bubble.
Even if someone that grew up in that world made an attempt to help, at the end of the day they return to their exclusive bubble and never learn what it’s like to live in the world they have never lived in.
How many people with enough money to live just about anywhere they want, voluntarily move into an areas with lots of poverty and violence?
I Goggled, “Does poverty rate take into account cost of living?”
And got this: “Costs related to housing, clothing, transportation, and other expenses commonly considered basic human needs are not considered. And the official measure does not account for variations in the cost of living across the country.”
“The number of people earning less than $30,000 accounts for 44.76% of the population. For reference, the 2022 Poverty Guidelines for a family of four is $27,750 ($34,690 in Alaska and $31,920 in Hawaii).”
Imagine the struggle these families have that live in areas with high costs of living. The biggest cost of living expense is housing or rent. The higher that cost, the harder the struggle will be.
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Good grief!
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“Liberation Education Conference”
The Fascists are creative when they come up with labels and titles that do not mean what they say but are designed to mislead as they take away one freedom after another.
Right to Work laws and Stand your Ground laws are other examples of this BS.
Right to Work laws in red states ended up taking away any rights workers once had thanks to a century of labor unions fighting for their members.
Stand your Ground laws made murder legal. All the shooter has to say is “I feared for my life”. I read that the NRA was even handing out cards that told murderers in Stand Your Ground states what to say to the police after they shot someone dead.
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Does anyone out there know anything about Total Education Solutions?
https://www.tesidea.com
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Never heard of it. I looked at the website and there’s no mention of leadership or board.
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