No Child Left Behind Standards: March 2013

Tuesday, 12 March 2013

Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools

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A citizens' guide to what's wrong with the nation's radical federal education legislation—and a passionate call for change

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has become the most fiercely debated education issue of this election year, and it will be at the center of the national conversation about schools for the foreseeable future. NCLB, signed into law in 2002, purports to improve public schools—and especially the way they serve poor children—by enforcing a system of standards and accountability through high-stakes testing and sanctions. It is radically affecting the life of schools around the country.

Many Children Left Behind is a devastating brief against NCLB. Far from improving public schools and increasing the ability of the system to serve poor and minority children, the authors argue, the law is doing exactly the opposite. Here some of our most prominent, respected voices in education—including Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, and Theodore R. Sizer—come together to show us how, point by point, NCLB undermines the things it claims to improve:

· How NCLB punishes rather than helps poor and minority kids and their schools
· How NCLB helps further an agenda of privatization and an attack on public schools
· How the focus on testing and test preparation dumbs down classrooms
· How we need alternatives to construing the idea of accountability in terms of test scores and sanctions.

Educators and parents around the country are feeling the harshly counterproductive effects of NCLB. This book is an essential guide to understanding what's wrong and where we should go from here.

Saturday, 9 March 2013

Assessing Teacher Competency: Five Standards-Based Steps to Valid Measurement Using the CAATS Model

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This comprehensive five-step model for measuring teacher knowledge and skills helps teacher educators and school administrators prepare fair, valid, and reliable assessments of teacher performance.

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A Land We Can Share: Teaching Literacy to Students With Autism

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This book helps in-service and pre-service teachers understand how students with mild to significant autism can be perceived as literate and then supported to participate in literacy activities both in and out of school.

A Land We Can Share: Teaching Literacy to Students With Autism Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

Parent's perspective, June 15, 2008

Jonathan M. Wenig (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Land We Can Share: Teaching Literacy to Students With Autism (Paperback)

A Land we can Share is directed primarily at educators and para professionals working with children with ASD to welcome then into the world of literacy.

My perspective is somewhat different. I am a parent of a 7 year old girl with ASD. We are currently in the throes of teaching our daughter to read (in collaboration with her teachers and therapists at school, of course). Whereas with my older children, the process of teaching them to read happened almost intuitively and naturally (on our part as parents), for our youngest the process has involved more effort. We have had to try more things, read more literature, consider different approaches, test more software programs and reader packages.

And much as parents really just want a simple solution, the instructional rigour of Paula's book is at once insightful, engaging and inspiring. It resonated with us, in that it delved in a practical and useful way into different literacy approaches, and provided examples and... Read more

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

Essential reading for all teachers at the primary and secondary levels, April 2, 2008

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Land We Can Share: Teaching Literacy to Students With Autism (Paperback)

It takes some adaptation to the curriculum and some insights on the part of the reading instructors, but autistic students can be literate students. "A Land We Can Share: Teaching Literacy To Students With Autism" is the collaborative work of Paula Kluth (consultant, teacher, author, and advocate in Oak Park, Illinois) and Kelly Chandler-Olcott (Associate Professor, Syracuse University Reading and Language Arts Center, Syracuse, New York) and specifically designed to teach the teacher of an autistic student in grades K-12 how to implement researched-based practices in reading and writing instruction (including those consistent with Read First recommendations); plan effective lessons that build on their student's strengths, interests, and individual needs; design a classroom environment that promotes literacy learning for all students while addressing the individual needs of mainstreamed autistic students; assess students who do not (or cannot) show their literacy learning in tradition... Read more

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

A Must Read!, February 23, 2008

Margaret Hartung - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Land We Can Share: Teaching Literacy to Students With Autism (Paperback)

If you are looking for answers to help your students diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum with literacy activities look no further. Paula Kluth and Kelly Chandler-Olcott have put together a valuable resource. Not only will the activities in this text help differentiate your curriculum for those students on the Autism Spectrum but also for those students who are considered neurotypical. The text is very user friendly with explanations of what you will see in the child diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum, the components identified in a strong literacy program, straight-forward explanations of practices and approaches to use in developing your literacy program (both reading and writing), assessment strategies (so important today!), and help developing ideas to use in working with those students who have significant disabilities. Paula and Kelly use many testimonials by individuals that have experienced difficulties in the classroom and what helped them to make gains in the area of literacy... Read more

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Must Read NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons From the Field

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Based on data from 6 states and 11 districts, this essential resource helps educators understand the issues raised by NCLB and its implications for educating all children.

