Education
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Gov. Jerry Brown’s State of the State
Is Jerry Brown the model for Liberalism 5.0? Every once in a while a major politician shocks by actually speaking in a way that politicians rarely speak, i.e., in a way that suggests that he really "gets it". What are the chances considering all the filters that prevent such people from seeing things other than
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Pushing Back against Technocratic Groupthink in Public Schools
Anthony Cody at Education Week: The trouble with Groupthink, as Janis points out, is that it can be disastrously wrong. Once we get swept up into this momentum, and more and more of our values and livelihoods hinge on this set of beliefs, it becomes harder and harder to break away. And with this particular set
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Education Reform and Neoliberalism
While it is impossible at this stage to know whether these resistance movements will be strong enough to force political leaders to withdraw their support from privatization and testing, they have created enough of a grass roots presence to publicly challenge and contest almost every Reform initiative at the local and national level. We now
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G.E.R.M rebuffed across the Country . . .
. . . except in Washington State, where a really awful Charter School ballot measure won by a very narrow margin. (GERM = Global Education Reform Movement, which is essentially a neoliberal program to privatize public education. The Gates Foundation, which was a huge funder behind this ballot measure, is one of the chief purveyors
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Quote of the Day: Connecticut Post
If Democrats continue with their right-wing conservative educational policies, they will alienate the teachers and teacher unions that have traditionally been the party's staunchest supporters. More importantly, these misguided policies and initiatives will deal a severe blow to public education and to the quality of the teaching profession as well as to the morale of
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The Great Technocratic Society
David Brooks's wrote a column several years ago, that I have to say I agree with to a large extent–culture matters. I think that a fundamental mistake of both the left and the right, for different reasons, is to look at the problems surrounding poverty primarily in economic terms. The economic is obviously a factor, but it's
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Quote of the Day: John Kuhn 2
Like many educators, I’ve smelled on my students the secondhand drugs that fill too many of their homes with bitterness and want. There is sometimes a literal pungency to low academic performance that remedial classes won’t scrub from our kids. But it isn’t kosher to declare that any parent is failing. And it isn’t okay
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Quote of the Day: John Kuhn
“Poverty isn’t destiny” is trite and meaningless and pretends to honor poor kids for their wide-open potential while actually disrespecting their experiences and neglecting to patch their holes; it posits that there is no such phenomenon as generational need and that neither public policy nor wealth distribution warrants consideration as a contributing factor in the formation
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Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir on “Won’t Back Down”
Pretty funny: Even Gyllenhaal’s 500-watt smile and Davis’ permanent air of wounded propriety can’t redeem a script that has that disconnected, amateurish quality distinctive to conservative-oriented entertainment and plays written by fourth-graders. It’s as if the right-wing disapproval of pop culture extends to rejecting the Aristotelian conventions of plot and character. Possibly this film is
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Primitives, Hacks, Naifs, Fools, and Mensches
There are three types of people who work for or enthusiastically support well-funded, national political organizations: (1) Primitives–people driven exclusively by self-interest, greed, powerlust and glory in it. I'm thinking of the Gordon Geckos and Marc Antonys of the world. Primitives don't do well in bureaucracies, but many do well as entrepreneurs. And there are places,