This is very funny, as is everything Randy Rainbow does.
Guess who they are?
You don’t need three guesses.
A clue to the right answer: they are not actually married to one another.
They are members of this blog’s Wall of Shame.
I’m breaking all my own rules by posting this but it is too funny not to post.
Randy Rainbow is one of the great satirists of our day.
We have to laugh. That’s the best defense against autocracy, as Mel Brooks reminded us in his show “The Producers,” both a great movie and an even greater Broadway show, which mocked Hitler. Brooks said that “laughter takes away their power.” Let us hope.
As regular readers know, our good friend Phyllis Bush is fighting what we used to call “the Big C,” but what she calls “cancer-shmanzer.”
Phyllis had a setback and needed emergency surgery.
She came through with her usual spunk, humor, and fight.
The world may be in desperate trouble but Phyllis inspires us to face our troubles with wit and courage.
Read what happened when high school valedictorian Ben Bowling gave his speech at graduation, and included an inspiring quote that he attributed to Trump. The crowd cheered heartily.
Then, he said, Sorry, that quote was Obama.
Ben Bowling’s graduation speech was one of the rare instances where electoral polling numbers can help us understand humor.
The 18-year-old is the valedictorian of the Bell County High School Class of 2018, about 80 miles north of Knoxville, Tenn.
The closest a 21st-century Democratic presidential candidate has come to winning the hearts and minds of the people of Bell County, Ky., was in 2004, when John F. Kerry got 39 percent of people there to punch a ticket for him.
Every other race has been (more of) a landslide by whoever happened to be on the Republican side of the ballot: nearly 71 percent for John McCain in 2008, according to the state’s board of elections. Mitt Romney got 76 percent in 2012, and Donald Trump received an overwhelming 82 percent of Bell County’s votes in 2016.
On Saturday, Bowling was slated to give a speech before his cap-and-gown-wearing peers and their families, as he noted in one fourth-wall breaking segment.
Read the inspiriting quote and the crowd’s response.
Peter Greene has fun dissecting a brainstorming session featuring tech titans and billionaires Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. He says, “They never learn.” Same old, same old, repackaged as new.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are going to attempt– once again– to change the whole world of education.
Their newly-released Request For Information is looking for “all promising ideas for how to use existing and new knowledge and tools to achieve dramatic results against the challenges we describe.” The list of challenges sadly does not include “the repeated failure of rich amateurs to impose their unproven ideas on the US public school system.”
They want YOUR ideas, but they start out with plenty of their own.
A few nuggets of Peter-Greene-Wisdom:
Here are the areas they believe “require more exploration”
Evidence-based solutions for writing instruction, including mastery of the “spectrum of skills encompassing narrative, descriptive, expository and/or persuasive writing models,” a “spectrum” that I’ll argue endlessly is not an actual thing, but is a fake construct created as a crutch for folks who don’t know how to teach or assess writing.
New proficiency metrics. Can we have “consistent measures of student progress and proficiency”? I’m saying “probably not.” “Can we use technology to support new, valid, efficient, and reliable writing performance measures that are helpful for writing coaching?” No, we can’t.
Educator tools and support. Gates-Zuck correctly notes that “effective” writing instruction requires time and resources, so the hope here is, I don’t know– the invention of a time machine? Hiring administrative assistants for all teachers? Of course not– they want to create “tools” aka more technology trying to accomplish what it’s not very good at accomplishing.
Always looking for ways to get better. Kind of like every decent teacher on the planet. I swear– so much of this rich amateur hour baloney could be helped by having these guys shadow an actual teacher all day every day for a full year. At the very least, it would save these endless versions of “I imagine we could move things more easily if we used round discs attached to an axel. I call it… The Wheeble!”
They want your ideas about “Measuring and Improving Executive Function,” which Peter says should creep you out. It creeps me out!
This is personalized [sic] learning at its worst– a kind of Big Brother on Steroids attempt to take over the minds, hearts, and lives of children for God-knows-what nefarious schemes. Only two things make me feel just the slightest bit better about this.
First of all, I’m not sure that Gates-Zuck are evil mad scientist types, cackling wickedly in their darkened laboratory. I’m more inclined to see them as feckless-but-rich-and-powerful computer nerds, who still believe that education is just an engineering problem that can be solved by properly designed sufficiently powered software. They’re technocrats who think a bigger, better machine is the best way to fix human beings.
