Citizens' Oversight Maryland---Maryland Progressives
CINDY WALSH FOR MAYOR OF BALTIMORE----SOCIAL DEMOCRAT
Citizens Oversight Maryland.com
  • Home
  • Cindy Walsh for Mayor of Baltimore
    • Mayoral Election violations
    • Questionnaires from Community >
      • Education Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Housing Questionnaire
      • Emerging Youth Questionnaire
      • Health Care policy for Baltimore
      • Environmental Questionnaires
      • Livable Baltimore questionnaire
      • Labor Questionnnaire
      • Ending Food Deserts Questionnaire
      • Maryland Out of School Time Network
      • LBGTQ Questionnaire
      • Citizen Artist Baltimore Mayoral Forum on Arts & Culture Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Transit Choices Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Activating Solidarity Economies (BASE)
      • Downtown Partnership Questionnaire
      • The Northeast Baltimore Communities Of BelAir Edison Community Association (BECCA )and Frankford Improvement Association, Inc. (FIA)
      • Streets and Transportation/Neighbood Questionnaire
      • African American Tourism and business questionnaire
      • Baltimore Sun Questionnaire
      • City Paper Mayoral Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Technology Com Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Biker's Questionnair
      • Homewood Friends Meeting Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Historical Collaboration---Anthem Project
      • Tubman City News Mayoral Questionnaire
      • Maryland Public Policy Institute Questionnaire
      • AFRO questionnaire
      • WBAL Candidate's Survey
  • Blog
  • Trans Pacific Pact (TPP)
  • Progressive vs. Third Way Corporate Democrats
    • Third Way Think Tanks
  • Financial Reform/Wall Street Fraud
    • Consumer Financial Protection Bureau >
      • CFPB Actions
    • Voted to Repeal Glass-Steagall
    • Federal Reserve >
      • Federal Reserve Actions
    • Securities and Exchange Commission >
      • SEC Actions
    • Commodity Futures Trading Commission >
      • CFTC Actions
    • Office of the Comptroller of the Currency >
      • OCC Actions
    • Office of Treasury/ Inspector General for the Treasury
    • FINRA >
      • FINRA ACTIONS
  • Federal Healthcare Reform
    • Health Care Fraud in the US
    • Health and Human Services Actions
  • Social Security and Entitlement Reform
    • Medicare/Medicaid/SCHIP Actions
  • Federal Education Reform
    • Education Advocates
  • Government Schedules
    • Baltimore City Council
    • Maryland State Assembly >
      • Budget and Taxation Committee
    • US Congress
  • State and Local Government
    • Baltimore City Government >
      • City Hall Actions
      • Baltimore City Council >
        • Baltimore City Council Actions
      • Baltimore Board of Estimates meeting >
        • Board of Estimates Actions
    • Governor's Office >
      • Telling the World about O'Malley
    • Lt. Governor Brown
    • Maryland General Assembly Committees >
      • Communications with Maryland Assembly
      • Budget and Taxation Committees >
        • Actions
        • Pension news
      • Finance Committees >
        • Schedule
      • Business Licensing and Regulation
      • Judicial, Rules, and Nominations Committee
      • Education, Health, and Environmental Affairs Committee >
        • Committee Actions
    • Maryland State Attorney General >
      • Open Meetings Act
      • Maryland Courts >
        • Maryland Court System
    • States Attorney - Baltimore's Prosecutor
    • State Comptroller's Office >
      • Maryland Business Tax Reform >
        • Business Tax Reform Issues
  • Maryland Committee Actions
    • Board of Public Works >
      • Public Works Actions
    • Maryland Public Service Commission >
      • Public Meetings
    • Maryland Health Care Commission/Maryland Community Health Resources Commission >
      • MHCC/MCHRC Actions
    • Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition
  • Maryland and Baltimore Development Organizations
    • Baltimore/Maryland Development History
    • Committee Actions
    • Maryland Development Organizations
  • Maryland State Department of Education
    • Charter Schools
    • Public Schools
    • Algebra Project Award
  • Baltimore City School Board
    • Charter Schools >
      • Charter Schools---Performance
      • Charter School Issues
    • Public Schools >
      • Public School Issues
  • Progressive Issues
    • Fair and Balanced Elections
    • Labor Issues
    • Rule of Law Issues >
      • Rule of Law
    • Justice issues 2
    • Justice Issues
    • Progressive Tax Reform Issues >
      • Maryland Tax Reform Issues
      • Baltimore Tax Reform Issues
    • Strong Public Education >
      • Corporate education reform organizations
    • Healthcare for All Issues >
      • Universal Care Bill by state
  • Building Strong Media
    • Media with a Progressive Agenda (I'm still checking on that!) >
      • anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com
      • "Talk About It" Radio - WFBR 1590AM Baltimore
      • Promethius Radio Project
      • Clearing the Fog
      • Democracy Now
      • Black Agenda Radio
      • World Truth. TV Your Alternative News Network.
      • Daily Censured
      • Bill Moyers Journal
      • Center for Public Integrity
      • Public Radio International
      • Baltimore Brew
      • Free Press
    • Far Left/Socialist Media
    • Media with a Third Way Agenda >
      • MSNBC
      • Center for Media and Democracy
      • Public Radio and TV >
        • NPR and MPT News
      • TruthOut
  • Progressive Organizations
    • Political Organizations >
      • Progressives United
      • Democracy for America
    • Labor Organizations >
      • United Workers
      • Unite Here Local 7
      • ROC-NY works to build power and win justice
    • Justice Organizations >
      • APC Baltimore
      • Occupy Baltimore
    • Rule of Law Organizations >
      • Bill of Rights Defense Committee
      • National Lawyers Guild
      • National ACLU
    • Tax Reform Organizations
    • Healthcare for All Organizations >
      • Healthcare is a Human Right - Maryland
      • PNHP Physicians for a National Health Program
      • Healthcare NOW- Maryland
    • Public Education Organizations >
      • Parents Across America
      • Philadelphia Public School Notebook thenotebook.org
      • Chicago Teachers Union/Blog
      • Ed Wize Blog
      • Educators for a Democratic Union
      • Big Education Ape
    • Elections Organizations >
      • League of Women Voters
  • Progressive Actions
    • Labor Actions
    • Justice Actions
    • Tax Reform Actions >
      • Baltimore Tax Actions
      • Maryland Tax Reform Actions
    • Healthcare Actions
    • Public Education Actions
    • Rule of Law Actions >
      • Suing Federal and State government
    • Free and Fair Elections Actions
  • Maryland/Baltimore Voting Districts - your politicians and their votes
    • 2014 ELECTION OF STATE OFFICES
    • Maryland Assembly/Baltimore
  • Petitions, Complaints, and Freedom of Information Requests
    • Complaints - Government and Consumer >
      • Sample Complaints
    • Petitions >
      • Sample Petitions
    • Freedom of Information >
      • Sample Letters
  • State of the Democratic Party
  • Misc
    • WBFF TV
    • WBAL TV
    • WJZ TV
    • WMAR TV
    • WOLB Radio---Radio One
    • The Gazette
    • Baltimore Sun Media Group
  • Misc 2
    • Maryland Public Television
    • WYPR
    • WEAA
    • Maryland Reporter
  • Misc 3
    • University of Maryland
    • Morgan State University
  • Misc 4
    • Baltimore Education Coalition
    • BUILD Baltimore
    • Church of the Great Commission
    • Maryland Democratic Party
    • Pennsylvania Avenue AME Zion Church
    • Maryland Municipal League
    • Maryland League of Women Voters
  • Untitled
  • Untitled
  • Standard of Review
  • Untitled
  • WALSH FOR GOVERNOR - CANDIDATE INFORMATION AND PLATFORM
    • Campaign Finance/Campaign donations
    • Speaking Events
    • Why Heather Mizeur is NOT a progressive
    • Campaign responses to Community Organization Questionnaires
    • Cindy Walsh vs Maryland Board of Elections >
      • Leniency from court for self-representing plaintiffs
      • Amended Complaint
      • Plaintiff request for expedited trial date
      • Response to Motion to Dismiss--Brown, Gansler, Mackie, and Lamone
      • Injunction and Mandamus
      • DECISION/APPEAL TO SPECIAL COURT OF APPEALS---Baltimore City Circuit Court response to Cindy Walsh complaint >
        • Brief for Maryland Court of Special Appeals >
          • Cover Page ---yellow
          • Table of Contents
          • Table of Authorities
          • Leniency for Pro Se Representation
          • Statement of Case
          • Questions Presented
          • Statement of Facts
          • Argument
          • Conclusion/Font and Type Size
          • Record Extract
          • Appendix
          • Motion for Reconsideration
          • Response to Defendants Motion to Dismiss
          • Motion to Reconsider Dismissal
      • General Election fraud and recount complaints
    • Cindy Walsh goes to Federal Court for Maryland election violations >
      • Complaints filed with the FCC, the IRS, and the FBI
      • Zapple Doctrine---Media Time for Major Party candidates
      • Complaint filed with the US Justice Department for election fraud and court irregularities.
      • US Attorney General, Maryland Attorney General, and Maryland Board of Elections are charged with enforcing election law
      • Private media has a responsibility to allow access to all candidates in an election race. >
        • Print press accountable to false statement of facts
      • Polling should not determine a candidate's viability especially if the polling is arbitrary
      • Viability of a candidate
      • Public media violates election law regarding do no damage to candidate's campaign
      • 501c3 Organizations violate election law in doing no damage to a candidate in a race >
        • 501c3 violations of election law-----private capital
      • Voter apathy increases when elections are not free and fair
  • Maryland Board of Elections certifies election on July 10, 2014
  • Maryland Elections ---2016

April 17th, 2014

4/17/2014

0 Comments

 
REMEMBER, ALL OF THESE POLICIES MAKING COST FOR HIGHER EDUCATION TOO HIGH FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC IS DELIBERATE....THE GOAL IS TO END HIGHER EDUCATION FOR 90% OF AMERICANS.  GLOBAL CORPORATIONS NEED PEOPLE BAREFOOT AND UNINFORMED IN ORDER TO MOVE FROM FIRST WORLD, TO SECOND WORLD, AND WITH THE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT-----THIRD WORLD.

Remember folks.....the massive corporate frauds of last decade of tens of trillions of dollars was meant to place the US into so much debt as to act as an excuse to dismantle all that is public.  It is why as well that Obama and neo-liberals suspended Rule of Law to allow the loot to stay at the top....they must have Federal, state, and local governments in debt so as to pretend our public structures cannot be maintained.



I spoke yesterday about the private non-profits in Maryland and Baltimore turning our government into a mechanism for profit. I want to talk today about the privatization of higher education and its goal for the same profit-generating mechanism.  I have spoken at length about the capture of our community colleges and transition into corporate job training paid for by taxpayers and students.  Some vocational tracks in community college are not bad, but making the entire system based on job training ends yet another avenue for the lower-middle class to enter strong higher education paths.....which is the point.  It also seeks to eliminate labor union apprenticeships which have always handled all of these job training duties while an employee was on the job and getting paid. 

SEE HOW UNION-BUSTING AND HUMAN RESOURCES OUTSOURCING TO THE PUBLIC IS A PROFIT-MAXIMIZER?
 

The entire education reform of Obama's terms have been about ending public education and access to the best of education.  Remember, the 1% have said that education is wasted on 90% of Americans.  This is the goal of these education reforms and it is why they are being fought all across the country.  We know that the Captains of Industry and government graduated from public schools when the US was operating its best.  Now that Ivy League grads have control----stagnation, crippling fraud and corruption have a grip.

Let's see what people across the country are doing and we thank those groups in Maryland who are starting to shout loudly and strongly-----


WHO'S SCHOOLS?  OUR SCHOOLS!!!!


It is very sad how Obama and neo-liberals in Congress have allowed the Department of Education to become a Wall Street credit collection agency complete with fraud, corruption, and profiteering as student loans are treated like pay day lenders.  People are forced into repayment plans they cannot afford while already making monthly payments and then fees of as much as $3,000 show up on their balances with no documentation of why.  Balances cannot be given they are told because the amounts change from day to day.  They have done to student loans what they did to the Federal Housing Agency---FHA.  Made it predatory and corrupt and intend to simply blow up these student loan programs.


KEEP IN MIND THAT TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN FOR-PROFIT EDUCATION FRAUD WILL COME BACK WHEN RULE OF LAW IS REINSTATED.  THIS INCLUDES ALL OF THIS FRAUD WITH STUDENT LOANS.

It is absurd that all of the politicians below calling for lower rates are not shouting at the degree of fraud and corruption super-sizing these loans.  If they were progressive that would be the solution.  Obama appointed Duncan just to do what is being done and Duncan saying his job is to lower cost for the taxpayers by raising rates for student loan holders is a lie.  Any money saved this way goes out to build the private education structures he pushes.


Student Loan Borrowers' Costs To Jump As Education Department Reaps Huge Profit

Posted: 04/14/2014 9:19 pm EDT Updated: 04/15/2014 12:59 pm EDT

The U.S. Department of Education is forecast to generate $127 billion in profit over the next decade from lending to college students and their families, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Beginning in the 2015-16 academic year, students and their families are forecast to pay more to borrow from the department than they did prior to last summer’s new student loan law, which set student loan interest rates based on the U.S. government's costs to borrow. The higher costs for borrowers would arrive at least a year sooner than previously predicted.

James Kvaal, a top White House official, last year dismissed the possibility that student borrowers would pay higher costs under the new law. The Consumer Protection Financial Bureau on Monday warned borrowers about a "jump" in rates.

The projection, made public Monday by the nonpartisan budget scorekeepers, provides the federal government’s best estimate of how much the government's student loan program will cost taxpayers. That the program is predicted to generate an average annual profit of about $12 billion through 2024 is likely to fuel calls for the Obama administration and Congress to take additional steps to reduce borrowers’ debt burdens, which the Education Department pegs at an average of more than $26,000.

The program produces a profit because the interest rate paid by borrowers exceeds the federal government’s cost to fund those loans and administer the program. The figure also accounts for loan defaults and borrowers’ use of flexible repayment plans that tie monthly payments to their incomes.

The congressionally mandated
accounting method that determines the profit figure has been criticized by some experts, including the Congressional Budget Office. The Education Department in the past has disputed the use of the word “profit.”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has used the profit to help his department reduce its cost to taxpayers to the lowest level since 2001, budget documents show. As Washington focuses on reducing federal expenditures, some experts and student groups said they fear the Education Department may be too reliant on student loan revenues to advocate for debt relief.

“This is a profit-making machine for the Education Department,” said Chris Hicks, who leads the Debt-Free Future campaign for Jobs With Justice, a Washington-based nonprofit group. “The student loan program isn’t about helping students or borrowers -- it’s about making profits for the federal government.”

Education Department representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

Amid an era of falling inflation-adjusted incomes for college graduates and increasing student debt burdens -- total student debt has doubled since 2007, according to the Federal Reserve -- a group of federal regulators, policymakers and student loan experts worry that the nation’s economy will be restrained for years as monthly student loan payments take an increasing bite out of borrowers’ paychecks.

Researchers have found that student loan borrowers are less likely to start small businesses, save for retirement, take out a home mortgage or buy a car. A group of bank chief executives that advise the Fed also have warned about negative repercussions on the nation’s banking system from growing student debt loads.

Hicks said younger borrowers face daunting circumstances. If forced to choose, he said he reckons that borrowers would most likely default on their federal student loans rather than give up their credit cards or forgo health insurance. “I really wonder whether the Education Department is thinking of the consequences of potentially setting up a generation of borrowers to fail,” he said.

To prevent economic ruin, a loose coalition of groups led by the Center for American Progress has been advocating for a federal plan that would enable borrowers with high-rate student loans to refinance into cheaper debt.

Refinancing plans have either been endorsed or formally introduced by lawmakers, including Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Some White House officials are said to support a student loan refinancing scheme, proponents said, but President Barack Obama has not yet publicly endorsed it.

The Education Department, on the other hand, has told some refinancing supporters that a plan to enable borrowers to refinance expensive debt into loans carrying lower interest rates could cost as much as $100 billion over a 10-year period in foregone federal revenue. The department also has warned that a refinancing plan likely would force it to reduce the number of Pell Grants given to college students from low-income households.

Supporters have taken the rough estimate and Pell Grant warning as an indication that the department does not want to allow borrowers to refinance.

Jason Delisle, director of the federal education budget project at the New America Foundation, said CBO figures show that the Pell Grant program will need more money to continue at present levels beginning in 2017. Assuming that Congress does not want to reduce the amount of Pell Grants available to low-income students, the program would need an additional $38.1 billion from 2017 through 2024, Delisle estimated.

Refinancing supporters argue that student loan profit should be used to offset the loss of future federal revenues that would result from allowing borrowers to refinance expensive student loan debts. Student loan profits are used to fund the federal government generally, rather than specific programs, James Runcie, Office of Federal Student Aid chief operating officer, told a Senate panel last month.

But the CBO estimates have been wrong before, underscoring the danger of basing policy on fleeting budget estimates from Washington’s main arbiter on the cost of federal programs.

For example, in August, when Congress was poised to pass the student loan law that set future interest rates, the budget office forecast that federal student loans would generate a $184.7 billion profit through 2023 -- more than the new estimate. Last year, the budget office estimated that the Pell Grant shortfall would be more than $47 billion, Delisle said. The budget office regularly revises its estimates, taking into account recent economic activity and other data.

Still, the Education Department’s estimated profits show a federal student loan program that is charging borrowers way too much, according to Hicks. Beginning in 2015, the average undergraduate borrower will pay 5.72 percent to borrow from the federal government, the budget office estimates. Graduate borrowers are forecast to pay at least 7.27 percent, while parents will pay 8.27 percent.

All three rates are higher than what borrowers paid in the 2012-13 academic year -- the last year before Congress changed the law. The Education Department could help borrowers deal with higher rates by pushing its loan servicers to offer distressed borrowers flexible repayment plans that base monthly payment amounts on incomes.

Despite White House pressure, the number of borrowers in income-driven repayment plans remains low.

“The public needs to be concerned about a government agency acting like a bank,” Hicks said. “The Education Department has a profit motive.”

___________________________
The point isn't how much university tuition has been raised over the last few years....the point is that the cost was raised too high over and last few decades to pay for the corporatization and administration costs.

These student loans accumulated over a decade or more have been deliberately inflated to pay for this privatization and now students are left with college debt they should never have incurred.  Add to this the deliberate policy of keeping the US economy stagnant as the rich dismantle our government structures and impoverish....and you have the making of totalitarianism.

Students protest college costs Rally at OSU part of national event


By Encarnacion Pyle The Columbus Dispatch  •  Friday March 2, 2012 10:15 AM

More than 100 Ohio State University students converged on the Oval yesterday to protest growing college costs and what they say is increasing administrative pressure to run the university like a business.

The rally was part of a national day of protests coordinated by several student groups, including the Occupy movement, which had its start on Wall Street.

“If education is a right, then education isn’t and shouldn’t be a privilege only accessible to people of certain financial qualifications,” said Molly Hendrix, a senior sociology major.


Gathered in front of the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library, students pumped their fists in solidarity as they chanted slogans such as “public education, not a corporation.”

The students complained about the increasing amount of money they have to borrow to pay for school and the poor job prospects awaiting them once they graduate.

Ohio college seniors who graduated with student loans in 2010 owed an average of $27,713, ranking the state the seventh-highest in the nation, according to a report by the Project on Student Debt.

It’s hard to repay loans, the protesters said, when you don’t have a job.

In Ohio, nearly 1 in 5 people between the ages of 20 and 24 were unemployed last year. Only 16- to 19-year-olds had a higher rate, at 24 percent, state statistics show.

They also protested against the state’s enterprise university plan and Ohio State’s willingness to consider leasing its ancillary operations, such as the airport, golf course and parking operation, to private investors. Privatizing operations would serve “private interests instead of the common good,” said Deb Steele, an organizer with Jobs With Justice, a national association of labor unions, faith-based groups and community organizations.

OSU spokesman Jim Lynch said the university has raised tuition only twice in the past five years. “We share our students’ concerns with rising college costs.”

That’s why the university is aggressively pursuing innovative ways to create revenue streams and reallocate existing resources to support teaching and learning, he said.

After listening to more than a half-dozen speakers, the students marched to President E. Gordon Gee’s office, where one of the students read off a list of demands. They then headed to N. High Street, where they spilled into the roadway, blocking southbound traffic for about 20 minutes.

The group ended its march at the Ohio Union with an “open mic” session on a bullhorn, allowing various students to share personal concerns about the future of higher education.