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Why Doesn't The Press Call Bloomberg On This Kind Of Stuff?

John Gambling fellates Michael Bloomberg one hour every week on WOR, letting our little mayor pontificate about all kinds of wonderful things like raising public school class sizes to standing room only without every pushing back on him and saying, "Hey, you're nuts! You don't know what you're talking about!"

Yesterday's radio program was a case in point:

Mayor Bloomberg yesterday put his foot in his mouth by suggesting homeless shelters are bursting at the seams because anyone can get a bed — even the filthy rich.

“You can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system, walk in the door, and we’ve got to give you shelter,” the billionaire mayor fumed on his weekly WOR radio show.

“That’s what the law is. I didn’t write the law.”

He was referring to a decree signed by Mayor Ed Koch 30 years ago that gives free shelter to anyone who says they need it.

Bloomberg’s comments came the week that an advocacy group for the homeless released a report saying the city’s homeless population surged in the past year.

“It’s pretty ludicrous to claim that there are people flying in private jets and taking private limos to the shelter system,” said Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless.

“He didn’t seem to want to take responsibility for the fact that there are more than 50,000 people sleeping in city shelters, including 21,000 children.”

City Comptroller John Liu piled on.

“Only an out-of-touch mayor who travels by private jet and limo would make such a tone-deaf wisecrack about a homeless crisis that has only worsened under his careless watch,” said Liu, a likely mayoral candidate.

Kudos to liu for calling Bloomberg out.

Now if only Gambling could have said to his face, "Hey Mikey, you're an arrogant, crazy know-nothing and I can't wait for the next mayor to come into office so I don't have to listen to your crazy-ass crap and make believe in makes sense.

Friday, 8 March 2013

Education Reformer Caught Plagiarizing Column, Blames It On Assistant

News Corporation journalist Juan Williams hates teachers unions because he believes they allow teachers to be unaccountable.

Just last week, he wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece about how the largesse Bill Gates and other "business leaders" give to education reform and schools doesn't benefit students because of "a lack of teacher accountability and school choice."

Williams believes union protections allow teachers to protect the "failing" status quo of the school system, fight even "modest efforts to alter the status quo," and hammer any politicians with the courage to take on the status quo with "strikes, protests, negative ads and litigation."

Williams is cheered that politicians in both parties - like Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Rahm Emanuel, and Andrew Cuomo - are courageous enough to take on the evil teachers unions and begin to hold the up-til-now unaccountable public school teachers accountable for their performance and hopes that more politicians and business leaders will follow the reform path of teacher accountability.

That column - with "the need for teacher accountability" as it's main theme - appeared on February 28.

On March 2, Salon found that The Hill, a political journal Williams writes for, had published a Williams column on February 18 which Williams, the stickler for teacher accountability, had partly plagiarized from a Center for American Progress report on immigration.

Here is Alex Seitz-Wald, the Salon writer who caught the plagiarism:

In a case of apparent plagiarism, Fox News pundit Juan Williams lifted — sometimes word for word — from a Center for American Progress report, without ever attributing the information, for a column he wrote last month for the Hill newspaper.

Almost two weeks after publication, the column was quietly revised online, with many of the sections rewritten or put in quotation marks, and this time citing the CAP report. It also included an editor’s note that read: “This column was revised on March 2, 2013, to include previously-omitted attribution to the Center for American Progress.”

But that editor’s note mentions only the attribution problem, and not the nearly identical wording that was also fixed.

In a phone interview Thursday evening, Williams pinned the blame on a researcher who he described as a “young man.”

“I was writing a column about the immigration debate and had my researcher look around to see what data existed to pump up this argument and he sent back what I thought were his words and summaries of the data,” Williams told Salon. “I had never seen the CAP report myself, so I didn’t know that the young man had in fact not summarized the data but had taken some of the language from the CAP report.”

