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Make no mistake, Minnesota has some awesome high schools producing state, national, and even world leaders. The yearly U.S. News rankings of America's top High schools are out. The usual suspects top the list, along with a few surprises.

Minneapolis Southwest is the top High School in Minnesota and in the top 200 nationwide, out of tens of thousands of high schools. Pretty impressive. A funny thing happens though, when you use subsets of test scores for judging schools, and in essence their teachers. You see, the number 1 high school in the state has been labeled a failure for at least six straight years. ...

Luckily for them, Southwest does not receive Federal Title 1 Funds. If they did, they would have been closed down four years ago! I will say that again for emphasis. If the #1 High School in Minnesota just had a few more poor kids, they would have shut it down years ago.

...All in all, more than half of the top ten [in Minn.] are made up of NCLB failures.

education classism

Mitt's statement perfectly articulates what the Republican Party has always believed. Being a mother isn't work; it is only through employment outside the home that a mother achieves "dignity." And women who don't have the convenience of their husbands' stock portfolio don't deserve to have a choice to stay home with their children. They "need to go to work." Rich women who stay home work hard. Poor women who do are lazy. And undignified. ...

Pick any policy that better enables women to spend more time with their children..., and Republicans are 100 percent against it. Paid family leave laws so working mothers can spend time with their new infants? Against it. Housing and nutritional assistance so women can forgo employment to stay home with their children? Not only are Republicans against that, but in several states, Republicans have pushed for, and even enacted, legislation requiring those women to submit to drug tests. Because obviously any woman who wants to make the choice to stay home with her children must be a drug addict. Unless her name is Ann Romney.

classism

But you can see what he's saying there. It's a matter of people working harder and living a "more moral life." It's good for 'em. Teach 'em the value of a real days work for a change. Make 'em grateful for they have instead of always wanting more.

This [responding to economic crisis with "austerity"] is tough love for the rubes who have to get used to their reduced circumstances.

classism

...one day things got scary enough that [the teacher], accompanied by a police officer, felt it necessary to escort the student home to speak with his parents. When they got to his apartment about a mile away from the school, the weeks of mystery surrounding the [boy's] behavior were replaced with instant clarity. His mother, his only guardian, answered the door ashamedly, and out scurried a man, her most recent john.

...The reason the "problem student" behaved so badly is because he knew that if his tantrums were chronic, he'd be sent home. And that was a good thing, because when he was home, his mother couldn't work as a prostitute. He couldn't tell any of his teachers this, of course, because then he'd run the risk of child welfare services taking him away from his mother, and he needed to be there to protect her. The boy never hated school, he just loved his mom more.

classism

The architects of equality before the law, or equality of opportunity, knew that it would only allow a few special black people to succeed, and shrugged their shoulders about the rest. As the Reverend Horace James, the former Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, said in 1865, “Give the colored man equality, not of social condition, but equality before the law, and if he proves himself the superior of the Anglo Saxon, who can hinder it? If he falls below him, who can help it?” (Side note: lynch mobs were the south’s response to the question who can hinder successful black people.)

racism history classism

Forbes magazine has posted a column by Gene Marks, a middle aged white guy, who wants to give advice to poor black kids about how to be successful in America. Of course, these young black kids read Forbes everyday and will internalize his wisdom. There is no poverty porn, noblesse oblige, white paternalism, compassionate conservative masturbation, navel gazing at work here. No. None at all.

...[I don't] know what Gene Marks' intentions were in writing his Forbes' essay. However, I am mighty curious about the intentions of Forbes' editors in publishing such a problematic piece of work.

[See also the comment by Shahryar on Tue Dec 13, 2011 at 05:50:49 PM PST - http://www.dailykos.com/comments/1045077/44253350#c9

--L.]

racism classism asshattery

For those who are curious, the organization collecting and distributing suits to protesters is called the Proper Business Attire Working Group. The suits were apparently given out on Oct. 15, the big global protest day. They have a nice little video montage on their site of well-dressed activists throughout history. I applaud any protester who shows up for #OWS, but I agree that it's more effective to look dignified, especially in the current Big Dumb Cable News Era. (You'd think, given their track record, that bald guys in suits would no longer be taken seriously, but alas, they still are.)

