Archive for Education
Crucial Conversation Full House
Posted by: | CommentsRob Schofield and Chris Fitzsimon came to Asheville this past week to provide a briefing on how policies out of Raleigh are affecting us all. The duo write for NC Policy Watch, a project of the NC Justice Center, who held last week’s budget symposium at AB Tech. There were over 80 attendees at this Crucial Conversation.
The two explained that their organizations provide a counterpoint to the conservative perspectives coming from Civitas, the John Locke Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity.
Recent NC polling results from Public Policy Polling were displayed early in the meeting:
On the Backs of Children and the Poor
Posted by: | CommentsYou saw the poverty facts that came out last week. Behind the rising percentages are real people struggling to meet their basic needs. Without a stable platform from which to operate, there is no time and there are no resources to utilize for purposes of escaping the poverty trap.
In light of these facts and the lives of hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians, the Republicans in Raleigh have decided to balance the budget on the backs of children and the poor. Rather than expanding revenues, they’ve targeted services for children and the impoverished.
The following statistics come from a report issued by the NC Justice Center and the United Way of North Carolina. I can’t find it online, but I’ll post the link when I can.
For-Profit Education Defends Its “Beachhead”
Posted by: | CommentsFrom the New York Times, another example of what happens when education goes from being a vocation to being a for-profit industry:
WASHINGTON — Last year, the Obama administration vowed to stop for-profit colleges from luring students with false promises. In an opening volley that shook the $30 billion industry, officials proposed new restrictions to cut off the huge flow of federal aid to unfit programs.
But after a ferocious response that administration officials called one of the most intense they had seen, the Education Department produced a much-weakened final plan that almost certainly will have far less impact as it goes into effect next year.
We have reported previously on for-profit K-12 providers, or Education Management Organizations (EMOs). The businesses, dubbed EMOs by Wall Street analysts, “emerged in the early 1990s in the context of widespread interest in so-called market-based school reform proposals,” according to a report from the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Education “Reform”: Putting Middle Men First
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Last summer, I asked this question:
Why are millionaires and billionaires targeting public education? For the same reason banksters pimped mortgage loans. For the same reason Wall Street wanted to privatize Social Security. For the same reason WillieHortonSutton robbed banks.Answer this question: What is the largest portion of the budget in all 50 states?
A couple of new columns chronicle further moves by what former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch calls “The Billionaire Boys Club” to take their cut of public education tax dollars.
The New York Times has a Sunday piece on billionaires using the “leveraging effect” of philanthropic advocacy to steer public policy. Efforts by the billionaire-funded Gates and the Broad Foundations to promote charter schools resulted in the Obama $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” program which, says the Times , prohibits states from limiting the number of charter schools. According to Ravitch, Obama appointed someone from the NewSchools Venture Fund that promotes charter schools to run “Race to the Top.”
One Teacher Who’s Had Enough
Posted by: | CommentsTaylor Mali – “What Teachers Make”
[h/t Bill Franklin]
Success Is Not An Option
Posted by: | CommentsIn case you missed it this week, Tea Party Nation included this pledge in an email to its membership. Colbert gives it a tip of his hat…
Right Wing Watch reports today that Tea Party Nation president Judson Phillips responded to the uproar caused by the post, saying “Liberalism is about the control of speech and thought and the suppression of any belief that does not agree with the liberal orthodoxy.” Which is, of course, exactly why lefty bloggers spread the Tea Party Nation email so far and wide this week, why it is featured here, and why Colbert gave it a coast-to-coast tip of his hat.
Not that Judson Phillips would grasp the irony.
Rabbit Punch
Posted by: | CommentsWow! That’s terrific bunny …
Wanted: Patriotic CEOs to stop corporate moochers
They’re like the guy who shows up at your Labor Day picnic empty-handed. He drinks all your beer, eats four helpings of barbecue and leaves a huge mess for everyone else to clean up. Then he asks you for 20 bucks in gas money to get home.A troubling number of U.S. corporations behave as moocher guests at our national cafeteria. They help themselves to all the taxpayer-funded goods and services we create and pay for together and leave patriotic small businesses and individual taxpayers with the bill.
The “Texas Miracle” vs. Massachusetts, the “Socialist Hellhole”
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Take A Bow, Matt Damon
Posted by: | CommentsFrom Gawker:
A reporter from libertarian rag Reason interviewed notorious Massachusetts liberal actor Matt Damon at this year’s Save Our Schools March and she tried to throw some business at him about teacher tenure and Ayn Randy incentive stuff and he wasn’t having it.
NCGOP Leader Cheers Job Losses
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The NCGOP is seeing the fruits of their labors – increased unemployment as educators and other public employees received their pink slips.
North Carolina’s unemployment rate jumped to 9.9 percent in June as community colleges, universities and other state government employers cut 7,600 workers, the state Employment Security Commission said Friday.
[...]
The number of government jobs lost may continue increasing. North Carolina’s Legislature closed a $2.5 billion budget shortfall projected for the fiscal year that began this month primarily by cutting spending. The budget, written by Republicans fully in control of the General Assembly for the first time in more than a century, took effect after lawmakers overrode a veto by Gov. Beverly Perdue…
[...]
“I hope it does increase,” Hayes said of the prospect of further state government layoffs.
While the leader of the NC Republican Party cheers layoffs in the public sector, there is still no coherent jobs policy coming out of Raleigh. They are excelling at the anti-education, anti-environment stuff, and as if on cue, the private sector is also doing away with their professionals:
June’s other big job-loser was the sector that includes professional, scientific, technical and administrative workers at private companies. That sector lost 5,400 jobs, the bulk of them from administrative and support positions, the ESC said.
