Month: December 2014
“Voices of a People’s History,” 10th anniversary edition features testing resistance & MAP Boycott!
Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove’s updated primary source companion to A People’s History of the United States includes Amber Kudla’s anti-standardized testing graduation speech and Jesse Hagopian’s reflection on the Seattle MAP test boycott.
Since its publication in 2004, Voices of a People’s History of the United States has played a vital role in my classroom—not only revealing the voices of social justice from the past so often choked into lifelessness by the standard issue corporate textbooks, but also inspiring my students to take actions of their own. Over the semesters and over the years, I repeatedly point students towards this collection of primary sources when they want to understand the ideas that helped propel social change: Bartolome De Las Casas’ “The Devastation of the Indies;” Tecumseh’s “Speech to the Osages;” Fredrick Douglass’ “What to the slave is the forth of July;” Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?;” Eugene Deb’s…
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ProPublica: When Charters are Nonprofit in Name Only
Marian Wang of ProPublica reports on a curious phenomenon in the charter sector: “nonprofit” charters that are run by for-profit corporations.
“A couple of years ago, auditors looked at the books of a charter school in Buffalo, New York, and were taken aback by what they found. Like all charter schools, Buffalo United Charter School is funded with taxpayer dollars.
“The school is also a nonprofit. But as the New York State auditors wrote, Buffalo United was sending ” virtually all of the School’s revenues” directly to a for-profit company hired to handle its day-to-day operations.
“Charter schools often hire companies to handle their accounting and management functions. Sometimes the companies even take the lead in hiring teachers, finding a school building, and handling school finances.
“In the case of Buffalo United, the auditors found that the school board had little idea about exactly how the company – a large…
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Undergrowth with Two Figures — Vincent van Gogh
▶ James Risen and Phil Donahue on Obama’s War on Press Freedoms
Published on Aug 15, 2014
TheRealNews: Award winning journalists James Risen and Phil Donahue discuss the importance of grassroots movements in preserving the basic tenants of democracy at a time of unprecedented attacks on whistle-blowers and journalists.
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Mike Leigh Picks DVDs from the Criterion Collection Closet
Pearson Plans to Reinvent Testing
REINVENTING THE STANDARDIZED TEST: Pearson has been adjusting its internal focus from print to digital; now the global education giant is out with a study of how that shift can improve testing around the world. “Preparing for a Renaissance in Assessment” argues that our current standardized tests – many of them, of course, developed by Pearson – aren’t making the grade. They’re not sensitive enough to accurately assess student performance at either the low or the high ends of the scale. They don’t give teachers timely, useful feedback. And they’re too focused on assessing low-level skills, rather than the competencies valued in today’s workplace, such as critical analysis, personal communication and hands-on problem solving. What’s the solution? Pearson touts the power of adaptive technology to customize exams. It’s also high on using computer algorithms to robo-grade student essays. (The report states as a fact that the PARCC consortium…
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Naked Woman Reading — Leon Kroll
100 Words on the Harrison Act at 100
New Federal Budget Defunds Race to the Top
According to news reports, the new federal budget strips all funding from Race to the Top. Good riddance to one of the worst, most destructive federal programs in history. Historians will one day tell us who cooked up this assault on teachers and public schools. If states wanted to be eligible for part of Arne Duncan’s $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funding, they were required to adopt the “college and career ready standards,” aka Common Core, even though no one had ever field tested them. States had to agree to evaluate teachers to a significant degree by student scores, even though there was no evidence for doing so. States had to open more charters, transferring control from public to private management. States had to create massive data systems to track students.
RTTT was an all-out assault on the teaching profession, public education, and student privacy.
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The Coming Neurosociety: Control, Brain, And Revolt
Slavoj Zizek mentions Ahmed El Hady’s article on Big Think: Neurotechnology, Social Control and Revolution in his short work Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept in which DARPA at the behest of the U.S. Government is carrying on a well-funded R&D project based on three strands: narrative analysis; augmented cognition (along the lines of the Iron Man project, etc., to create soldiers with enhanced cognitive capacities); and autonomous robots (aiming to convert a large fraction of the military into a robotic one, which is easier to control , will decrease the economic burden of having military personnel, and will reduce losses in terms of soldiers’ lives).1
The first project Hady describes it DARPA’s narrative networks project seeks to detect potential security threats and to protect vulnerable people from being recruited by terrorists through analysis of people narratives in the context of national security. Yet, the obverse potential of…
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TFA Closing NYC Office, Not Enough Recruits
There have been rumors for months that TFA has seen a sharp decline in applicants. This may be confirmation.