____________________________
As I have said, this education privatization is ground zero in Maryland as Erhlich and now O'Malley make ending public education their goal.  Maryland universities have been gutted and corporatized to such an extent that we have some of the worst education stats in the country.  Online universities are now the only path some lower-middle class families have and these platforms are dismal.

Don't go by the media headlines in Maryland.....they have all the data ranking Maryland #1 in every measured area....including education because none of the data is real!  That is what corporatized education is about-----no public accountability means they can say anything!


Making adjuncts of academics charged with higher education makes sure the people charged with holding power accountable will not be able to do so.  This was the goal of dismantling the tenure/professor as academic structure.  No doubt professors had allowed themselves to be removed from the student, but that was because the emphasis on research and being published that came with university privatization.

IF YOU END ALL OF THE CORPORATE STRUCTURES BUILT THESE FEW DECADES TO MAXIMIZE CORPORATE PROFIT AND CAPTURE THE PUBLIC'S MAIN SOURCE OF HOLDING POWER ACCOUNTABLE-----STUDENT TUITION DROPS BIG-TIME AND
EDUCATION FUNDING GOES TO SUBSIDIZING THE LOWER/MIDDLE CLASS AND NOT CORPORATE PROFIT.

The story with the institution below, MICA, is doubly-telling.  MICA and Peabody Institute for Music were both taken by Johns Hopkins in what can be described as a hostile takeover.  Basically Hopkins controls all of the money and City Hall and as they do with everything in the city----they starve communities and/or institutions until they are forced to merge.......THAT IS A HOSTILE TAKEOVER.  Simply reversing this structure will go far to bring more power to these instructors.
 

Since it was O'Malley that allowed all of these structural changes to occur-----we know he is not really going to support any labor issue beyond a statement.  Every deal he has made during his tenure has weakened and impoverished labor.  In Maryland, pols make statements to get headlines and then the issue is ignored or not enforced.

THIS IS HOW POLICY PROPAGANDA WORKS----IT IS O'MALLEY WHO CREATED ALL THIS CORPORATE STRUCTURE FOR ALL MARYLAND UNIVERSITIES AND NOW THE MEDIA ARE PRETENDING THAT O'MALLEY SUPPORTS LABOR AND JUSTICE! 



Thursday, Mar 20, 2014, 2:15 pm

Academic Labor Unrest Spreads to Maryland Colleges

(UPDATED) BY Bruce Vail Email Print

Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley (D) supports a bill that would ease organizing among community college workers.   (NASA Goddard/Flickr/Creative Commons)

BALTIMORE – Part-time professors at the historic Maryland Institute College of Art are joining a growing movement of academic workers around the country who want a union to help them with fundamental issues of fair pay and decent job conditions.

A committee of part-time faculty—also known as adjuncts—filed a petition on March 7 with the National Labor Relations Board seeking an election to establish Gaithersburg, Md.-based Service Employees International Union Local 500 as its collective bargaining agent. Joshua Smith, one of the committee’s leaders, tells In These Times that the adjuncts hope to move to an election within just a few weeks.

And instructors at other institutions in the region see the move to unionize as highly necessary. “This is an exciting development. Adjuncts really need a union to protect them from the abuses of a system they are unable to change. At the moment, they have no voice ... There can be no sense of community, scholarly or academic, when adjunct faculty are not included in decision-making as to curriculum or policy,” says Peggy Beauvois, a part-time instructor in the College of Education at the nearby Loyola University Maryland, which does not employ unionized faculty. 

“We simply can not meet the needs of students when we must have two—and sometimes three—adjunct positions to even begin to support ourselves. I’ve heard stories about adjuncts who can’t afford an apartment and are living out of the back seat of their cars,” she adds.


Smith estimates there are about 200 adjuncts at MICA, who teach about 45 percent of the school’s courses; overall, he says, the campus environment is a positive one. “We do enjoy working at MICA and it’s a great place to teach,” he says.

But that’s not enough to outweigh the worries about survival and consistent employment that being an adjunct entails, he points out. “Of course compensation and benefits are big issues, but job security is probably the biggest concern,” he says. “You can have been an adjunct for ten years, but you still don’t know whether you will have a class to teach next semester.”

The big question awaiting the adjuncts at MICA is whether the school’s administrators will actively oppose unionization, Smith says. A best-case scenario would see the college bosses adopt a neutral position, as they did at Georgetown University, where Local 500 ran a successful part-time faculty organizing campaign in 2013. Alternatively, higher-ups could take a more antagonistic approach similar to those of Boston’s Northeastern University, where administrators hired the notorious union-busting firm Jackson Lewis last year to stifle organizing. For the moment, though, MICA public relations director Jessica Weglein Goldstein says the school has “no comment” on its position of adjunct unionization.

Smith, however, remains optimistic. The part-time professor, who has taught art history in Baltimore for four years, believes the union will prevail easily in an election. The organizing committee has been active on MICA’s campus since 2011, he says, and has worked to gather support both within the adjunct population and outside of it. For example, members of the committee formally asked full-time professors to remain neutral in an election campaign—a presentation Smith deemed to be effective.

In general, the unionization of adjuncts “is long overdue,” says Michelle Tokarczyk, Vice President of the Maryland Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). There is very little unionization of college staff in the state thus far, she says, but the movement has a broad base of approval from many in the higher education community.

Though MICA is a private institution, labor allies in Maryland hope that its faculty’s efforts will work in conjunction with another campaign focused on community colleges throughout the state. A coalition of unions comprised of the Maryland State Education Association (MSEA), SEIU Local 500 and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) is currently working to push legislation through the state house in Annapolis that would ease organizing at community colleges. Given the lack of labor laws specifically covering community college employees, the coalition is advocating for a bill that would provide a statewide legal framework for those workers when they unionize in the future.

Prospects for passage of the bill are good, reports Sean Johnson, an MSEA official, although it does not appear that state legislature is inclined to act quickly. Organizers have garnered support from key state representatives, however, and Gov. Martin O’Malley has pledged to sign the bill if it passes. Right now, a number of community college presidents are opposing the bill, but labor lobbyists in Annapolis believe that opposition can be overcome, Johnson says.

If the bill is passed, the three unions hope to organize some 19,000 employees at 16 community college campuses: MSEA would seek to unionize the regular full-time faculty, Local 500 would agitate among the adjuncts and AFSCME is interested in the other college staff. “Our coalition has been successful in the past,” Johnson says, in reference to unionization of more than 1,000 academic workers at suburban Washington, D.C. Montgomery College in 2008, “and we think it will be successful again.”

The urgency of organizing academic workers—especially part-time ones—is starting to be recognized on a national scale, says Local 500 organizer Kevin Pietrick. Indeed, on the same day the Baltimore art college instructors filed for an election, so did adjuncts at Washington, D.C.’s Howard University. Similar organizing efforts are underway in several other states, he says.

And in Baltimore, a successful campaign at MICA may potentially pave the way for other colleges in the area. 

Beauvois wishes the MICA adjuncts well and hopes that union movement picks up steam in the academic community. “As it is now, [working as an adjunct] is not a living wage,” she says. “It’s a hobby, or volunteer work, but you can’t make a living.”

UPDATE: Maryland Institute College of Art confirmed on March 24 that it had agreed to a National Labor Relations Board-supervised election for the part-time instructors seeking union representation. The election, to be conducted with mail-in ballots, will commence April 10, and will conclude with the counting of completed ballots April 29.

The bargaining unit will include about 350 employees.


 
______________________________________________
Below you see a great example of what is happening in the US as well although the US has no mainstream media that isn't captured and corporate so we do not hear about this.  This is the dangerous effects of having universities handled as corporations.....the money 'donated' to support these universities come with the direction of curricula.....and if a university is running on money from patented research, then market values take the lead.

THIS IS NOT WHAT DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION LOOKS LIKE.

In the US it will be Common Core taught in the K-12 classrooms that will rewrite history as this standardization hits every single classroom in America.  Common Core will do what is being done at the university level-----control all avenue of information a person can access.  The power of academics to operate freely and unafraid of stating facts is the primary source of a free society.  This is why neo-liberals from Obama and Congress to O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly are building these structures that have as a goal ending democracy and freedom of information.


Academics back students in protests against economics teaching Professors argue in letter to the Guardian against 'dogmatic intellectual commitment' to 'orthodoxy and against diversity'
  • Phillip Inman, Economics correspondent

  • The Guardian, Monday 18 November 2013 17.10 EST

Unemployed men in the 1930s. 'Students can complete an economics degree without learning about the Great Depression.'

Photograph: Mark Benedict Barry/Corbis

A prominent group of academic economists have backed student protests against neo-classical economics teaching, increasing the pressure on top universities to reform courses that critics argue are dominated by free market theories that ignore the impact of financial crises.

The academics from some of the UK's most prestigious institutions, including Cambridge and Leeds universities, said students were being short-changed by their courses, and they accused higher education funding bodies of being a barrier to reforms.

In a startling attack on the agencies that provide teaching and research grants, they said an "intellectual monoculture" is reinforced by a system of state funding based on journal rankings "that are heavily biased in favour of orthodoxy and against intellectual diversity".

The academics said in a letter to the Guardian that a "dogmatic intellectual commitment" to teaching theories based on rational consumers and workers with unlimited wants "contrasts sharply with the openness of teaching in other social sciences, which routinely present competing paradigms".

They said: "Students can now complete a degree in economics without having been exposed to the theories of Keynes, Marx or Minsky, and without having learned about the Great Depression."

The attack follows protests at Manchester University. Students there, who formed the Post Crash Economics Society, said their courses did little to explain why economists failed to warn about the financial crisis and had too heavy a focus on training students for City jobs.

Earlier this month an international group of economists, backed by the New York-based Institute for New Economic Thinking, pledged to overhaul the economics curriculum and offer universities an alternative course.

At a conference hosted by the Treasury at its London offices, they pledged to have a first-year course ready to teach for the 2014-15 academic year that will include economic history and a broader range of competing theories.

The debate over the future of economics teaching follows several years of debate about the role of academics, especially in the US, in providing the intellectual underpinning for the borrowing and trading binge ahead of the 2008 crash.


Levels of private borrowing reached record levels in many countries and trades in exotic derivatives, often funded with debt instruments, soared to a point where few bank executives understood their exposure in the event of a credit crunch.

Many economists, including the 2013 Nobel prize winner Robert Shiller, have argued that mainstream economics wrongly teaches theories based on maintaining openly competitive markets and that well-informed buyers and sellers eliminate the risk of asset prices rising beyond a sustainable level for a prolonged period.

The academics, led by Professor Engelbert Stockhammer of Kingston University, said: "We understand students' frustration with the way that economics is taught in most institutions in the UK.

"There exists a vibrant community of pluralist economists in the UK and elsewhere, but these academics have been marginalised within the profession. The shortcomings in the way economics is taught are directly related to an intellectual monoculture, which is reinforced by a system of public university funding (the Research Excellence Framework and previously the Research Assessment Exercise) based on journal rankings that are heavily biased in favour of orthodoxy and against intellectual diversity," they said.


_______________________________________

All around the world developed nations are seeing their democratic institutions dismantled as these global corporations seek to create autocratic structures of what are democratic nations.  The universities and K-12 are the foundation of free societies which is why Clinton, Bush, and now Obama and our state neo-liberals are dismantling and corporatizing K-college.  Having business people replace academics sets the stage for silencing what has always been the source for holding power accountable-----the universities!

Below you see what universities have done for centuries------shouted out and monitored the conditions of society.  See how super-sizing privatization with adjuncts and business people as classroom lecturers will do?  People fearful of losing a job will not shout.....

MARYLAND IS GROUND ZERO FOR THESE FEARS AS PRIVATIZATION HAS BEEN IN THE WORKS IN MARYLAND LONGER THAN AROUND THE COUNTRY.

We need the citizens of Maryland to stand with these educators from K-college.  These changes are killing our educators but as important, they are killing our democracy.

Hundreds of academics protest against mass surveillance

Politics
03 January 14 by Olivia Solon  WIRED UK




Shutterstock Hundreds of academics from around the world have signed a declaration that highlights that the world is under "an unprecedented level of surveillance" and that "this has to stop" in order to protect people's privacy.

Academics Against Mass Surveillance was conceived of by four colleagues -- Nico van Eijk, Beate Roessler, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius and Manon Oostveen -- at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam after all of Edward Snowden's revelations about large-scale surveillance by governments.

"We were discussing that academics had been a tad quiet in the media," explains the Institute's Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius. 


The law professors drafted a declaration and then asked friends (mainly human rights professors) for feedback before they agreed on a text. The text was then shared internationally with colleagues, and almost 300 other academics -- from countries including the US, UK, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Japan, Germany and Austria -- have put their name against the declaration. "It was a snowball effect," he adds.

The declaration points out that intelligence agencies "monitor people's internet use, obtain their phone calls, email messages, Facebook entries, financial details, and much more".

It adds: "Agencies have also gathered personal information by accessing the internal data flows of firms such as Google and Yahoo. Skype calls are 'readily available' for interception...This has to stop."

The declaration points out that the right to privacy is a fundamental one, protected by a range of international treaties including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.


"Without privacy people cannot freely express their opinions or seek and receive information. Moreover, mass surveillance turns the presumption of innocence into a presumption of guilt. Nobody denies the importance of protecting national security, public safety, or the detection of crime. But current secret and unfettered surveillance practices violate fundamental rights and the rule of law, and undermine democracy."


Those who have signed the declaration call for action and urge these spy agencies to be more transparent and accountable. "States must effectively protect everyone's fundamental rights and freedoms, and particularly everyone's privacy," it says.

When asked which organisation represented the biggest threat to digital rights, Zuiderveen Borgesius told Wired.co.uk: "Phew, hard question. It seems to be a draw between the NSA and GCHQ, as far as the Western countries are concerned. But it wouldn't surprise me if more scandals will be disclosed about other European intelligence agencies soon."

He added that the declaration wasn't so much a political message, but "a scientific consensus that this unfettered and secretive surveillance has to stop".









__________________________________________

Act Locally » March 26, 2014

Teachers’ Strikes, Catching Fire From Oregon to Minnesota, school is out unless teachers and communities are heard.


BY Sarah Jaffe

Medford teachers protected their preparation time from proposed cuts and limited the student-to-teacher ratio. Portland teachers won an increase in their prep time and the hiring of new instructors to shrink class sizes.

Conventional wisdom holds that it’s hard to garner sympathy for relatively well-paid public workers at a time when fewer and fewer people have jobs that make ends meet. So the so-called “age of austerity” has seen unions of teachers and other public-sector employees accept cut after cut. Teachers in particular have been targeted by an education reform movement that posits unionized educators as a threat to children’s learning.

Yet in spite of that, teachers are beginning to win some battles—by winning over hearts and minds in the communities they serve.

“I think we’ve reached the point where it’s very clear to teachers that we can’t give [students] what they deserve under the circumstances that we find ourselves in now,” says Elizabeth Thiel, a high-school English teacher at Madison High School in Portland, Ore. Parents and students have also realized that endless standardized testing and demands for “accountability” from teachers at the same time that budget cuts swell class sizes and reduce services is a recipe for disaster, not success.

Thiel’s union, the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT), came within days of a strike before reaching an agreement February 18 with Portland Public Schools that includes the hiring of 150 new teachers to reduce class sizes and curtailing the extent that teacher evaluations hinge on student test scores. In Medford, Ore., a 16-day strike ended February 21 when the district conceded to many of the teachers’ demands on pay, benefits and working time. And in St. Paul, Minn., the district agreed to a deal on February 21, the last working day before the union was due to take a strike vote. In all three districts, strong community support helped the teachers win a stronger contract. A year and a half after the Chicago Teachers Union revived the strike with a seven-day work stoppage that became national news, teachers unions around the country are showing a willingness to fight, and are doing the organizing necessary to win communities to their side.

“[The district] didn’t believe that we would go out on strike, and they didn’t believe that after 11 days we’d still be every single one of us strong,” Cat Brasseur, the communications chair of the Medford Education Association, tells In These Times.

The Medford and Portland school districts seemed to be counting on the austerity ideology to hold sway as they demanded “rollbacks” from the workers: 118 separate demands for concessions in Medford, 78 in Portland. Both districts called an end to direct bargaining after the minimum amount of time mandated by law and then declared an impasse after the minimum 15 days of mediation. But teachers called their bluff, and the community was on their side. It turns out that making conditions in schools, not just wages and benefits, central to collective bargaining is popular with the public. In Oregon and Minnesota, the unions built relationships with parents and students that helped convince the school districts that they should accede to some demands.

Medford teachers protected their preparation time from proposed cuts and limited the student-to-teacher ratio. Portland teachers won an increase in their prep time and the hiring of new instructors to shrink class sizes. In St. Paul, teachers secured an expansion of the city’s pre-kindergarten program and smaller class sizes in high-poverty schools, in order to allow teachers to give individual attention to students who need it the most. According to Nick Faber, a 28-year St. Paul teacher and an officer in the St. Paul Federation of Teachers union (SPFT), families are facing more economic challenges than ever, which means students are coming to teachers with more problems that require closer relationships.

Bargaining for policies that help teachers deepen their relationships with parents is not new to the SPFT: Their last contract won funding for a project that trains teachers to make home visits. In addition to maintaining that program, which has now trained more than 400 teachers, Mary Cathryn Ricker, president of the SPFT, says that the new contract allows schools to change how parent-teacher conferences work. In the past, she says, conferences had been modelled on “a generally white, middle-class mom who could find time to stop by after school got out and visit with her teachers.” But today, more children come from single-parent homes or those where two parents work, and schedules can be erratic. And so, Ricker says, St. Paul teachers successfully won the flexibility to design conferences in ways that better suit community needs.


0 Comments

March 18th, 2014

3/18/2014

0 Comments

 
LISTEN TO THE CANDIDATES FOR DEMOCRATIC OFFICES.  DO THEY EDUCATE YOU AS TO THE PROBLEMS OF MAKING OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION PRIVATE, OR DO THEY TALK OF SMALL 'PROGRESSIVE' BONES THAT GO WITH THIS CORPORATIZED SYSTEM?

NEO-LIBERALS ARE PRIVATIZING PUBLIC EDUCATION AS FAST AS REPUBLICANS AND IT KILLS DEMOCRACY AND WILL MAKE OUR NATION THIRD WORLD.


Efficient and effective workers make US global corporations more competitive they say!  Well, that has nothing to do with citizens and their quality of life since these corporations are stealing everything that is public!

Regarding corporate NPR/APM calling higher education funding 'entitlements that are history':

Isn't it LOL when corporate media describes as entitlement the higher education funding taxpayers receive for spending their entire working life paying taxes?  Education funding is of course a citizen's decision to use the tax revenue they pay in a way they want.  On the other hand, corporate NPR/APM taking taxpayer money while working as corporate media are receiving corporate welfare.  See the difference?

Let's talk about the state of higher education funding.  I have pointed out more than once the cost of higher education is too high because of the corporatization of universities these few decades.  It is the administrative structures around this corporatization that American taxpayers and students paying high tuition are supporting.  So, dismantling this corporate structure is the solution to lower student tuition not to mention getting back to rebuilding higher education in America.  We are ranked second world in higher education because of this corporatization.  So, policies offered by Maryland democratic candidate for governor Anthony Brown in 'capping higher education tuition' are of course not the answer.  What Brown is saying is that it is fine to corporatize our universities and charge what are already too high tuition prices.  Brown will also continue O'Malley's defunding of higher education grants and financial aid with the goal of sending most Maryland students to this cheapened vocational track education path.  THAT'S NOT VERY DEMOCRATIC IS IT?  INDEED, NONE OF THIS MEETS THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM.  Only neo-liberals would take education policy in favor of corporations at the expense of public interest.

Maryland just passed a budget funding that provides scholarships for KIPP charter chain students only.  KIPP is a national charter chain that will become the private charter structure that takes public schools and the Maryland Assembly place bias in this system to encourage more students to attend KIPP for example.  You keep hearing from WYPR how Maryland colleges are in high gear with corporatized campuses full of free labor and taxpayer-funded start-ups

BUT YOU DO NOT HEAR THAT MARYLAND UNEMPLOYMENT IS 36% AND THE LABOR MARKET IN MARYLAND IS BUILT FOR CONSTANT LABOR TURNOVER.

