(This is Doug Martin’s newest article detailing Florida charter school operators’ funding of school board members in Florida. The first article on Mavericks in Education Florida can be read here.) While the Miami-Herald recently noticed that people associated with the for-profit school management company Academica have donated a whopping $279,000 to Florida legislators and PACs since 2007, the fact that they also have been buying…
The Uses of Revolution
“A revolution, then, is a way of putting power in different hands.” Guy Davenport Jamie Warren, Associate Professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (and former Bloomington resident and graduate student in the Indiana University Department of History) has offered a critique of the use of national iconography and myth by proponents of and activists within the Occupy Movement. She can be seen here…
Clare-ity on Enclosure
From “The Mores,” by John Clare These paths are stopt–the rude philistines thrall Is laid upon that and destroyed them all Each little tyrant with his little sign Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine But paths to freedom and to childhood dear A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’ And on the tree with ivy overhung The hated sign by…
Stand from betwixt me and the Sun…Thoughts on Enclosure
I’m working on a longer piece intended to be about parallels between eighteenth century land enclosures in England as they became legalized via Parliamentary Acts at the behest of vested private interests and the current private interest in turning our local, common, public learning institutions into “educational enclosures” benefiting the propertied classes. Now it’s likely very true that our educational institutions already do a fine…
Virtual Schools: Setting Minds Adrift on Black Ships
Excerpted below is a report from the Texas Observer’s Abby Rapoport, “Virtual Schools, Virtually Unregulated?,” about how a “virtual school” has avoided accountability in order to avoid being a, well, school. At this point, the Texas Virtual Academy shouldn’t exist. Under the state’s accountability rules, the school should have been shut down or overhauled after failing to meet state standards two years in a row….
Watching Jonathan Franzen Dance on HBO
Below is from an essay by Denis Donoghue in the New York Review of Books, “Coming in from the Cold,” (2006) discussing the work of Jonathan Franzen. This, from the excerpt below, seems incisive and most psychologically astute: “This passage, in which the young Franzen finds satisfaction in being looked at, is more characteristic of his sensibility than the moods of introspection he also engaged…
Wake Up, Anaesthetized and Distracted Morons: Drones Don’t Mirandize
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Logic is what he valued, and not metaphor…
Speaking out of Charles Simic’s mouth. Ask me in a hundred years. Aided by Augustine of Hippo (Sources below) The natural order, which would have peace amongst men, requires that the decision and power to declare war should belong to princes. (Saint Augustine) Innocent human beings get killed—that was my earliest lesson. Whenever I read about a “just war” in which thousands of innocents…
By Day One Cannot See Any Stars
Guy Davenport: Collage is retrospective in content, modern in its design. Kept up, it will recapitulate and summarize the history of its own being. Herakleitos: The untrained mind shivers with excitement at everything it hears. Kafka: Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one cannot see any stars. Tatlin: We declare our distrust of the eye, and place our sensual impressions under control. Fourier: …
Frank Biden and Privatizers Buying Nation’s 11th-Largest School District
(UPDATED NOTE, 1/31/2012: Frank Barbieri, as promised, returned all checks from members of Mavericks on January 10, 2012.) (UPDATED NOTE: I recently discovered this statement by Frank Barbieri, posted on the facebook page “Testing is Not Teaching, in response to the article below: Simply put, my votes are not for sale. The PBC School Board voted unanimously (with one member abstaining) to approve Maverick’s application…