Archive for Education
Chairman Gantt Delivers the Facts
Posted by: | CommentsThanks to all of the Buncombe County Commissioners for making sure Asheville City Schools’ students have good facilities.
Education: The Philosophic Difference
Posted by: | CommentsThis radio interview with North Carolina state Rep. Rick Glazier last week has stayed with me. Glazier and state Rep. Ray Rapp were reacting to the Republican handling of education after gaining control of the North Carolina legislature in January 2011. Glazier explained it with this story:
Sort of mind-boggling. Maybe an opening script at the beginning of this session was a precursor to what happened.There was a Republican legislator who has been there several terms … she had a question early on, because Representative Rapp and I did chair for four years that appropriations committee, and she said, “How much do we spend on financial aid for needs-based kids going to college in North Carolina?”
I think my answer at the time we were looking at it was somewhere around $175-$200 million dollars was need-based. And she said, “Well, I don’t understand why we spend any.”
Progressives Go Galt!
Posted by: | CommentsSara Robinson, Visions editor at Alternet, lays down the Galtlet. A recent NYT piece reported a fact that many of us know already: blue states pay more into the federal treasury than they get back; red states, Mother Jones observes, take more money from Washington than they put in.
Progressives believe in the redistribution of wealth, so we’re not usually too upset by this state of affairs. That’s what it means to be one country. E pluribus unum, and all that. We’re happy to help, because we think we’ve got a stake in making sure kids in rural Alabama get educations and seniors in Arizona get healthcare. What’s good for them is good for all of us. We also like to think they’d help us out if our positions were reversed. It’s an investment in making America stronger, and we feel fine about that.
It’s not that blue staters resent helping out, writes Robinson, it’s the pissing and moaning from the self-righteous states Ayn Rand herself would describe as “parasites.”
So we’ve got every right to get good and angry about the fact that, by and large, the people who are getting our money are so damned ungrateful — not to mention so ridiculously eager to spend it on stuff we don’t approve of. We didn’t ship them our hard-earned tax dollars to see them squandered on worse-than-useless abstinence-only education, textbooks that teach creationism, crisis-pregnancy misinformation centers, subsidies for GMO crops and oil companies, and so on. And we sure as hell didn’t expect to be rewarded for our productivity and generosity with a rising tide of spittle-flecked insanity about how we’re just a bunch of immoral, godless, drug-soaked, sex-crazed, evil America-hating traitors who can’t wait to hand the country over to the Islamists and the Communists.
Robinson suggests that blue staters Go Galt and let the by-your-own-bootstraps crowd pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and take responsibility for everything from the free-market viability of their farm products to their children’s competitiveness in the job market.
We realize some of you aren’t too keen on public schools. It’s great that you want to take on more personal responsibility for educating your own kids. Just be warned: if you don’t teach them real science and real history — including evolution, climate change and the actual contents of the US Constitution — we’re probably not going to hire them. So we hope you’re also ready to take responsibility for that, too, which will probably mean supporting your grown kids in your basement until you die.
Made me laugh out loud several times. Enjoy.
Public Officials With A Dim View Of The Public Good
Posted by: | CommentsWhat do former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and North Carolina state Rep. Tim Moffitt have in common? They both take a rather dim view of public education.
A Buncombe County Republican and a member of the state’s House Select Committee on Early Childhood Education Improvement, Moffitt received a flood of election-year criticism for recent comments about public education. Moffitt is one of over three dozen North Carolina politicians affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded organization that promoting its ghost-written model legislation in states across the country and whose goals in education are, according to critics, “ideological — creating a system where schools do not provide for everyone — and profit-driven.” The Charlotte Observer quoted Moffitt saying in the education committee on which he sits, “I am very suspect of early childhood education. I am very suspect of education in general.”
So is Santorum. Last March, Santorum suggested to New Hampshire voters that Democrats use public schools like a “drug dealer outside a school yard” as a means of “drugging” children into dependency on government. According to a New York Times report on Saturday, Santorum told the crowd at a campaign stop in Ohio, “… the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic.”
And It Shows
Posted by: | CommentsTimmeh!
“I am very suspect of early childhood education. I am very suspect of education in general.”Oh boy. Is that what you want to hear from a state legislator? More specifically, is that what you want to hear from a member of the House Select Committee on Early Childhood Education Improvement?
Rep. Tim Moffitt, a Republican and a management consultant from Asheville, said it during that committee’s meeting Thursday morning, people who were there say. We’ll hope he meant he’s frustrated with the state of education right now and fervently hopes to improve it. We left a message for him Friday afternoon to find out. Given the 20 percent cut Republicans inflicted on pre-K education last year, though, it appears most Republicans have an odd sense of what ‘improvement’ means.
Read more here.
Because It’s Not About Education – It’s About The Money
Posted by: | CommentsThe American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) held an education “academy” for legislators this week at a resort in Florida. Last week, ALEC released its 17th Report Card on American Education. Dustin Beilke at Truthout explains the ALEC report card this way: “Imagine getting a report card from your teacher and finding out that you were graded not on how well you understood the course material or scored on the tests and assignments, but rather on to what extent you agreed with your teacher’s strange public policy positions.” Better yet, imagine L. Ron Hubbard writing your child’s lesson plans.
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
Posted by: | Comments
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.”
