The War On Teachers

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby slomo » Sat Dec 05, 2015 1:29 pm

Due to an intensification of automation, technology, etc., I think that capitalism has advanced beyond that and it’s not the case that quantitatively more and more workers are functional and useful for profit accumulation, for the system. We’ve reached a point where we’ve out-produced ourselves, where productivity has increased so that simply not as many workers are needed. From the cold logic of capitalist accumulation, this increasingly youthful, educated group is kind of just surplus, they are more of a management and political stability problems — which we see inklings of in the Arab spring, or occupy movements, or London, or Greece, where there are huge levels of youth under-employment, or here where people with massive student debt are working for minimum wage at Starbucks.


Not sure if this is the right thread, but this passage made me think of this white paper: THE FUTURE OF EMPLOYMENT: HOW SUSCEPTIBLE ARE JOBS TO COMPUTERISATION?

Abstract
We examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, we examine expected impacts of future computerisation on US labour market outcomes, with the primary objective of analysing the number of jobs at risk and the relationship between an occupation’s probability of computerisation, wages and educational attainment. According to our estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. We further provide evidence that wages and educational attainment exhibit a strong negative relationship with an occupation’s probability of computerisation.
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Apr 02, 2018 9:50 pm

Look at that, three years no post.

Teachers struck and won their demands in West Virginia and are now on strike in Oklahoma and Kentucky. Arizona may be next. We're talking tens of thousands involved in the organizing, ready to risk everything, desperate enough, angry enough.

(I do not need to note how much coverage this is getting from corporate media and the social media repeater brigades. I expect it might if a "Russian bot" should post a link in support of the teachers.)
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Sun May 13, 2018 3:57 pm

Moving on to post-grad ed for a moment, a good read and a reminder of someting worthwhile we still have in many pockets in the U.S., and of the corporate horrorshow to which it has been heading for many years, which apparently already prevails in the UK. Embedded links in the original.



https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/cis ... sob-story/

lareviewofbooks.org
Cisco and Microsoft — Their Part in My Downfall; or, the Lost Ethics of Higher Ed; or, Maybe, a Sob Story
MAY 10, 2018


I SPENT MUCH of last fall worrying how to put pound notes in my wallet.

Because I live most of the year in the United Kingdom, I must deal with the fact that an unelected, uneducated, uninviting, and undistinguished monarch is on one side of the currency. So I try to look exclusively at the obverse of pound notes, which represents people who are prominent for what they did, rather than who their papas were. (Jane Austen, for instance, is on the tenner.)

Ordering currency in a billfold became especially complex recently. From 2001 through 2016, the five-pound note featured the 19th-century social reformer Elizabeth Fry. But she was replaced by arch-imperialist and staunch 1930s fan of Hitler and Mussolini, Winston Churchill. I don’t want that person staring up at me each time I open my wallet, any more than the unelected, uneducated, et cetera person.

Plus, the new five-pound note initially contained tallow, which led to protests by animal-rights activists. Thankfully, the Bank of England caved in quickly, consenting to return to vegan currency.

But then things got even more complicated in terms of money in my pocket.

Already locked in an oleaginous divorce, I was removed as director of the Institute in London where I worked.

Losing jobs has happened to most of us — whether as short-order blue-collar chefs or short-order national-security chiefs. We are used to being told how many times we must retrain in our lives, that secure employment no longer exists, and so on.

But it hadn’t happened to me since late 1987, just after “Black Monday” on the Stock Exchange.

A new head of sociology, who had been on leave during my year there, got up at a farewell lunch for someone in a vaguely fancy restaurant. Announcing that she would be a more humane chair than the norm, she then asked where I was; looked across to me among the 30 gathered; and offered as a peroration of her speech to the multitude, “Oh, and Toby, we’re not renewing your contract.” These were the first and last words she spoke to me. An anti-abortion health sociologist with a minor in occupational prestige and theories of scapegoating, she was later revealed to be the beneficiary of large sums of money from a bordello.

But I digress.

Back to the fall of 2017, and getting 86’d as director. My sacking took the initial form of a three-line Decanal email proposing that I “step down.” No reason was given. I had not received any formal or informal evaluation of my work over the two and a half years of my time there.

The dean provided some detail of the poverty of my performance three weeks later, during a meeting I asked for with him and the president of our union local.

I was described in person as “woefully inadequate.”

I’ve been looking for antonyms of “woefully.” I can’t find any. Not really. Once that adverb’s been applied, you’re shit out of luck finding a binary opposite.

This dean — the man who by contrast with me is ipso facto superordinately adequate — leveled the following charges (an advisory: please be seated when reading this):

Refusing to use Cisco’s Jabber
Abjuring Microsoft’s Outlook
Declining a free cell phone, tablet, and laptop from the university
And not attending sufficient meetings
As the dean enumerated this extraordinary set of failings, he warmed to his task — leaning ever further forward, as if sharing gossip with a group of intimates or inmates. Encouraged, no doubt, by a sense of rightness and righteousness, the faithful apparatchik’s eyes lit up like a chap embarked on a quest with like-minded souls.

But the union president reacted bug-eyed to this list of incompetence. He couldn’t believe it. And when I suggested that these things were distortions or, just possibly, completely fucking unimportant, and anyway that my boss hadn’t bothered to communicate such matters to me beforehand, or indeed breathed a word of criticism, we settled on the need for a professional development review of my work by the superordinately adequate one (something that should have been done annually).

The dean clarified that he wanted me out no matter what, insisting that must be the outcome. But presumably he realized that his superordinate adequacy had not accounted for a little zinger known as “due process.”

The dean then described me as “exceptional” in representing the interests of the Institute internally, and the school externally.

But I was “not a team player.” As a consequence, the entirety of senior management, plus anonymous faculty members, wanted me gone.

I figured the professional development review would either be an opportunity to set targets for overcoming my manifold, manifest deficiencies, or an exit interview. Either way, the school would rid itself of me as director, sooner or later.

I had a little while to decide what to do.

It seemed likely that I’d remain “woefully inadequate” in the eyes of the big man on campus (cf. the dude at Ohio State who directs the tuba players at football games, marching in a quasi-military outfit).

When added to the detritus of my break-up, the denunciations convinced me not to struggle on.

My resilience was lacking and I was not entirely supported by colleagues (who were the anonymous faculty, and what had they said?). A bloc had been broken; a formation was quickly falling apart.

I went to the meeting with the dean, this time alone, in January, having filled out the form that was a required prelude to my review. He wanted me to step aside immediately and be replaced on an acting basis by a company man. I dissuaded him of this, while consenting to depart in mid-March.

