Who runs our IPS? “The crisis is not about education at all. It’s about power.” ~ James BaldwinOverview:Traditionally, local school board races are nonpartisan. Such elections are supposed to be about grassroots politics and connections made at doorways between candidates and voters. Campaign chests are small: some yard signs, political buttons, and lots of volunteers. [...]
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Extreme Thinking Errors: Tough-Love Christian Boarding Schools and the Indiana Department of Child Services
In a clip from Kidnapped for Christ, Kate Logan’s movie debuting next year, a homosexual U.S. teenager named David describes how men, to “de-gay” him, woke him in the night, dragged him by his belt, and drove him to an airplane which flew him to a Dominican Republic boarding school operated by a fundamentalist religious [...]
What Is American Education?
Today, though it is certainly by now an “old” debate, our Sunday paper has an “opinion” piece about Common Core State Standards. The Errant has posted before on this (here, and here–the collusion of “divergent” interests) but I want to try to elaborate a bit on what I think are the things that are not [...]
In the City of Corporate Love and Beyond: The Boston Consulting Group, Gates, and the Filthy Rich
When the Michelle Rhee/Betsy Devos-endorsed Pennsylvania governor, Tom Corbett, slashed $1.1 billion in educational funding over the last two years, he was merely continuing the disaster capitalism agenda against Philadelphia schools which began in 1998, when Act 46 passed. As retaliation against Philadelphia Public Schools’ superintendent David Hornbeck for threatening to close down the entire [...]
Managed Democracy and Stalinism: Education Reform From Russia, With Love.
Okay, because schools, I’ve been told, suck, and because Americans, it’s been said, are stupid, and because citizens, it seems, are unaware of the history that has brought us to this point, I will offer a brief lesson. You can do it yourself if you just go to the Wikipedia right now (I’m told you [...]
Walmart Scholars Aghast at Barbaric Liberal Goons Against Common Core
Keeping with our recent focus on the Occupy Movement and in particular that directed at corporate control of the local institutions of public education I thought I’d share my favorite Reform Scholar blog’s response to the “Occupy DOE” video that we blogged about here on Friday, “Occupy the DOE: New York’s Panel on Educational Policy [...]
Weighing Capital Intent in Public Systems
From the Herald Times of Bloomington, IN. Letter: Voucher programs LETTERS October 26, 2011 To the editor: Recently the Chamber of Commerce hosted an education forum that will showcase the aggressive policies of profiteering implemented by the state government and promoted by the Indiana Superintendent for Public Instruction, Tony Bennett. Note that “Instruction” is not [...]
The Draft, the War at Home, and Occupy Wall Street
What do the demonstrations on Wall Street and those spreading across the country such as the one in Baltimore on Tuesday, praised and encouraged by the Baltimore Sun in an editorial with guts, and the one planned for Saturday in Indianapolis, have in common with the Tea Party movement and the Vietnam War protests? The [...]
Tony Bennett’s Barbarians of Profit Breach the Walls of Public Institutions
Yesterday the Bloomington Chamber of Commerce hosted a kind of dog and pony show they called an Education Forum that featured the salesmanship of one Tony Bennett (aka T.B. Sheets*), Indiana’s Minister of Public Deception. Others involved were two local Superintendents (who carry water for the elephants) and an IU policy researcher. The local paper [...]
Leaning on Straws: Further Comments on Jon Stewart
Yesterday’s post that centered on Jon Stewart in the hopes of making a larger point about our inability to see just how we are “molded and mollified” by our systems of message conveyance instigated a very intense transaction on the Facebook page of my dialogue partner, Kenny Childers. This conversation created in me a bit [...]