Hugo Gurdon, the editor in chief of the Hill, told Salon on Thursday evening that: “CAP drew the similarities between Juan’s column and their report to my attention and I spoke to Juan about it. He went back and looked at the two and spoke to me having had a look and acknowledged there were unacceptable similarities.

“And he gave me an explanation, which I found satisfactory. And I believe there was an honest mistake and it related to the transfer of copy and the use of a researcher and it was completely inadvertent. He was very concerned to set the record straight.

“All parties — CAP, the Hill and Juan — were satisfied that we had not dramatically changed the column after the fact to conceal what had happened.”

Williams told Salon that the researcher has submitted a letter of resignation, but that he has not decided whether to accept it. “I just feel betrayed,” Williams said.

Williams claimed the plagiarized part of the column was "not the start or ending of the column — it’s not the theory of the column. It’s just the data.”

Salon writer Seitz-Wald disagreed:

There are three key passages where the CAP report and Williams’ original column are similar.
In the first example, here’s the original language from the CAP study:
According to the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants will add a net of $611 billion to the Social Security system over the next 75 years. Immigrants are a key driver of keeping the Social Security Trust Fund solvent, and Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy finds that cutting off immigration to the country would increase the size of the Social Security deficit by 31 percent over 50 years.
Here’s what Williams wrote in the original published version of his February 18 column, as found through a Google cache search:
According to the independent National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), immigrants will contribute $611 billion to the Social Security system over the next 75 years. Indeed, immigrants are a key force in keeping the Social Security trust fund solvent for older Americans who are at or near retirement. NFAP also found that halting all immigration into the United Size [sic] would explode the size of the Social Security deficit by at least 31 percent over 50 years.
To the first sentence, Williams added the word “independent.” In the second sentence, he added “indeed” and turned “key driver” into “key force.” He split CAP’s second sentence into two, but the language is strikingly similar — “cutting off” becomes “halting” while “increase” becomes “explode.”
But that section of the story was dramatically rewritten and republished on March 2, with the editor’s note. Here’s how that paragraph is cast in the version of the column that appears online at The Hill now:
The CAP report makes the point. It cites a study on the impact of immigration reform by the independent National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). That study finds immigrants will contribute $611 billion to the Social Security system in the next 75 years. Indeed, the arrival of newcomers is key to funding Social Security for older Americans who are at or near retirement. NFAP found that halting all immigration into the United States would explode the size of the Social Security deficit. They estimate an increase of at least 31 percent in that deficit in the next 50 years without continued immigration.
In this second example, we’ve italicized the borrowed wording:
CAP writes:
These big gains occur because legalized workers earn higher wages than undocumented workers, and they use those wages to buy things such as houses, cars, phones, and clothing. … Hinojosa-Ojeda found that the tax benefits alone from legalization would be between $4.5 billion and $5.4 billion in the first three years.
Here’s how the cached version of Williams’ column reads:
These big gains occur because legalized workers earn higher wages than undocumented workers, and they use those wages to buy things and stimulate the economy through commerce. Professor Hinojosa-Ojeda also calculated that the tax benefits alone from legalization would be between $4.5 billion and $5.4 billion in the first three years.
The revised version not only attributes that to the CAP reports, but the paragraph is rewritten to put the borrowed language in quotation marks. Again, the editor’s note mentions only the attribution problem and not the word-for-word echo that now appears in quotes.
In citing that study, CAP attributes the increase in GDP to gains that “occur because legalized workers earn higher wages than undocumented workers and they use those wages to buy” merchandise. That stimulates the economy through commerce.
A third section of the story also appears to have been borrowed and then changed.
In the CAP report:
Demographers Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson, for example, compared welfare-participation rates of legal permanent resident immigrants to the native born. When controlling for income, they found that immigrants had similar—if not lower—participation rates than natives in the three main social programs: welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. At the 200 percent poverty line—a common threshold for low-income households—32 percent of native families received food stamps, compared to 22 percent of naturalized-citizen immigrant families.
In Williams’ original column:
Jeffrey S. Passel and Michael E. Fix, two respected demographers, recently compared the welfare participation rates of legal immigrants to native-born American citizens. Controlling for income, they found that immigrants had nearly identical — and in some cases lower — participation rates than citizens in the three big social programs: welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. They found that 32 percent of natural-born citizen families at the 200 percent poverty line received food stamps, compared to only 22 percent of immigrant families.
And finally the rewritten column, which again adds an attribution to CAP and quotation marks to the borrowed language, but retains many echoes:
The CAP study also included reference to a report by Randy Capps, Everett Henderson and Michael E. Fix, respected demographers, comparing the welfare participation rates of legal immigrants to native-born American citizens. The Center’s conclusion is that the three demographers show that “controlling for income… immigrants had similar —if not lower — participation rates” than American-born citizens who get benefits from three safety net programs: welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. They found that 32 percent of natural-born citizen families at the 200 percent poverty line received food stamps, compared to only 22 percent of naturalized immigrant families.