All across America citizens are protesting, shouting, and demanding these policies stop.  Haven't heard about all this?  You must be listening to corporate media.  You know more about Ukraine then you do events in your own country.  THE OUTPOURING OF AMERICANS AGAINST THE CORPORATIZATION OF PUBLIC K-COLLEGE IS HUGE!!!!!!  IT'S THE LARGEST MOVEMENT SINCE THE CIVIL/LABOR RIGHTS MOVEMENTS IN THE 1960s and yet, Maryland moves along with the same corporate policies.  That's when you know the politics in your state are crony and neo-liberal.

AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION IS PROTECTED IN THE CONSTITUTION AND IS THE CORNERSTONE OF OUR DEMOCRACY.  WE EDUCATE TO GIVE ALL CITIZENS THE ABILITY TO BE LEADERS OF BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT AND TO BE CITIZENS WHO EXERCISE THEIR RIGHTS AS CITIZENS.

Using Federal higher education money to build corporate structures within universities and state using state higher education funds to market overseas for foreign students and to build a tiered structure of online degrees to track most students is a very, very, very bad policy for democracy.  The first thing an autocratic society does when it represses its citizens is take control of education and media.  SOUND FAMILIAR??????  YOU BETCHA!



Marjorie Elizabeth Wood

  Op-Ed Published: Friday 14 March 2014

Once hailed as the “Great Equalizer,” public higher education today has arguably become a driver of inequality.

Striking for the Public University

Earlier this year, hundreds of faculty members at the University of Illinois-Chicago canceled their classes and went on strike. In the first faculty walkout in UIC history, they picketed the campus for two days.

What could professors possibly have to complain about?

Nearly everything. And it might not be what you think.

Today, more than half of all faculty are part-time, or adjunct, instructors. Many of them lack employer-provided health insurance coverage and job security. When accounting for temporary, full-time positions such as lecturers and visiting faculty, a whopping 76 percent of all instruction in American higher education is provided by contingent, temporary, or part-time educators.


But professors are not only worried about income and job security. The UIC faculty strikers, for instance, have broader concerns about a trend of declining investment in American public universities and a related rise in crippling student debt. Nationwide, public investment in state universities — previously made possible by progressive taxation — has declined sharply over the last 30 years. To make up for lost state funds, universities raised tuition. What used to be a collective burden borne by taxpayers was transferred onto the backs of students. Now at a staggering $1.1 trillion, student loan debt has surpassed Americans’ total credit card debt.

Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent of public university employees are doing better than ever. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, there has been a sea change in executive compensation, with pay packages for some public university presidents surpassing $2 million. Hiring of administrative staff has exploded, growing more than three times the rate of faculty hires.

UIC’s Dr. John Casey, a lecturer and leader in the faculty union, has witnessed these developments firsthand since he started as a UIC graduate student 13 years ago.

“There is a sense that the school is being taken away from us,” Casey said. As he described it, a build-up of administrative staff at UIC has led to “corporate management” making unilateral decisions about the welfare of faculty and students, usually to the detriment of both.

Not surprisingly, the faculty members who went on strike are demanding higher pay and better working conditions. But as Casey explained, they also feel that something bigger is at stake. “This is not just about the money,” he said. “We want the entire city to understand that this is their school.”

The sense that public higher education itself is under attack has led to remarkable unity among  among both permanent and temporary faculty. They’ve become so unified that the faculty members created a localized union for the cause. A unique aspect of UIC United Faculty is that it is evenly comprised of both groups. “This aspect of our union is special to us,” said Casey. “We know what we’re fighting for.”

While the rise of inequality has become a familiar story, inequality in the university is a lesser-known — and more ironic — tale. Once hailed as the “Great Equalizer,” public higher education today has arguably become a perpetuator of inequality. This stark reality at UIC fueled the rise of the faculty union. Underlying their demands is a collective sense of urgency to save a great public university.

UIC professors have set a powerful example. Other faculty around the country should follow their lead. The rest of us must stand behind them. Together, we can take back our public universities.

_______________________________________________

This will become the rule as almost no regulation and no public method of accountability or way to seek justice just opens this category of education to the same for-profit frauds last decade. This move to give accreditation to these online schools seeks to dismantle a long-proven and strong public higher education model of accreditation. We did not have a problem of graduates not being prepared to work, we have corporations telling us we will vocationalize our public education so that those newly hired will be ready for work day one. THAT IS THE FUNCTION OF HUMAN RESOURCES AND NOT OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM.

MARYLAND WAS ONE OF THE FIRST TO ADOPT ALL OF THE ONLINE EDUCATION POLICIES AND NOW ACCREDITATION. THE QUALITY IS NOT THERE!


We could fully fund education grants and financial aid by simply recovering trillions of dollars in for-profit education industry fraud.  Rather than seeking justice, neo-liberals are simply building more private/public structures that will continue to defraud students and taxpayers while giving no results.  We do not have a broken system, we have neo-liberals working to end the first world public education that made this nation great.

STOP VOTING FOR NEO-LIBERALS.  RUN LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES AGAINST NEO-LIBERALS.



Induced to Fail?


 February 24, 2014 By Carl Straumsheim


A group of former Excelsior College students have sued the institution over its online associate degree program in nursing, claiming the self-paced, competency-based curriculum clashes with an expensive and "subjective" clinical exam.

In the complaint, filed in a federal district court in New York, 17 former students in Excelsior’s associate degree program in nursing from 11 different states say the college sold them “
an
 ‘educational’
 program
 that
 was
 devoid
 of
 any
 education,
 and
 ... an
 ‘objective’
 test,
 which
 was
 anything
 but
 objective.” The students, many of whom have decades of experience in the medical field, are suing Excelsior for breach of contract and deceptive
 or
 misleading
 practices.

The nursing program’s curriculum can be accessed online or, for students without Internet access, as a set of CD-ROMs. Once students have passed several nursing theory exams, completed 21 out of the 31 required credits and taken a computer-based clinical assessment test, they take the college's Clinical Performance in Nursing Examination. The 17 students, however, say the coursework did not prepare them for the CPNE, and that Excelsior withheld information about the test until they “had
 expended
 resources
 and
 were
 irreversibly
 committed
 to
 completing
 the
 program.”

“Excelsior
 did 
not 
provide 
consumers 
with
 the
 clinical 
education
 that
 it 
promises,” the complaint reads. “
Instead, 
it 
provides 
a 
test.”

Competency-based education has attracted considerable interest lately, but the learning approach is not new territory to Excelsior. The college has been in the field for a long time, and has in fact been cited by some as evidence of the potential for competency-based education.

Still, several states have in recent years raised questions about the preparedness of Excelsior’s graduates. California does not allow recent graduates to apply for registered nurse licenses, for example, and 14 other states require those who have passed the CPNE to log hundreds of hours of experience before becoming eligible.

Some studies have challenged those claims about competency-based education. In one example, the Council on Adult and Experiential Learning in 2012 found Excelsior’s graduates and students from other programs pass licensing exams at the same rate.

In a January 2013 exit survey, several recent graduates of the nursing program at Excelsior singled out the CPNE as the one aspect of the program they would change. Some recommended more practice materials and changing the test from a pass-fail system to a percentage score, while others called it “traumatic” and said it “ruined the [Excelsior College] experience.”

The CPNE costs $2,225 per attempt, and students are given a test date between three and eight months after signing up.

One of the 17 students, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not sign up to retake the test after failing it the first time. The student described being subjected to “psychological tricks,” such as facing constant interruptions and having to whisper the reasoning behind each step of the clinical process. At one point during the test, the student said a registered nurse walked up and said “I feel really sorry for you guys.”

“They were trying to induce you to fail,” the student said. “When you’re playing against a stacked deck, you don’t stand much of a chance of winning.”

The group of plaintiffs also includes Jillian Phelan, who passed the CPNE “solely 
because 
of
 the
 Examiner’s
 discretion.” In Phelan’s case, the complaint says her examiner “assisted
 [Phelan] on
 six
 (6)
 different
 occasions
 during
 her
 examination” and “informed
 [Phelan] that 
she
 felt
 that
 the 
program 
was
 ‘unfair.’”

John
 Hermina, who represents the 17 students, declined to speak on the record, as the complaint was filed as recently as Wednesday.

William M. Stewart, assistant vice president at Excelsior, also said the college is not yet in a position to comment. He pointed out that the nursing program has been accredited since 1975, and that more than 42,000 students have earned associate degrees from the college and are working as registered nurses.

John F. Ebersole, Excelsior's president, also highlighted the college's experience in the field. "Facts are that this is a 40-year-old program that has produced more than 50,000 graduates and has been designated a Center of Excellence in Nursing Education by the National League of Nursing for the past 7 years," he wrote in an email. "We are proud of what we do and what we have achieved."
______________________________________
I have already shown on a number of occasions that the propaganda of a failing US public school system is bogus.  Indeed, urban schools were defunded with few resources and this does lower achievement.  The solution is to fund them and give them resources not to closed schools down and replace schools with charters that do nothing better.  Temporarily using private funding to skew results hides the long-term goals of ending equal opportunity and access to education.

Consider that currently over 70% of Americans have been brought to poverty and another 20% are not far above poverty.  The goal will be to have 90% of Americans in this captured tiered vocationally tracked system.  Add to that the goal of neo-liberalism's BEST OF THE BEST OF THE WORLD outreach to immigrants from around the world and you see that most leadership will go to a select few while the people who are citizens are largely impoverished.  THIS IS THE SOCIETAL STRUCTURE OF THIRD WORLD NATIONS. 

EDUCATION IS THE KEY TO DEMOCRATIC AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY AND PROTECTION UNDER LAW!


Understanding the Propaganda Campaign Against Public Education

March 15th, 2014 by admin |

by Diane Ravitch

Progressive America Rising via Huffington Post

Marcj 12, 2014 – A few years ago, when I was blogging at Education Week with Deborah Meier, a reader introduced the term FUD. I had never heard of it. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to harm your competition. The term and its history can be found on Wikipedia. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The reader said that those who were trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. They were selling the false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing.

This insight inspired me to write Reign of Error to show that the "reform" narrative is a fraud. Test scores on NAEP are at their highest point in history for white students, black students, Hispanic students, and Asian students. Graduation rates are the highest in history for these groups. The dropout rate is at an historic low point.

Why the FUD campaign against one of our nation’s most treasured democratic institutions? It helps the competition. It makes people so desperate that they will seek out unproven alternatives. It makes the public gullible when they hear phony claims about miracle schools, where everyone graduates and everyone gets high test scores, and everyone goes to a four-year college. No such school exists. The "miracle school" usually has a high suspension rate, a high expulsion rate, a high attrition rate, and such schools usually do not replace the kids they somehow got rid of. Some "miracle schools" have never graduated anyone because they have only elementary schools, but that doesn’t stop the claims and boasting.

It turns out that there is actually a scholar studying the phenomenon of the "the cultural production of ignorance."

He hasn’t looked at the attack on public schools, but his work shows how propaganda may be skillfully deployed to confuse and mislead the public. Michael Hiltzik of theLos Angeles Times writes about the work of Robert Proctor of Stanford University:

Robert Proctor doesn’t think ignorance is bliss. He thinks that what you don’t know can hurt you. And that there’s more ignorance around than there used to be, and that its purveyors have gotten much better at filling our heads with nonsense.

Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, is one of the world’s leading experts in agnotology, a neologism signifying the study of the cultural production of ignorance. It’s a rich field, especially today when whole industries devote themselves to sowing public misinformation and doubt about their products and activities.

The tobacco industry was a pioneer at this. Its goal was to erode public acceptance of the scientifically proven links between smoking and disease: In the words of an internal 1969 memo legal opponents extracted from Brown & Williamson’s files, "Doubt is our product." Big Tobacco’s method should not be to debunk the evidence, the memo’s author wrote, but to establish a "controversy."

When this sort of manipulation of information is done for profit, or to confound the development of beneficial public policy, it becomes a threat to health and to democratic society.
Big Tobacco’s program has been carefully studied by the sugar industry, which has become a major target of public health advocates.

FUD was pioneered decades ago. Now public education is the target, and privatizing it is the goal. I hope Professor Proctor turns his attention to this issue, where a well-funded propaganda campaign seeks to spread enough doubt to destroy an essential Democratic institution.

There is no evidence from any other nation that replacing a public system with a privatized choice system produces anything but social, economic, and racial segregation.

______________________________________________

WELL, IF PENNY PRITZER LIKES IT IT MUST BE BAD POLICY!  NO ONE HATES LABOR AND JUSTICE MORE THAN THIS HYATT HEIRESS.


ALL ACADEMICS AND EDUCATION ADVOCATES SAY THERE IS NO SKILLS DEFICIT-----ONLY CORPORATIONS WANTING THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM TO BE THEIR HUMAN RESOURCES DEPARTMENTS


This is a great article that shows how neo-liberals are moving all government agencies towards working for corporations and ending Federal agencies working to protect the public interest.

We saw Obama and Arne Duncan privatize the Department of Education....it is run by Wall Street.  Race to the Top privatizes K-12.  This gives a good look at how the Department of Labor is now being redesigned to work for corporations.  That is why Maryland's Perez was placed into this position.....Maryland is well on its was to privatization of K-college.

We see here that Labor is now about preparing workers for jobs.  Corporations say they want workers ready to work day one and neo-liberals are giving it to them.  This is what privatizing all of our community colleges is about.  Each time a person changes jobs they will have to go back to community college to start the next job and we know in this environment, job assignments are short.  So, over and over and over people will come to community colleges just as they used to go to Human Resources and go through a few weeks of job orientation.  Only now, it is all paid by taxpayers.  The funding for training all employees for all jobs will be tens of billions of dollars.  See why there will be no money for student aid to stronger 4 year universities?  All education help will go to job training and career certificates.  Bye Bye equal opportunity and access to education.  So, with corporate business structures at colleges you have students working for free while paying tuition with no guarantees of a job.  Remember, the social democratic structure had students graduating from school and entering union apprenticeships paid for by unions and businesses hiring and the employee was paid for the work done.  See how that maximizes profits?


THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU----KILLING DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURES TO MAXIMIZE CORPORATE PROFIT.  SEE RAWLINGS-BLAKE STANDING WITH THE GROUP?  SHE IS THERE BECAUSE SHE DOES WHATEVER A CORPORATION TELLS HER TO DO.

Below you see Chicago is ground zero for these schools as job training policies and guess what?  Obama and Rahm Emanuel are from Chicago!  GO GUESS!  Also from Chicago-----the strongest protest organization of community groups against these education policies handing our schools to corporations.

Feds to Mayors: Work with Industry on Workforce Development Officials from the departments of Labor and Commerce told city leaders at a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting to take a hands-on approach with their area businesses to match workers with jobs.

by Chris Kardish | January 23, 2014  Governing

Mayor Scott Smith, of Mesa, Ariz., speaks during the opening press conference of the 82nd winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. AP/Evan Vucci 17  35  2  18  0         Labor economists may be divided over how much the gap between employer needs and employee skills is driving long-term unemployment, but there’s no shortage of anecdotes at the ground level about businesses that can’t fill job openings. The country’s mayors are in a position to do something about it, federal officials told an audience at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C.

Representatives of both the departments of Commerce and Labor offered sobering statistics on the nation’s unemployment problem, activities at the federal level to alleviate joblessness and highlights of innovative programs at the city level.

About 10.4 million people are unemployed, with another 2.4 million not counted as unemployed because they’ve given up their search. Job openings are up 66 percent since the end of the recession, but hiring rates are up only a quarter since that time.  Sometimes those unfilled vacancies require businesses to raise wages, review the skills needed for the job or take other steps, but government also needs to reassess how it invests in workforce development, said Kate McAdams, senior advisor to Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.  

“We need to bring everyone together in partnership to ensure training responds to industry needs,” she said.

There's considerable debate about the seriousness of the so-called skills gap, with some economists blaming corporations for low pay and others insisting labor markets show no difference in demand between low-skilled and high-skilled jobs .
But employer surveys show that, at least among the minds of business leaders, a gap does exist. In an Adecco survey of 500 executives last fall, 92 percent said there's a serious skills gap in the U.S. workforce, though 44 percent of respondents said "soft skills" such as communication and critical thinking are the most serious deficits.

The skills gap has also dominated state-level policy, appearing again and again in gubernatorial State of the State speeches opening 2014.
In Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal wants to expand tuition-free technical training to more high-demand fields, low-interest loans at community colleges and launch a task force with businesses to better understand how to align educational offerings with the needs of private industry. In Idaho, where state leaders are rebranding K-12 education “K-through-career,” Gov. “Butch” Otter is calling for more instructors in high-demand programs to reduce the time needed to graduate.

But McAdams noted many cities are taking proactive steps, forming public-private organizations that work as job recruiters and trainers. Skills for Chicagoland’s Future, launched in 2012, is one such initiative. The nonprofit provides free recruitment, placement and training services to employers. A Chicago-based health care technology company called GoHealth recently announced it’s on pace to hire more than 650 new employees this year with Chicagoland’s help, well above initial forecasts of 250. More than 140 of those employees so far have come through the organization’s “train-to-hire” program as licensed insurance advisors and sales representatives.

Chicago has also worked aggressively to revamp training through its community college system by partnering with more than 100 businesses for direct input on curricula, course offerings and job placements. In Chicago's community colleges, associate degrees are now built around occupational certifications that offer better jobs and pay. Students can earn credentials that offer employment but continue working toward a full degree.

Tying class offerings to workforce needs also extends to K-12 education, said Mayor Christopher Cabaldon of West Sacramento. That means finding ways to give subjects real-world applications, forging relationships with businesses to encourage youth “apprenticeships” and encouraging all paths to training, he said. In a city with the highest number of job openings per capita in the region but one of the worst unemployment rates, the leadership needs to try something new in the area of economic development, Calbadon said.  

“As a mayor, much of my focus is finding new companies and building around those we have. That strategy has diminishing returns and is not addressing in really deep ways…our long-term political responsibilities,” he said.

______________________________________


Thanks to the AFT for getting in
the stop privatization protest.  Please shout out in Maryland as Baltimore is building a template for the state!


Check out Cashing in on
Kids and help us spread the word by sharing with your social networks.


American Federation of Teachers


For-profit charter schools that operate in the dark without basic public transparency and without strong public control too often put their bottom line ahead of the public interest
and high-quality public education.

  Is the rapid expansion of charter schools about helping kids learn or about enabling for-profit operators to rake in millions in tax dollars?   Find out.

So, last week, in partnership
with In the Public Interest, the AFT launched the
website Cashing in on
Kids—a one-stop shop for the facts about for-profit
education in
America.

While we are working to reclaim the promise of public education, these for-profit charters are cashing in on kids. Help us call them out.

The site profiles five for-profit charter school operators:

K12 Inc., Imagine Schools, White Hat Management, Academica and Charter Schools USA.

It identifies several issues that need to be addressed in charter school policy, including public control, equity, transparency and accountability, and it analyzes the impact of profit-taking and privatization in charter schools, where student results are mixed and mismanagement is widespread.

Curious to see how Jeb Bush’s friends are cashing in on kids? Check it out.

We built this site because we want parents, educators and policymakers to be better informed about the impact of profit, money and private interests in education, particularly charter schools.

Check out Cashing in on Kids, and help us
spread the word by sharing with your social networks.

In unity,

Randi
Weingarten
AFT President

P.S. Don’t forget to “like” Cashing
in on Kids on Facebook and to follow it on Twitter.

___________________________________________

As the American people shout 'WE DO NOT WANT THIS EDUCATION REFORM' neo-liberals working for global corporations push harder and faster to get this in place.  Please note that when education is taken out of your communities and privatized you will be losing the last public place of community cohesion.  Having individual students locked into computer lessons and worst, virtual classrooms deliberately disconnects people from their communities.

All of this would not be happening without Race to the Top.  Obama and neo-liberals pressed this republican education policy by holding states hostage to Federal education funding and in the process gave states the right to choose educational platforms.....ending Federal control of public education.  While Common Core and testing seek to centralize, the structure of public schools is being deliberately torn apart.

MARYLAND NEO-LIBERALS SAY 'WE ARE MOVING FORWARD NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK'!




Teachers Union Launching Massive Campaign Against Education Reform Movement



Posted: 12/05/2013 5:03 pm EST  |  Updated: 12/05/2013 6:37 pm EST

  The American Federation of Teachers union is unveiling a seven-figure advertisement campaign ahead of Dec. 9, a day that the group has billed as a "national day of action" against the education reform movement and push alternative solutions.

“Public education is under attack and underfunded throughout our country," the advertisements read, according to materials AFT, the nation's second-largest teachers union, provided to The Huffington Post. "Now, communities are coming together for our schools and our children to champion great public schools as the heart of our neighborhoods. … Together, we can make sure our schools are places where all kids can thrive and the voices of those closest to the classroom are heard.”

