Alaska Governor Sarah Palin
We took government out of the dairy business and put it back into private-sector hands – where it should be. [she has no idea what she's saying - down is up]
more fromwww.gov.state.ak.us
Democratic Strategist
The Big Article du jour is Todd Purdum's massive profile of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair.
more fromwww.thedemocraticstrategist.org
NPR's ombudsman: Why we bar the word "torture" - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
Anyone who believes that NPR is a "liberal" media outlet -- and anyone who wants to understand the decay of American journalism -- should read this column by NPR's Ombudsman, Alicia C. Shepard, as she explains and justifies why NPR bars the use of the word "torture" to describe what the Bush administration did.
more fromwww.salon.com
Education Week: Start Over
duncan: I’m calling on the existing network of turnaround specialists to be ready, and I’m urging charter school groups, unions, districts, and states to get in this business of turning around our lowest-performing schools.
more fromwww.edweek.org
Arne Duncan and the Chicago Success Story: Myth or Reality? - Volume 23 No. 3 - Spring 2009 - Rethinking Schools Online
With the appointment by Barack Obama of Arne Duncan—a noneducator from the business sector who was Chicago's "chief executive officer"—as U.S. Secretary of Education, this phenomenon may repeat itself.
more fromwww.rethinkingschools.org
t r u t h o u t | Conversation With Henry Giroux: Let Us Make Haste While We Can (Part II)
Henry Giroux: I think public education and higher education are now suffering from two kinds of crisis: A "legitimation" crisis, and a "political" crisis.
more fromwww.truthout.org
A History of Schooling for Alaska Native People
This article documents significant historical events and trends that have helped to shape the policies and practices of education in Alaska, particularly those that have most directly impacted the schooling of Alaska Native people.
more fromwww.ankn.uaf.edu
Education Week: The State of Curriculum
On the eve of the 21st century, the struggle for the curriculum--being played out in the setting of state academic standards and measures for holding schools, teachers, and students accountable for meeting them--is no less fractious. Scholars, administrators, teachers, and parents are all bidding to leave their imprint. But in the span of a hundred years, much of the control over what is taught has shifted from the schoolhouse to the statehouse--an often turbulent transition made reluctantly and grudgingly. State leaders, more than ever, are at the helm, still trying to fulfill the hope and promise for public education their counterparts were striving for a century ago.
more fromwww.edweek.org
46 States and D.C. to Pursue Common Education Standards - washingtonpost.com
by Maria Glod - "If you agree to common standards but you don't agree to tests, it's like buying a car without a motor," said Jack Jennings, president of the D.C.-based Center on Education Policy. "It's buying the outside without getting the thing to work."
more fromwww.washingtonpost.com
Op-Ed Columnist - The Howls of a Fading Species - NYTimes.com
Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!
Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.
Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”
Never a peep did you hear.
more fromwww.nytimes.com
What happened to prison education programs? | SocialistWorker.org
With the retreat of the movements of the 1960s, the government's approach to prisons and prisoners was pulled in a more conservative direction, like other social policies. The idea that it should be a concern of society to help prisoners better themselves disappeared; instead, prison became a place where people were thrown away to pay for their crimes.
more fromsocialistworker.org
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin
"The standards are not the education problem we face," the governor said. "The major challenges are persistently low achievement among some students and low graduation rate. Now is the time for the state and school districts to work together to improve instruction and student achievement."\n\nTo that end, in this past legislative session the administration proposed and the legislature funded a pilot program to improve young children's readiness for school and an initiative to help struggling school districts build a sustainable capacity to serve their students.\n\n
more fromwww.gov.state.ak.us
Listen to the Other Guy's Story
ou have to live your life in conformity with the patterns and structures of reality in order to be a healthy human being. That kind of teaching is going on in the womb. And that pattern goes back. When a Yup’ik mother-to-be today goes through the hotel door at the Hotel Captain Cook head-first without stopping, she’s repeating a pattern that goes back to the first mother and the first parents and the beginning of the human race.
So, for a village person, meaningful time can be any time you repeat the pattern that has been handed down to you from the past. If that’s where your focus is, if that’s the way you live your life, the way you get out of bed, the way you go through a doorway, the way you eat your food, then life is filled with time that passes in a very different way from the kind that we measure with clocks and calendars.
more fromlitsite.alaska.edu
ommunity used to be there as a givenBridging Differences: Civil Rights and Democracy are Inseparable
The poorer the children, the less self-initiated activity allowed—after all, “they have to catch up.” The metaphors we use tell us a lot—including the unfortunate latest out of Washington: The Race to the Top. Ugh.
Deb
P.S. Speaking of using racing as a metaphor for schooling: If everyone becomes proficient, we’ll invent a new set of indicators to separate the very proficient, moderately proficient, etc. The new rank order will look a lot like the old ones—guess who’ll be on top and on bottom? On and on and on.
more fromblogs.edweek.org
A Plan for Parents to Shut Down Schools - On Education (usnews.com)
The parent union says the charter schools would be smaller, safer, and better at preparing all students for college. Principals would also have the authority to dismiss bad teachers swiftly, which rarely is an option at traditional schools. If the district ignores these petitions, Barr's organization or another charter school operator could threaten to open charter schools in the neighborhood where a bad school exists. These charter schools could drive students away from the failing neighborhood school, depriving the district of state funding that follows students.
more fromwww.usnews.com
Exposing the Pro-Life Lie | Red Room
The murder today of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas confirms what many of us have long known. Among those who call themselves pro-life, there are plenty who are anything but. They are terrorists, plain and simple, who seek to subordinate women to the religiously fanatical, patriarchal dystopia of their theocratic fantasies. At best, they are pro-fetal life. They love the pre-born but could care less for those children already here, whose poverty they will blame on their parents, whose illness and lack of health care they will shrug off as "not their problem," and whose humanity they will altogether ignore or even cheer as it is destroyed, so long as those children be Iraqi, or Afghan, or just Muslim in general.
more fromwww.redroom.com
Newt Gingrich Reaches His Sell-By Date
Gingrich tweeted off the deep end Wednesday when he jumped over the cliff of responsible Republicanism and into the chasm of right-wing talk-radio delusion.
Responding via Twitter to the nomination of Federal Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill the vacancy that will be created by the retirement of Justice David Souter, Gingrich did not think. He took his talking points from Limbaugh, who has been trying to foster the fantasy that the nominee is some kind of "reverse racist."
more fromwww.thenation.com
Sam Alito, Affirmative Action Baby? | Mother Jones
there has been less talk about another Supreme Court controversy that revolved around race and gender politics at Princeton University. In November 2005, a few weeks after George W. Bush nominated Samuel Alito, documents emerged showing that in a 1985 application for a job in the Reagan Justice Department, Alito had listed under his “personal qualifications” the fact that he was "a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton University, a conservative alumni group."
more fromwww.motherjones.com
The Battle for a Country's Soul - The New York Review of Books
As Major General Antonio Taguba told The New Yorker, his investigation of Abu Ghraib was limited to the military police below, not those above him. "I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority," he said. "I was limited to a box."
more fromwww.nybooks.com
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