What's worse than Williams' trying to minimize the plagiarism by changing the column after the revelations is how he tries to blame the mess on the assistant.

To wit:

“I was writing a column about the immigration debate and had my researcher look around to see what data existed to pump up this argument and he sent back what I thought were his words and summaries of the data,” Williams told Salon. “I had never seen the CAP report myself, so I didn’t know that the young man had in fact not summarized the data but had taken some of the language from the CAP report.”

...

Williams told Salon that the researcher has submitted a letter of resignation, but that he has not decided whether to accept it. “I just feel betrayed,” Williams said.

So Juan Williams was plagiarizing words from his assistant who had plagiarized them from the CAP report but Williams is the one who has been betrayed and the assistant is the one who has to lose his job.

How's that for personal accountability from Juan Williams, the teacher accountability man?

Williams should be fired from his Hill gig not only because he plagiarized a column from the Center for Amercan Progress report but because he sees nothing wrong with plagiarizing the words of his assistant without offering any attribution and only publicly discloses he lifted someone else's words when that someone else is caught lifting those words too.

Just another example of an education reformer who promotes the idea that teachers need to be "held accountable" for performance but refuses accountability for himself.

In that way, Williams fits right in with Bloomberg, Klein, Rhee, Duncan, et al.

Parents Protest DOE's Failure To Inform Them About PCB's At PS 87

From NY1:

Parents are planning to protest at a Manhattan elementary school after finding out that hazardous toxins were found there months ago.

A group of parents at P.S. 87 on the Upper West Side said that a smoking light fixture emitting PCBs was discovered in early December but wasn't replaced until almost three weeks later.

They also said they didn't know about the leak until P.S. 87 appeared on a PCB remediation list published by NY1 last week.

The group said they received a notice Wednesday, almost three months after the leak was discovered.
City law requires that parents be notified within seven days.

PCB leaks have been discovered in more then 300 schools across the city.

In a statement, the city said it has been open about the whole process.

A rally will be held after school on Friday.

The NYCDOE motto - Children first. Always.

Just ignore the cancer-causing toxins those children the DOE puts first are breathing in.

Which is easy to do since the DOE never actually informs you that your child is attending a school with cancer-causing toxins in it for months and months and months (and even then, only when caught!)

Thursday, 7 March 2013

Teacher Evaluations Costs Far Outpace RttT Award Money In NY State

From Politics on the Hudson:

New York’s small city, suburban and rural school districts expect to spend an average of $155,355 this year to implement the state’s new teacher and principal evaluation plans, a report Thursday from the state School Boards Association found.

The one-year costs outpace the four-year federal grant provided for funding the program by nearly $55,000, according to an analysis of 80 school districts outside the state’s “Big Five.”

“Our analysis … shows that the cost of this state initiative falls heavily on school districts,” the group’s executive director, Timothy Kremer, said in a statement. “This seriously jeopardizes school districts’ ability to meet other state and federal requirements and properly serve students.”

The evaluation system is a requirement for receiving funding from President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.

In 2010, New York was awarded $700 million in grants. About half of the funding will go to local school districts over four years to implement the evaluation system, as well as other initiatives.

The average Race To The Top grant in New York, excluding the state’s five largest city school districts, is $100,670. That’s $54,685 short of districts’ average implementation costs, according to the report.

School districts incurred costs for additional compensation, training, developing new assessments and purchasing technology.

The implementation costs for the 80 districts included in the analysis ranged from $15,500 to $626,583.