The figure who typifies me as “woefully inadequate” still hasn’t completed his part of the form-filling at the time of this writing: mid-April, three months after the review meeting.

I guess that once you’ve come up with the perfect, antonym-free denunciation, trying to improve on it might make a chap appear, you know, inadequate by contrast.

Now I’m on what the British call “gardening leave.” An offer is on the table for me to return in 2019 as a jobbing prof. But not as director.

What is the underlying political economy and culture of this story — assuming you accept that Cisco, Microsoft, and various phone, laptop, and tablet manufacturers and marketers did not conspire to bring me down in revenge for my heartless rejection of their services, and you consent to move beyond the discourse of Decanal denunciation?

Here’s the scoop.

British citizens had basically enjoyed a free ride through undergrad from the 1960s to the 1990s. (This remains the case for the Scots.) Then fees were introduced. Since that time, colleges have come to embrace the idea of students as customers and other universities as competitors. They seek to attract as many international students as possible, who pay double what locals do (“international” currently means “outside the European Union” — think “out of state tuition”). Although that implies folks from the rest of the world, it refers to Chinese citizens more than anybody else.

There’s considerable debate about how many Chinese nationals are studying in Britain. Some put the number at 90,000; the government says 95,000. In 2015, the Chinese embassy told me the figure was 150,000. By comparison, there are 100,000 international students in the United Kingdom from the United States, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Thailand combined. (Last year, the official number of Chinese students in the States was 350,000. In Canada, it’s over 120,000.)

In Australia, where the Chinese student stat is in-between Britain and the United States, there’s a moral panic that they’re spies for the Party and state.

Closer to home, we see controversy over the dozens of Confucius Institutes that have appeared across US colleges since 2005. The American Association of University Professors is worried about the role of the Politburo and the state in these alleged Trojan horses, to the point where the Institutes are said to “ignore academic freedom,” despite being located on liberal campuses.

When I speak to colleagues from the PRC and Hong Kong, they tell me spying does indeed go on in their classes.

Hong Kong schools increasingly rely on money from mainlanders coming to study, some of whom describe the ideological tenor of lectures to their Party handlers. One department chair I know says to his class each semester: “I realize you’re going to be reporting on me to the Party. I only ask that you do so accurately.”

The Chinese situation is not unprecedented. We recall that leftist academics across the United States were subject to intelligence evaluation by clandestine informants during the Cold War; while on the other side of politics, CIA-sponsored scholars proliferated among the professoriate. Today, colleges gleefully spy on students appropriating copyrighted material, and school pupils’ internet use is subject to intense corporate surveillance.

Back in Britain, 007-like or not, many Chinese students arrive in the boonies. Finding little of interest in places laden with white cloning, insular monolingualism, and active xenophobia, they take off for the Big Smoke. Cue these colleges doing the same — establishing satellite campuses in London to grab a piece of the action. Hence our Institute.

We just teach grad school. This year, approximately 90 of our 92 MA students were from the PRC.

And do we have a deal on offer!

An MA for 17,500 pounds (about $25,000)! Just 10 short weeks of tuition (that’s right)! When students arrive, they get ranked as gold, silver, or bronze in terms of employability! And among their first classes — a forced collective internship where they can do research for a corporation looking (just possibly) to sell things in their country! Best of all — they don’t need a relevant first degree.

Wait a minute. “They don’t need a relevant first degree?”

Again, I hope you were sitting comfortably as you read that.

Here’s the deal. The university’s regulations state that graduate admission is decided by the faculty. But that doesn’t happen in the case of a “postgraduate taught programme” (gobbledygook for a terminal MA). This is where they make a lot of loot. And other than in a few cases, at my school, bureaucrats determine these admissions, based on targets they are expecting/expected to meet.

I asked around about this among friends in my field, and found it was pretty much the norm elsewhere. Nobody liked it; everyone thought it was improper; they all objected — and eventually went along with it. Like me, they were ultimately complicit. Cue Lucky Jim. (Cue also legacy admissions in the US, of course.)

The result? Extremely pleasant and interesting grad students arrive, virtually none of whom can write English using conventional syntax or grammar, and who lack familiarity with democracy, postcolonialism, liberalism, queer theory, scholarly research and writing, justice, human rights, and a few other funky things we favor.

These folks have been launched into a place where most of the faculty (who hailed from Korea, Colombia, Ireland, and Turkey, inter alia) were used to studying, teaching, and publishing in second languages — but unused to teaching students without significant experience of liberal education, civil rights, the third sector, or political participation.

In US terms, we are profoundly multicultural — and profoundly ignorant of the desires of our customers/clients/paymasters, the actual existing student body. Our very international and cross-cultural graduate curriculum is not devised for people who have trouble with the language and ideology of instruction, and minimally relevant undergraduate preparation.

As I indicated above, these are nice, smart students, from whom I have learned quite a lot.

But I’m not sure I’ve taught them much. Why? Because I operate as I have done while teaching in Mexico, Chile, Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombia, Iceland, Norway, Brazil, Sweden, Australia, India, Peru, Ireland, France, and the United States — whether the students are local or foreign.

It is tough when, for example, the folks in front of you have never heard of any major political figure, economic trend, intellectual tendency, artistic format, social movement, sports team, religion, political party, architectural trend, literary theory, or popular genre beyond their own country prior to, say, 2016. And can’t easily understand what you say or what is in the readings. In graduate seminars of over 70 people.

In search of help, I spoke to PRC intellectuals I knew. I was aware of the politically awkward nature of my impressions (albeit that some were shared by colleagues from the Global South). And that I was getting paid thanks to people whose credentials for study I doubted.

My Chinese friends and colleagues told me three things:

The only way to urge liberal education, political economy, non-corporate knowledge, or cultural studies onto these folks is to build such norms into mandatory assessment
Regardless, the game is up. Top students now know that a UK degree isn’t worth the 3,500 tallow-laden, Churchillian fivers that pay for it, due to lax admission and language policies and the insular nature of monolingual British academics. As a consequence, alums from top schools in China are increasingly heading to Canada and the United States for graduate study
And yes, what I profit from is corrupt
Hmm.

I aired my concerns about these matters on campus — often, and frequently in a febrile manner.

So that is partly what got me nixed.

I think there was something else.

I kept acting as if I were still in the United States.

When I left Britain in 1978, my prevailing experience of the country could best be represented by a hand raised as a stop sign. You were supposed to behave, dammit.

That hasn’t changed, though something is different about it.

The Brits got both sides of the neoliberal memo — redistribute income upward, as part of public proclamations of individual economic freedom operating under the invisible sign of socialism for corporations; and continue to regulate ordinary conduct and self-expression to the max.

