During his press conference, Trump said he has turned his businesses over to his sons. That eliminates any possibility of conflict of interest. He said.

Right. His sons will receive business offers they never dreamed of.

He he also acknowledged that Russia did the hacking but said it was the fault of the DNC for lacking proper protection.

Samuel Abrams, experienced high school teacher, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatizarion in Education, and author of the new book “Education and the Commercial Mindset,” has some good advice for Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos. 

He knows they want to run schools like businesses but he says it is important to take the right lessons from business, not the wrong ones.

“The fundamental problem with the free-market model for education is that schools are not groceries. Education is complex and the immediate consumer, after all, is a child or adolescent who can know only so much about how a subject should be taught. The parent, legislator and taxpayer are necessarily at a distance.

“Groceries, by contrast, are discrete goods purchased by adults who can easily judge each item according to taste, nutritional value and cost. Supermarkets can likewise be easily judged according to service, atmosphere and convenience.

“Although the free-market model isn’t a good fit for schools, there are five business concepts that should be embraced by education reformers and policymakers.

“Much as early stage investment in promising companies can deliver outsized rewards for investors, early stage investment in schooling can deliver significant rewards for society. Another Chicago economist, James Heckman, analyzed data from Michigan and North Carolina going back several decades and found that no other infusion of public dollars comes close to matching the rate of return of high-quality early childhood education.

“Since the days of Henry Ford, business has understood “efficiency wage theory.” In 1914, Ford doubled the pay of assembly-line workers from $2.50 a day to $5. Economists later validated the results: It costs less to pay more, as employers attract and retain better workers and thus improve production and even reduce costs of both supervision and turnover. Studies show a similar tight relationship between teacher pay and educational outcomes.

“An analysis of teacher salaries and student performance in science (at age 15) provides an example. The data come from the five Nordic and six English-speaking countries involved in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment. The U.S. and Norway paid teachers 68% and 71% as much as fellow citizens with university degrees, respectively, and posted scores just below the PISA average. Finland and Canada, on the other hand, paid teachers 97% and 105% as much as fellow citizens with university degrees and posted scores far above the average.

“Retaining good teachers and grooming administrators from within the ranks instead of handing over the reins to outsiders constitutes another significant lesson from the corporate playbook. As the business historian Alfred Chandler documented, great organizations develop talent internally. Education researchers have repeatedly shown, in particular, that teacher turnover impairs student achievement. In addition, as Los Angeles may remember from its experience with David Brewer, superintendents without classroom experience tend to be out of step with pedagogical needs.

“Pay for performance — another cardinal objective of business-minded reformers like DeVos — sounds logical but backfires. Instead, reformers should follow the lead of W. Edwards Deming, the father of the modern Japanese auto industry, who contended merit ratings and pay generate fear and undermine teamwork. “The organization is the loser,” he wrote.

“Separate longitudinal studies of merit-based pay for teachers in Nashville and Chicago, completed in 2010 by researchers at Vanderbilt University and Mathematica, bear him out. They found no effect on student achievement.

“Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality,” Deming wrote. “Routine inspection becomes unreliable through boredom and fatigue.” That recommendation should be applied to the annual testing of students in reading and math mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and reauthorized by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.

“Instead of “routine inspection,” Deming urged detailed analysis of small samples. Bucking widespread practice, the Finns do exactly that, with high-quality exams administered to small groups of students. Teachers consequently feel no pressure to “teach to the test,” students get a well-rounded education and administrators gain superior understanding of student progress. Finnish teens score at or near the top of international educational assessments.”

Here are the members of the Senate Committee on Health Education Labor and Pensions.

http://www.help.senate.gov/about/members

Eight of the 12 Republican members have received money from Betsy DeVos.

On the Democratic side, Michael Bennett is a major advocate for charters and a favorite of DFER.

One of the curious effects of the recent election is the Republican Party’s dramatic turnabout on Russia and Putin. Those of us old enough to remember Senator Joseph McCarthy find this change both starling and amusing.

Oddly, some on the left defend Putin because they think that any criticism of Russia is red-baiting. But Russia is no longer red or Communist, which is why Republicans are eager to join in the Great Billionaire Barbecue.

This article by James Kerchick tells the the story of the Republican-Russia romance. Now even Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin are fans of Putin and his revival of state capitalism and conservative white Christendom.

Ex-talking head Campbell Brown was just hired by Facebook to handle media relations. Brown hates public schools, teachers, and unions. She has filed lawsuits to eliminate teacher due process rights.

Pleae read and consider signing this petition opposing her hiring by Facebook. 

Sorry to keep up the bad news about the election.

Here is the link to the story:

Intel report: Putin directly ordered effort to influence election
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/politics/intelligence-report-putin-election/index.html

This is is the first time in US history that a foreign government has directly and successfully intervened in our presidential election.

Putin directly ordered the hacking of DNC emails and leaked them to Wikileaks and other sites. On his orders, Russian agents planted fake news stories and acted as trolls on logs.

This is a major crisis. It is a political crisis and a constitutional crisis. But who can call for a new election? The Republicans won’t. They control both houses of Congress.

I am in despair: Trump has appointed people to destroy the mission of their agencies. He is not a stupid man. But he is woefully uneducated, ignorant and narcissistic, with a brilliant capacity to tap into racism, sexism, and xenophobia. . Greed is his god. He hoaxed his voters. The founding fathers must be weeping.

Trump is #notmypresident. He is #Putinspuppet.

• This story just appeared in The NY Times.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump acknowledged the possibility on Friday that Russia had hacked a variety of American targets, including the Democratic National Committee, after an almost two-hour meeting with the nation’s top intelligence officials.

Mr. Trump asserted that the hacking had no effect on the outcome of the election.

In a statement issued after the president-elect was briefed by senior American intelligence and law enforcement officials, Mr. Trump said: “While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines.”

For months, Mr. Trump had publicly resisted any suggestion that Russia was involved in cyberattacks during the 2016 presidential election and had mocked the intelligence agencies behind assessments on Russian hacking. After Friday’s briefing, he said he had “tremendous respect” for the people who work for American spy agencies.

But just hours before, the president-elect had attributed claims of Russian hacking to embarrassed election-year rivals, calling the storm surrounding the cyberattacks a political witch hunt being carried out by his adversaries, who he said were embarrassed by their loss to him in the election last year.”

He is #PutinsPresident.

During the heat of the election, our blog poet disappeared.

He/she is back! Posted today in response to the article about the poet who could not answer the questions on the Texas standardized test about her own poems:

“Understanding Poetry”

To understand a poem
You shouldn’t ask the poet
Cuz poets all are dumb
And, worst of all, don’t know it.

They’ll tell you this and that
And even ’bout the other
They’ll tell you ’bout their cat
And tell you ’bout their brother

They’ll tell you everything
Except what you desire
So never give a ring
And never ever hire