“When we talk about unfunded—or, in this case, underfunded—mandates, this is exactly what we mean,” Kremer said.

This reform has always been about piling underfunded mandate upon underfunded mandate onto these districts, forcing them into insolvency and eventually breaking the districts up and letting the for profit education free marketeers come and take over.

One year of evaluation costs has eaten up more than the entire four year Race to the Top award for evaluations.

It seems that the $700 million "award" is going to cost well over $2 billion in additional expenditures around the state.

New Jersey should consider itself lucky that Chris Christie and his ed department screwed up the application.

They're saving so much more money in the long run.

When do we put an end to the madness here in NY State?

This Won't Deter Them

Here is the LA Times analysis of the school board elections on Tuesday:

Outside interests poured money into Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's war chest for this week's school board elections in an attempt to influence education reform here and nationwide. But when the votes were tallied, the group could count only one clear winner.

The mayor's political action committee, which amassed more than $3.9 million on behalf of three candidates, secured just incumbent Monica Garcia's seat.

In the other two races, the Coalition for School Reform lost its bid to unseat incumbent Steve Zimmer, who was backed by the teachers union. The group's other favored candidate, Antonio Sanchez, is headed for a May 21 runoff.

The results were "a loss for the mayor and the future of reform in the district," said former state Sen. Gloria Romero, who is generally allied with Villaraigosa's education agenda.

But American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten summed up Tuesday's election this way: "Big monied interests — most of whom live far away from Los Angeles and virtually none of whom have children in LAUSD schools — were rebuked by parents, teachers and the community."

Leaving aside the audacity of Weingarten bragging about parents, teachers and a local community beating back monied interests from outside the district when she often helicopters into districts from her DC home to try and influence policy and contract negotiations in places like Baltimore, Newark, New Haven and Philadelphia, let's just assume that the losses suffered by the ed deformers in the LA school board race will not deter them from trying to buy the next school board elections.

Let us assume that the lesson they will take from this is throw more money into the race - or circumvent the democratic process completely and engineer backroom deals that disenfranchise parents, teachers and the local community from having a say in the process.

Isn't that what ALEC is all about?

Isn't that what the Common Core Federal Standards movement was all about?

Isn't that what the Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation and Bloomberg's political PAC all about?

Bloomberg in particular has a few scalps in his PAC belt.

You can bet a couple of percentage points loss in this school board race won't deter him from trying to buy future school board races or simply force through his policy preferences in some backroom deal.

Bloomberg Caught Secretly Funneling Tax Money To Real Estate Cronies

From Juan Gonzalez in the NY Daily News:

The Bloomberg administration secretly funneled more than $9 million in city property taxes to the Hudson Yards project on Manhattan’s far West Side without informing the City Council, a Daily News investigation has found.

That $9 million is on top of $234 million the mayor gave the Hudson Yards Infrastructure Corp., the private group spearheading the new 50-block district by extending the No. 7 subway line to 34th St. and 11th Ave.

This money could have gone to regular city services but went instead to a favored project of the real estate industry.

And while Mayor Bloomberg’s aides at least negotiated the bigger subsidy with the Council, they never disclosed the $9 million they allocated to Hudson Yards from the property taxes of buildings that existed before the project began.

The Olivia, for example, is a luxury building on W. 33rd St. built in 2000, five years before Hudson Yards. Yet the Olivia’s $6.7 million property tax is now subsidizing the project, finance records obtained by The News show.

Then there’s the Glass Farmhouse on W. 37th St. Converted into luxury condo lofts in 1998, its nearly $1 million property tax is also going to Hudson Yards.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, whose district includes Hudson Yards, was surprised to learn about this arrangement. “ It is important that these payments are done in a transparent way,” Quinn said.

What's worse, the Hudson Yard Project Bloomberg pushed so heavily is lagging in development and thus needing more tax money to shore it up:

Scores of hotels, office buildings and apartment buildings would quickly sprout in the area, City Hall predicted .

But the Council also reluctantly agreed to subsidize possible shortfalls in the project’s revenues during the early phase.

Eight years later, new development is drastically below projections, and the bill for city subsidies keeps growing. Last year, Hudson Yards took in just $27 million in taxes from “new construction” but had to pay $114 million in debt service.