Plus a creepy Orwellian doublespeak emerged in universities, derived from the mimetic managerial fallacy. That fallacy imagines corporations to be worthy and emulable models for public institutions. It has an entirely mad and maddening vocabulary of capitalist organizational clichés: check and challenge, light touch, sector norm, business-like, enterprise, world-leading, partnering, knowledge transfer, student-facing, create impact, metrics, thought leader, comfortable with, best practice, relaxed about, maker place, hot desking, work-ready graduates, start-ups, our community, industry-centered problem-solving, I am the lead on x, agree a catch-up, industry-facing, this is the available spend, schedule a one-on-one — student experience; on, and on, and on, ad infinitum.

Such language conceals a powerful drive toward central control of everything. Students have commercial rights — but put away that cell phone! Students are customers — but lock the doors if they dare to arrive late! Students are sovereign — but punish them if they speak “privately” in class. Students are consumers — but take attendance and require them to download an application that monitors their movements.

You get the point, and a similar infantilizing discourse applies to the profs.

A while after I started the job in Britain, a guy I knew from the principal campus of my school, the one in the boonies, popped in for lunch. He had just spent his first months as dean at a big state school in the United States after 25 years at superordinately adequate U in Britain. The president of his college had said, “Stop pestering me by asking whether you can do something. Just go ahead and do it. If it doesn’t work, then come see me.”

In addition to trying things out without asking form-filling, non-publishing nothings, noodges, and nobodies, I’d left the United States assuming faculty democracy as a right, with curriculum and research autonomy part of professional sovereignty.

That wasn’t really the case in London. The idea was to do what daddy state and mommy company asked for — and do it, you know, really quickly and well! Then you might get an elephant stamp in your penmanship book. Maybe even a gold star.

I didn’t want a gold star. Or an elephant stamp.

So I think that’s another reason why I got 86’d. Along with software, hardware, and attendance issues, I had called out instrumentalism and wrongly presumed faculty democracy.

But there is good news: two friends who read this gave me passing grades. One called it “blessedly sufficient”; the other, “adequately extraordinary.” Maybe there are antonyms to “woefully inadequate” after all.

¤

Toby Miller lives in London and Barranquilla. His most recent books are Greenwashing Culture, Greenwashing Sport, Global Media Studies, Greening the Media, and Blow Up the Humanities.

¤

Banner Image: “Lucky Jim, Amis,” Loyola University Chicago Digital Special Collections, http://www.lib.luc.edu/specialcollectio ... /show/1156.

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Oct 27, 2018 5:54 pm

What a non-surprise.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/styl ... hools.html

The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected

America’s public schools are still touting devices with screens — even offering digital-only preschools. The rich are banning screens from class altogether.

By Nellie Bowles
Oct. 26, 2018


The parents in Overland Park, Kan., were fed up. They wanted their children off screens, but they needed strength in numbers. First, because no one wants their kid to be the lone weird one without a phone. And second, because taking the phone away from a middle schooler is actually very, very tough.

“We start the meetings by saying, ‘This is hard, we’re in a new frontier, but who is going to help us?’” said Krista Boan, who is leading a Kansas City-based program called START, which stands for Stand Together And Rethink Technology. “We can’t call our moms about this one.”

For the last six months, at night in school libraries across Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., about 150 parents have been meeting to talk about one thing: how to get their kids off screens.

It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide. Schools ask students to do homework online, while only about two-thirds of people in the U.S. have broadband internet service. But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.

This is already playing out. Throwback play-based preschools are trending in affluent neighborhoods — but Utah has been rolling out a state-funded online-only preschool, now serving around ten thousand children. Organizers announced the screen-based preschool effort will expand in 2019 with a federal grant to Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho and Montana.

Lower-income teens spend an average of eight hours and seven minutes a day using screens for entertainment, while higher income peers spend five hours and 42 minutes, according to research by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit media watchdog. (This study counted each screen separately, so a child texting on a phone and watching TV for one hour counted as two hours of screens being used.) Two studies that look at race have found that white children are exposed to screens significantly less than African-American and Hispanic children.

And parents say there is a growing technological divide between public and private schools even in the same community. While the private Waldorf School of the Peninsula, popular with Silicon Valley executives, eschews most screens, the nearby public Hillview Middle School advertises its 1:1 iPad program.

The psychologist Richard Freed, who wrote a book about the dangers of screen-time for kids and how to connect them back to real world experiences, divides his time between speaking before packed rooms in Silicon Valley and his clinical practice with low-income families in the far East Bay, where he is often the first one to tell parents that limiting screen-time might help with attention and behavior issues.

“I go from speaking to a group in Palo Alto who have read my book to Antioch, where I am the first person to mention any of these risks,” Dr. Freed said.

He worries especially about how the psychologists who work for these companies make the tools phenomenally addictive, as many are well-versed in the field of persuasive design (or how to influence human behavior through the screen). Examples: YouTube next video autoplays; the slot machine-like pleasure of refreshing Instagram for likes; Snapchat streaks.

“The digital divide was about access to technology, and now that everyone has access, the new digital divide is limiting access to technology,” said Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine.

Technology Is a Huge Social Experiment on Children
Some parents, pediatricians and teachers around the country are pushing back.

“These companies lied to the schools, and they’re lying to the parents,” said Natasha Burgert, a pediatrician in Kansas City. “We’re all getting duped.”

“Our kids, my kids included, we are subjecting them to one of the biggest social experiments we have seen in a long time,” she said. “What happens to my daughter if she can’t communicate over dinner — how is she going to find a spouse? How is she going to interview for a job?”

“I have families now that go teetotal,” Dr. Burgert said. “They’re like, ‘That’s it, we’re done.’”

One of those families is the Brownsbergers, which had long banned smartphones but recently also banned the internet-connected television.

“We took it down, we took the TV off the wall, and I canceled cable,” said Rachael Brownsberger, 34, the mother of 11- and eight-year old boys. “As crazy as that sounds!”

She and her husband, who runs a decorative concrete company, keep their children away from cellphones but found that even a little exposure to screen time changed the boys’ behavior. Her older son, who has A.D.H.D., would get angry when the screen had to be turned off, she said, which worried her.

His Christmas wish list was a Wii, a PlayStation, a Nintendo, a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

“And I told him, ‘Kiddo, you’re not gonna get one of those things,’” Ms. Brownsberger said. “Yeah, I’m the mean mom.”

But one thing has made it easier: Others in what she described as a rural neighborhood outside Kansas City are doing the same thing.

“It takes a community to support this,” she said. “Like I was just talking to my neighbor last night — ‘Am I the worst mom ever?’”

