The River Wanders...

here are four reasons the President’s pre-K initiative faces a tough ride in Congress:

1)  It’s expensive.  Delivering high-quality pre-K is an investment that pays off in the future – but it’s one that Washington has to pay for now.  That’s a tall order in today’s fiscal climate, gives opponents an easy way out (“it’s important, but we can’t afford it”), and redirecting the funds from existing programs such as Head Start creates substantial opposition. The President didn’t outline how this would be paid for.

2) The early-childhood education community is rarely accused of effectiveness.  In many ways early-childhood advocates are their own worst enemies.  ”They eat their own,” one observer told me today while discussing the President’s proposals.  That’s true, despite all the obstacles they have to overcome together, advocates have traditionally had trouble getting on the same page.  Splintered support is a liability.

3)  There is no center to hold.  The basic battle lines are people who think expanding access to pre-K is paramount and those who think improving quality in pre-K is.  Underneath the posturing the quality and access caucus is pretty small.  That’s thwarted pre-K initiatives in the past and the President has his work cut out for him to change those politics.

4) It’s a hell of an issue.  Pre-K enjoys wide-support among the American people.  In the through-the-looking-glass world of Washington that can be a liability as much as an asset because politicians sometimes, ‘want the issue.’ With tough midterm elections on the horizon some politicians in Washington who support pre-K might not support it too fast because it’s political gold in a campaign.  Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened on an education issue.

(via robot-heart-politics)

questionall:

Since the Department of Labor’s monthly employment report was released last Friday, very little discussion in the media has been devoted to the fact that of the 13,000 local government workers that were laid off last month, more than 11,000 were teachers or school-related staff. Reuters reported that last month’s firings have driven the number of workers employed by local government to their lowest levels since 2005.

Typically, a school will announce layoffs slated to go into effect at the end of a school year. That the firings have occurred in the middle of the year points to the fact that many districts, pressed for funds, simply have no choice but to let go of staff without warning.

“There is some expectation that state and local budgets will start to improve as the economy is picking up,” said Jan Eberly, the US Treasury’s assistant secretary on economic policy, about the findings. This echoes the refrain of the Obama administration, citing the barely 153,000 average jobs added per month in 2012 as a sign of an improving economy. It has been acknowledged, however, that at this pace, the level of employment will not reach pre-recession levels for nearly a decade.

In reality, the Obama administration has no intention to restore public sector jobs that have been eliminated since the onset of the recession in 2008. Public education has been a prime target of privatization and downsizing under the administration’s Race to the Top program. Across the country, district managers have used questions of accountability and so-called efficiency in school districts to shred public education, with teachers bearing the brunt of this onslaught.

Alongside this is the outright elimination of public education in many school districts, with its replacement by privately contracted charters. A recent announcement by the Philadelphia public school district noted it was preparing to shutter as many as three dozen schools in the city. Such a move would effectively eliminate public education for many neighborhoods in the district. Washington, D.C., has an arrangement stating that any new public facilities that are opened in the district will be given to charter operators on a first come, first served basis.

The Economix blog of the New York Times recently noted that while the private sector has added roughly 725,000 workers since 2008, the public sector has lost a near-equivalent number at 697,000. This means that a shifting has occurred within the workforce, sending workers out of the public sector and into less-secure, lower-paying private sector jobs, if they happen to be rehired at all. Over that period, 300,000 of those lost pubic sector jobs belonged to teachers.

A National Employment Law Project study released last fall found that 60 percent of the jobs that the “economic recovery” has produced were low paying, having wages between $7.69 and $13.83 an hour. In contrast, medium-paying jobs, those that made up the majority lost during the recession, made up barely 22 percent of those that have returned since.

Local governments, starved of federal and state funding, have been compelled to carry out some of the most drastic budget cuts and layoffs. US Commerce Department data shows that local and state government spending contracted 11 of 12 months throughout last year, with only a slight uptick of 0.3 percent in December.

The elimination of public education has been a central aim of Obama’s Race to the Top, an expansion on the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind. The program ties school funding to bogus “accountability” measures, singling out teachers with standardized test performance in order to label schools that fail to meet these requirements as underperforming, and thus designated to be shut down, making way for for-profit charter schools.