That’s why Bloomberg has repeatedly asked the Council for subsidies for the bonds.

And just how did Bloomberg get away with secretly funneling tax money from older buildings in the area to fund the project?

City Hall did not disclose until now that $9 million of the paltry $27 million in revenue actually comes from pre-Hudson Yards buildings like the Olivia and the Glass Factory.

“There was never any discussion of involving buildings built before 2005 in paying for Hudson Yards,” said Joe Restuccia of the Clinton Housing Development Co.

The city included revenues from such buildings if their permanent certificate of occupancy was issued after January 2005, said Deputy Budget Director Ray Orlando.

The Olivia and the Glass Farmhouse got temporary certificates when they opened, but took years to get permanent ones — a loophole City Hall used to hand their tax payments to Hudson Yards. The city must pay any project shortfalls, Orlando said.

But a subsidy openly agreed to between City Hall and the Council is one thing; secret subsidies that mask Hudson Yards problems are something else.

It's a joke that Comptroller John Liu has had his political career essentially destroyed by campaign finance fraud allegations involving his aides when Bloomberg secretly routes tax money to a project run by his real estate cronies and nothing happens to him.

In fact, this isn't the first time Bloomberg has funneled tax dollars to his real estate cronies at Hudson Yards, as Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News reported back in December 2102:

Private developers were supposed to pay for the grand Hudson Yards project on Manhattan’s far West Side, but right now taxpayers are being made to finance an ever-growing bill for the development.

The Bloomberg administration paid $234 million during fiscal year 2012 to a city-created development group that oversees the huge new commercial and residential complex, one of the mayor's most ambitious projects.

City Hall quietly earmarked most of that money — $155 million — to the Hudson Yards Infrastructure Corp. in late June, because the group has not been generating enough revenue to pay the annual interest due on $3 billion in bonds it issued.

Hudson Yards Corp. floated those $3 billion in bonds to pay for an extension of the MTA’s 7 subway line to 34th St. and 11th Ave., plus a new boulevard that will run between 10th and 11th Ave. Initial plans by Bloomberg’s aides called for private developers to pay enough money in fees, air rights, and taxes to Hudson Yards Corp. to pay back the $3 billion in bonds.

But when the City Council approved that plan in 2005, the Council also agreed that if revenues from private developers were not sufficient to pay debt service in the early years, the city would make up the shortfall.

In fiscal 2012 alone, six years after the project started, the city transferred $79 million to Hudson Yards Corp. from the general budget to make up for anemic revenues from developers. That’s nearly double the $42 million it paid in 2011.

Then in June, in the midst of final budget negotiations with the Council, Bloomberg aides added another $155 million to help Hudson Yards Corp. make up for even bigger revenue shortfalls expected for both 2013 and 2014, a city official with knowledge of the transaction said.

“Consistent with the city’s general approach to managing its budget and debt service, the city decided to make a grant to HYIC at the end of FY (fiscal year) 2012 to pre-fund future (interest) costs,” David Farber, spokesman for Hudson Yards Infrastructure Corp., or HYIC, said.

And that's not all the money the public is forking out.

This column reported last December that an analysis by the city's Independent Budget Office found nearly $160 million of additional “infrastructure projects” related to Hudson Yards that Bloomberg’s people have buried in the budgets of other agencies.

All the rosy predictions have not materialized of a new commercial district springing up in the Hudson Yards area once a new subway got underway.

So much money going to subsidize Bloomberg's real estate cronies - some of it without the knowledge or approval of the City Council.

No wonder Bloomberg wants to cut $260 million from city schools even if a judge refuses to allow Cuomo to cut $260 million in state education aid.

Bloomberg wants to funnel that money to his real estate and business cronies.

Wednesday, 6 March 2013

This Is Why They Want Bradley Manning And Julian Assange Silenced And Imprisoned

The Guardian reports the following:

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus's "eyes and ears out on the ground" in Iraq.

"They worked hand in hand," said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. "I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there ... the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture."

Additional Guardian reporting has confirmed more details of how the interrogation system worked. "Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee," claimed Samari, talking for the first time in detail about the US role in the interrogation units.

"Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts."