Ms. Boan has three pilots running with about 40 parents in each, looking at best practices for getting kids off phones and screens. Overland Park’s Chamber of Commerce is supporting the work, and the city is working to incorporate elements of digital wellness into its new strategic vision.

“The city planner and the chamber of commerce said to us, ‘We’ve seen this impact our city,’” Ms. Boan said. “We all want our kids to be independent, self-regulated device users, but we have to equip them.”

The Privilege of Choices
In Silicon Valley, some feel anxious about the growing class divide they see around screen-time.

Kirstin Stecher and her husband, who works as an engineer at Facebook, are raising their kids almost completely screen-free.

“Is this coming from a place of information — like, we know a lot about these screens,” she said. “Or is it coming from a place of privilege, that we don’t need them as badly?”

“There’s a message out there that your child is going to be crippled and in a different dimension if they’re not on the screen,” said Pierre Laurent, a former Microsoft and Intel executive now on the board of trustees at Silicon Valley’s Waldorf School. “That message doesn’t play as well in this part of the world.”

“People in this region of the world understand that the real thing is everything that’s happening around big data, AI, and that is not something that you’re going to be particularly good at because you have a cellphone in fourth grade,” Mr. Laurent said.

As those working to build products become more wary, the business of getting screens in front of kids is booming. Apple and Google compete ferociously to get products into schools and target students at an early age, when brand loyalty begins to form.

Google published a case study of its work with the Hoover City, Ala., school district, saying technology equips students “with skills of the future.”

The concluded that its own Chromebooks and Google tools changed lives: “The district leaders believe in preparing students for success by teaching them the skills, knowledge, and behaviors they need to become responsible citizens in the global community.”

Dr. Freed, though, argues these tools are too relied upon in schools for low-income children. And he sees the divide every day as he meets tech-addicted children of middle and low-income families.

“For a lot of kids in Antioch, those schools don’t have the resources for extracurricular activities, and their parents can’t afford nannies,” Dr. Freed said. He said the knowledge gap around tech’s danger is enormous.

Dr. Freed and 200 other psychologists petitioned the American Psychological Association in August to formally condemn the work psychologists are doing with persuasive design for tech platforms that are designed for children.

“Once it sinks its teeth into these kids, it’s really hard,” Dr. Freed said.

Nellie Bowles covers tech and internet culture. Follow her on Twitter: @nelliebowles

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Jan 09, 2019 2:29 am

Bizarre to see such a perceptive, educated view on the rising childhood surveillance industry coming from the chief executive of California, who apparently made no public issue of it and did nothing to reverse it, only says he slowed it down. Contrast to thing he said earlier at the start of this excerpt.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... iew-223757


Jerry Brown’s Midnight in America

California’s governor leaves a rich and complex legacy. But in our interview, he seemed much more concerned about the future of the planet than with writing his political epitaph.

By JOHN F. HARRIS

January 06, 2019

Brown: [...]There are a lot of issues. But the big ones are hard to keep focused, right? You don’t go to Iowa and say, “Now, let’s talk about annihilation.” You wouldn’t talk about climate change. That’s probably going to be a big deal. But you got to make it a big deal.

[...]

Google and Apple and Facebook could do no wrong, and now people in the European Union and Washington, they’re actively starting to attack them. This seems to be part of the distraction of modern society. And there are problems. And I would say the totalitarian capacity is being built up every day and being pushed by the liberals as much as the conservatives.

Harris: What’s an example of that being pushed by the liberals?

Brown: An example would be measuring each individual child from preschool to beyond college, and keeping those as permanent records in the computer, that would measure discipline and mental attributes. Just the general centralization of information, which is being billed as the way to help the poor but which will enable an authoritarian to totally monopolize and control the society.

In fact, we have something called “Cal-PASS,” a state computer, which I kept in check. And I think now it’ll be full throttle to collect as much possible data and measure people in all sorts of ways. I think it’s dangerous. I don’t think it’s very useful, except for academics who have to write theses and do research. We had one on the teachers, which we stopped.

See, the trouble is the computer can collect a lot of information and regurgitate it in many different ways, and people are fascinated by that. Controlling and measuring everything. … We’re all ranked. And who’s it for? Now, if it’s for the academics, they’re relatively harmless. But then it’s going to ultimately be used, at some point, and it has kind of a smell of eugenics, that we want to purify this kind of motley race called human beings and if we can measure all the different attributes, we can then make normative the right path and the right way to be. I think that is the absence of diversity and the absence of freedom.

I would just say, spoken in a somewhat abstract level—it’s not just me who says that. I mean, there are political theorists who notice that the welfare state and the warfare state work hand in hand. They both want to see more power. They want more engineering of things. And, in many ways, that’s mass society, that’s an inevitable trend. But we do need to—we, the government—so that it can function is guard against that. And some of these big issues are not thought about.

Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna contributed research.


Different story with Newsom, meanwhile, and Pritzker in Illinois, as covered in this very interesting blog I've discovered.


New Governors Pritzker and Newsom Set Up For Their ReadyNation Gold Rush

This past week will go down as an auspicious one for social impact investors and a foreboding one for the targets of their interventions: toddlers, job seekers, the unhoused, and those with mental illness. On November 1, 2018 corporate executives, military officers, athletes, and faith leaders converged on New York City to discuss the impending transformation of early childhood into a global investment market. Five days later JB Pritzker became the Democratic governor of Illinois, and former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom became the Democratic governor of California.

JB Pritzker: Impact Investor As Governor

JB Pritkzer, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt family fortune and backer of the first two early childhood social impact bonds in the US, was not on the recent ReadyNation conference program in New York City as he was in the final push of his campaign to oust Republican Bruce Rauner from the Governorship of Illinois. For over a decade, Pritzker’s Children’s Initiative has financed the work of ReadyNation’s Robert Dugger and University of Chicago Economist James Heckman.

Pritzker money paid for the creation of the Heckman Equation, a tool kit promising a 7-10% annual rate of return to investors in early childhood education, up to 13% if health factors were built into the intervention. The tool kit targets very young children ages 0 to 3, identifying “success” metrics for character training, which were felt to have more potential for “growth” than cognitive achievement or IQ. Heckman and a cadre of researchers have since plowed considerable resources into devising tools, many digital, that supposedly measure social-emotional competencies, particularly Big Five “OCEAN” character traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Pritzker and Heckman made the rounds, promoting outcomes-based pre-k impact investing to community foundations and institutional investors for quite a few years. In October the complicit NEA (National Education Association) spoke positively of Pritzker’s 5-point, two-generation early childhood education plan, which would allocate $95 million for pre-k expansion in the first year alone. The Annie E. Casey Foundation of Baltimore has been advancing this “two-generation” approach, which hinges on the adoption of vastly expanded integrated data systems.