Second of all– well, wait a minute. The two guys who have bombarded education with enough money to make a small island and who do not have a single clear-cut success to point to– these guys think they’ve got it figured out this time? They have never yet figured out how to better educate the full range of ordinary students (nor ever figured out what “better educate” means) now think they can unlock the formula for better educating students with larger challenges?
This is like going to a circus and the announcer hollers that Evel Von Wheeble is going to jump his motorcycle over fifty buses, and you get very excited until you read the program and see that Von Wheeble previously attempted to jump over ten, twenty and twenty-five buses– and he failed every time.
Peter Greene is still the only blogger who makes me laugh out loud!
Our very own blog poet has written a wonderful new poem.
“Jabbertalky” (after Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll, of course)
“Twas brillig, and the billionaires
Did lie and dissemble in the press
All flimsy were Deformer wares
And the charter rats did nest
“Beware the Jabbertalk my son!
The Cores that bite, the tests that catch!
Beware the Coleman bird, and shun
Felonius charters, natch!”
“He took his opt-out sword in hand:
Long time Deformer foe he sought —
So rested he by the Knowledge tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
”And, as in peaceful thought he stood,
The Jabbertalk, with eyes of flame,
Came bumbling through the teaching wood,
And burbled as it came!
“One, two! One, two! And through and through
The opt-out blade went snicker-snack!
He left test dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And, has thou slain the Jabbertalk?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.
“Twas brillig, and the billionaires
Did lie and dissemble in the press
All flimsy were Deformer wares
And the charter rats did nest”
Tongue planted firmly in cheek, John Merrow questioned Rick Hess’s anguished post about the failure of reform in D.C. under Michelle Rhee and her deputy Kaya Henderson. Hess admitted that “reformers” circled the wagons and refused to listen to naysayers, but he blamed the naysayers for being critical of the fraud and the coverup.
John Merrow spent many hours covering Michelle Rhee as the PBS education correspondent, and it was only at the end of her reign of error that the scales fell from his eyes. But fall they did, and he has since documented the depth of the flimflam that Rhee, Henderson, and their enablers perpetrated.
When Merrow read Hess’ apologia, he reached for the phone to question Rick, but Rick was on a national speaking tour.
The phone at the American Enterprise Institute was answered, Merrow said, by a woman with a French accent.
“I told the young woman that I had the press release in my hand and had hoped to talk with him before he left. I asked her whether he was going to apologize for being wrong about the so-called ‘school reforms’ in Washington, DC?
“Mais non. Monsieur Hess is going to be explaining why everyone of importance got it wrong about Washington. And zen he will explain how to get it right.”
“Hearing that upset me. I told her that a lot of us, including USA Today, Guy Brandenburg, Diane Ravitch, Mary Levy, the Washington City Paper, local politician Mark Simon, and me, got it right about DC. I told her that we have been saying for years that Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson were perpetrating a fraud.
“Zen, monsieur,” she said with a provocative giggle, “You must not be of importance, because Monsieur Rick explained it to me very clearly.”
“Tell me about the tour, I said. I see from the press release that The Four Seasons is the tour’s official hotel, NetJet the official airline, and Uber the official means of transportation. Will Rick be visiting schools?
“Oh, I don’t zink so,” she said. “Monsieur Rick, he does not like to be with noisy children. He prefers to talk to old people in auditoriums.”
“Will anyone else be appearing with Rick, I wanted to know? After all, lots of important people were wrong about DC: Arne Duncan, Checker Finn, Richard Whitmire, Campbell Brown, Katherine Bradley, Tom Toch, Andy Rotherham, Mike Petrilli, Whitney Tilson, Kati Haycock, the Washington Post, some major foundations, and others.”
Merrow is a notorious trickster. I suddenly remembered his resignation letter, when he announced that he was leaving PBS to join the board of Pearson. Or was that his April Fools’ letter?
This is The Onion, a humor website. Humor strikes close to home.
“Recognizing the aid the organization has provided to young people struggling to escape the pressure cooker of the nation’s most prestigious universities, officials from the educational nonprofit Teach For America are celebrating three decades of helping recent graduates pad out their law school applications, sources confirmed Friday….
”Today, we honor that mission,” said spokesperson Liza Cooper, who emphasized that educational inequity in the United States is so stark that without the support of Teach For America, many of its participants would have no chance of acceptance at the Washington University School of Law, let alone NYU or Harvard.”
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