Is it just me or do those allegations, if true, amount to war crimes by Petraeus and Rumsfeld?

So glad Education Week got an interview with Rummy last week about education leadership in schools!

He sure does have a lot to teach us about illegal detentions, torture and war crimes.

No wonder the Obama administration is doing everything in its power to get Assange and they've already got Manning.

The evidence of war crimes is mounting.

Bloomberg's Legacy

Here it is:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is reportedly $5 billion richer this year than he was last year, good for the number 13 spot on a Forbes list of billionaires.

According to a new report being released today and previewed in the Wall Street Journal, "More than 21,000 children—an unprecedented 1% of the city's youth—slept each night in a city shelter in January, an increase of 22% in the past year."

Really says it all.

1% of the city's youth slept each night in a shelter in January.

Bloomberg has $5 billion more than he had the year before.

These two stories are not unrelated.

Bloomberg and his fellow oligarchs are gobbling up more and more of the wealth and leaving less and less for the rest of us

Common Core Kindergarten Homework

Via @ The Chalk Face, here is a piece of Common Core homework brought to you by Pearson:

Kindergarten homework?

What the hell happened to afterschool play?

@ The Chalk Face describes how one little boy reacts to his Pearson work:

Sara Wottawa is a parent in New York who is highly conscientious of her kids’ school work and progress. Today, she posted the following on Facebook:
Today I am very emotional and upset. My son, who is in kindergarten, is very cooperative in school but when he comes home he emotionally falls apart. Today after trying to assist him with his developmentally inappropriate homework I reached my breaking point. I decided for the remainder of the year he will no longer take part in completing developmentally inappropriate homework.

What damage is being done to this generation of children by the Best and Brightest who have brought us the untested, unpiloted, developmentally inappropriate Common Core Federal Standards?

As we saw last month, the Common Core work is already driving up the anxiety level of kindergarteners by giving them work they are not ready for (and shouldn't be ready for!)

These standards have been rammed through by the oligarchy to try and show the peons how "stupid" our children are, how "failing" our schools are, how "we" are at fault for the economy because we and our kids are just not smart enough to handle the work needed for the 21st century economy, why "we" are the reason why the American Experiment in democracy is failing.

None of this is true, of course.

Our children are NOT stupid, our schools are NOT failing, we are NOT at fault for the economy collapse, we are NOT at fault for the failures of government and the political classes.

The problems the country is facing quite simply come from the oligarchy looking to steal every bit of wealth in this country and leave nothing for the rest of us.

They're scapegoating the working and middle classes ("You're not working hard enough to succeed in the 21st Century economy"), they're blaming the school system ("Children are not receiving the 21st Century skills they need to succeed in the global economy"), they're promoting education reform and Common Core and school choice as the solution for these problems.

But they're the ones causing all of the income inequality and poverty with their economic policies and tax policies meant to distribute ALL of the wealth upward.

Of course education reform, Common Core, and school choice are not meant to solve the problems of income inequality, poverty and the like.

They are meant to be used as a bludgeon against what little is left of the Liberal Project as the Shock Doctrinaires strip every bit of the "public" and the "commons" from American life, privatize every public institution in sight, and gobble up all the wealth (NOTE: Dow at all time high - unemployment, income stagnation, social mobility remain HUGE problems for all but the 1%.)

The American Experiment is coming to an end. We are now fully in the American Empire where the powers that be subvert democracy by spending billions to buy the offices they want (see here), where the powers that be ram through education programs that are meant to further exacerbate the problems (NOTE: Not one oligarch is sending his/her kid to a school run under the education reforms the oligarchs are pushing for other people's kids), where they steal all the money and get government bailouts and run up the government debt and then blame us for the problem and look to cut what little is left of the social safety net as the solution.

It's a rough time to be a kid here in America.

It's a rough time to be a teacher.

With labor leaders like Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew supporting the oligarchy in their attempts to destroy the working and middle classes, to implement a privatization program for schools, and to bust the unions and break what little power is left with working people, the future looks quite dim.

But the resistance to Common Core and reform and privatization is growing.

They've got the money and the media.

But the resistance has the numbers.

99%, in fact.

Time to use that against the oligarchy.

We can start by boycotting the Pearson kindergarten homework.

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