Interoperable data is a priority for impact investors, because they expect to track impact metrics across multiple interventions to claim “credit” for ALL possible outcomes so they can extract as much profit as possible. It is fitting that the Casey Foundation would be a prominent voice advancing data-interoperability given their funding and organizational leadership are tied to UPS (United Parcel Service), pioneers in real-time tracking.

In 2015, The Pritzker Foundation donated $10 million to the University of Chicago to develop five Urban Data Labs addressing education, crime, poverty, health and the environment. The state of Illinois also recently created a taskforce to investigate Blockchain platform government. Last year they announced a pilot program to put birth certificates on Blockchain in partnership with Utah-based Evernym. Combining digital identity systems with public service delivery may be exactly the infrastructure needed to finally scale privatization of public services via outcomes-based contracts.

The Urban Lab Initiative at the University of Chicago is one of six data labs coordinated out of New York University’s GovLab. The other five are located in Providence, RI; Philadelphia, PA; Los Angeles, CA; Olympia, WA; and London, UK. Below is a screen shot of an expansive data lab network, which includes select funders and social impact bond projects. Due to the scale it is best to view it on the Little Sis website here. We would do well to keep close tabs on the Pritzker administration’s activities in the social sector. [...]

Continue here with all the links and images
https://wrenchinthegears.com/2018/11/11 ... gold-rush/


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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Jan 13, 2019 2:16 pm

.

"The state, which had provided half the university’s budget in the 1970s, was now covering only 17 percent of it."

That's the story of the article below. Everything else follows. It comes in the 12th paragraph, after much else that is subsidiary has been set up to create an air of inevitability: "The state, which had provided half the university’s budget in the 1970s, was now covering only 17 percent of it." (Two words are key: Scott Walker.)

Other well-known shifts in population (getting older, moving elsewhere) and economics (majority getting poorer) are of course important, but the bottom line is that they would be less damaging if the state were still covering 50 percent of the budget.

The rest of the described horror, the dismantling and denigration of the one thing that probably was true about American exceptionalism -- the world's best university system -- consists in attempts by a careerist university administration that lacks any vision to adapt to this intentional suffocation.

So there they go. Stuck in rural WI, they can't go the Academic Hollywood route. Like many universities now in this situation, they begin to abolish the liberal arts and repurpose as a vocational school ("STEMtm") in all but name, and pretend this will suffice to restore the sagging enrollment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/12/us/r ... aving.html

www.nytimes.com

Students in Rural America Ask, ‘What Is a University Without a History Major?’

The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, facing declining enrollment and revenue, is weighing major changes to its degree programs.

STEVENS POINT, Wis. — Chancellor Bernie Patterson’s message to his campus was blunt: To remain solvent and relevant, his 125-year-old university needed to reinvent itself.

Some longstanding liberal arts degrees, including those in history, French and German, would be eliminated. Career-focused programs would become a key investment. Tenured faculty members could lose their jobs. The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Dr. Patterson explained in a memo, could “no longer be all things to all people.”

Dr. Patterson’s plan came as Stevens Point and many other public universities in rural America face a crisis. Such colleges have served as anchors for their regions, educating generations of residents.

Now student enrollment has plummeted, money from states has dropped and demographic trends promise even worse days ahead.

Universities like Stevens Point are experiencing the opposite of what is happening at some of the nation’s most selective schools, like Harvard, Northwestern and the University of California, Berkeley, where floods of applications have led to overwhelming numbers of rejected students.

But critics say that in trying to carve out a sustainable path for Stevens Point — and build a model for other struggling, regionally focused universities — administrators are risking the very essence of a four-year college experience.

“Part of the fear is, is this an attempt to really kind of radically change the identity of this institution?” asked Jennifer Collins, a political-science professor, who wondered aloud whether Stevens Point would become a “pre-professional, more polytechnic type of university.”

Kim Mueller, 21, a senior who hopes to become a history teacher at a Wisconsin high school, said her first reaction to the proposal was: “What is a university without a history major?”

Nestled in a city of 26,000 residents in the middle of the state, Stevens Point has seen its fortunes rise and fall with its region. Founded more than a century ago to train teachers, and distinguished by Old Main, an 1894 building with a famous cupola that overlooks the campus, the college grew as people moved to the area’s paper mills and farms.

The college became a pathway to the middle class, a respected place to get a bachelor’s degree without spending too much money or moving too far from home. By the 1970s, it had strengthened its liberal arts programs and joined the state university system.

But in recent decades, troubling signs cropped up. Young families left rural Wisconsin for Madison and Milwaukee, which had their own University of Wisconsin campuses. Fewer students graduated from high school in the area around Stevens Point, including a 14 percent drop in its home county from 2012 to 2016. And under former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican whose term ended Monday, state funding declined and a mandatory tuition freeze made it hard for the college to make up the difference.

By last spring, the university, which has about 7,700 students, was looking at a two-year deficit of about $4.5 million. The state, which had provided half the university’s budget in the 1970s, was now covering only 17 percent of it.

“Sometimes, I liken it to climate change,” said Greg Summers, the provost, who helped come up with the plan to remake Stevens Point. “The higher-ed climate has changed profoundly and it’s not going back to the old normal.”

The turmoil is not unique to Stevens Point, where nearly half the students are the first generation in their family to attend college. In large parts of the Midwest and Northeast, public universities far from urban centers are hurting for students and money. And they are facing painful choices.

Almost four hours from Chicago, Western Illinois University eliminated dozens of vacant faculty positions last year and announced it would lay off 24 professors, including some with tenure.

In Maine, the state university system folded a small campus into its flagship and merged some functions at two other remote campuses.

And in Vermont, where state funding for higher education is among the lowest in the country, officials consolidated two small public colleges into a single university to try to save about $2 million a year.

“We tried to look ahead and take action before we were not able to help ourselves,” said Jeb Spaulding, the chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges System, whose colleges are also pushing apprenticeship and nondegree programs in hopes of attracting more students.

The locations of college campuses can be a reflection of a bygone America. Most universities were founded generations ago, when rural communities were thriving and when traveling across a state to a larger urban campus was more complicated. As people moved toward cities and the Sun Belt, and as cars and planes connected the country, many rural universities have fallen on hard times.

“There is and ought to be a bit of a scramble to redefine and resituate themselves,” said David Tandberg, a vice president for the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. “There’s nothing they can do about birthrates. That’s something they have no control about. So it’s opening up different markets and offering different services.”