In an interview, AFT President Randi Weingarten said the AFT is spending about $1.2 million on the push. The radio, online and print advertisements, including a full-page ad in USA Today, are running through Dec. 9 in 30 cities, including New York, Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia. The messaging is framed around the idea of "reclaiming the promise" of public education, according to AFT materials.

Weingarten said various protests are expected to take place in at least 60 cities on Dec. 9. For the day of action, AFT has collaborated with the National Education Association, America's biggest teachers union, groups like the Schott Foundation, and community organizations like the Chicago-based Journey for Justice Alliance. The groups are circulating a document, "the principles that unite us," to outline their cause: making sure public schools "are public institutions"; fostering the creation of community schools; fighting so-called privateers; respect for teachers; and schools that are "welcoming and respectful places for all" and fully funded. The document says the groups do not entirely oppose charter schools, but that those schools must be regulated and accountable to the public.

The unions are calling the movement a groundswell of organic support against the usurping of public schools by "corporate interests" that want to make a "market-based system of schooling" involving high-stakes testing and attacks on collective bargaining. An AFT one-pager obtained by HuffPost lists the day's purpose as "to begin to create a national echo chamber for our vision and narrative." The memo calls on groups to "mobilize large numbers of parents, students, community residents and union members" to "tell stories of the impact of the corporate agenda on students," and, in some cases, "target an agent of the corporate agenda."

Weingarten said the idea behind the campaign came from a human rights conference in Los Angeles and through town halls AFT held in different cities. "We want to fight austerity, but we also want to come up with a proactive way of trying to change public education," she said. "You see a grassroots movement that says no -- not just no we have enough, no we're critical -- but these are the kind of reforms we need to help kids succeed in life, college and career. We thought it was important to have one day to mark that."

In Illinois, the Chicago Teachers Union is expecting 500 teachers, students and residents to hold a press conference near City Hall and march to the State of Illinois building to deliver a wish list to the governor.

Friday, in advance of the Day of Action, activists in Austin, Texas, are slated to march from the Capitol South Steps to the Federal Building to rally with unions and advocate for their agenda. In Boise, Idaho, teachers and unions plan to advocate outside the Capitol for more funding.

Weingarten acknowledged that the effort is a sort of rehash of previous campaigns. "People have been engaged in this effort for awhile. This is bringing people together like we have never done before in a thoughtful and deliberative process that is also about action," she said. "It's the growing of a movement."

Others took a different view. "The kinds of things that they have been against -- more options for families in low-performing schools, higher standards for students and stronger accountability for results -- those are all things that the public is strongly in favor of," argued Tim Daly, who oversees TNTP, an alternative teacher certification group. "Instead of being against things that the public is in favor of, there have been efforts to shift attention to red herring issues like privatization."
0 Comments

December 30th, 2013

12/30/2013

0 Comments

 
EDUCATION POLICY IN AMERICA BECOMES ALL ABOUT LABOR AND CORPORATE PROFITS.  DEPARTMENT OF LABOR AND LICENSING REGULATORY AGENCIES IN STATES ARE NOW TIED WITH STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION----

AND AS WITH CORPORATIZATION OF PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES, ALL THE PUBLIC MONEY FOR EDUCATION IS PAYING HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY TO ADMINISTRATIVE SALARIES, PRIVATE CONSULTING FEES, AND EDUCATION BUSINESSES LIKE PEARSON.




What needs to change asks the panel below--------the politicians pushing this mess.  We need to send these pols packing so we can go back to building strong public education!  Please listen to this video-taped panel on education policy and ask----why are we not having these conversations in Maryland?

Why are these education professionals shouting that Race to the Top is bad, and in Maryland the education leaders are saying the opposite? 

IT IS WHO THE GOVERNOR AND MAYOR APPOINT IN EDUCATION LEADERSHIP.  SEE WHY DEMOCRATIC STRONGHOLDS LIKE BALTIMORE AND NOW PRINCE GEORGES COUNTY HAS LOST ITS ABILITY TO ELECT SCHOOL BOARD OFFICIALS! 

When school administrators are making hundreds of thousands of dollars and have little background in education.....when billions are being spent in education businesses that make huge profits with no positive effect----you see a fleecing of our education system.


CTU President Karen Lewis joins us to discuss the effectiveness of No Child Left Behind.


‪#‎1u‬ The Professors | Dec. 22, 2013 - No Child Left Behind: Time for a Change? | WYCC PBS...video.wycc.orgCTU President Karen Lewis joins us to discuss the effectiveness of No Child Left Behind.
_____________________________________________

If you look at the article below this one you will see all of the educational programming that leads to high-skilled jobs and education readiness for future higher education are being dismantled supposedly because of costs constraints but it isn't a lack of money, it is where the money is being funneled.  If public money is going to replace a businesses human resources department and pay for ordinary job training for an individual each time he/she changes jobs, you are not going to have money to expose these students to more sophisticated skills development.

What we want to do is allow unions and labor organizations that have always handled this take that expense and connect our K-12 to all of the corporate facilities built on public university campuses.  Those hundreds of billions used to build 'world-class' campuses need to come back to the communities and tying them to our schools is a first step!


Budget cuts kill acclaimed space program for students at Northeast High

Several NASA astronauts visited the program over the years; at right is a photograph of astronaut Michael Anderson, who died in the Columbia accident in 2003. The closure is "really, really unfortunate," said junior Leon Frame, who was an astronaut this month in the final simulated mission. (ERIC MENCHER / File Photograph)GALLERY: ERIC MENCHER. In this photo, John Schneider (left) and… By Kristen A. Graham, Inquirer Staff WriterPosted: December 24, 2013

For 50 years, Northeast High School students have taken part in sophisticated simulated space missions that halted asteroids speeding toward Earth, repaired satellites, and landed on the moon.

That era is over.

Last week, the nationally acclaimed Space Research Center after-school program - and dozens of other academic clubs - were eliminated, yet more victims of the Philadelphia School District's ongoing budget cuts.

"It's really, really unfortunate," Northeast junior Leon Frame said. He was an astronaut this month on the program's final mission.

The Space Research Center program, known as SPARC, was just one of dozens of extracurricular activities dropped at Northeast because of fiscal pressures. Debate, dance, Science Olympiad, and other clubs also were cut.

Sports are funded by the district's central office and were not affected.

The academic clubs had operated with no budget since September, principal Linda Carroll said, and teachers volunteered in the hope money could be found to keep activities going.

But recently, "the people who have been running things said, 'As much as we want to do it, we can't,' " Carroll said. "I don't fault them. People get tired of being disrespected. They bank on our passion."

Carroll hopes to restore the clubs, and laments their loss.

"I feel so badly," she said. "The kids are the ones who are suffering."

The space program, which had 120 student participants this year, has a rich history.

In the early 1960s, at the height of the space race, physics teacher Robert A.G. Montgomery launched it to pique students' interest when the United States was in a frenzy to beef up science education. Early flight simulations happened on the auditorium stage, with a rudimentary capsule made of lumber.

NASA donated money early on, and it recognized the program on multiple occasions. Northeast's Medical, Engineering and Aerospace magnet program - which still exists - began because of it.

Eventually, a separate wing was built for the after-school club and the magnet program, with elaborate capsules built on site.


Several NASA astronauts have visited the program, and one of them, Philadelphia native Chris Ferguson, was honorary flight director and teleconferenced with students in 2007 and 2008.

Students studied engineering, robotics, computer science, and trained in CPR and first aid. Their work culminated every year in a two-day simulated space mission that required months of planning.

Funding the program has been a continual problem, said retired teacher Anthony Matarazzo, who served as its director from 1991 to 2005.

"They almost did away with it for the last few years," Matarazzo said. "They did flights, but teachers were volunteering. Each year, there was a little less."

The loss of the space program is a loss for Philadelphia, Matarazzo said. It drew students from across the city.

"It was a marvelous program. The kids who went through this program have become unbelievable assets to this country," he said. Alumni include engineers, professors, surgeons, computer scientists, and others.

Senior Jeremy Cruz, one of the program's managers, was crestfallen at the news of its elimination, news he had to deliver to his classmates in an emotional meeting last week.

"We were heartbroken, all of us, even the teachers," Cruz said.

He and others are frustrated that academic clubs were cut but athletics remain, and they have vowed to fight.


"We were angry. We were sad. But we weren't just going to take this sitting down," Cruz said.

Students have reached out to Mayor Nutter and others in the hope someone can help. Cruz estimated it would take several thousand dollars to restore the program.

Cruz's mother, Lisa Maldonado, knows what the space research program has done for her son. He's not into sports, but this activity gave him a chance to shine.

"This teaches them about teamwork, and they loved doing it - they loved the flights, everything," Maldonado said. "To take this away from them is such a shame."

The loss of the space program is a symptom of a larger problem. Systemwide, massive money troubles have stripped schools of staff, programs, and services. Many schools have not run clubs this year.

At Northeast, the city's largest school with more than 3,000 pupils, things are so dire there was no cash to pay for batteries for students' calculators. A fund-raiser was held to drum up the $1,600 needed to keep the calculators powered.

Principal Carroll knows what losing the space program and other clubs means.

"If you want children to get a quality education, you can't just talk about it - you have to back it up," she said. "We want to keep their interest, but we just don't have the funding for these extracurriculars."

_____________________________________________


One of the biggest complaints I hear from people in the workplace is that these programs do not emphasize workplace safety and teach employees labor laws and OSHA safety standards so we have workers entering the workplace without knowledge of these labor regulations and agency requirements.  Accidents and on-the-job injuries are at a record high and people do not feel safe while working their jobs because of this lack of readiness.  Apprenticeships would normally last several years where these job training programs are often several months at best.

So, as corporations disregard OSHA and labor law, as the Federal agencies tasked with overseeing workplace violations, this is another step towards ending New Deal labor protections.  In Maryland, the DLLR has no operations looking at workplace abuse, employee exploitation, and workplace safety......AND THAT IS THE AGENCY THAT DOES THIS.

We think that DLLR needs to spend its time and resources doing the job it was tasked to do and allow corporations and unions to train people for specific job readiness!



Putting employers in the driver's seat for job training New Md. program, other efforts across the country ask businesses to work together to close gaps in job seekers' skills


By Jamie Smith Hopkins, The Baltimore Sun 9:25 a.m. EST, December 29, 2013

Even as the manufacturing industry sheds jobs overall, a number of firms in Maryland want to hire — and aren't having an easy time of it.

That's what the Maryland Manufacturing Extension Partnership heard when the nonprofit talked to 40 employers this year. Most of the entry-level people the firms bring on don't work out, in part because it can be a culture shock to take a job in manufacturing for the first time, said Brian Sweeney, executive director of the manufacturing-assistance organization.

A new state program aims to fill such gaps with training designed and launched by employers. Twenty-nine groups in a variety of business sectors will get funding to analyze their needs and plan training next year, including the "boot camp" prep course envisioned by manufacturers, the state plans to announce Monday.

The Employment Advancement Right Now program, called EARN, is part of a national movement to get employers more deeply involved in efforts to develop a skilled workforce — a shift that has gathered steam in recent years as federal funding for training has shrunk.

Elisabeth A. Sachs, director of the EARN program for the state Labor Department, describes the benefits of the approach.

"Instead of … 'train and pray' — you sort of throw the money out there, hope people get a credential and then find a job — we're starting with strategically getting employers in an industry to the table and saying, 'What skill sets are missing, what curriculum changes, what on-the-job training, what expert teachers do you need to bring in … to get the skilled worker at the end of the investment?' "

The nation's major training programs in the 1970s, '80s and most of the '90s took a worker-centric approach.

"Very little was focused on understanding what employers needed," said Fred Dedrick, executive director of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, which aims to get industry more involved in training.

The 15-year-old Workforce Investment Act system requires states to appoint oversight boards made up mostly of employers. But Dedrick said that usually produces general ideas about needs — which he said is "not enough to build a program around."

Enter the industry partnerships, in which employers and industry groups in the same sector come up with specific plans for getting more trained job candidates. A growing number of states are encouraging and funding them.

"It's a real shift in the way we're doing occupational training in communities all over the country," said Rachel Gragg, federal policy director with the National Skills Coalition, which advocates for increased access to training.

Some Maryland employers organized years ago. The Baltimore Alliance for Careers in Healthcare, for instance, was launched in 2005 with funding from local foundations to work on creating a bigger pipeline of trained entry-level workers.

In other cases, groups that help low-income people teamed with employers to make training more effective. Halethorpe-based Vehicles for Change, working with like-minded nonprofits including the Center for Urban Families and Catholic Charities of Baltimore, launched an auto detailing training program this fall with assistance from a local detailing firm.

Cockeysville-based Diamond Detail helped with the curriculum, donated equipment, trained the trainer and offered suggestions about how to organize the work area.

"Since they helped us set the program up, we're giving them first crack at our recently trained detailers," said Philip C. Holmes, director of the new Academy for Automotive Careers at Vehicles for Change.

Chuck Heinle, Diamond Detail's president, said he's hired three graduates already. The 190-employee company is growing fast and needs a pipeline of new employees. Heinle likes getting them already trained and with a reference from Vehicles for Change. The organization can monitor work habits, because students who finish the four-week training program temporarily stay on as paid apprentices.

Vehicles for Change is working to get other employers involved in the program — if only to come in and watch participants clean, polish and repair scratches in cars donated for low-income families.

"Our key strategy is to get the company to visit and see the quality of the work our students can do, and then our theory is, if they can see the demonstrated skills, the company may overlook some of the issues that our students are dealing with," Holmes said.

Homelessness, for instance. Four of the program's five apprentices are living in shelter arrangements such as transitional housing.

Tyrone Carter, one of the apprentices, lives at Christopher Place Employment Academy in Baltimore, a residential program run by Catholic Charities. As he cleaned a slightly dented Nissan last week, first with water and then with clay to pull out stubborn dirt and dust, Carter said he has two jobs now — detailer during the week and security guard in a homeless shelter on weekends.

_______________________________________________
If you look at the number of organizations tied to this nonprofit......many of them corporate representatives with some community organizations created just for the job training process.....and think to yourself

WE GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL AND EITHER WENT TO COLLEGE OR WAS HIRED TO A JOB AND TRAINED EITHER BY THAT BUSINESSES' HUMAN RESOURCES OR A LABOR APPRENTICESHIP.  WE GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE AND IF YOU HAD A DEGREE YOU WENT INTO MIDDLE-MANAGEMENT OR TO A PROFESSIONAL POSITION.

There was no need for this long list of organizations all taking public money to promote some kind of job training.  It is ridiculous and will lead to public money once going to strong advanced education now going to just placed people into individual jobs!


National Skills Coalition



Our Mission.

National Skills Coalition organizes broad-based coalitions seeking to raise the skills of America’s workers across a range of industries. We advocate for public policies that invest in what works, as informed by our members’ real-world expertise. And we communicate these goals to an American public seeking a vision for a strong U.S. economy that allows everyone to be part of its success.



How We Advance our Mission:

We organize.  We build multi-stakeholder coalitions that demonstrate broad-based support for a new national skills policy. We help our diverse coalition partners develop a common skills agenda that serves the common good. We then bring the real-world expertise of these workforce development practitioners into policy discussions.

We advocate.  We actively work to change policies. We do not focus on a narrow set of policies that impact a single stakeholder group, rather, we advocate across policy silos, ensuring that we’re helping all workers at every point in their careers. We also connect federal and state advocacy, providing policy expertise to our coalition partners to support their efforts both in Washington, DC, and in their state capitals.

We communicate.  We keep our members informed about policy efforts at the state and federal levels, providing timely and actionable information. We also reach out to people outside the workforce development field, helping our members reach new audiences and thereby better engage the American public.
_______________________________________________
Below you see the words of educators in NYC in regards to Bloomberg and Wall Street's attempts to kill public education there.  Baltimore is a NYC satellite as Johns Hopkins is Bloomberg's to run.  We are seeing education policy straight from what is spoken of below brought to you by Alonzo and his privatizing Baltimore City School Board appointed by O'Malley.  Remember, the governor is appointing because Rawlings-Blake handed Baltimore City Schools to the state.

We need our schools back in Baltimore's hands and a mayor who works for the public interest and not Wall Street to reverse all these really bad policies as is happening in NYC.


Outsourcing Public Education: Things Fall Apart With The Incremental Privatization of NYC Public Schools
Jan. 27, 2007
1:19 pm
by Leo Casey


Edwize has obtained a copy of the RFP [Request for Proposal] for “Partnership School Support” that the New York City Department of Education has hidden from the general public in a remote precinct of its website accessible only to private vendors with passwords. In it one finds the details of one of the central components of the latest structural reorganization Chancellor Klein want to impose on New York City public schools.

What is remarkable about the RFP is the general plan to outsource to these private ‘partnership’ entities virtually all of the educational support functions traditionally fulfilled, for better or for worse, by the DOE. Instructional program, professional development, special education: all of these and more will now be organized and supported by the Partnerships. And in contrast to the current intermediaries such as New Visions and Urban Assembly, this RFP invites ‘for profit’ EMOs [Educational Maintenance Organizations, modeled after Health Maintenance Organizations or HMOs] like Edison Schools and Victory Schools to become Partnerships.

Corporate outsourcing operates generally on the theory that an organization should focus on its core mission, and turn over ancillary functions which are not central to its work to other institutions to run. Applied to education, such a theory would have an entity like the Department of Education outsourcing functions like transportation, food services and facilities, in order to focus on what is central to its mission, teaching and learning. One could argue that the DOE need not have top of the line luxury buses moving children or serve the most nutritious, most appealing food in its school cafeterias, and so could afford to outsource such services, but that it needs to provide world class, quality education in its classrooms.


But what the DOE proposes to do here is the inverse of this corporate model of outsourcing. They are taking the core mission of the Department of Education — the promotion of excellent teaching and learning which is at the center of any education worthy of that name — and are outsourcing it. Such a move is a tacit admission that those who make the decisions at Tweed are themselves incapable of providing educational leadership. They lack the most elemental understanding of how the world of instruction works, and so propose structural change upon structural change, with every one avoiding the substance of teaching and learning like it were the plague. If anything, they fear educational expertise, for it exposes their own lack of knowledge and leadership: just look at an organizational strategy which has systematically purged professional educators from the top echelons of the Department of Education. With this week’s retirement of Rose DePinto, in part a reaction to yet another structural revolution bringing more institutional chaos and instability, there remains in the inner councils of Tweed literally a single educator who knows what it takes to teach real classes and lead real schools — Eric Nadelstern, the last of the educational Mohicans. There is a sort of perverse logic to turning over to private entities what the current leadership at Tweed is so clearly incapable of doing itself, as a result of its own design.

The permanent revolution of endless structural reorganizations brought to us by Chancellor Klein has been bereft, from day one, of any educational vision and any instructional strategy for New York City schools. Instead, an obsession with structure — at its root, an obsession with power as an end in itself — has been the motivating spirit. The logic of this structure driven quest is the devolution not of educational decision making power and authority, but of accountability. The goal is to divest the Chancellor and the Department of Education of responsibility for what goes on in its own schools. Five years in charge, longer than any other Chancellor in two plus decades, and Joel Klein still blames everyone but himself for the shortcomings of New York City public schools. Now he wants to organize the entire school system around that political strategy of accountability and responsibility avoidance. A proper name for these perpetual organizational revolution and obsession with structure would be “Classroom Last.”

In this regard the details of the RFP are telling. Schools do not get to choose their partnerships — they can simply state their preferences, and the DOE makes the choices. Just as importantly, schools do not get to drop their partnerships if they find them useless or worse — only the DOE can do that. There is no system of accountability for the partnerships, no metrics by which their performance will be measured, no responsibility for their actual work in their schools — the best one can find is some vague language of how the DOE will canvas the schools to obtain their opinion on the quality of services provided. Most significantly, there is no responsibility and accountability for the Department of Education in Klein’s brave, new world. It turns over all of its educational support functions to the partnerships, and leaves for itself only the training of principals [the Leadership Academy], the setting of standards, the operation of the accountability system and actual decision making authority. All responsibility, all accountability rests with the schools.

