Category Archives: Uncategorized

I used to shop at Walmart.

In September 2012, I couldn’t bring myself to do so anymore.

Several months prior, in April 2012, I began investigating the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) right around the time that watchdog group Common Cause filed its original whistle blower complaint against “nonprofit” ALEC for its lobbying of legislatures nationwide to promote its corporate-interest-serving “model legislation.” Walmart was very involved in helping promote corporate-feeding ALEC legislation, including anti-union legislation, and education and prison privatization legislation.

I began to learn what Walmart owners, the Walton family, really value– and it isn’t their workers, or the workers of vendors with which Walmart conducted business.

I learned that Walmart did business with Arizona-owned and prison-labor-run Martori Farms– a company with a reputation for abusing its female prison workers. (Walmart was active in ALEC when ALEC promoted its Prison Industries Act in statehouses across the nation, a piece…

This article in Jacobin magazine describes the astonishing victory of the Massachusetts Teachers Association in a recent confrontation with the state board of education and the state commissioner. The state commissioner floated a proposal to remove teachers’ licenses if they failed their evaluation, a draconian step that would bar the teacher from teaching in the state in the future. The MTA, under the leadership of recently elected president Barbara Madeloni, informed its members, mobilized the membership, and refused to negotiate this draconian and punitive plan. The MTA did not want a seat at the table; they knew the members were on the menu.

It was not always this way. Not long ago, the union negotiated with the anti-union “reform” group called Stand for Children and bargained away some of their rights to avoid something worse. They dared not be militant.

This time, the teachers of Massachusetts under bold leadership were…

Clarice Berry, president of the Chicago Principals Association, told a hearing of the City Council Education Committee that she was “terrified” of what would happen when the snows began, given the general disorder and incompetence associated with privatization of custodial services in the public schools. The city administration awarded a $340 million contract to Aramark, which proceeded to lay off numerous custodians.

“Let’s talk about staffing. That is horrific. A school with 900 kids with one custodian in the daytime? We have to collect breakfast. I’ve got assistant principals who are emptying garbage. I ‘ve got all kinds of situations. You cannot run a school with 900, 1,000 or 1,300 kids with one custodian in the morning and one at night. Just last week, we were told some of custodial issues will be taken care of. However, going from one custodian to two or from one to 1.5 is not…

Myra Blackmon, who writes for the Athens (Georgia) Banner, poses a question. What if Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, came up with an idea for a drug? Would we skip clinical trials and the FDA? Would we just dispense because he said so?

That’s what Bill Gates is doing to our children, she writes, and we shouldn’t stand for it.

But that is exactly what Bill Gates, another megabillionaire, has done with education. Gates is rich, he has purchased his bully pulpit and we are swallowing his “brilliance” hook, line and sinker.
Just because he has made a lot of money. Just because he is smart. Gates is suddenly the education expert, advising the president and secretary of education on what is “best” for America’s children. He funds the development and promotion of his idea of “good” education practice.
He has never taught nor…

In Milton Friedman’s world, profits are god—more important than an end to poverty, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To Milton Friedman thinking, the only way to end poverty is for the top 1% to earn more than the bottom 99%, and to see that those earnings for the 1% continue to increase while the net worth of the 99% continues to shrink.

And here’s a perfect example of how this thinking works: The Hunger Games franchise.

The latest Hunger Games film, Mockingjay  – Part 1,  came out on November 21, and the next day, Saturday, I read a major media financial news piece about  how this film was a loser, because it didn’t earn more money its first weekend than the previous Hunger Games film, Catching Fire.  Before I reached the end of this piece, it mentioned how the stock prices had dropped for the production…

Dear Parents of Rochester, New York:

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) and the New York State Board of Regents have approved a charter school to be opened in your community in September 2015: The Greater Works Charter School (GWCS).

GWCS lead applicant Ted J. Morris, Jr.– the man chiefly promoting the project– has been found multiple times over to be a fraud.

He lied about his high school graduation from Rochester’s School Without Walls.

He lied about graduating with a bachelors degree from Western Governors University.

He lied about attending and graduating with a masters and doctorate from Concordia University Chicago.

He lied about graduating with a doctorate from Grand Canyon University.

And watch here to see Morris lying in person on Rochester television.

In the Democrat and Chronicle, Morris described himself as being “too advanced” for the traditional classroom:

“I remember being in school and feeling I was…

A guest post by Dr. Denise Gordon                                  November 22, 2014

I write this short essay to disclose what is happening within my own science classroom, I write to expose the demeaning work environment that I and my fellow colleagues must endure, and I write to give purpose to my years of acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge in teaching science for the secondary student. I am not a failure; however, by the Texas STAAR standard assessment test, I am since this past year I had a 32% failure rate from my 8^th grade students in April, 2014. The year before, my students had an 82% passing rate.

What happened in one school year? It does not matter that 2/3 of the student population speaks Spanish in their home. It does not matter their reading capability could be on a 4^th grade level. It does not matter homework never…

Twenty five years ago, when charters were a brand-new idea, advocates said they would cost less and get better results than public schools. Now, however, charter schools are suing for equal funding. The Arizona appellate court just ruled that the state is not obliged to provide equal funding to charter schools and public schools.

The Education Law Center reports:

AZ COURT RULES STATE CAN FUND CHARTER SCHOOLS LOWER THAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

At the beginning of the charter school experiment, charter school advocates touted their ability to provide a superior education at a lower cost than traditional public schools. Now, we are seeing the charter lobby abandon that claim and turn to the courts to demand equal funding for charter schools. In Texas, charter school advocates recently lost their claim for equal funding. In New York, charter school advocates have sued for equal facilities funding. In a ruling that may have…

David Tyack and Larry Cuban, two of America’s most accomplished scholars in education, published the book “Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform” (1995) examining various efforts to reform American education and  explaining why schools tend to persist regardless of changes envisioned by reformers.  The book, arguably one of the best treatises on the subject in the past two decades, opens by noting how it is possible to portray American education as either evidence of progress or of regress depending almost entirely upon the motivations of the examiner:

Beliefs in progress or regress always convey a political message. Opinions about advance or decline in education reflect general confidence in American institutions.  Faith in the nation and its institutions was far higher in the aftermath of success in World War II than in the skeptical era of the Vietnam War and Watergate.  Expectations about education change, as do media…

In a new blog post Gene V. Glass, who, earlier this year with David Berliner published the excellent 50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools, recently posted, Are Charter Schools Greenhouses for Innovation and Creativity?  Glass declares: “The rationale for the charter school movement went something like this: ‘Public education is being crushed by bureaucratic regulation and strangled by teacher unions.  There is no room left for creative innovation; and tired, old traditional educators have run out of energy and ideas.  Let free choice reign!’ It sounded good, especially to people who were clueless about how schools actually run.  How have things actually worked out?  What new, revolutionary ideas have come out of the charter school movement that can teach us all about how to better educate the nation’s children?”  Glass describes the conclusion in his and Berliner’s new book: “that in our opinion the vast…