Month: May 2010

School of the Future

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

This is a cautionary tale from the Philadelphia Daily News. Yes, we’re rapidly privatizing schools, building them around wealthy CEOs’ uninformed wish lists designed to produce workers. They’re using the kids as guinea pigs in this great capitalist experiment, carrying the torch of Ronald Reagan’s conviction that public education exists primarily to fund free job training for business.

Hell, what’s not to like?

When the High School of the Future opened amid the rolling green grass of Fairmount Park four years ago, many parents eagerly sought a place there for their children.

On its first day, Sept. 7, 2006, former school district superintendent Paul Vallas and former Mayor John Street rang bells outside the school in Parkside to start the new year.

It was an expansive, space-age-looking facility – dubbed the “Microsoft School” because the company helped design it – where every student was issued laptops and textbooks weren’t required.

Now, Ivy Dixon, whose daughter Soleil is among the first group of seniors to graduate after spending four years there, said she and her daughter feel cheated.

“There are too many learners at the school whose college options are limited due to the lack of solid foundations in core subject matters delivered by the majority of inexperienced educators,” Dixon told the School Reform Commission yesterday.

Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman told Dixon that other parents had come to her this spring with similar concerns about students’ lacking “foundational skills” as teens began getting the results of their SAT scores and applying to colleges.

“This is not the first time I’ve heard this,” Ackerman said. “We are looking at the curriculum at High School of the Future. We’ll definitely be making some changes.”

Later, senior class president Quetta Fairy said students were told earlier this year that only 48 of the 120 members of the senior class would be eligible to graduate.

“Now, we can’t seem to get any answers on how many will actually graduate,” Fairy said.

But she said a number of students feel that low SAT scores have meant they will have to go to a community college.

According to Dixon, and several students who accompanied her yesterday, the school’s focus on computer-based learning may have left some students struggling with the basics.

“We don’t have any textbooks there, and we need them,” Dixon told the commission.

Now, you might think this was some kind of horrible oversight. But was it? Danny Weil over at Daily Censored, a most enlightening piece on Obama’s push to privatize education:

You will never see a town hall meeting on ‘standards in education’ on any corporate news channel and not much on other progressive venues either. The policies of Race to the Top are literally destroying lives in cities throughout the nation. According to the Atlantic Journal Constitution:

“Starting with the Class of 2012, every Georgia student must pass four years of math to receive a college prep diploma even if he or she plans to attend a technical school or enter the work force after graduation. Special needs students can appeal to opt out after completing Math III if they stay concurrently enrolled in math support classes and a review of their education plan makes it clear that the course would be the highest level they could achieve” (By D. Aileen Dodd and John Perry The Atlanta Journal-Constitution May 20, 2010 http://www.ajc.com/news/new-curriculum-math-anxiety-532073.htm).

The Atlantic Journal Constitution then went on to note what many of us have been saying, or screaming for years:

“When the state initiated this new era of souped-up instruction in math, pushing students to grasp complex concepts in algebra, geometry and statistics sooner than ever before, the goal was to produce a new generation of college-ready teens to compete globally” (ibid).

There you have it. It is really gets no clearer; the neo-cons are in control of the educational process for their delusional competitive free market that is failing as we read and write. So, in an effort to compete with low paid workers in China in areas of science, math and technology students, “higher standards were passed, standards so high even tutors for kids can’t do the problems. Aker says the program is so accelerated that upperclassmen that used to help her tutor can’t do the math the freshmen do (ibid).

The math overhaul was pushed by state Superintendent Kathy Cox. Now that Cox has announced she will not seek a third term, some parents and teachers wonder whether the program will continue at the same accelerated pace, be diluted or scrapped altogether by her successor. Slash and burn, Kathy and then retire on an administrator’s salary after leaving a wake of bodies and minds under nourished by your vicious policies. Don’t be surprised if old Kathy goes to work for one of the testing companies that is needed to support the curriculum she tube fed teachers and students paid for by tax dollars.

I just wonder when people will start to notice.

The Perfect Tea Kettle

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I forgot to mention that my search for the perfect replacement tea kettle is finally over. The one on the right is the replacement for the one on the left, which will be transitioned into a garden watering can. Cost? $3, minus 50% senior citizen discount at the thrift store = $1.50! Can’t beat that.

‘Dickensian’

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Remember the judge in Luzerne County who owned the detention facility to which he’d sentence juveniles? The report is out, and it’s heartbreaking:

The report described as “Dickensian” the role of former judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., who ordered children as young as 11 to jail for failure to pay fines, “effectively using the county detention center as a debtor’s prison for children.”

