As Bart Peterson and David Harris’ Mind Trust sells its “Opportunity School” agenda (PDF) to the City-County Council Community Affairs Committee this week, it is time to get one thing straight. The Mind Trust plan for Indianapolis Public Schools is not about improving education. Essentially, it is an elaborate (and $500,000 of it taxpayer funded) [...]
Tag Archives: charter schools
Experts Serving Interests: Academic Collusion in the Corporate State
Readers of Errant musings know that my primary focus seems to always have a common theme: the loss of local human good to the abstractions of wealth and power. We are seeing a very rapid decline in social goods “produced” by human economy replaced rapidly and without check by the externally and mechanically produced “cultural” [...]
Palm Beach County School Board Considering Shady Charter School Applications
What do Florida and Indiana have in common? They are both laboratories for the New America. Which explorer in history did the most damage to an indigenous population? Pick any one, right? When the pirates flying flags of national power bring their ships to shore there are three waves of massacre and erasure–1. the initial [...]
Twist the Barrel: Opposing ALEC’s Parent Trigger in Indiana
Disarmament sculpture at the UN* (Please use the following as a template to email to your Indiana congresspeople now.) Yesterday, the Parent Trigger bill passed an Indiana House committee. Although Rep. Rhonda Rhoads’ House Bill 1219 has her name on it, the Parent Trigger bill was written and supported by the Heartland Institute and ALEC, [...]
Imperial Philanthropy: Using Education Reform to Buy the Earth and Sky
Editor’s note: Doug Martin’s work supplies a kind of corrective to the simple “top-line” story and understanding of the education reform movement. It can be understood to be “about” management and assessment to enforce a worldview where production is only quantifiable and quality must ape the measurements of assessment; and that’s the kindest way to [...]
Demetrio Perez Jr. Leading Miami-Dade School Board Race, Despite Not Running
“An educated people will always be strong and free. The alternative is ignorance. Ignorance will ultimately destroy us.” Jose Marti. The 2012 Miami-Dade School Board race promises to be a close one. Not for the board members, mind you, but for the for-profit charter schools competing to buy votes to open more of their schools. [...]
News Flash: VP Biden’s Brother Frank Has an IRS Problem
photo by D’Arcy Norman (UPDATE: In an interview with Broward/Palm Beach New Times’ Lisa Rab, Frank Biden responded to the Doug Martin article below concerning Biden’s tax debts. Rab writes the following: Meanwhile, the vice president’s brother also cleared up a mystery about a federal tax lien filed against him in Kentucky. The $32,500 in unpaid income [...]
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 [...]
The Crony Corruption of the Indiana Charter School Board: Mining Kids for Cash
(The following is a letter Doug Martin recently sent to the Indiana Charter School Board, which is now taking comments concerning their corporate school reform agenda. Take the opportunity to email them and let them know you do not approve of selling our kids off to the privatizers invading our state. Their email address is [...]
VP Biden’s Brother Frank Shovels for Mavericks in Education
When Lisa Rab outed Joe Biden’s brother, Frank, as a major force behind a for-profit education management organization (EMO) dead set on building 100 new charter schools across Florida,* it came as no surprise to anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to the corporate school reform movement, the Obama/Biden/Duncan regime, or [...]
Articles
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The Chaos of Monoculture
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The Custom House: Louis Agassiz with Christoph Irmscher
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The Errant Goes Audible: The Custom House on WFHB