Teach for America is closing down its NYC office because of a decline in recruitment.
It seems the pushback from alumni has made a difference, despite TFA’s massive PR and funding. Alumni have written many articles warning that they were ill-prepared for their assignments.
John Pilger: War by Media and the Triumph of Propaganda
Secrecy, Surveillance and Censorship
The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.
By JOHN PILGER Counterpunch Weekend Edition, Dec. 5-7, 2014
Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?
Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?
These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war…
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The Temptation of St. Anthony (Detail) — Hieronymus Bosch
Will Corporate Titans Destroy Public Education?
Film-maker Brian Malone of Malone Media has completed a documentary about the corporate assault on public education. the film is called Education, Inc.
Please take a look at the trailer and let Brian know what you think. His email is brian@malonetv.com
Find it here:
https://www.facebook.com/edincmovie
Trailer
Interview with Henry GIroux: Current “Reforms” Attempt to Drive Young People Out of Democracy
Right off, it is crucial to make corporate power and its effects visible. And that means not just material relations of power but also the ideologies that legitimate corporate power. This means that it is crucial to recognize that there is no correlation between corporate power and democracy. When corporate power speaks in the name of democracy, it basically lies and the ideological assumptions that drive corporate power have got to be challenged.
By Camilla Croso, Latin-American Campaign for the Right to Education | Interview truthout.org November 24, 2014
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)
Henry Giroux teaches at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and has written several books about youth, democracy and public education. In this interview with Camilla Croso, coordinator of the Latin-American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE), Giroux talks about corporate interests in the privatization of education, attacks on the importance of schooling and…
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New book focuses on women in reggae
There are hundreds of books written about Bob Marley, reggae and dancehall, but none have been all about the women. Now all that has changed thanks to Heather Augustyn, a correspondent for The Times of Northwest Indiana, U.S., and an adjunct professor at Purdue University’s North Calumet campus as well as the author of Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World’s Greatest Trombonist, Ska: An Oral History and Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation.
Songbirds: Pioneering Women in Jamaican Music is the first the first book about women ni reggae, many of whom are critical to the ska explosion in the 60s or the global rise of roots reggae in the 70s.
The book is a detailed look at the daughters, wives and mothers in reggae; the vocalists, instrumentalists, producers, dancers and deejays who helped to shape the course of Jamaican music on the island…
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Podemos on the rise
These are the lead paragraphs of my article “Where Did Podemos Come From? Where is it Going?” that is timed to coincide with the relaunch of North Star,
This article provides some background on Podemos in Spain, a broad-based radical party that has been likened to Syriza in Greece and that like Syriza could very possibly become a ruling party in the not too distant future. It was written for the relaunch of North Star (http://www.thenorthstar.info/), a website that calls for the creation of a non-sectarian, broad-based anticapitalist party—in other words, an American Podemos.
For those of us in the United States who are working to create something equivalent, there are many lessons to be drawn even if there are sizable differences between the USA and Spain. But what they do have in common is key: a two-party system that has effectively maintained hegemonic control over politics.
Since…
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How the US rolls (post-Global Minotaur) – by SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
In this article, aptly subtitled It’s lonely being the global policeman, Slavoj evokes a parallelism between the age of extremes that began as the British Empire was losing its grip with the present moment in history. Now that the Global Minotaur (quoting my book) is mortally wounded, “…the American century is over and we are witnessing the gradual formation of multiple centers of global capitalism”.
Zizek’s verdict? Faced with increasing uncertainty and mounting insecurity, “…the solution is not to be very careful and avoid risky acts—in acting like this, we fully participate in the logic which leads to catastrophe. The solution is to fully become aware of the explosive set of interconnections that makes the entire situation dangerous. Once we do this, we should embark on the long and difficult work of changing the coordinates of the entire situation. Nothing less will do.” Hear, hear!
To read the full article…
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21st Century Theater 