This educational dystopia, one which Klein promoted in the recent Tough Choices, Tough Talks report, would remake public education in the image of what the Bush administration and the Louisiana Governor have done to the post-Katrina New Orleans public schools. The results in New Orleans should give anyone who cares about the education of children – and especially, children living in poverty who are at most risk for academic failure – serious pause about conducting more experiments in this vein. Make no mistake about it: we are clear that the management of our public schools needs to be reformed, and that real decision making power needs to be devolved to the schools, in the hands of school leaders, teachers, and parents. We need real empowerment of schools, not rhetorical empowerment smokescreens. We need public schools accountable to the public, not outsourced to private entities in a perpetual deferral of accountability by its top leadership. Klein’s “Classroom Last” will not accomplish these ends, but only make matters worse. It — and the New Orleans public schools — is a world perhaps best captured in the title of Chinua Achebe’s novel of post-colonial Africa, borrowed from a William Butler Yeats’ poem: The center can not hold. Things fall apart.

The way forward for New York City public schools is not putting up for sale the leadership of teaching and learning in New York City public schools. Rather, it is the replacement of a Chancellor of New York City public schools incapable of providing educational leadership with a Chancellor who can do precisely that. Since you can’t lead us in teaching and learning, Joel Klein, step aside for someone who can, someone who will accept responsibility and embrace accountability for himself and his administration, someone who will set about restoring the professional educational talent you have driven from the management of New York City public schools, someone who will empower New York City public schools to do their best.


________________________________________________
LET'S LOOK AT ONE ISSUE AS REGARDS EDUCATION AND JOB TRAINING......PRE-K. 

Now, pre-K is good, we like more money for pre-K right?  Only, none of the money gets to the classroom.....it is all administrative and building structures.

JOB TRAINING IS STARTING IN PRE-K WITH THESE NEO-LIBERALS.


Keep in mind the panel in the education discussion above stated clearly that none of the funding was getting to the schools and all are being sent to administrative agencies not even connected to education.  Keep in mind as well that Maryland has a long history of being at the low end of all social welfare funding.  Look at where we were in 2004.  Now, in Baltimore with tiered per-student funding and underserved and special needs children getting the least----most of our schools cannot even afford to buy toilet paper (unless a private corporation has partnered and donates tons of money).

I showed you how private non-profits are regarded as offering little help and actually appear to be fronts to move money.  Now, that's not ALL private non-profits, but those attached to these education reforms are just that.  From Special Needs to Wellness private non-profits, parents are seeing nothing useful from them and are shouting they are taking away all public voice on these issues.  INDEED, THAT IS WHAT THESE PRIVATE NON-PROFITS COMING WITH THIS REFORM ARE MEANT TO DO!

Look at yet another education issue that will take public education money and consider where they are going to spend that money.  Remember, the goal with education privatization is to create a Pre-K - college tracking of students through testing and assignment to vocational tracks from that testing.  So, we can bet that the pre-K funding listed below in the Federal stimulus is all about creating these education testing and structures for pre-K. 

THE CLASSROOMS THEMSELVES WILL GET ALMOST NOTHING......WHICH IS WHAT THE PANEL ABOVE IS REFERRING.




Costs Per Child for Early ChildhoodEducation and CareComparing Head Start, CCDF Child Care, andPrekindergarten/Preschool Programs

(2003/2004)Douglas J. BesharovJustus A. MyersandJeffrey S. MorrowAugust 31, 2007Welfare Reform AcademyUniversity of MarylandAmerican Enterprise Institute1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.Washington, D.C. 20036www.welfareacademy.org


Of those states with a prekindergarten or preschool program, state spending varied substantially, from a low of about $721 in Maryland to a high of about $9,305 in New Jersey(about $697 and about $9,000, respectively, in 2004 dollars)




***************************************
Remember how casinos and their profits were going to bring money to education coffers and we see it all being diverted to development projects around the casinos?  Job training for casino workers is education they say!  That is what is happening with all of the funding below.  It sounds great that funds are going to underserved schools, or funding head start but what are these private non-profits offering?

As we see with after-school programs attached to underserved schools.....it is more of the worst in education environment you can provide for students.  Pre-K will be more of the same.


DEMAND THAT RACE TO THE TOP AND EDUCATION FUNDING GO TO STRENGTHEN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND NOT BUILD A SYSTEM OF PRIVATE NON-PROFITS SERVING AS SCHOOL SUBSTITUTES!

The Stimulus Package: Education and Job Training By FARHANA HOSSAIN, AMANDA COX, JOHN McGRATH and STEPHAN WEITBERG



Category Programs Cost

Education and Job Training; Aid to States Help states prevent cuts to essential services like educationmore » $53.6 billion

Education and Job Training; Aid to Individuals Increase the maximum Pell Grant by $500, from $4,850 to $5,350 $15.6 billion

Education and Job Training; Tax Cuts for Individuals Expand higher education tax creditsmore » $13.9 billion

Education and Job Training Provide additional money to schools serving low-income childrenmore » $13.0 billion

Education and Job Training Provide additional money for special educationmore » $12.2 billion

Aid to States; Education and Job Training Create new bonds for improvements in public educationmore » $10.9 billion

Education and Job Training Finance job training programsmore » $4.0 billion

Education and Job Training Increase financing for Head Start and Early Head Startmore » $2.1 billion

Education and Job Training Finance technology upgrades in schoolsmore » $650 million

Education and Job Training; Aid to States Help states and local school districts track student data and improve teacher qualitymore » $550 million

Education and Job Training; Health Train primary health care providers, including doctors and nursesmore » $500 million

Education and Job Training; Energy; Unemployment Train workers for careers in energy efficiency and renewable energy fields $500 million

Education and Job Training
; Aid to States; Unemployment Help states find jobs for unemployed workers $500 million Education and Job Training Provide additional money for College Work-Study program $200 million


____________________________________________
If you look at Baltimore City schools all of the education programs having to do with students becomes attached to private non-profits, yet if you look below at the wealthy Montgomery County where democratic institutions still work-----the public schools are the ones getting the funding and growing strong public schools.

Baltimore City schools are largely charters and vocational academies and private non-profits control all student enrichment......only many of the families are not feeling the enrichment.  After school programs are largely just more of the reading and math online training that fills the public schools in the city. 

REMEMBER HOW THE PANEL ABOVE DESCRIBED THE TOTAL EMPHASIS ON READING AND MATH TO THE DETRIMENT OF ALL OTHER SUBJECTS?  THAT IS WHAT WE HAVE IN BALTIMORE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.



Montgomery County
Grantee: Montgomery County Community Action Agency


Delegate Agency:

  • Montgomery County Public Schools
______________________
Now, we know the reason Baltimore City as with other urban schools like Chicago and Philadelphia do not get the money Montgomery County does is that the majority of students are underserved and special needs.  The funding is being kept from these 'public' schools and placed in the hands of selected charters and religious organizations for the most part.  The programs that these groups offer are often tied with the national education businesses pushing privately developed programs.  Where an individual school designs each program to fit its community's needs.

For those thinking this is happening only in poor schools think again......middle-class schools are getting these canned programs as well.


Head Start The Y of Central Maryland

is one of the largest providers of Head Start services in Maryland. We are the Grantee for Head Start in Baltimore County and are a Delegate of the Baltimore City Head Start program. Our main objective is to prepare young, economically disadvantaged children for success in school and life. We provide comprehensive early intervention to low-income children and their families and help support parents as the first and primary educator of their children. Collectively, we serve more than 950 infants, toddlers and preschool children through our Head Start programs.



Baltimore City
Grantee: Baltimore City Head Start/Mayor's Office of Human Services 


Delegate Agencies:

  • Baltimore Metropolitan Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc
  • Dayspring Head Start
  • Emily Price Jones Head Start
  • Morgan State University Head Start
  • St. Bernadine's Head Start
  • St. Jerome’s Head Start
  • St. Veronica’s Head Start
  • St. Vincent De Paul Head Start
  • Umoja Head Start Academy
  • Union Baptist/Harvey Johnson Head Start
_______________________________________________
As you see  below all of this is tied with private corporate non-profits and you can believe that Maryland is just the same.  We do not have the media coverage on this until after things happen......but it will be the same as Johns Hopkins is behind Baltimore's education policy and they are neo-cons just as in Georgia.

Posted: 11:20 p.m. Friday, Sept. 20, 2013

All eyes on pre-k when Arne Duncan and U.S. business leaders converge here Monday

By Maureen Downey



Stephanie Blank is the chairman of the board of directors of GEEARS, the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students. Carol Tome is the Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President, Corporate Services of The Home Depot. 

They wrote this guest column to highlight Monday's 2013 National Business Leader Summit in Atlanta where U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will discuss the importance of investment in early learning to strengthen the economy and global competitiveness. 

 The summit, hosted by ReadyNation-America’s Promise Alliance and the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students (GEEARS), will bring together business executives and public officials to discuss support for early learning to build the nation’s workforce and strengthen the economy.

***********************************************************************
Math Curriculum for Special Ed aligned to Common Core Standardswww.ablenetinc.com/
Curriculum/Equals-Mathematics-Program 

Equals is a Pre K-12 curriculum that provides the best in mathematics instruction for educators who work with special needs students or in alternative education programs.


_____________________________________________

This is what vocational tracking gives you and in Chicago it starts with pre-K.  Remember, Arne Duncan and Obama come from Chicago and pushed this last decade on the citizens of Chicago and it is now being exported.  We know how much all parents and families are shouting against these reforms in Chicago and NYC.


It is not only the poor shouting so do not assume this is happening only in poor areas......it is happening to middle-class schools as well.  I Maryland, Baltimore is building a private structure for schools that will be exported to the state once finished


Cramming for kindergarten testsParents hiring tutors to prep preschoolers for CPS selective-enrollment exam

February 14, 2011|By Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Tribune reporter
    •  

To test into some of Chicago's top schools, incoming kindergartners must be able to do more than just count to 10 or rattle off the alphabet.

They could be asked to identify trapezoids, figure out how many cookies they'd have if Mom put two more on their plate, demonstrate advanced literacy skills and, for gifted programs, be able to infer relationships, recognize patterns and predict what comes next.

You can probably predict what comes next yourself: With 3,337 applications filed for about 500 seats in Chicago Public Schools' classical and gifted kindergarten programs next fall, parents are helping their preschoolers cram for the tests.

"It's just yet another example that the country has gone test crazy," said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a national nonprofit that advocates for other methods of assessing young children. "This sort of insanity testing produces test coaching for little kids and gaming of the system by parents and others to figure out what's on the test and get their kid a leg up. We're not letting kids be kids, and we're making them into little Einsteins."

But with low-performing neighborhood schools an unattractive option and the cost of some private schools out of reach, many parents see CPS' selective enrollment programs as the best public education option in the city. As kindergarten is an entry year for most of those programs, many parents are hiring private tutors, researching tests used in other large urban school systems, finding age-appropriate questions online and doing whatever else it takes to get their kids on the right track early.

"I was blissfully naive about how this all worked when my older daughter tested for first grade," said Shannan Bunting. Even though with no special preparation her daughter made it into Decatur Classical Elementary, a top-scoring school, "we realized we couldn't do that for our second child and just hope to be lucky," she said.

This year she hired a former Montessori teacher to tutor her preschooler on everything from learning continents to sounding out words.



On our newsroom blog Trib Nation, how a conversation with parents became a sidebar on how to prepare kids for these tests. Such a move would not be unusual in New York, where parents have for years hired tutors and paid upward of $1,000 for "kindercramming" boot camps for 3- and 4-year-olds, but in Chicago it's a new phenomenon.

Although a test prep company called SelectivePrep offers courses for sixth-graders and up for admissions to top-scoring middle and high school programs, nothing similar exists for kindergarten.

And getting a child in a school for that first year can help them ultimately secure spots in subsequent years, which is becoming increasingly difficult. This year, CPS has 13,058 applications on file for approximately 1,150 seats in classical and gifted elementary schools. Some of the best schools have found themselves rejecting students who score as high as the 98th percentile on entrance exams.

CPS officials don't encourage prepping children for the tests because it skews the results, said Abigayil Joseph, head of CPS' Office of Academic Enhancement.

"We want children to come to the table with their natural ability, without having been prepared," she said. "That's how we find the best match. We don't want them to come in and do well because they've been prepped, but then be in an environment that's two grades above their level."

But that doesn't stop parents from trying to do what they consider best for their kids. Some even wonder why CPS doesn't follow New York's example and tell parents which test they use.

"Why is it that there's so much secrecy about it?" asked Gail Wilson, who hired a tutor to work with her two daughters to prepare for gifted testing. "They tell you (that) you can't prepare, but you can."

Author Karen Quinn, who parlayed her extensive research and her personal experience into a popular book, "Testing for Kindergarten," agrees with those parents.

"So much of it is exposure to concepts," said Quinn, who sells a $300 Candyland-like test-prep game she developed. "If they're practicing the kinds of questions that are on these kinds of tests, they will be more prepped than a child that goes in cold."

Quinn said her game can help spark the critical thinking parts of the brain and gets children familiar with answering test questions similar to those used for gifted programs. She also offers daily questions and tips to people who pay $5 a month to access her website, testingmom.com. More than 1,000 Chicago-area parents have joined.

Tutor Lemi Erinkitola started a tutoring company for kids as young as 3, preparing children, mostly on the South Side, for CPS' admissions tests. She said that when she went through the process with her own three children, she found few resources.


0 Comments

November 04th, 2013

11/4/2013

0 Comments

 
Neo-liberals are working with republicans to kill labor and justice and that starts with union-busting public private partnerships and replacing union apprenticeships with a cheap public version that kills our higher education institutions as well.  THIS IS YET ANOTHER CORPORATE SUBSIDY ----THIS TIME TO HUMAN RESOURCES JOB TRAINING DEPARTMENTS!

VOTE YOUR NEO-LIBERAL INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!!  WE NEED STRONG EDUCATION AND STRONG LABOR TO REBUILD OUR FIRST WORLD DEMOCRACY!!!

Regarding the NPR report on Washington State's vocational/career tech for public schools:

FIRST, THE LIVING WAGE IN WASHINGTON IS AT LEAST $15/17 AN HOUR AND NOT $13. SO, THESE MECHANICS ARE GRADUATING TO POVERTY WAGES IN A FIELD THAT HISTORICALLY PAID FAR MORE TO START.

SECOND....UNIONS ARE BEING BUSTED BY THIS ATTACK ON UNION APPRENTICESHIPS!

This reports talks of the Bill Gates privatization scheme for public education that has public schools as human resources departments for corporations. What a way to maximize corporate profits they say! They say students are graduating without the skills needed to do a job so they are trying to create an entire system of publicly funded job training programs that focus a student on one skill set all paid for by taxpayers and student tuition. So, if you go to these 'career colleges' and get a 'degree' for dental hygienist or auto mechanic you will find yourself having to go back to a career college to get yet another 'degree' if you need to change directions. Each time the goal is to make you ready to work from day one with no job training at the point of hire.

SWEET DEAL FOR CORPORATIONS!!!! PROFITS ARE SOARING WITH THIS POLICY BROUGHT TO US BY NEO-LIBERALS!

Here is what has been in existence for decades------when we had a thriving economy and strong labor wages and benefits and corporations had profits enough. A student graduates from high school with a broad course of strong liberal arts and humanities tied with either a professional track or a vocational track. The students received strong class content in all subjects so regardless of what they decided when they graduated.....they were ready for most career directions. You either go to university where you again had strong liberal arts and humanities with your career major and when you graduated you were ready for any number of career directions in your major.....for example science.....not only dental hygiene. That science degree allowed you to move to research, laboratory, public service, all with just a little on the job training.

How about that student graduating with a vocational track? Well, they could go to a two year community college for an associates degree or they could go right from high school into a union apprenticeship found in most trades. Those apprenticeship programs over several decades were known all over the world for quality training and were open for all to apply. A company hired someone to a job and then paid for their training with the union sharing cost.....no taxpayer money involved. The worker got the job first and then was trained for the job and paid while they worked. This system allowed all students a direction after school and allowed for a broad-based democratic education that gave that student choices in career changes.

What we know from a decade of this corporate education reform that has for-profit career colleges doing the job of the union apprenticeships and requiring all this training be done before someone is hired is this----most people go through these corporate trainings and then do not get jobs. So the student and taxpayers hand profits to these training programs and then there are no jobs to be had. WHEN YOU ARE TRAINED ON THE JOB YOU HAVE A JOB ALREADY FOR GOODNESS SAKE! It is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money and funding meant for meaningful degree financial aid. Half of all public education financial aid went to these career colleges and most students did not get jobs.

So, what this report from Seattle tells us is how this dysfunctional system of job training is now going to move to high schools and in fact Baltimore is already doing this. We had a report on the Medical Arts high school and the dental hygienist program. I went to the news paper to see the job listings for dental hygienist in the Baltimore area and there were about a dozen listings. Now, this is a high school program rotating several groups of youth through a program that also has for-profit and other training groups doing the same thing. THEY ARE CHURNING OUT TONS OF STUDENTS PREPARING FOR DENTAL HYGIENE JOBS THAT WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE IN THE BALTIMORE AREA. It is a mess. They are doing this with Emergency care programs for ambulances. When all is said and done these students generally end up in home health care earning poverty wages with no way to change direction.

Well, we are told.....go to where the jobs are for dental hygienist.

The point here is that when K-12 concentrates on strong broad educational achievement people have more of an ability to navigate to different career paths as needed. Will students from vocational schools test as well on SAT if they decide to try that course? If we look at Baltimore where students are doing Teach to the Test with Reading and Math as the primary subject at the loss of all other subjects, you see we are making little progress. When the focus is vocational there is even less.

Brown vs the Board of Education and equal opportunity and access was about all public schools giving children the opportunity to choose a direction in their lives. What these school privatizers are trying to adopt has pre-school testing deciding what skills these children may have and tracking them accordingly with parents and students having little say. That is happening now in Baltimore as parents are finding the school choice being more directed to these charters/vocational tech schools. Baltimore schools were sadly neglected in funding and oversight for decades so resources and staffing failed to meet the needs of our students. We want strong public schools that allow all students a chance at career paths they choose!



Apprenticeship
From Wikipedia,

Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a structured competency a basic set of skills. Apprenticeships ranged from craft occupations or trades to those seeking a professional license to practice in a regulated profession. Apprentices (or in early modern usage "prentices") or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships. Most of their training is done while working for an employer who helps the apprentices learn their trade or profession, in exchange for their continuing labor for an agreed period after they have achieved measurable competencies. For more advanced apprenticeships, theoretical education was also involved, with jobs and farming over a period of 4–6 years.

To be successful, the individual must have perseverance, ambition, and initiative. Like a college education, the successful completion of an apprenticeship term does not come easily, but is the result of hard work on the part of the apprentice. In practically every skilled occupation, more than fundamental knowledge of arithmetic is essential. The ability to read, write and speak well is beneficial in any walk of life, but in some apprenticeship occupations it is more important than in others.[1]



_______________________________________________

We are being told that job placement standards are going to be tied with student loans and grants yet we know that while universities do not track those stats and may not be as successful as these new laws intend-----all of the for-profit data has been skewed from the start and as with all oversight agencies in the US right now, these agencies lie, cheat, and steal more than the business.

So, we have a college system that has centuries in business which has been beset with an economy that is systemically fraudulent working on bubbles that crash and kill employment over and over-----impossible conditions to live and work----and neo-liberals think we need to change our esteemed college system to meet the crippled, criminal, and corrupt business system we have today.  OH, REALLY??????



High job placement ratings are becoming a matter of U.S. law while accrediting agencies are losing trust.

It’s not surprising there is deception in the online school system or we wouldn’t have created the scam blog.  What is shocking to us is the accrediting agencies turning a blind eye to the abuses even while the Obama administration is passing stringent new laws about graduate employment numbers.  We knew we should be leery of some schools, now we know to be suspicious of accrediting agencies and their lack of action. Every potential student should read this and more.  High job placement ratings are becoming a matter of U.S. law while accrediting agencies are losing trust. 

The Obama Administration just released final regulations requiring career college programs to better prepare students for “gainful employment” or risk losing access to Federal student aid. While many career college programs are helping to prepare America’s workforce for the jobs of the future, far too many students at these schools are taking on unsustainable debt in exchange for degrees and certificates that fail to help them get the jobs they need or were promised. These regulations are designed to ramp up over the next four years, giving colleges time to reform while protecting students and their families from exploitative programs.

“These new regulations will help ensure that students at these schools are getting what they pay for: solid preparation for a good job,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. “We’re giving career colleges every opportunity to reform themselves but we’re not letting them off the hook, because too many vulnerable students are being hurt,” Duncan continued.  Read the rest  http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/gainful-employment-regulations

Recently Philip G. Altbach wrote, “Hardly a day goes by in the United States without another report of malfeasance and exploitation by the for-profit education industry. ABC’s national television news featured a story about how the University of Phoenix, owned by the Apollo Group, one of the largest for-profit education corporations, misrepresents job possibilities to prospective students.”    Read the rest

The Career College Association (CCA), the lobbying organization of the for-profits has been busy explaining how the stories are the result of unfair reporting, or examples of just a few “rotten apples” in the barrel. Some who have been involved in the investigation, such as Senator Tom Harkin (D) of Iowa, has said that the entire barrel is rotten.