The same trends that have led to cuts at rural public colleges, which often struggle but almost never close, have forced some private colleges out of business, including Dana College in Nebraska and St. Catharine College in Kentucky. Some historically black institutions, both public and private, have also faced financial and enrollment challenges. South Carolina State University fended off threats of closing in recent years and has struggled to recruit students to its rural campus. Wilberforce University, a private historically black institution in Ohio, has faced accreditation questions and budget deficits.

All the while, flagship public campuses in many states, including Wisconsin, have remained vibrant. Those universities often have much larger endowments and the ability to recruit high-performing students from across the country, insulating them somewhat from funding crises.

“Budget cuts will give the flagship university a cold and the regional public colleges pneumonia,” said Thomas Harnisch of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

At Stevens Point, where flashing signs announce the next hockey game and low-slung buildings sit near evergreens, administrators are trying to make up for increasingly elusive freshmen.

Greg Summers, the provost, said that by making hard decisions now and “doing fewer things better,” the university could find a more stable future.CreditTim Gruber for The New York Times

Their solutions: Recruit more midcareer adults to enroll in programs such as nursing. Promote majors such as business and education with clear career paths. And invest in teaching people specialties with local appeal — forestry or fisheries management — on a campus with a 280-acre nature conservancy that doubles as an outdoor laboratory for natural resources students.

In the coming months, after a final round of campus review, Dr. Patterson will present a list of proposed changes to the University of Wisconsin regents. Dr. Summers, the provost, said that by making hard decisions now and “doing fewer things better,” the university could find a more stable future.

The proposal was especially bitter for liberal arts professors, who have viewed their disciplines as the backbone of the college experience but now fear losing their jobs. Stevens Point administrators have winnowed an initial list of majors to eliminate (English and political science were among those spared), but some faculty members said they remained queasy, uncertain about what additional changes the future will bring.

“I’m afraid it’s done a great deal of damage to the university’s reputation with current high school students and current high school teachers,” said Lee Willis, the chairman of Stevens Point’s history department, who said there was already stiff competition for students with the University of Wisconsin’s other four-year campuses, five of which are within 115 miles of Stevens Point.

“The fear,” Dr. Willis said, “is that we’re going to get into a death spiral that we won’t be able to pull out of.”

Across the campus, where the mascot is the Pointer, a dog, and the school colors, purple and gold, adorn sweatshirts and signs, there has been skepticism and anxiety.

“If you want a career-focused program, I think then you could look at a community college or tech school,” said Madeline Abbatacola, a senior studying history and wildlife ecology. Universities like hers, she added, “have a different lane.”

Last spring, students held a protest on the campus sundial. In the fall, some professors signed a letter seeking the replacement of university leaders, and some professors are applying for jobs elsewhere. And even those like Dona Warren, a longtime philosophy professor who did not take a position on Dr. Patterson’s plan, said they believed the campus was at an inflection point.

“Everyone is just scared to death about the bottom line,” Dr. Warren said. “The suspense movie music has reached its crescendo, and either something’s going to jump out from the corners or something really good is going to happen.”

Last edited by JackRiddler on Sun Jan 13, 2019 2:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Jan 13, 2019 2:23 pm

.

Highly recommended lecture on the emerging new big picture:

Alison McDowell - What Silicon Valley Has Planned for Public Education

McDowell, who has accumulated unbelievable chops and provided acres of research findings online, describes the ongoing shift from Ed Reform 1.0 (vouchers, charters, high-stakes testing, remote rating every school and teacher, uniforms and discipline, cops in schools, better cheaper prisons) to what she calls the "Ed Reform 2.0" now being plotted and tried out by the enormous complex of corporate foundations increasingly defining what's left of public policy: a fully corporate-run digital education, minimizing seats and buildings, learning games online, VR, cradle-to-grave educational surveillance and tracking, check-in "mentors" instead of teachers, blockchain accounts for given services instead of vouchers, remote grading based on achievement of defined competences...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvqBJYmpQrY

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 14, 2019 11:47 am

TEACHERS ON STRIKE IN
LOS ANGELES

-->AND ATHENS (SECOND WEEK)
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby Sounder » Thu Jan 24, 2019 8:17 am

https://gadflyonthewallblog.com/2016/03 ... -eugenics/

Adolph Hitler was a big fan of standardized testing.

It helped justify much of the horrors of the Nazi regime.

“National Socialism is nothing but applied biology,” he said.

In other words, it’s just science, people. Some races are simply inferior to others. Black people, Jews, Gypsies, Hispanics – they just can’t hold a candle to the superior races of Northwestern Europe.

And Hitler based much of this on the “science” of Eugenics, especially the work done in America in the 1910s and ‘20s.

Eugenicists used a flawed and biased interpretation of Gregor Mendel’s laws on heredity to argue that lawlessness, intelligence, and even economic success are passed down in families due to dominant or recessive genes. Moreover, the negative traits are widespread in certain races and the positive ones in others.

Practitioners like Carl Brigham used IQ tests to PROVE white people were just the best and everyone else, well, maybe they should just stop breeding. (In fact, laws were passed in the U.S. imposing mandatory sterilization on thousands based on the conclusions of these “scientists.”)

Brigham was a U.S. Army psychologist who used WWI data to declare that whites (especially those born inside the United States) were the most intelligent of all peoples and that immigrants were genetically inferior. He went on to refine his work into an even better indicator of intelligence the he called the Scholastic Aptitude Test or S.A.T.

Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

In his seminal work, A Study of American Intelligence, Brigham concluded that American education is declining and “will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial mixture becomes more and more extensive.”


To combat this mixture, eugenicist education reformers encouraged schools to rigidly track students into low, middle and high level classes – similar to the way many of our schools are organized today.


Lewis Terman, Professor of Education at Stanford University and originator of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, expressed these views in his textbook, The Measurement of Intelligence (1916). He wrote:

“Among laboring men and servant girls there are thousands like them [feebleminded individuals]. They are the world’s “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” And yet, as far as intelligence is concerned, the tests have told the truth. … No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable voters in the true sense of the word.

… The fact that one meets this type with such frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods.

Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding” (91-92).

This was the original justification for academic tracking. Terman and other educational psychologists convinced many schools to use high-stakes and culturally-biased tests to place “slow” students into special classes or separate schools while placing more advanced students of European ancestry into the college preparatory courses.


Compare that ideal to the increasingly segregated American schools of today. We have schools for the rich and schools for the poor. We have schools for black and brown kids and schools for whites.


Terman would have been in heaven!


It was the work of patriots like Brigham and Terman that the Nazis relied on heavily to justify their forced sterilization programs and ultimately the Holocaust, itself.


Does that sound extreme? It isn’t.


At the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi scientists repeatedly praised the work of American eugenicists, who uncoincidentally also created the standardized test model of education favored by corporate education reformers today.