More than half the juveniles who appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom between 2003 and 2008 did so without counsel, the report said. Witnesses told the commission that Ciavarella had pressured defendants into waiving their right to counsel and even had a table set up outside his courtroom with waiver forms to sign.

The report concluded that many defense attorneys who had appeared before Ciavarella “clearly abdicated their responsibilities” to defend their clients and “protect their due process rights.”

Ah, but they protected their own careers, and that’s the important thing!

Presidential Commission

~ susie

From Truthout:

The problem, visible to nearly everyone except the president, is that when you drill, accidents happen, as Alex Cockburn mercilessly pointed out here a couple weeks ago and as a recent report on Solve Climate further confirmed, citing chances of a blowout as 1 in 400. There have been almost 40 blowouts already, but most of them were small, brief and in relatively shallow waters, with minimal ecological impact. That doesn’t mean this sort of drilling isn’t dangerous. It means that before Deepwater Horizons caught on fire we’d been lucky. We are now experiencing the end of our luck and the oil from the spill is threatening an 150-mile spread of marshland, full of mollusks and other shellfish, along with the native marsh-grasses that tamp down the swells and winds that were part of the reason Hurricane Katrina was as bad as it was: the natural storm-swell protection services offered by wetlands on the New Orleans coast had been replaced by an ingenious and utterly vulnerable-to-breakdown system of concrete levees.

There’s a pattern here, one identified by agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry: “If you put the fates of whole communities or cities or regions or ecosystems at risk in single ships or factories or power-plants, then I will furnish the drunk or fool or imbecile who will make the necessary small mistake.” That may be a “mistake” in construction, or an engineering mistake, or a steering mistake or any of the sorts of mistakes endemic to the complex technological systems that compose our life-support systems.

The Obama commission could have a mandate to come up with a way to transition to a green economy or any of a number of imaginative, forward-looking, rigorously pragmatic, Utopian schemes that would address the “root causes” of the BP disaster: the fossil-fuel arterial infrastructure upon which American society is based. Economist Robert Pollin calls for a “broader green investment project … to encompass public transportation, electrical grid upgrades and the creation of a competitive renewable-energy manufacturing sector,” as part of a broader effort to create 18 million new jobs in the next three years. A renewable-energy manufacturing sector would create the devices necessary to create a renewable-energy-generating infrastructure.

At a time when, according to the Pew Research Center, only 32 percent of the American public think it “very important” for Congress to prioritize climate change, 67 percent think it “very important” to prioritize addressing the country’s energy needs and 81 percent think it’s “very important” to “address the job situation,” such an infrastructure would simultaneously fulfill not only the goal of rebuilding and reinvigorating the rusted American industrial plant, but would also politically braid together employment, energy and climate.

That would be a good first step for dealing with the explosion’s root causes. Americans aren’t dumb. They don’t know that energy, climate and employment can be addressed, at least on a short-term horizon, simultaneously and no one knows this because it’s taken as a tacit assumption that there won’t be a centralized, planned, immediate transition to a renewable-energy-based economy. That would be what a dream commission would come up with. Less dreamily, the commission could use market-pressures to force BP to stop drilling oil – initially high-risk deepwater drilling, then all oil since all oil is risky.

See, BP is aware of the world’s willingness to supply the “drunk or fool” who will make the mistake that will destroy an ecosystem. Aware of this risk, it long ago opted to socialize it. As economist Frank Ackermancommented, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, adopted after the Exxon Valdez catastrophe, finances the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, currentlycontaining billion dollars, through an eight-cents-a-barrel tax on oil. As Ackerman added, in return for this tax liability is limited to clean-up costs plus 75 million dollars, “a pittance for a giant oil company and is far below the economic losses to the communities affected by BP’s recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico.” Imagine oil companies couldn’t socialize their risks from oil spills, or from emitting ecocidal CO2. They’d have to stop emitting it and then we’d be foursquare in front of what looks like a conundrum: hyper-expensive fossil fuel and no jobs.

Except there’s a way out – a planned conversion to green energy via an Apollo project. These are root causes, and you can forecast that the commission will not discern them with as much certainty as you can predict the sun’s daily rise in the East. And then there will be another Deepwater Horizons poisoning our waters and our atmosphere and another Exxon Valdez spilling black crude all over pristine estuaries and penguin colonies. And maybe, just maybe, that’s why Obama looked so much like a mannequin while delivering his speech – because he knows these facts, but is a creature of the fossil fuel companies and can barely contain the jostling contradictions between facts and policy. Rather than resolving the ensuing mental disturbance, it’s easier to affect catatonia. Easier for Obama, for the Gulf of Mexico, for the poor of the world whose lives will be shattered by climate change. For our future? Not so nice.