Several of the American accrediting agencies should be embarrassed by this situation. They have accredited many of the for-profits, and now must deal with the implications of what seem to be poor judgment. So far, the accreditors have been silent.

As far as we know, they are still silent.


______________________________________________

This article is written from the view of business so it does not mention the fact that union apprenticeships have always had the best system of skill development throughout US history.  If you look below you see these public job training programs started to grow with Reagan and skyrocketed with Clinton and Obama.  This is the same time neo-liberals worked with republicans to union-bust.  NAFTA sent the jobs away and these public job training programs worked to replace union apprenticeships.  IT IS DELIBERATE!!!!

When I graduated from college with a degree in science I took that degree and pursued careers in any number of directions in any number of fields.  When a union apprentice finished he had a paid job while he apprenticed and signed up for several years after that.  His finishing that apprenticeship gave great assurance he could get a job anywhere in the country.

These career college formats have regional recognition of most 'degrees' and hold very little status of completion.


States like Maryland are trying to make these second and third rate education platforms legitimate while the entire academic and business community say NO!


August 11, 2010

The Job-Training Charade

By Steven Malanga
Even as the ranks of the unemployed and of those no longer looking for a job grow, the media are suddenly discovering more and more businesses which say they want to hire workers but can't find enough qualified people. The Wall Street Journal earlier this week featured the stories of manufacturing companies having a tough time getting applicants with the right expertise to fill skilled jobs. A few weeks ago a technology headhunter from Silicon Valley created a stir when he said he couldn't fill some job searches despite the still growing ranks of the unemployed. Economists, meanwhile, point out that the number of unfilled job openings in the economy has been rising for most of the last 13 months, but even so unemployment stays high.

While labor market research suggests at least some of this disparity is attributable to successive extensions of unemployment benefits, which keep at least some workers from taking new jobs, the bigger problem may be the mismatch between the skills of those seeking jobs and the jobs themselves. And that mismatch, which only appears to be growing wider, is a reminder of the continuing failure of government-sponsored job training and retraining programs, which are a signature part of labor policy in Washington these days.

It's not as if the disparity between jobs and skills suddenly arose out of nowhere and surprised us. It's been building for decades, and federal and state government have rolled out an alphabet-soup of training and retraining programs under legislation ranging from the Manpower Development and Training Act, to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, to the Job Training Partnership Act, to the current Workforce Initiative Act. Congress passed a number of these programs specifically because what preceded them was ineffective, and the new programs were supposed to replace them with something better. No such luck.

Although worker training is as fashionable as mom and apple pie among politicians, these programs consistently fail because they bear all the weaknesses typical of government social programs. They are frequently handed to politically connected groups to run without regard to expertise. The programs often focus on retraining for jobs in industries that politicians and bureaucrats favor now, not necessarily for industries that are most in need of workers. Meanwhile, journalists and policy makers often make the mistake of touting small programs (often run with private money) that do seem to succeed, assuming the model can work nationally, even though upsizing small, successful programs often fails.

In the 1980s, research on programs run under the Job Training Partnership Act, the key training vehicle for government programs at the time, found that they had virtually no impact on employment or wage levels among those who completed them. This was not surprising considering that the programs placed people in training for jobs with companies that were rapidly expanding at the time, like McDonald's, which freely admitted they would have hired the workers even without the federally sponsored training. Money also went to train workers who were being hired by companies that had shut down plants in one location and reopened them somewhere else, providing a neat relocation subsidy to firms but no job gains. One commission looking at agencies running job training under the partnership legislation in New York City noted that they "do not consistently teach the right skills and overall are not of sufficient quality.''

Still, convinced it could do the job, Congress moved on in 1998 to a new program, the WIA, which was supposed to focus on training for higher skill jobs and to deliver better services to training applicants. But old patterns are hard to break in Washington. The feds designated some $900 million to design the new system and then, according to a Government Accountability Office study, let out contracts to reshape the system largely through a no-bid, no-competition system of handing out grants. Seven years after Washington set up the system, the GAO reported, the feds had little idea of whether it had achieved what they hoped for, namely to "shift the focus of the public workforce system toward the training and employment needs of high-growth, in-demand industries."

As a candidate, President Obama made renewing WIA a centerpiece of his labor agenda, though the GAO reported that some 60 percent of funding for a key WIA program to retrain workers never made it to the workers themselves but was eaten up in program administrative costs. Such utter lack of apparent concern for results perhaps explains why, as a GAO official testified before Congress, "We have little information at a national level about what the workforce investment system under WIA achieves." Later he declared that the government doesn't know "what works for whom" in the program.

Naturally, these failures didn't prevent the government from including job training and retraining money in the 2009 federal stimulus package (an effort to include the money in the previous 2008 stimulus failed). A big chunk of the money went to retrain workers to work in ‘green' industries. In other words the government spent tax dollars to prepare workers for jobs in industries that are only growing because they are subsidized by tax dollars. Somewhere in all of that is something called the private sector, but it's hard to find.

An ineffective job training program is worse than nothing. Beyond the tax dollars it wastes, such a program misleads the unemployed and ultimately demoralizes them. Today, for instance, many of those without a college degree who go to government retraining programs are routinely told by counselors that they need to "upgrade their skills" via government-financed classes that teach skills such as how to use basic word-processing or spreadsheet programs. But the unemployed soon find out these new skills make little difference in landing a job in today's market.

About the most that these job training programs are accomplishing is to give jobs to politically connected insiders who otherwise might be out on the street with the rest of the unemployed.

_______________________________________________
We are being told that job placement standards are going to be tied with student loans and grants yet we know that while universities do not track those stats and may not be as successful as these new laws intend-----all of the for-profit data has been skewed from the start and as with all oversight agencies in the US right now, these agencies lie, cheat, and steal more than the business.

So, we have a college system that has centuries in business which has been beset with an economy that is systemically fraudulent working on bubbles that crash and kill employment over and over-----impossible conditions to live and work----and neo-liberals think we need to change our esteemed college system to meet the crippled, criminal, and corrupt business system we have today.  OH, REALLY??????


Community Colleges Call Job Training An 'Underfunded Mandate'
Posted: 08/30/2012 3:25 pm Updated: 08/30/2012 3:28 pm  Huffington Post

  President Obama talks to students at Lorain County Community College in Ohio. Community colleges are more than ever being tasked with the critical role of putting unemployed Americans back to work -- but they are being asked to do it with scarce funding and unrealistic expectations, according to a new report released Wednesday by the University of Alabama's Education Policy Center.

The study, called "Workforce Training in a Recovering Economy," included numbers that leaders of community colleges and job training have observed for years. Of the 49 state community college leaders who responded, 45 said that business leaders are now relying on them for workforce training -- up from 34 last year.


But the problem, the survey found, was that those same schools need more state and federal support. About 35 percent of community college leaders said that training dollars had "increasingly been exhausted" in their state, as opposed to 12 percent who disagreed with that statement.

"The community colleges that were emerging from recession, we still see a lot of states have exhausted their Workforce Investment Act funds," said Stephen Katsinas, a professor at the University of Alabama who co-authored the report. Those funds, provided by the federal government, are supposed to be used in conjunction with local unemployment centers to get people back on their feet. Currently, 12.8 million people in the United States are looking for work.

Even though the money isn't there -- and the additional billions once provided by the stimulus and a change the Obama administration made to the Pell Grant system are gone, too -- community colleges are still being called upon to fill an expanded role in their communities.

Politicians love to name-check community colleges (they've been mentioned in every State of the Union, save one, since 1996), but they also have some high hopes for them. Thirty of the 49 community colleges polled said that they were being pushed "to offer or expand 'quick' job training programs in noncredit areas" in their states.

"There's a great focus on the short term and not enough focus on investing in long term, in terms of more expensive technical training, that in turn will lead to the much higher wage jobs," said Katsinas. "The issue then is they don't have the funding to do the high-tech training that would produce the wage level we want for our workforce."


There is an emerging consensus among community colleges that they should focus their efforts on "sectoral training" in quick-growing, high-wage industries. But to teach students mechatronics, nursing or information, technology requires well-payed instructors and expensive equipment.

One way to help, said Katsinas, would be to make sure that the federal Pell Grants supporting community colleges are maintained at their current levels. House Republicans have taken aim at Pell in their budget, but Katsinas said that would harm efforts to fill the so-called "skills gap" some employers have complained about, between the skills and education levels they need in workers and what the labor force has to offer.

Or, as he put it, "you can do more with more, or you can do less with less, but you can't do more with less."



0 Comments

August 30th, 2013

8/30/2013

0 Comments

 
 RESEARCH AND LOTS OF PARENT AND TEACHERS VOICES ARE SAYING NO TO THIS REFORM,.....LOOK CLOSELY AS CORPORATE POLS TRY TO PUSH REFORMS FORWARD WITH SKEWED DATA!

Regarding education reform policies:

I support the rigor brought by stronger standards because the education reform of the Reagan/Clinton years did indeed gut rigor in education.  The balance lies in both old school and new school.  What I wanted Maryland citizens to see in this article is that well-prepared states think Common Core holds less rigor.  Meanwhile, we are hearing media in Maryland using Common Core as the reason Maryland achievement stats are falling.  THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING......SO WHY ARE YOUR MEDIA OUTLETS ALLOWING O'MALLEY TO LIE?

Most high-performing states also had rigorous standards prior to Common Core. For them, the new standards represent a significant step down from the academic rigor that was the foundation of their success.

The problem in this reform is that the political powers emphasis on performance in classrooms states a goal of more resources and funding.  What we are seeing is most funds being spent on consultants and education businesses.  It will take time to bring older students up to par....but the fact that the youngest students in Maryland...the ones with these few years of reform are still failing shows the people doing the reforming do not know what they are doing.  THEIR GOALS ARE DIFFERENT FROM THEIR STATED MISSIONS!  We do want achievement levels raised but we recognize that to correct the past will take time and as the Baltimore Teachers Union and most teacher's unions across the country are saying....

THERE HAS NOT BEEN ENOUGH TIME TO IMPLEMENT CHANGES IN CURRICULA, RESOURCE APPLICATION, AND DEVELOPING LEARNING SKILLS.  THERE ARE NOT PROPER MODELS FOR ASSESSING TESTING/EVALUATIONS OF TEACHERS AND STUDENTS.

Why are Maryland officials pushing these policies on public schools when everyone knows they are not ready to implement and often are not the best policy for achievement?  The goal is to hand education over to corporations as a market so building the structure for markets trumps what is good for people or achievement.  THAT IS FROM WHERE YOUR MARYLAND NEO-LIBERALS IS WORKING.



August 15, 2013

Why states are backing out on common standards and tests
By Charles Chieppo and Jamie Gass

The bloom is surely off the rose of Common Core, the new English and math standards pushed by Washington, D.C. education trade organizations and the Obama administration. In the last few months, a number of states have paused or de-funded implementation of the standards; others have pulled out of the consortia developing tests tied to them.

Charles Chieppo, left, and Jamie Gass.

In recent years, the Obama administration has made a number of federal goodies, such as Race to the Top grants and No Child Left Behind waivers, contingent on states’ adoption of Common Core standards and assessments. But now that Race to the Top money has been spent, states are belatedly taking a clear-eyed look at Common Core. High-performing states in particular won’t like what they see.

In a recent Boston Globe op-ed marking the 20th anniversary of the Massachusetts education reform law that triggered dramatic improvements in the performance of Bay State students, Tom Birmingham, one of the law’s principal authors, wrote: “the political vectors will all tend to push the new standards to a race to the middle … In implementing the Common Core, there will be natural pressure to set the national standards at levels that are realistically achievable by students in all states. This marks a retreat from Massachusetts’ current high standards.”

Birmingham, a Rhodes Scholar and former president of the Massachusetts Senate, may well be among the least calculating or self-serving people ever to have attained high elective office, but it doesn’t take Machiavelli to know how these politics are likely to play out.

Most high-performing states also had rigorous standards prior to Common Core. For them, the new standards represent a significant step down from the academic rigor that was the foundation of their success.

Compared to Massachusetts’ previous standards, Common Core reduces the amount of classic literature, poetry and drama taught in English classes by 60 percent. Goodbye Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and Edith Wharton.

In math, the new common standards delay the progression to all-important Algebra I—the gateway to higher math study—by two years. Stanford University emeritus mathematics professor James Milgram, the only academic mathematician on Common Core’s validation committee, refused to sign off on the final draft. Milgram described the standards as having “extremely serious failings” and reflecting “very low expectations.”

The scores of U.S. students are already mediocre at best compared to their counterparts in other industrialized nations. It is a condition that could become permanent if scores in the highest-performing states revert to the mean. In contrast with their peers in other states, Massachusetts’ eighth-graders tied for best in the world in science in the 2007 Trends in International Math and Science Study.

Common Core poses a different problem for lower-performing states. In his Globe op-ed, Birmingham wrote that “for all its complexity, the Education Reform Act can be reduced, in essence, to two propositions: We will make a massive infusion of progressively distributed dollars into our public schools, and in return, we demand high standards and accountability from all education stakeholders.”

The massive infusion of new money is proving to be the Achilles’ heel for an increasing number of low-performing states that have adopted Common Core. A 2012 Pioneer Institute study estimated that transitioning to the new standards will cost states about $16 billion over seven years. Technology upgrades, new textbooks and instructional materials, and teacher training and support account for most of the expense.

The costs of implementing the standards, or costs associated with the two consortia of states developing assessments tied to Common Core, have caused a number of states to drop out. Within the last year, Alabama and Utah pulled out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. In recent weeks, Georgia and Oklahoma dropped out of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) consortium.

Meanwhile, state legislative leaders in Florida asked Tony Bennett, former state education commissioner, to withdraw from PARCC last month after determining that the new exams would double per-pupil testing costs. And Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania have put Common Core standards and testing on “pause” or frozen state funding for implementation.

When 45 states and the District of Columbia quickly adopted Common Core in their pursuit of federal largesse, it seemed the common standards and tests would take the country by storm. Fast-forward three years, and the nation is split between higher-performing states chafing at the prospect of less rigorous standards leading to declining student performance, and their lower-performing counterparts that are unwilling or unable to fund the transition to Common Core tests.

Charles Chieppo is a senior fellow, and Jamie Gass directs the Center for School Reform, at Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based public policy think tank.


________________________________________________________
I include Chicago's parents organization here because Baltimore has no education advocates for education. All of Baltimore organizations are created to support charters, school choice, and tests/evaluations.
Remember, we do need some reform but the reforms we are getting are not about quality ....they are about cheapening and tracking students and privatizing public education.



What you can do about some of the hot issues in public education


Downloadable pdf version here. Also, see companion piece, “How They’ve Been Taking the Public and Education out of Public Education.”

  • Track federal ESEA reauthorization (PURE and PAA have news services to help you – see below). The federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) expired in 2007 but Congress has yet to agree on how to fix it. Unfortunately, the “bipartisan” take on education looks a lot like the corporate reform version – charter schools, parent “choice,” testing. Please see PAA’s charts comparing the Republican House and Senate Democratic proposals (attached). Experts we listen to do not think an agreement is possible in the next year or two, but it is still important to inform and influence your representatives. Proposals or parts of proposals that are in the works now can end up as federal law.
  • Watch out in your own state for some of the following (PAA news lists will help with this – see below):
    • Parent trigger and other “parent empowerment” laws
    • Voucher bills
    • Final mandates for test-based teacher evaluation
    • State boards of education agreeing to share confidential student data without parental consent
    • Other testing mandates related to the Common Core
  • Join PURE’s news list: http://pureparents.org/?page_id=40 or just use the link at the top of our web site home page, www.pureparents.org. You will receive regular posts – news, opinion, and a weekly action alert for Chicago and/or the nation.
  • Join Parents Across America’s newsletter list: http://parentsacrossamerica.org/sign-up/ or click on “Take Action” at the top of our home page, www.parentsacrossamerica.org. You will receive a weekly newsletter with updates about PAA and our chapters and affiliates, and a weekly action alert. Join the PAA News listfor regular news and updates on education: Send an e-mail to PAAnews-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
  • Consider starting a PAA chapter. Chapter leaders should be current or former public school parents. Details here: http://parentsacrossamerica.org/join-us/
  • Why would anyone who cares about public schools shop at WalMart? When you shop at WalMart and other businesses, your money ends up paying Michelle Rhee, Teach for America, and fat cat charter school operators. Boycott them and spread the word!
  • Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing (http://timeoutfromtesting.org/nationalresolution/). If you belong to a group, have them endorse it, too.
- See more at: http://pureparents.org/?p=20803#sthash.EydxeAbd.qingp4JS.dpuf
_____________________________________________
PLEASE TAKE TIME TO READ THIS LONG ARTICLE.


This article was written by a conservative think tank that would support some stereotypes I do not and I might point out that this article does not tell us that career education used to be union apprenticeships having nothing to do with public education.  We had some of the strongest trades education in the world that allowed high school grads a course to hiring right out of school with on-the-job payment as the corporation and the union paid for this apprenticeship.  It is the killing of the union membership that continues with these career colleges.  The question for me is not college for all or career education.  It is college-for-all that want it and trade apprenticeships with on-the job-training.

The article does well pointing to the differing schools of thought.  WHAT OVERRULES THOSE THOUGHTS IS THAT CHARTERS ARE PRIVATIZING SCHOOLS AND THEREFOR WILL OFFER NO CHOICE FOR CITIZENS.


What people are not allowed to discuss because labor unions are on the neo-liberal hit list.....redesigning democratic education that prepares students to be citizens works just fine when you have a union apprenticeship available for students graduating and wanting to go into the trades.  It does not involve taxpayer money needed for schools....it allows for people to graduate from school and start a job....and it allows schools to graduate students ready for college.....ALL OF WHICH VOCATIONAL K-12 WILL NOT!
  THIS WORKED LIKE A CHARM FOR DECADES!

August 19, 2013

College-for-all vs. career education? Moving beyond a false debate

By Sarah Carr This piece was originally published in the Wilson Quarterly.

At New Orleans charter schools, even students in the primary grades sometimes start the day with rousing chants professing their commitment to college. “This is the way, hey!/ We start the day, hey!/ We get the knowledge, hey!/To go to college!” kids shout. During several years writing about the remaking of the school system since Hurricane Katrina, I have heard high school teachers remind students to wash their hands before leaving the restroom because otherwise they might get sick, which might cause them to miss class, which would leave them less prepared for college. College flags and banners coat the walls and ceilings of schools across the city. College talk infuses the lessons of even the youngest learners. College trips expose older kids to campuses around the country.

While particularly strong in New Orleans, the “college-for-all” movement has swept the nation over the past decade, with education reformers in different cities embracing the notion that sending more low-income students to and through college should be America’s primary antipoverty strategy. In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama echoed that theme when he asked every American to pledge to attend at least one year of college. “We will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”
OBAMA IS COUNTING WHAT IS CAREER COLLEGE JOB TRAINING AS COLLEGE

Students study at Akili Academy, one of dozens of charter schools in New Orleans. (Photo: Sarah Garland)

At schools that have embraced the college-for-all aspiration, career and technical education is seen as being as outdated as chalkboards and cursive handwriting. Instead, the (mostly poor and mostly minority) students are endlessly drilled and prepped in the core humanities and sciences—lessons their (mostly middle- or upper-income and mostly white) teachers hope will enable the teenagers to rack up high scores on the ACT, SAT, and Advanced Placement exams and go on to attend the four-year college of their dreams (although it’s not always clear whose dreams we’re talking about). On the surface, the tension between college-for-all and career and technical education pits egalitarianism against pragmatism. What could be more egalitarian, after all, than sending the nation’s most disadvantaged secondary students off to the vaunted halls of institutions once reserved for the most privileged? Only eight percent of low-income children in America earn a bachelor’s degree by their mid-twenties, compared to more than 80 percent of students from the top income quartile.

Yet what could be more pragmatic than acknowledging that in cities where more than half of students fail tests of basic academic skills, imposing purely academic aspirations might be a fool’s errand? Some studies have shown that only about one-third of low-income students who start college earn bachelor’s degrees by their mid-twenties; the large majority who drop out are left, in many cases, with thousands of dollars in debt. At some institutions, including the historically black Southern University at New Orleans, the graduation rate is less than 10 percent.

