Robert Freeman - How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars

The Vietnam War produced more than its share of iconic idiocies. Perhaps the most revelatory was the psychotic assertion of an army major explaining the U.S. bombing of the provincial hamlet of Ben Tre: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” If only such self-extinguishing claims for intelligence were confined to military war.

The U.S is ratcheting up a societal-level war on public education. At issue is whether we are going to make it better — build it into something estimable, a social asset that undergirds a noble and prosperous society — or whether we’re going to tear it down so that private investors can get their hands on the almost $1 trillion we spend on it every year. The tear-it-down option is the civilian equivalent of Ben Tre, but on a vastly larger scale and with incomparably greater stakes: we must destroy public education in order to save it. It’s still early in the game, but right now the momentum is with the wreckers because that’s where the money is. Whether they succeed or not will be up to you.

Here’s a three-step recipe for how to destroy education. It maps perfectly to how to make a prodigious profit by privatizing it. It is the essential game plan of the big money boys.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/29-0

Susie Madrak - Philadelphia Blows Up Its School District, And No One In The Complicit National Media Even Cares

The elites' plans are in place to close 40 schools, break the teacher and janitorial unions, and put the education of the City of Philadelphia's children up for bid. It just makes me sick.

I knew it was coming (when you see the Democratic city councilman expected to be the next mayor praising Michelle Rhee and philanthro-capitalists like the Gates Foundation, it's only a matter of time), but I never expected it to happen this fast. It feels like a kick to the gut.

Our schools were taken over by the state in 2001 (you can read the gruesome history here) and instead we're run by a five-person School Reform Commission. (The governor gets to appoint three members, the mayor gets to appoint two.) And even though the reason for declining results may have more to so with the fact that the state contribution to public education has dropped from 55 percent in 1975 to 36 percent in 2001, the hillbilly politicians in the Pennsyltucky parts of the state have done a fine job convincing voters outside the more educated areas that funding schools in Philadelphia is throwing money down a "black hole." (Emphasis on the word "black," since color plays a very large part in these funding decisions.)

But don't worry, the charter schools-privatization crowd has bought off some prominent black politicians, too, so at least the payoffs are color-blind.

Here's the thing: It's not the school district's fault that Pennsylvania funds its schools through an inequitable system of property taxes, nor that the state voters rejected attempts to fix that. It's not the district's fault that Gov. Tom Corbett (PA's own Scott Walker) has once again drastically cut education funding (especiallyreimbursement toward the same charter schools that were pushed on districts) — even though the same old divisive voices convince voters it is.

Read More:

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/philadelphia-blows-its-school-distric

First the smart phone, now the smart home

We have all heard of the smartphone and any day now, most of us will have one. Not far behind: the smart home. Writing in the latest issue of the journal Science, Washington State University's Diane Cook says it won't be long before our homes act as "intelligent agents" that use sensors and software to anticipate our needs and tend to tasks that improve our health, energy efficiency, even social media.

Many homes are already halfway there, with computer chips helping microwave popcorn, record TV shows, and turn on coffee makers and thermostats. "If you have a programmable thermostat, you have the beginnings of a smart home," says Cook, a WSU professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "What we're trying to do is get the home to take over the job of programming it."

"We want your home as a whole to think about what you need and use the components in it to do the right thing," she says.

Cook has been applying artificial intelligence in test homes since coming to WSU in 2006. Sites around the Northwest, including 18 apartments in Seattle, already show that the technology can help monitor aging-in-place elderly residents and alert caregivers if they are not completing ordinary activities like rising, eating, bathing, and taking medications.

Read More:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-03/wsu-fts032712.php

Valerie Strauss - Corporate-Driven Report Exemplifies Failed Thinking on US Education

A new report being officially released today — by a Council of Foreign Relations task force chaired by Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice — seems to want very much to be seen as the new “A Nation at Risk,” the seminal 1983 report that warned that America’s future was threatened by a “rising tide of mediocrity” in the country’s public schools

It’s a pale imitation.

The U.S. Education Reform and National Security report, to be sure, has some similar language and themes of a Nation at Risk. It says (over and over) that America’s national security is threatened because America’s public schools aren’t adequately preparing young people to “fill the ranks of the Foreign Service, the intelligence community, and the armed forces” (or diplomats, spies and soldiers).

But it takes a very different view of the public education system than the authors of “A Nation at Risk,” who sought to find ways to improve public schools and treat the system as a civic institution. The new report seems to look at public schools as if they are the bad guys that need to be put out of business, with a new business taking over, funded with public dollars.

Read More:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/condi-rice-joel-klein-report-not-the-new-a-nation-at-risk/2012/03/19/gIQAI8hKOS_blog.html

Jesse Hagopian - 'Occupy Education' Debates the Gates Foundation (and Wins)

The chants of some 150 teachers, students, parents and Occupy Seattle activists reverberated off the windows of the global headquarters of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – a leading promoter of a corporate brand of education reform—announcing we were ready for our scheduled debate about the schools as part of a national call to "Occupy Education" on March 1st.

From Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland, California, to the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., Occupy activists schooled the nation with experiential learning demonstrations with the instructional objective of making education a right for the 99 percent, not a privilege for the 1 percent. In Seattle, when our spirited march for education arrived at the Gates Foundation, many of the event organizers were as nervous as kids before a high-stakes test--not because they doubted the validity of challenging one of the biggest backers of charter schools and standardized testing – but because many expected a no show from the foundation that they would have to simply chalk up as an unexcused absence.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/13-4

Howard Lisnoff - When Public Schools Became Disposable

For more than three decades, education at all levels in the US has been subjected to a frontal attack on the part of local, state, and federal governments. The inception of the attack came with the far-right presidency of Ronald Reagan, specifically with the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983). That document laid the groundwork for the frontal attack that has moved ahead without pause for over three decades. Like the missile gaps of the 1960s that scared the public into supporting a buildup of nuclear armaments, that publication painted a picture of public education on the verge of collapse. Schools were failing to produce a competitive workforce in the US, when in reality the US workforce was being undermined by corporations sending their work overseas. Like the destruction of the air traffic controllers union during Reagan’s presidency, public schools were put on notice that they had received a failing grade from the administration. The attack against unions, community schools, and teachers was on!

Read More:

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2012/03/09/WHEN-PUBLIC-SCHOOLS-BECAME-DISPOSABLE/

Diane Ravitch - Flunking Arne Duncan

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan loves evaluation. He insists that everyone should willingly submit to public grading of the work they do. The Race to the Top program he created for the Obama Administration requires states to evaluate all teachers based in large part on the test scores of their students. When the Los Angeles Times released public rankings that the newspaper devised for thousands of teachers, Duncan applauded and asked, “What’s there to hide?” Given Duncan’s enthusiasm for grading educators, it seems high time to evaluate his own performance as Secretary of Education.

Here are his grades:

Read More:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/07/flunking-arne-duncan/

Tom Jacobs - For Better Grades, Try Bach in the Background

As every teacher knows, it is one thing to impart information; it’s quite another for students to absorb it, process it, and be able to regurgitate it. New research suggests educators can help this to occur by turning to some old friends: Beethoven, Bach, and Tchaikovsky.

In the journal Learning and Individual Differences, a research team led by Fabrice Dosseville of the Universite de Caen Basse-Normandie describes an experiment featuring 249 university students. All were enrolled in an introductory course in sports psychology.

The students were divided into two groups “that were equal on academic performance.” Each group viewed a different version of an hour-long videotaped lecture on “Expertise in Athletics,” in which the talk was accompanied by synchronized slides.

For one group, the lecture was accompanied by a series of familiar classical pieces, including excerpts from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and Bach’sThird Brandenburg Concerto. The other group heard the lecture with no background music.

Read More:

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/for-better-grades-try-bach-in-the-background-38573/?utm_source=Newsletter198&utm_medium=email&utm_content=0131&utm_campaign=newsletters#

Paul Thomas - Universal Public Education Is Dead

The National Education Association (NEA) [4] received criticism for publishing an Op-Ed with Teach for America (TFA) [5]. Ken Bernstein found the piece to be “unbelievable,”[6] while raising the possibility that union members felt betrayed. Anthony Cody first responded with “I just don’t get it,” [7] and then raised this question [8]:

“I wonder how it is possible to fight vigorously for a minimum one-year residency program and simultaneously praise someone whose recruitment model features a five week summer training course, and targets people who do not even wish to become teachers?”

While this rising concern that NEA is failing its mission has received relatively strong coverage in the new media of blogs and twitter, Susan Ohanian [9] has been raising a similar (but nearly ignored) concern about the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) [10]—the largest professional organization for teachers of English. I too have challenged NCTE’s role insupporting national standards [11] and partnering with National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) for teacher certification standards [12]. But my voice like Ohanian’s has been essentially shouting down an empty well, it seems.

Read More:

http://dailycensored.com/2012/01/20/universal-public-education-is-dead-expanded/

Sarah Jaffe - $422,320 for a College Degree? With Tuition Skyrocketing, It is Time to Rethink Higher Education

$422,320.

That's what The Daily, News Corp. and Apple's daily news outlet for the iPad, calculated a college education could cost members of the class of 2034—children born this year, for the most part—if they attend one of the nation's priciest schools. But even an average public university will cost $81,000 for four years if tuition hikes continue at current rates—which are increasing much faster than inflation. As tuition continues to go up, and even the president calls for solutions, some are looking at radical possibilities for keeping tuition down—or even eliminating it.

The Daily found that tuition has been increasing even faster at public schools than private—4.5 percent a year for public universities and only 3.5 percent for private. According to Jane Wellman of the Delta Project, which studies the cost of higher education, public schools have been relying on tuition rather than endowments to make up for state education budget cuts..

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/153788/%24422%2C320_for_a_college_degree_with_tuition_skyrocketing%2C_it_is_time_to_rethink_higher_education