2011_protests united_states occupywallstreet classism

A federal judge temporarily blocked Florida’s new law that requires welfare applicants to pass a drug test before receiving benefits on Monday, saying it may violate the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

civil_liberties privacy war_on_inanimate_objects classism

Lawmakers in three dozen states this year have proposed drug testing for people receiving benefits like welfare, unemployment assistance, job training, food stamps and public housing...

war_on_inanimate_objects classism privacy civil_liberties

We can, at this point, take it as well-established that men are too often considered "success objects" by society, yes? I don't need to once again explain how, just as women are judged by their perceived adherence to a largely arbitrary standard of sexual attractiveness, men are judged by their material and financial "success"? Good.

Now, being "successful" financially has never been easy, and has only gotten harder in recent decades. Thing is, the narrative that anyone can get rich is built very deeply into American culture. ...If anyone can get rich, this assumption runs, then everyone can get rich, and therefore any person who's not rich has, in some way, failed.

...Just as the women-as-sex-objects narrative has created the fucked-up mess that is the beauty industry, so has the men-as-success-objects routine gotten together with the rigged game of the American economy to create the success industry. And hot damn, are they both ineffably awful.

sexism classism

...every news program gives us the financial news. There are specific programs focusing on nothing but the financial markets, and newspapers have whole sections covering them.

Yet it is rare, these days, for any media source to have a section focusing on labor news, and the nightly news certainly do not routinely cover labor issues. All this despite the fact that many more people are workers than stake-holders in the financial markets.

And sure, financial news are important and affect our lives. But surely labor news are also important and affect our lives?

classism

"Here in New York City, we are presented with a [glaringly] unequal education," he continued. "There are physical disparities in the same school building. Those of us who went to magnet schools in the '80s might recall the pain caused when they put a magnet school inside a regular school, and the way in which the magnet kids were seen as different because they had everything, and the kids at the regular school had nothing."

classism racism

Newsweek has released its list of America's best high schools, which reveal one startling key to a great high school: selectively screening all but the highest achieving children. ...

The nominal purpose of this ranking list is to "highlight solutions" in terms of preparing secondary students for life in the real world. How can you possibly draw any conclusions from a sample of high schools whose entire purpose is to not have to deal with the problems you're attempting to solve?

education classism

The white woman is waiting for me to speak.

I know a great deal rides on my response. It is not an overstatement to say that the success or failure of the emerging movement to end mass incarceration may turn on the ability of advocates like myself to respond to people like her in a manner that validates and honors her experience, while not brushing aside—even slightly—the thoroughly racial nature of the prevailing caste system. ...

racism war_on_inanimate_objects classism

rape_culture racism classism feminism

...an attempt to reduce the number of dropouts, despite criticism that the approach isn't effective.

Legislators in Alabama, Iowa, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia are working to pass bills or update laws that would snatch driver's licenses out of the hands of dropouts, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

classism beatings_will_continue_until_morale_improves

[GOOD - Shamus KhanShamus Khan]

A recent GOOD column argues that college is overrated. Unfortunately, this is dead wrong. The economic returns to a college education are increasing. There is a wealth of academic data on this....

This makes it hard to ar

education classism

racism classism war_on_inanimate_objects florida class_warfare

..Trump was recently caught railing on immigrants at a Tea Party rally in Florida this past weekend. Yet, Trump doesn’t have a problem with well-educated foreigners coming to the United States. He takes issue with the poor undocumented immigrants who “hav

racism immigration xenophobia classism asshattery

...my take is that what we’re looking at is the closing of the conservative intellectual universe, the creation of an echo chamber in which rightists talk only to each other, and in which even the pretense of caring about ordinary people is disappearing.

classism