Understanding grassroots realities

The neat dichotomy between egalitarianism and pragmatism breaks down when we consider the players and grassroots realities, however. The desire to send impoverished students to the best four-year colleges undoubtedly stems from worthy motives. In New Orleans, only about five percent of African-American public school children graduated from college in the years before Hurricane Katrina—a statistic that everyone with common sense and a conscience would agree needs to change. But while the reformers’ big-picture goal of sending the other 95 percent to and through college might be egalitarian in theory, the means to that end are often quite paternalistic.

In their efforts to set poor children of color on the path to college, the idealistic young educators attempt to inculcate middle-class aspirations in their students through a form of body and mind control: instructing them in everything from how to take notes to how to sit, talk, walk, and move; embracing the goals of “re-acculturating” and “re-calibrating” them; and calling them “scholars,” in honor of the new pursuit. One veteran principal refers to it as “lockstepping.” In a not atypical scene inside a New Orleans charter school, a kindergarten teacher told her young charges, “We have a lot to do this year—a lot if we want to go to the first grade. The first graders already have read this book and moved on to other books. I know all of you want to go to first grade because all of you want to go to college. But you need to show discipline over your bodies to do that.”



“The idea that career and technical education is high quality and somehow rooted in the real world is just bunk.” Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust


Many parents (and even some “scholars”) welcome this structure and the intense focus on college. But some would like to see the new charters incorporate more trade and technical training in addition to their heavy college-prep emphasis. And others see a disconnect between the reformers’ goals and their methods. New Orleans grandfather Ronald McCoy shook his head during a 2010 interview with NPR when he thought about some college-prep charter schools that force their students to walk a straight line—marked out with tape—in the hallway between classes. “This walking the line?” he said. “I have been incarcerated, and that’s where I learned about walking behind those lines and staying on the right-hand side of the wall.” Applying the college-for-all ethos in a top-down fashion in low-income communities of color creates the risk of being more imperialistic than egalitarian. But emphasizing career and technical education can do another kind of harm, simply because of the dismal state of many programs. “The idea that career and technical education is high quality and somehow rooted in the real world is just bunk,” says Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization that works to improve student academic achievement.

Even advocates of career and technical education acknowledge that the programs are often divorced from economic and industry needs. Many of them were designed not out of a desire to prepare students for high-wage jobs in growing technical fields, but on the basis of classist, racist assumptions that low-income students and children of color cannot learn at high levels. To the extent that these programs fill an economic need, it’s to create a permanent underclass of workers destined for minimum-wage jobs. In New Orleans, before Katrina, that meant the schools produced an endless supply of graduates to serve as housekeepers and dishwashers working for less than $20,000 a year in the city’s tourist-based economy, but very few who could repair air conditioning units, a job that pays more than twice as much.

The origins of college-for-all

A confluence of forces has fueled the college-for-all push of the last couple of decades. Apart from the well-publicized hollowing out of the economy, a raft of reports have shown the differential benefits of college and graduate school education in terms of earnings, job stability, and health. In 2010, for instance, the median wage for a male high school graduate between the ages of 25 and 34 was $32,800, compared to $49,800 for one with a bachelor’s degree.

At the same time, the standards movement—with its emphasis on disaggregated data, high-stakes testing, and school accountability—exposed huge failures in the schooling of low-income and minority children. “This very good idea that all kids need a strong academic underpinning morphed into the idea that all kids need to be prepared to attend a four-year college,” says Robert Schwartz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He doesn’t think the two ideas are necessarily the same.

“We have a class snobbism that the only jobs that matter are the jobs we do: white-collar jobs in offices.” Robert Schwartz, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

The 1990s and 2000s also saw the rapid growth of programs such as Teach For America, which sends recent graduates of elite colleges into poor communities in New Orleans and other places for missionary-style stints. TFA members and recent alums founded several of the charter schools and charter networks, such as KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program), that dominate in post-Katrina New Orleans and are the most strident, best-known backers of the college-for-all—or at least college for far more—movement.

Some prominent educators have pushed back against the movement in the last two years, citing its lack of pragmatism. In 2011, for instance, Schwartz coauthored an influential paper, Pathways to Prosperity, which reported burgeoning demand for “middle-skill” workers, including  electricians, construction managers, and dental hygienists. The report focused on fields where the average wage is above $50,000 ($53,030 for electricians, $70,700 for dental hygienists, and $90,960 for construction managers, according to 2012 figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics); workers in other traditional vocational fields, including health aides and short-order cooks, make far less.

The “middle-skill” fields described in the report typically require an associate’s degree or occupational certificate, but not a four-year bachelor’s degree. “The ‘college-for-all’ rhetoric . . . needs to be significantly broadened to become a ‘post high-school credential for all,’” Schwartz and his colleagues argued.


The Harvard report stressed that schools and officials should not downplay efforts to improve traditional academic instruction. But it concluded that secondary school career training should be significantly upgraded and expanded by introducing more opportunities for work experience, extensive employer involvement in shaping programs, and enhanced hands-on (as opposed to classroom-based) learning. (THIS IS THE UNION APPRENTICESHIP...INDEED, THESE CAREER COLLEGE JOB TRAININGS ARE INFERIOR TO WHAT ALREADY EXISTS IN UNION WORKSHOPS.  BUT THESE CONSERVATIVES WRITING THIS ARTICLE WILL NOT TALK ABOUT THE PUBLIC COSTS OF TRYING TO END UNION APPRENTICESHIPS!)

Earlier this year, the Brookings Institution published a report that dissected the college payoff by school selectivity, major, and occupation. “While the average return to obtaining a college degree is clearly positive, we emphasize that it is not universally so,” the authors wrote. They cited the low, or negative, “return on investment” for less selective, yet pricey, private universities and for majors such as art and psychology. “By telling all young people that they should go to college no matter what, we are actually doing some of them a disservice.”

Many of the most thoughtful backers of college-for-all and expanded career education agree on more than they disagree on: They all hope to boost the percentage of Americans with some form of postsecondary degree or training and thereby increase social mobility. And they all believe that the high school curriculum could be improved. But they part ways on the best means to their shared ends.

“If we’re talking about earning enough to support a family, the smartest choice is a four-year degree,” Haycock says. “It is the only sure route out of poverty.”

Schwartz maintains that there needs to be more emphasis on alternate pathways to well-paying jobs. “We have a class snobbism that the only jobs that matter are the jobs we do: white-collar jobs in offices.”
THAT IS BECAUSE JOBS WITHOUT COLLEGE HAVE BEEN SLASHED TO POVERTY WAGES!

The best way to address this divergence is not to give up on college-for-all, or on expanded career and technical education. We need to look at the debate in a different way, incorporating individual experience as well as data, and humanistic as well as economic perspectives. Using this lens, we can come to a more nuanced understanding of how to make our education system both more pragmatic and more egalitarian.

Too much focus on elites


As with most social issues in America, the debate over college-for-all and career education has taken place mostly at an elite level, with little understanding of the desires and needs of low-income students and their parents. During several years of close observation of New Orleans charter schools, I saw how hard it is to prescribe a set of educational aspirations to a group of people, no matter how convincing the data and experts might be.

Two teenage students I interviewed provided a case in point. Both were poor, smart, creative, and intense, but that’s where the similarities ended. Brice was talkative, clever, mischievous, and, despite his kindness and generosity, constantly in trouble. One of his teachers described him this way: “Brice’s mouth is his weapon. But if you don’t understand Brice, you would think his weapon is more than his mouth.”

By contrast, Anthony (whose name has been changed) was soft spoken and reserved, and avoided conflict at all costs. Yet he occasionally burst forth with statements that revealed how much he saw and knew, such as his description of the topics covered in an elective philosophy class: “How come people come in different races and what’s the difference? Why is everything this way? How do we know what’s ethically right or wrong? Who are we? Why do we speak to each other and why do we have five fingers and five toes? How can we make the things we make? How do we know what matter is, and why can we feel things?”

Anthony, whose mother scraped by as a hotel housekeeper, desperately wanted to go to college, while Brice preferred the military. (He only somewhat facetiously declared that guns and violence were what he knew.) But in a twist of fate, Brice enrolled in a KIPP high school whose principal endlessly recited the school’s mantra: “One thousand first-generation college graduates by 2022.” Meanwhile, Anthony attended a long-struggling and less ambitious non-charter New Orleans high school where, in 2010, the year before he enrolled, only 14 of 44 graduating seniors continued on to college. Among those 14 graduates, 10 needed to take remedial courses and the average ACT score was 13.9. (The ACT is scored on a scale of 1 to 36, with a national average of about 21.) Anthony earned a 12 when he took the test in the spring of his junior year.

The education system failed Anthony and Brice in different ways. Anthony suffered from a failure of training: He had more than enough desire and ambition, but his schools did not provide him with the skills and tools to make college graduation an easy (or even likely) prospect. Brice, on the other hand, suffered from a failure of imagination: He attended a school hell-bent on giving him the skills and tools he needed to thrive in college. Yet he retained a limited view of his own potential in spite of all the college banners, slogans, chants, and ambitions that surrounded him.

Anthony graduated from high school in the spring of 2012 and entered Southeastern Louisiana University at the start of 2013, where he struggled academically during his first semester but remained determined to persist. Brice was arrested for second-degree attempted murder during the spring of his freshman year at KIPP. He spent more than a year in jail before his lawyer negotiated a plea deal during the summer of 2012. Brice has not returned to a traditional high school, although he hopes to earn a GED.

Most of the new college-for-all charter schools in New Orleans are just graduating their first cohorts of students, so only time will tell if they succeed in their mission. (A national study of KIPP’s earliest graduates found that 33 percent had received a degree from a four-year college within 10 years—four times the national rate for students with similar backgrounds, yet a far cry from the organization’s stated goal of 75 percent.) But it struck me as sadly ironic that a restructured school system so focused on getting students through college could fail so utterly to give both Brice and Anthony what they most needed to get there.

Stop treating academic and vocational education as ‘silos’

There are changes we could make to our schools and way of thinking that would help students like Anthony and Brice—changes that would, however, complicate our understanding of what’s pragmatic and what’s egalitarian.

To more pragmatic ends, we should stop treating academic and vocational education as curricular silos and develop more strategies for boosting college completion rates among low-income students. There’s little point in expanding technical education or four-year college matriculation rates if both pathways are, by design or default, bridges to nowhere. And replicable small-scale efforts aimed at shoring up career education and improving college graduation rates already exist.

For instance, nine school districts participating in a California-based initiative called the Linked Learning Alliance agreed to expand their career and technical education courses while also integrating them with academic classes. Students might study both algebra and computer-aided design (a modernized vocational subject) in the same class and no longer choose (or get nudged toward) an early college-prep track or a career track. It was assumed that all students would have access to both a rigorous academic curriculum and work experience, such as an internship or employment at a school-based business. “We are trying to overcome the mindset that career and technical education is ‘just shop,’” said Olivine Roberts, the chief academic officer at the Sacramento City Unified School District, one of the participating districts, in an interview with School Administrator magazine.

Operating in large cities such as New York and Chicago (as well as New Orleans), the Posse Foundation sends cohorts of 10 low-income children from the same urban community off to elite colleges as a group. The theory is that the students will feel more comfortable, and will be more likely to stay in college, if surrounded with peers who have similar backgrounds and culture. Neither Linked Learning nor Posse is, on its own, a solution to educational or economic inequity in America. But they are both much-needed practical approaches in an area that’s been dominated by abstract, and at times ideological, arguments and approaches.

To a more egalitarian end, we should stop viewing low-income children of color as a form of “other” in the debate over secondary and college education, a bias both sides can be guilty of at times. Children growing up in poverty are not incapable of higher-level thinking and learning, as many backers of vocational tracks have explicitly or implicitly maintained for generations. But neither are they empty vessels who need to be filled with mainstream middle-class ambitions and values at super speed. One extreme discredits and undervalues poor children of color through the end it envisions for them (uniformly working-class jobs), the other through the means it employs (a form of cultural indoctrination). Both fail to fully conceive of these children as talented and aspirational in their own right.


Before we redesign our education system to better meet the needs of the most disempowered, we must acknowledge how this idea of otherness has fostered the most simplistic (and least constructive) positions in this debate. In the long run, social policies and programs that deny the overwhelming power of individual agency are destined to fail.




0 Comments

May 15th, 2013

5/15/2013

0 Comments

 
Once again WYPR made sure the education reform of Alonzo was the only news relayed as he emphasized ever more charters opening around the city.  Once the school building project is finished most of those will be chartered as well. That is what NYC did and Baltimore is copying NYC.  I want people in Baltimore to know they are not alone in hating this education reform being pushed on them and I want parents to know that there are education organizations that want to help you fight this as well.  Baltimore's teachers cannot start a fight until the parents and communities fight SO IT IS UP TO ALL OF US TO SHOUT OUT AT CITY HALL, AT THE SCHOOL BOARD MEETINGS, OUTSIDE OF OUR SCHOOLS.

VOTE YOUR THIRD WAY CORPORATE DEMOCRAT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!!

RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE NEXT ELECTIONS!!!

Marylander's have watched as the state sends billions to build these corporate universities while the public fights for insufficient funds for all public schools.  We will not prosper under private schools.....they are only motivated by profit and not what will be best for your child.  CHARTER SCHOOLS, TEACH FOR AMERICA, THIS KIND OF TESTING AND EVALUATION......IS NOT GOOD EDUCATION POLICY!!!  All of Maryland's democrats are supporting this and these private education non-profits are designed to embrace these policies. 



Unified Backlash to Education Mandates Grows, Spreads

“It’s always hard to tell for sure exactly when a revolution starts,” wrote John Tierny in The Atlantic  recently. “I’m not an expert on revolutions,” he continued, “but even I can see that a new one is taking shape in American K-12 public education.”

Tierney pointed to a number of signs of the coming “revolution:”

  • Teachers refusing to give standardized tests, parents opting their kids out of tests, and students boycotting tests.
  • Legislators reconsidering testing and expressing concerns about corruption in the testing industry.
  • Voucher and other “choice” proposals being strongly contested and voted down in states that had been friendly to them.
Tierney linked to a blog post by yours truly, “The Inconvenient Truth of Education Reform,” explaining how the movement known as “education reform” has committed severe harm to the populations it professes to serve while spreading corruption and enriching businesses and political figures.

Echoing Tierney, on the pages of Slate, The Nation, and elsewhere, David Kirp, education professor and author of a popular new book casting doubt on competitive driven, market-based school reform, declared that cheating scandals and parent rebellions over high stakes standardized testing were proof that much ballyhooed reform policies championed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are not “a proven – or even a promising – way to make schools better.”

Kirp declared that mounting evidence from school reform efforts in major U.S. metropolitan areas reveals “it’s a terrible time for advocates of market-driven reform in public education. For more than a decade, their strategy – which makes teachers’ careers turn on student gains in reading and math tests, and promotes competition through charter schools and vouchers – has been the dominant policy mantra. But now the cracks are showing.”

In a legislative view, the Progressive State Network, which supports left-leaning state legislators and monitors legislative policy in state houses, noticed “a backlash is brewing in many states as more and more parents and legislators alike start asking questions about corporate education reform.” The post on PSN’s website referenced Tierney’s article and highlighted a Minnesota bill that eliminates testing requirements for graduation and several states that are embroiled in battles to defeat measures known as the “parent trigger,” which enables private takeovers of public schools.

These observations are not alarmist chatter but well-reasoned, valid conclusions that anti-government collectivist actions related to public school policy are scaling up from isolated protests to a nationwide movement of unified resistance.

The movement is widespread among teachers, students, and parents. It is grassroots driven and way out in front of most journalists and political leaders. And it’s scaling up in intensity.

A Teacher-Student-Parent Movement

For quite some time now, education historian and reform opponent Diane Ravitch has written about the ever expanding discontent among teachers over the emphasis on standardized testing and test-based teacher evaluation and school rating systems.

As proof of this discontent, Ravitch has closely followed and commented on a boycott against standardized testing among teachers in Seattle, an ongoing protest among principals in New York state against new teacher evaluations, and objections to the “testing beast” among educators and parents in Texas.

In ever-greater numbers, however, students are also leading the resistance. A recent article in The Nation reported on the growing student resistance movement driven by grievances over austerity budgets and systemic racism.

From all corners of the country – North Carolina to Philadelphia to Louisiana to Chicago – students as young as eight years old are organizing and taking part in a variety of actions including zombie protests, school walkouts and sit-ins, and acts of defiance like the recent rant by a high school student in Texas that went viral over the Internet when he castigated a seemingly indifferent teacher for dispensing education in “packets” rather than engaging the class in meaningful, relevant learning.

In Chicago, youth voice is forming in grassroots groups like CSOSOS (Chicago Students Organizing To Save Our Schools) and VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education) that have led prominent, headline-earning protests to school closures, teacher firings, and over emphasis on high-stakes testing.

In Philadelphia, a handful of students used their social media and organizing skills to whip up student resentment and send hundreds of students into the streets to protest budget cuts to their favorite education programs.

In Denver, high schoolers have formed Students4OurSchools and staged walkouts protesting the over-emphasis on standardized testing.

Students in Philadelphia, Providence, Rhode Island, Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere have formed student unions that have developed attention-getting tactics, which have spread to a national scale. These student organizations’ Facebook pages speak in unison against school closures and cutbacks, widespread teacher firings, and top-down implementations of mandated standards and high-stakes testing.

In many places, teachers and parents are supporting rebellious students and even joining in the protests. Grassroots parent groups, in fact, have been the driving force behind efforts to beat back school voucher proposals in Tennessee and parent trigger legislation in Florida.

Resistance is particularly vehement in low-income communities of color in large urban school districts where reform measures have lead to widespread teacher firings and school closings. In Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit, vocal protestors have been organizing in their own communities but also uniting in national campaigns, such as this year’s Journey for Justice effort that brought hundreds of activists in allied grassroots organizations to the White House to protest school closings.

Unlike school reform proponents who benefit from massive donations from rich foundations and politically connected funders, grassroots groups leading the resistance – like the Alliance for Educational Justice and Alliance for Quality Education – have far humbler means and few connections to the political class and deep pocketed philanthropists like Bill Gates.

Nevertheless, these groups have generated strong outpourings of popular dissent and produced important analyses of the duplicity of the reform agenda.

A Movement Getting More Recognition

Mostly, grassroots-led protests against education mandates have gotten little attention from even the few media outlets and reporters focused on education.

That changed, however, when the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, called for a moratorium on the consequences of high-stakes testing related to the Common Core.

All of a sudden, when there was a crack in the conventional wisdom that education policy was a centrist agreement between teachers’ unions and conservative belief tanks, many education bloggers and journalists decided the school accountability movement had reached a surprising new level of intensity.

Long-time education journalist Dana Goldstein speculated on her blog that Weingarten’s moratorium call is proof that education matters that were once considered products of a “coalition” of centrist-minded – although mostly conservative – wonks and Beltway operatives are now points of strong contention.

Her conclusion was that these differences represent a “deep divide” among the political class about whether it’s a good idea to “scare us into meaningful school reform.”

Another experienced education journalist, Sam Chaltain also reflected on his blog on calls for a testing moratorium. He recalled that after Barak Obama was elected, Obama proceeded with “a series of education policies that further entrenched America’s reliance on reading and math scores as a proxy for whole-school evaluation.”

Critics of those policies “vented,” Chaltain explained, but “policymakers nodded. And absent any real noise, the tests continued.” But with this more recent backlash to education mandates, Chaltain observed, “policymakers have been unable to ignore a groundswell of noise and resistance.”

Chaltain concluded that conflicts over school policy had “reached a tipping point.”

Similarly, veteran education reporter at Education Week Michelle McNeil observed, “Not since the battles over school desegregation has the debate about public education been so intense and polarized.”

McNeil sourced the polarity to the conventional wisdom that public education is “an institution that historically is slow to change,” and now it’s being “forced to deal with so much change at once.” And she asserts that the controversy over change is mostly “about centralization or decentralization” of specific “reform” efforts.

But what Goldstein, McNeil, and others on the sidelines fail to grasp is that the pushback against the nation’s education policy is not new. The “polarization” is not “obscuring” the issues – as McNeil contends – it’s clarifying them. And the “debate” over education has broken free from being an issue confined to “fringes” and “policy elites” to take its rightful place at the center of “a growing, broader backlash.”

