Saturday, March 29, 2014

Here it is. It was advertized on "ABC Family" today. This is what is going to happen to our public school students.



Here it is the future of public education. If a child doesn't make it into a charter school he or she can sit at home and peak in while hoping to wait for another lottery to actually have classmates.

When the public school infrastructure has finally failed due to lack of funding and investment, this is what will be left.

Education: A Chance for Every Child (click here)
 
Parents are responsible for the education of their children. We do not believe in a one size fits all approach to education and support providing broad education choices to parents and children at the State and local level. Maintaining American preeminence requires a world-class system of education, with high standards, in which all students can reach their potential. Today’s education reform movement calls for accountability at every stage of schooling. It affirms higher expectations for all students and rejects the crippling bigotry of low expectations. It recognizes the wisdom of State and local control of our schools, and it wisely sees consumer rights in educationchoice – as the most important driving force for renewing our schools.

Crippling bigotry of low expectations. Really? Minority parents don't love their children enough to expect them to achieve? I am sure the GOP will get them straightened out, huh? Learn to standard or go to reform school. Right? "We'll make 'em learn." Nothing like being incarcerated all your life.

Education is much more than schooling. It is the whole range of activities by which families and communities transmit to a younger generation, not just knowledge and skills, but ethical and behavioral norms and traditions. It is the handing over of a personal and cultural identity. That is why education choice has expanded so vigorously. It is also why American education has, for the last several decades, been the focus of constant controversy, as centralizing forces outside the family and community have sought to remake education in order to remake America. They have not succeeded, but they have done immense damage.

Personal and cultural identity. Really? Education by computer is going to supply all that. Wow. How convenient. Evangelism by profiteers.


Source:
Diatribune and Daily Kos, March, 30, 2007
Title: “Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From NCLB”
Author: Mandevilla

Researchers: Alan Scher and Sam Burchard
Faculty Evaluator: Karen Grady, PhD

The architect of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), President Bush’s first senior education advisor, Sandy Kress, has turned the program, which has consistently proven disastrous in the realm of education, into a huge success in the realm of corporate profiteering. After ushering NCLB through the US House of Representatives in 2001 with no public hearings, Kress went from lawmaker—turning on spigots of federal funds—to lobbyist, tapping into those billions of dollars in federal funds for private investors well connected to the Bush administration.

A statute that once promised equal access to public education to millions of American children now instead promises billions of dollars in profits to corporate clients through dubious processes of testing and assessment and “supplemental educational services.” NCLB—the Business Roundtable’s revision of Lyndon Johnson’s Education and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—created a “high stakes testing” system through which the private sector could siphon federal education funds. The result has been windfall corporate profit. What was once a cottage industry has become a corporate giant. “Millions of dollars are being spent,” says Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy, “and nobody knows what’s happening.”

The wedding of big business and education benefits not only the interests of the Business Roundtable, a consortium of over 300 CEOs, but countless Bush family loyalists. Sandy Kress, chief architect of NCLB; Harold McGraw III, textbook publisher; Bill Bennett, former Reagan education secretary; and Neil Bush, the president’s youngest brother, have all cashed in on the Roundtable’s successful national implementation of “outcome-based education.” NCLB’s mandated system of state standards, state tests, and school sanctions has together transformed our public school system into a for-profit frenzy....

Earth Hour (click here)

8:30 PM - 9:30 PM
 

Chicagoans (click here) are being urged to power down tonight in honor of Earth Hour, called one of the largest global environmental events.
Earth Hour calls on residents, businesses and governments to switch off non-essential lights and other electronic items for an hour beginning at 8:30 p.m. Saturday to raise awareness about climate change.
This year Chicago has been named the 2014 U.S. Earth Hour City Capital by the event's organizing group, the World Wildlife Fund. Chicago will receive a $30,000 grant from the conservation organization to kick-start a solar purchase program for residents, according to the WWF website....