It’s easy to follow their logic. If certain races can be scientifically proven to be inferior, it is a small step to thinking that they should be stopped from breeding or eradicated from the face of the planet altogether.


And the pseudo-scientific justification for this scheme was standardized testing. The IQ test – which has since been shown to be incredibly biased – was used to justify mass murder. And then Brigham refined that same test into our most popular current standardized assessment – the SAT. In fact, all standardized tests that students are forced to take today owe a huge debt to the SAT and other standardized assessments used by Terman and other eugenicist educators.


The resemblance between testing in the 1910s and the 2010s is obvious to those who will but look.


Similar to the IQ test, modern standardized exams like the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) repeatedly have been shown to be biased in favor of affluent and white test takers. Supporters bemoan the “racial proficiency gap,” but that’s just a nice way of wondering why the same folks Hitler thought were “inferior” don’t do well on our modern tests.


This is no accident. It’s how the assessments are designed.


The IQ test is supposed to demonstrate an innate intelligence. However, modern psychologists have become increasingly skeptical that intelligence is fixed. So standardized assessments like the SAT are supposed to somehow show BOTH what students have learned AND their innate intelligence. That’s the justification behind the high stakes. You have to pass the SAT to show you’re smart enough to do well in college.

Such outright racism would not be tolerated today, so it becomes cloaked in doublespeak. It’s good that poor black students don’t score well on standardized tests because that shows us they need extra help. And then, instead of providing any help, we close their schools or turn them over to fly-by-night charter operators.

Once again, standardized tests are used as the justification for doing something obviously racist. If anyone said, “We’re going to close and privatize all the schools serving minorities and the poor,” people would revolt. However, when you say we’re doing it because of standardized tests – because of “science” – people just shrug and say, “You can’t argue with that!”

The same goes for Common Core State Standards. States were bribed to enact them so that the reasons for attacking public schools would be uniform across the country. This provides another level of pseudo-scientific justification.

They are supposed to ensure every student who graduates high school will be “college and career ready.” However, now that Common Core has been adopted in 46 states and their tests have become aligned with the standards, we’ve seen student scores take a nosedive. Only our rich white kids apparently are ready for college.

So what will we do with those who fall below the mark? We’re sending no additional resources to help them increase their achievement. We’ll just close their schools and/or privatize. And to make sure none of them escape, we’ll make passing the Common Core tests a graduation requirement.

This does not level the playing field. This does not – as some corporate education reformers claim – ensure the sanctity of students Civil Rights. It extensively violates them!

The education model of Test and Punish is a modern eugenics movement. We’re shellacking over class divides so that those below a certain point have no possibility of ever rising to the white place. And I do mean “white.”

Standardized testing is not a ladder of social mobility. It is a means of keeping certain people in their proper place.

Some try to deny the racial component by pointing to the intersection with class. Testing impacts poor white children as it does poor black ones.

To a degree this is true, but remember our eugenic forerunners saw everything in purely racial terms. For instance, today, few people would claim Judaism is a race. It is a religion. It is essentially a belief system, not a set of shared genes even though some adherents do share genetic characteristics after centuries of segregation. But the Nazis considered them a race and, thus, systematically murdered 6 million of them.

The same goes for the poor. Brigham and his Nazi admirers thought that people were poor mainly because of their genes. They are genetically predisposed to being lazy and good for nothing, so they can’t keep a job or advance themselves. Therefore, they’re poor. Pause for a moment to consider the large numbers of people in America today who would agree with them.

Standardized testing treats the poor the same way it does minorities. In fact, it is just the lack of opportunities that come with poverty that cause the very scores that are being used to denigrate these people. Lack of proper nutrition, food insecurity, lack of prenatal care, early childcare, fewer books in the home, exposure to violence – all of these and more combine to result in lower academic outcomes.

But standardized testing puts the blame on the victim. Students score badly because they aren’t working hard enough, corporate reformers say. These kids don’t have enough “rigor.”

To make sure few people actually volunteer to help, we blame their teachers, as well. We make the education profession as unattractive as possible, indicting teachers for all societies ills knowing full well that this will result – as it has – in a nationwide teacher shortage. Then we can deprofessionalize the field and replace educators who have four-year-degrees with lightly trained Teach for America temps.

These kinds of shenanigans didn’t fool the anti-racists of the past.

The great African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois remarked in 1940, “It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [First] World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization.”

He could be talking about No Child Left Behind.

In “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda,” scholar Horace Mann Bond issued a warning about the misuse of IQ tests:

“But so long as any group of men attempts to use these tests as funds of information for the approximation of crude and inaccurate generalizations, so long must we continue to cry “Hold!” To compare the crowded millions of New York’s East Side with the children of Morningside Heights [an upper class neighborhood at the time] indeed involves a great contradiction; and to claim that the results of the tests given to such diverse groups, drawn from such varying strata of the social complex, are in any wise accurate, is to expose a fatuous sense of unfairness and lack of appreciation of the great environmental factors of modern urban life.”

He could be talking about Race to the Top.

Karen Lewis, a present-day Chicago teacher and president of her union, says this:

“What many people do not know is that the use of standardized tests has its origins in the Eugenics movement …we have to be clear about the original purpose of standardized tests.

In a society fascinated by statistics, we are often compelled to reduce everything to a single number. Those of us who work with children know that there are so many characteristics that cannot be quantified.

Ask yourselves whether you want to be part of a legacy born of the unholy alliance between the concept of “natural inequality” and the drudgery that has been imposed on many of our classrooms.”

Make no mistake. Corporate Education Reform is modern day eugenics. It pretends to justify increasing standardization and privatization of public schools through flawed and biased assessments. Its claims that any of this is actually supported by research are spurious. At heart, these are articles of faith – not science. Neither Common Core nor high stakes testing nor charterizing impoverished schools nor putting districts into receivership nor evaluating teachers based on student test scores – none of it has ever been shown in peer-reviewed studies to help students learn.

Corporate Education Reformers are asking all of us to have faith in a racial and economic social order that benefits those already at the top and keeps the rest of us in our place.

And for anyone who questions it, we are continually blinded by their pseudoscientific justifications.
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby chump » Thu Jan 24, 2019 11:40 am


https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/ ... wants-turn

Wednesday, January 23, 2019 by Common Dreams

’This Is Called Union-Busting': As Teachers Union Approves Strike, Denver Superintendent Wants to Turn Furloughed Federal Workers Into Scabs

Ahead of a union vote on Tuesday, the newly-elected school official reached out to federal employees who haven't been paid in weeks, asking them to cross the picket line

by Julia Conley, staff writer


For seeking to exploit a situation in which hundreds of thousands of public employees nationwide are going without paychecks as the Trump shutdown enters its second month, the superintendent of Denver's public schools is under fire for floating the idea that those suffering workers could be used as replacements for city teachers who voted Tuesday to approve a district-wide strike.