The teachers’ unions have facilitated these attacks. In light of the latest round of layoffs, National Education Association (NEA) teachers’ union president Dennis Van Roekel told Reuters that he remained “hopeful that President Obama and the 113th Congress, as well as governors, will prioritize our students and public education and work hard to stave off further cuts.” The NEA was the first major union to endorse the president’s re-election bid, when at the time Obama had already presided over 200,000 layoffs in the education sector.

The author also recommends:

US jobs report points to continuing stagnation
[05 January 2013]

This is a very disturbing trend.  If we allow our schools to become privatized, our kids will be far worse for it.  We will become even more dumbed down, more compliant, more unquestioning of authority.  Our country will become more stagnant and the population will become more impoverished.  We must stand up to these corporations that want to enslave us completely and are succeeding with the help of the government.

(via end-the-republican-mafia)

I wish I had these when I was little!

climateadaptation:

Guess what? They’re doing it. Students at over 100 colleges across the U.S. are petitioning, debating, writing letter campaigns, and giving speeches and presentations to force their colleges to dump oil stocks. The point is to make owning oil stocks the moral equivalent of investing in tobacco or other harmful products.

Thus, the clever idea is to hit oil companies where it hurts - their wallets. It’s called “divestment.” “Divestment” is the opposite of investment. It’s when an organization liquidates its stock and other investments in certain industries, in this case big oil.

A group of Swarthmore College students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no.

But, the students are very organized with the help of Bill McKibben, a well known environmentalist and head of 350.org. They’ve had some success:

In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal, oil and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda.

“We’ve reached this point of intense urgency that we need to act on climate change now, but the situation is bleaker than it’s ever been from a political perspective,” said William Lawrence, a Swarthmore senior from East Lansing, Mich.

Divestment has worked before:

Students who have signed on see it as a conscious imitation of the successful effort in the 1980s to pressure colleges and other institutions to divest themselves of the stocks of companies doing business in South Africa under apartheid.

A small institution in Maine, Unity College, has already voted to get out of fossil fuels. Another, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, has adopted a broad investment policy that is ridding its portfolio of fossil fuel stocks.

A new chapter in activism is born. The full story makes for an exciting read, To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios.

(via dendroica)

oneluv918:

How would you motivate elementary school kids to want to learn? I’m sure we could all think of creative ways, some that may even involve a sugary bribe. But the way one Idaho school teacher chose to motivate her students is causing some parents to question her judgment.

Summer Larsen, who teaches the fourth grade at Declo Elementary, is being criticized for the way she allowed students to behave after asking them to assess their reading goals. The students came up with incentives to accomplish the goals. Students who met their reading goals would be allowed to draw on the faces of those who did not reach their goals. The students who fell short of their goals could choose to either skip recess or allow other students to draw on their faces. Of the 21 fourth-graders involved, nine did not meet the goals, six chose to be drawn on, and three chose to miss recess. Some of the students chose to draw goatees and mustaches on other students.

One parent said, “Not only was my son punished with bullying, but the other students were rewarded with bullying. They’re being taught that bullying is OK.”

Some parents didn’t have a problem with what happened. “I’m just one of many parents who stand totally behind Summer Larsen and her teaching methods and what she does. We think she is a wonderful teacher, and we want to see her stay at Declo for many years,” said Carla Christensen.

Gayle Smyer, the superintendent of the district where Larsen teaches, told KMVT reporter Andrew Reed that Larsen was put on temporary leave for a week, but was back teaching at the school as of Monday. Smyer said the incident is still being investigated and the school district takes parents concerns very seriously.

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Source

This is such a BS “choice”.  They’re basically being taught “if you follow the rules you can use others how you like”, and if you don’t meet expectations then you have to decide whether to lose one of the few forms of exercise/stress relief during school or be branded on your FACE.

thenationmagazine:

Mitt Romney, yesterday:

We simply can’t have a setting where the teachers unions are able to contribute tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of politicians and then those politicians, when elected, stand across from them at the bargaining table… I think we’ve got to get the money out of the teachers unions going into campaigns. It’s the wrong way for us to go.

So Mitt’s got absolutely no problem with billionaires buying elections, but working people participating in the political process is apparently a bridge too far.

The only good union is the NFL referee’s union.

(via silas216)