Ahead of the vote, held by the city's 5,600-strong teachers union, Denver Public Schools (DPS) Superintendent Susana Cordova told the local press that she was preparing to strike furloughed federal workers substitute teaching jobs for the duration of a potential strike.

“Teachers fighting for better pay are now facing the possibility of their jobs being temporarily filled—and their union's efforts undermined—by federal employees who are themselves getting screwed out of work by an uncaring administration."       
                — Rafi Schwartz, Splinter News”


We've got a whole group of federal employees who've been furloughed who are not working or not getting paid," Cordova told NBC affiliate KUSA. "We have attended some of the work events where folks who are looking to pick up extra cash can come substitute with us."

Cordova was planning to offer twice the daily substitute teaching wage to public employees, hundreds of whom have turned to the crowd-funding website GoFundMe.com to raise money for rent and mortgage payments, groceries, and other necessities as President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have refused to take action to end the shutdown.

As local SEIU president Ron Ruggiero wrote on Twitter, Cordova was preparing for a blatant "union-busting" operation in order to weaken the teachers' momentum.

[… con’d]
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Apr 12, 2019 4:26 pm

https://dianeravitch.net/2019/04/12/ber ... on-policy/

Bernie Sanders’ Staff Called Me to Talk About Education Policy
By dianeravitch
April 12, 2019 //
91


I got an e-mail recently from Senator Bernie Sanders’s education advisor. She said she reads the blog and wondered if we could talk. I said sure but I was not ready to endorse anyone in the Democratic primaries.

I asked for and got her permission to share that this conversation occurred. As everyone knows who ever gave me confidential information, I never write or speak about what I was told in confidence.

We set a date to speak on the phone since I am in New York and she is in D.C.

She called and conferenced in the campaign’s chief of staff.

Here is what happened.

I told them that I was upset that Democrats talk about pre-K and college costs—important but safe topics—and skip K-12, as though it doesn’t exist. Every poll I get from Democrats asks me which issues matter most but doesn’t mention K-12.

I expressed my hope that Bernie would recognize that charter schools are privately managed (in 2016, he said in a town hall that he supports “public charter schools but not private charter schools). No matter what they call themselves, they are not “public” schools. They are all privately managed. I recounted for them the sources of financial support for charters: Wall Street, hedge fund managers, billionaires, the DeVos family, the Waltons, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, ALEC, and of course, the federal government, which gave $440 million to charters this year, one-third of which will never open or close soon after opening. (See “Asleep At the Wheel: How Athens Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride,” Network for Public Education).

I proposed a way to encourage states to increase funding for teachers’ salaries. I won’t reveal it now. I think it is an amazingly innovative concept that offers money to states without mandates but assures that the end result would be significant investment by states in teacher compensation, across the board, untethered to test scores.

I recommended a repeal of the annual testing in grades 3-8, a leftover of George W. Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind. I pointed out to them that all the Democrats on the Education Committee in the Senate had voted for the Murphy Amendment (sponsored by Senator Chris Murphy of Ct), which would have preserved all the original punishments of NCLB but which was fortunately voted down by Republicans. I suggested that grade span testing is common in other developed countries, I.e., once in elementary school, once in middle school, once in high school.

We had a lively conversation. Our values are closely aligned.

They are in it to win it. I will watch to see if Bernie moves forward with a progressive K-12 plan. No one else has.

My options are open. My priorities are clear.

Let’s draw a line in the sand. We will not support any candidate for the Democratic nomination unless he or she comes out with strong policy proposals that strengthen public schools, protect the civil rights of all students, curb federal overreach into curriculum and assessment and teacher evaluation, and oppose DeVos-style privatization (vouchers, charters, cybercharters, for-profit charters, home schooling, for-profit higher education).

Silence is not a policy.

Democrats support public schools.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby stickdog99 » Sat Apr 13, 2019 7:54 pm

JackRiddler » 13 Jan 2019 18:23 wrote:.

Highly recommended lecture on the emerging new big picture:

Alison McDowell - What Silicon Valley Has Planned for Public Education

McDowell, who has accumulated unbelievable chops and provided acres of research findings online, describes the ongoing shift from Ed Reform 1.0 (vouchers, charters, high-stakes testing, remote rating every school and teacher, uniforms and discipline, cops in schools, better cheaper prisons) to what she calls the "Ed Reform 2.0" now being plotted and tried out by the enormous complex of corporate foundations increasingly defining what's left of public policy: a fully corporate-run digital education, minimizing seats and buildings, learning games online, VR, cradle-to-grave educational surveillance and tracking, check-in "mentors" instead of teachers, blockchain accounts for given services instead of vouchers, remote grading based on achievement of defined competences...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvqBJYmpQrY

.


But not their own kids. Just yours.
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Wed May 01, 2019 7:50 am

Worth it, including for the evil of the rationalizations by those supporting this particular "philanthropic" offensive (by Zuckerberg money, no less) against teachers and students. The destruction of the schools by the IT bleeding edgers is actually a modern form of primitive accumulation. And the story links the one above, about how rich motherfuckers are banning screens from their schools. Where do the Zuckerberg kids go?

Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools. That Started a Rebellion.

A yard sign in Wellington, Kan., where some parents and students have rebelled against a web-based education program from Summit Learning. Credit Christopher Smith for The New York Times Image A yard sign in Wellington, Kan., where some parents and students have rebelled against a web-based education program from Summit Learning.

Read more
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/tech ... hools.html
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Thu May 07, 2020 4:15 pm

With Gates GIGANTIC in the news and on a new thread here and actually finding a second or third or fourteenth life in the field of "education reform" (a.k.a. destroying the teaching profession, smashing the unions, shattering public education, and privatizing all the pieces with Microsoft tech, in the name of PHILANTHROPY and CHILDREN) here's a bump.

I also discovered the fate of this old post -- six years ago -- which was a graphic detailing connections within the Common Core policy implementation:



GONE AGAIN! O YOU IMPERMANENT INTERNET.

How bad this is yet to get. This graphic had been hosted on Truthout, destroyed in a day by some fucking latest robber baron purchase, an archive of 10 or 15 years deleted at a keystroke. Motherfuckers.

Anyway, I found that graphic on Reddit. Surely reliable and durable. :rofl2 Was making the rounds in 2013. People still used markers and everything.

Image
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby Harvey » Fri May 08, 2020 7:08 am

The War On Teachers is really the just commodification of education. We're all staring at our disappearing world through narrowing gaps in the fence of commerce.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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