Indeed, just like the fight to integrate public schools was connected to the larger struggle for civil rights, fights to preserve and strengthen public schools – whether they take the form of students walking out of class to protest education cuts, parents fighting against deceptively named “empowerment” policies, or teachers boycotting standardized tests – are connected to much larger struggles over what kind of nation America is becoming.

A Leadership Out Of Touch

The growing rebellion to education mandates has been driven mostly by grassroots groups formed first among low-income communities of color, but now the movement is extending to people of greater means and social-political capacity like parent groups that worked an inside game with state legislators to thwart implementation of the Common Core standards in Indiana, block parent trigger bills in Florida, and curb the emphasis on high stakes testing in Texas.

This unification of the grassroots with the “grass tops” in education is not well understood in the media or among policy elites.

In fact, people in charge of education governance appear to be more clueless than ever about what they are intent on accomplishing and legislating.

Witness the recent confession from one of the movement’s most influential leaders, Bridgeport, Conn., school chief Paul Vallas. As Valerie Struass reported at her blog on The Washington Post, Vallas has led reform efforts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans that have become blueprints for education policy ideas across the country. Yet he admitted that the policies he has championed are resulting in a “nightmare” of complexity.

Reportedly, he characterized his efforts to enact test-based teacher evaluations as a feature of a “testing industrial complex” and “a system where you literally have binders on individual teachers with rubrics that are so complicated … that they’ll just make you suicidal.”

Vallas’ newfound doubts over what he has created reflected other confusing comments from education policy leaders. Most notable was the commentary by Bill Gates, widely acknowledged as a leader in the movement to base teacher evaluations and school ratings on student test scores, warning against the “rush to implement new teacher development and evaluation systems” based on test scores.

Even more perplexing was Secretary Duncan’s recent inability to deliver a straight answer about parent trigger bills. As Beltway gadfly Alexander Russo recently reported, “Duncan described the trigger as ‘an important tool’ for parent involvement — but not the only or even the most important one” – whatever that means.

Compared to authentic grassroots outpourings for resources, equity, and real democracy, these equivocations from education policy leaders are puny and venal to say the least.

Intensity Is Building

“Scared” or not, recalling Goldstein’s comment, activists driving protests against the nation’s prevailing education policies are ratcheting the fight to unprecedented intensity that will likely become even more forceful in future efforts.

Later this month, for instance, teachers in Chicago are planning a citywide three-day march to protest impending school closures. Education related bills in state legislatures in California, Texas, New York, North Carolina, and elsewhere will be highly visible points of contention. And actions to protest the imminent doubling of college loan debt interest rates – certainly an issue related to public education – are generating a unified response from hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Clearly, the resistance to top-down education mandates is building. The movement is propelled by forces far greater than what education journalists and policy leaders understand – widespread grievances about inequity, unfairness, and public disempowerment.

The revolt is happening. The revolt is now.






___________________________________________

THE WASHINGTON BELTWAY IS WEALTH AND POWER AND THE COURTS REFLECT THIS SO IT IS NOT SURPRISING TO HAVE A JUDGE QUESTIONING THIS FIGHT FOR SCHOOLS. WE ALL KNOW THAT THE CHILDREN REPLACED ARE NOT GETTING INTO THE 'GOOD' SCHOOLS PRETENDED.

WHERE ARE THE LAWSUITS ACROSS THE COUNTRY IN CITIES HAVING FUNCTIONING JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS??!!


Judge sharply questions activists seeking to block D.C. school closures
By Emma Brown,May 10, 2013

A federal judge had several sharp and skeptical questions Friday for D.C. education activists who have sued to halt the planned closure of 15 city schools.

Opponents argue that the closures would disproportionately affect poor and minority children and therefore violate a number of civil rights laws. In a packed U.S. District courtroom Friday, they pleaded for a preliminary injunction to block the closures, citing “irreparable harm” to children if the plan put forth by Chancellor Kaya Henderson is allowed to move forward.

But Judge James E. Boasberg raised concerns about that argument. Minutes after the hearing began, he referred to a sheaf of statistics demonstrating that most of the children affected by closures are slated to attend schools with higher test scores and more racial diversity than the schools they’re leaving behind.


“The whole purpose of going to school, for these kids, is to receive a good education, correct?” Boasberg said. “It seems to me that the schools they’re transferring into are a whole lot better.”

Attorney Jamie B. Raskin, arguing on behalf of five plaintiffs with the community group Empower D.C., said Boasberg’s question sidestepped the central point of the lawsuit.

“The point is that having a neighborhood school is a precious public resource and a precious public benefit that we think should not be distributed along the lines of race and class,” said Raskin, a constitutional law professor and Democratic Maryland state senator.

Thirteen schools are slated to close in June and two more in 2014.

The move will displace more than 2,700 children, almost all of whom are African American or Hispanic.

District attorneys on Friday denied that the closures are discriminatory, describing them as an effort to improve education across the city. Children have no constitutional right to a neighborhood school, they said, and having students move to a new school does not deprive them of services.

Henderson, who in January announced her intent to close the schools, has long said that the school system must close buildings left half-empty after four decades of declining enrollment. Under-enrolled schools are expensive and inefficient to operate, according to the chancellor, who was in the courtroom Friday but did not speak during the proceedings and declined to comment afterward.

Boasberg, whose brother is the superintendent of Denver Public Schools, asked the plaintiffs repeatedly to explain when a school system leader could ever legally close a school with a higher-than-average percentage of minority children.
Ads by Google

Apply to Become A NurseApply To Our Nursing School And Earn Your Degree at a Local Campus. Chamberlain.edu

Raskin said the problem is not the closing of individual schools, but a historical pattern of closing schools in poor and minority neighborhoods.

Schools in affluent areas west of Rock Creek Park have been under-enrolled at times over the past several decades, he said, but remained open.

Sitting in the courtroom were many school-closure opponents who had rallied outside the courthouse before the hearing. When Boasberg asked whether the plaintiffs’ attorneys believed that Henderson — who is African American — intended to discriminate against black and Hispanic children, some in the audience responded “Yes!”

Boasberg continued, asking whether the attorneys believed that African American leaders in other cities where schools are closing, such as Philadelphia and Chicago, also intend to discriminate.

“Yes!” the audience said again before the judge quieted the courtroom.

Raskin then stepped in, saying that plaintiffs are not accusing Henderson of racial hatred but are highlighting a pattern of discrimination that grows out of the District’s history as a segregated city. That history is “now fundamentally impairing people’s ability to have an equal right to a neighborhood school,” he said.

The plaintiffs also said that the city failed to give proper notice of the closure plan to Advisory Neighborhood Commission members. Boasberg said he had concerns about whether plaintiffs had legal standing to sue on those grounds.

The judge said he would issue a decision on the preliminary injunction next week.





______________________________________________
Here you see how a Department of Labor appointee who is Third Way looks at job training as opposed to a labor and justice appointee. Labor unions have apprenticeship programs that have been the best in the world for decades. No taxpayer money....the unions and businesses pay for on-the-job training. What corporate democrats are doing is handing all these costs to taxpayers and making public community college corporate job training centers. So a huge hunk of public education spending is going to subsidize corporate profits. THIS IS THIRD WAY CORPORATE POLICY COURTESY OBAMA AND CAPITOL HILL. That is why Obama chose Maryland's Perez because Maryland and O'Malley have placed all our public higher education on corporate overdrive with Perez as State Labor Secretary!!


Federal Spending
That Works


May 14, 2013 - 3:00am By Paul Fain

Inside Higher Ed


Most community colleges could easily put federal grant money to good use plugging up budget holes after years of slashing by states. But the U.S. Department of Labor’s $2 billion in workforce development funding for the sector was designed to encourage two-year colleges to make lasting, ambitious changes instead of just back-filling budgets. And that approach seems to be working.

The 15 community colleges in Massachusetts, for example, have shared $20 million from the Labor Department to create new or redesigned credentials, which are aimed at unemployed or underemployed adults.

The colleges have also used the money to sharpen their focus on career services. Rather than just trying to help students find jobs as they finish degree programs, each one has hired a full-time “career and college navigator” to lend a hand to students throughout their time on campus.

Ana Sanchez, the new navigator at Springfield Technical Community College, describes herself as a matchmaker between students and local employers, including hospitals, government agencies and local companies.

Her most important role, however, might be helping students cope with the demands of their daily lives, including childcare, managing their finances and figuring out how to commute between jobs and school. “It’s really important to help them with those challenges,” said Sanchez.

Under the program, the state’s community colleges have worked with employers to create accelerated training for students in six targeted industries: health care, advanced manufacturing, IT, biotechnology, green energy and financial services. The colleges have called the three-year program the Massachusetts Community Colleges and Workforce Development Transformation Agenda.

That grant is one of many that have gone to consortiums. But a few individual colleges also received grants. (Lists of grantees are available here and here. And see box for a few notable examples.)

Created in 2010, the package of Labor Department grants is dubbed the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Program, (TAACCCT, a long acronym even for Washington). It replaced the Obama Administration’s proposed $12 billion American Graduation Initiative that was also aimed at community colleges, but which failed to get Congressional approval.

The Labor Department last month announced the third wave of approximately $500 million in funding under the program, bringing the total so far to $1.5 billion. The last round is slated for next year.

Notable Labor Department grants

North Carolina Advanced Manufacturing Alliance: $19 million for 10 community colleges to address gaps in education and training in advanced manufacturing.

Pennsylvania Consortium of Community Colleges: $20 million for the state's 20 community colleges with an initial focus on electronic medical records technology, advanced manufacturing and renewable energy.

National STEM Consortium: $20 million for 10 community colleges in nine states, which are developing one-year certificates in five high-demand fields with industry partners.

National Information, Security and Geospatial Technology Consortium: $20 million for seven community colleges in six states with focus on advanced IT fields.

Illinois Green Economy Network Career Pathways: $19 million for 17 community colleges to develop training programs in eight green economy industries.

To land a grant, colleges need to make the case that they will quickly create career training paths for high-wage, high-skill jobs. They are also encouraged to experiment with ways to speed up the time students need to spend earning a degree or credential. As a result, the program gives a nudge to prior-learning assessment, competency-based education and stackable credentials, which offer a path for students to duck in and out of college as needed, beginning with short-term certificates earned in as little as one semester.

“This is about encouraging colleges to think more creatively,” said Kathryn Jo Mannes, senior vice president for workforce and economic development at the American Association of Community Colleges. That means building partnerships with industry that will last.

“It’s not just a proposal-writing exercise,” Mannes said of the grants. “They’re meant to survive the exhaustion of federal funds.”

Competencies and Stackable Credentials

By giving priority to larger clusters of colleges, the Labor Department sought to create cooperation that can be rare in higher education. But the broad scope of the grants was initially confusing to some.

For example, with six target industries, the Massachusetts program seemed a bit scattershot at first. But observers said the colleges quickly settled into niches. That means institutions have taken the lead in working with industries that are particularly strong in their backyards, like health care for Boston-area colleges.

Jennifer Freeman, the grant’s project manager, said the overarching goal is to make the state’s community colleges more of a go-to place for technical and middle-income jobs. That’s a shift, she said, because many in the state had viewed the primary purpose of community colleges as being transfer prep for four-year institutions, instead of direct training for jobs.

The presidents of the 15 Massachusetts colleges decided to apply jointly for the money.

“This is the largest thing they have ever done as a consortium,” Freeman said, adding that “it wasn’t called a transformation agenda lightly.”

One of the project’s first steps was to develop a common set of competencies for each featured industry, which were then woven into curriculums. That was hardly an easy task, particularly given the grant’s relatively compressed time frame.

For advanced manufacturing, the final product was a pyramid of competencies employees should ideally master to work at various job levels. The colleges worked with manufacturers statewide to develop those standards.

For example, in the precision machining field, entry-level jobs like assemblers or warehouse workers should have skills in five major areas: shop math, blueprint reading, metrology, problem solving and workplace readiness. But further up the pyramid, supervisors and managers should hold certificates and degrees in manufacturing technology, as well as more learned skills, such as programming, and a minimum number of hours working in the industry.

The project has led to far more than a smattering of new academic offerings. Over all, the colleges plan to create more than 85 new degree, certificate and noncredit programs in the six industry fields. About 2,000 students are currently enrolled in those programs.

Many of the new credentials are designed to be stackable. Freeman said the manufacturing and health care tracks in particular include a series of certificates and degrees for students to build upon as they progress in their jobs.

Angela Bellas, the initiative’s program manager at the Springfield campus, said the college created new short-term certificates in health care for patient care technicians and medical administrative assistants. Most of those credentials will be 16-18 credits, she said, which means they can be earned in a semester or two.

Part of the challenge the Massachusetts colleges have faced is making sure that noncredit programs match up well with credit-bearing ones. That becomes more important in a stackable pathway. Freeman said “colleges are really rolling up their sleeves” to improve articulation between programs.

The first step to a job for students, however, is probably their initial conversations with navigators. Sanchez said many students say they are interested in health care when they first enroll. “Everybody wants to be a nurse,” she said.

Part of her job, Sanchez said, is injecting a dose of reality. She typically asks aspiring nurses about their math and science skills, which are key requirements in nursing. Sanchez makes sure students know how much work it might take to land a job.

“Let’s do baby steps,” she tells them.

______________________________________________
In Maryland, K-12 has had to beg for funding and the cost of tuition has climbed over this decade as all education funding was earmarked to create this international system of education in our public colleges. How does this help Maryland citizens? It doesn't. It has Maryland citizens and Federal taxpayers footing the bill for what will become privatized corporate universities. Citizens will have only career community colleges to attend. RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE AND REVERSE THIS NONSENSE!!!!! WE CAN TAKE THIS BACK!!!

In Baltimore, Johns Hopkins has declared 10,000 new city residents will arrive in 10 years.  They are copying NYC's model of flooding the city with immigrants.  That is what these policies are about and it is not good for most American citizens.  Marginalized/competing with citizens of the world rather than just people living in your state for example!!!

SEND ALL EDUCATION FUNDING BACK TO EDUCATING THE PEOPLE OF MARYLAND AND BALTIMORE BY GETTING RID OF THESE CORPORATE POLS.......

College and Government Officials Discuss U.S.-India Partnerships

May 14, 2013 - 3:00am

Inside Higher Ed


The importance of collaboration with U.S. community colleges to realize India's goal of creating 200 such institutions was a major focus of a roundtable discussion on "Advancing U.S.-India Academic Partnerships" held at the Institute of International Education's Washington office on Monday. Governmental representatives participating in the discussion with college administrators included M.M. Pallam Raju, India's minister of human resource development, and Nirupama Rao, the ambassador of India to the United States, as well as several high-level U.S. Department of State officials.

The discussion portion of the meeting was closed to media (only the opening remarks were open), but participants reported that subjects of discussion included not only community college collaboration but also the role of MOOCs (massive open online courses) in increasing India's higher education capacity and the imbalance in exchanges between American and Indian students. (While there are more than 100,000 Indian students in the U.S., only 4,345 Americans studied in India in 2010-11, according to IIE data.) The subject of long-stalled legislation permitting the establishment of foreign branch campuses in India did not come up during the 45-minute discussion.

Monday's roundtable discussion was intended to inform the ongoing, governmental U.S.-India Higher Education Dialogue, a component of a larger strategic dialogue between the two countries.


____________________________________________
Here is a Chicago education organization working and protesting for their children's future.  Baltimore can as well!!


PURE

Building powerful public school parents and communities

« PSAT for 5-7-13: Say no to 36! PSAT for 5-14-13: Sign up for the 3-day march Our City, Our Schools, Our Voices, will come together this coming weekend in the final protest push before the May 22 Board meeting where the mass school closing vote will be taken.

Here’s what the CTU says about this event:

The mayor and Board of Education want to destroy 54 school communities. This will be the largest destruction of schools in U.S. history. We need our neighborhood schools and we should all fight together to save them. Join parents, teachers, students, public school workers, clergy, activists and others in the three day citywide march across the city. They want to divide us. But this is our city, our schools, and together, we’ll use our voice to tell the mayor and the world that we intend to fight back.

The march is organized into south and west sides.

South side 10:00 a.m. Saturday Kickoffat Owens Elementary, 12450 South State Street

West Side 10:00 a.m. Saturday Kickoff at Lafayette Elementary
2714 West Augusta Avenue

Register now for updates and information.






0 Comments

May 07th, 2013

5/7/2013

0 Comments

 
When you hear Maryland is ranked #1 in education by Education Week.....a Bill Gates education journal.....you know that O'Malley is tops in taking Maryland's school system and making it tied to corporate profit in every way.  It is creation of all of these online programs that have taken the bulk of public education spending as K-12 kept seeing cuts.  Whether UMUC or these cheap and useless job training courses O'Malley is ranked #1 for Wall Street goon.

What is rolling out after I'm sure a few years of 'consultants' is simply job training programs that should be in-house corporate Human Resources training but instead are now being paid for by taxpayers.  The student is left with a cheapened program certification that cannot be used anywhere else and will have to return to similar training every time she/he starts a new job again at taxpayer expense.  IT IS YET ANOTHER RACKET DESIGNED FOR CORPORATE PROFIT AT TAXPAYER AND STUDENT EXPENSE.  Meanwhile O'Malley is cutting the financial aid to state universities because after paying for all this job training the state can't afford financial aid for middle/lower class students to attend an actual university.  The Federal financial aid program under Obama will do the same thing.  JOB TRAINING PAID FOR BY YOU AND ME IS IN YOUR CHILD'S FUTURE COURTESY OF THIRD WAY CORPORATE DEMOCRATS!!!!


VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE AND RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!!!

We know that Alonzo in Baltimore was charged with establishing a charter platform with similar ties to corporations and vocational training at the K-12 level.  That is what O'Malley did as well as he appointed not only Alonzo but his business sector Baltimore City school board.  Below you see the quality of teachers these Third Way corporate democrats intend to stick in our schools.  Keep in mind......these charter schools will spread across the state and will be education for all middle/lower class families.

You can see by this online 'teaching school' in Maryland how cheapened our school system is being made by Third Way corporate pols like O'Malley. These online programs are by there nature providing a platform for educators that will lower quality and be less selective in students/graduates. Know where these online educators will ultimately teach? In charter schools that are being made into businesses. THIS IS MARYLAND FOR YOU.....HOME OF TIERED AND CORPORATE EDUCATION BY GOVERNOR O'MALLEY

Teaching Degrees (click here)teaching.onlinecolleges2013.com

Teaching & Education Degrees in Maryland

More than 35 percent of the people living in Maryland hold bachelor's degrees or higher. If you are interested in joining the ranks of the state's highly-educated, Maryland teaching degrees could be the path for you. Teaching programs in Maryland offer the fundamentals needed to enter this profession. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, middle school teachers employed in Maryland were some of the highest paid in the nation. The state is home to more than 60 colleges and universities, so you should be able to find many options to fit your needs. If the on-campus experience doesn't supply what you are seeking, you could find an alternative through one of the programs offering online teaching degrees in Maryland -- and even find yourself teaching online as well. Maryland teachers are qualified to teach at
online elementary schools and beyond. No matter what method of study you chose, teaching programs in Maryland prepare you for teaching. Your courses should revolve around education philosophies, teaching strategies and how to identify and meet the needs of students. The 175,690 workers in Maryland's state's education, training, and library occupations earned mean annual wages of $56,460 in May of 2009, according to BLS data. Elementary school teachers earned mean annual salaries of $61,000, while middle school teachers earned mean annual salaries of $64,510. Not only do teaching degrees in Maryland offer an opportunity to enter a respected field, they could open the door to a satisfying salary.


You can get this same quality education if you live in a cave in Kenya or in the jungles of Columbia.  That is for what these online classes may be helpful but for the US citizens it is an attempt to dumb down even further our education system for the 'masses'.  That is middle/lower classes.  Maryland is ground zero for this Wall Street-style online push!  Look to what our taxpayer money in financial aid will go....just as with the for-profit career colleges these are taking from financial aid for students that should be attending 4 year public universities like University of Maryland.  Maryland's Governor O'Malley actively travels overseas to recruit military to these online programs keeping them from quality 4 year universities.  But wait....the 4 year universities are recruiting for wealth foreign students.  SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING IS STINKING IN DENMARK!


If you look you see this is a program for a legal assistant...it is a certification not a degree.  What is supposed to be job training by the business hiring an employee is now training paid for by taxpayer money and the certification leaves you with no other job opportunities.  IT IS A LOSE LOSE FOR TAXPAYERS AND STUDENTS!!!!

You Can Take Your Career One Step Further with Paralegal Courses in Baltimore



  • Gain the solid training you need to effectively pursue a career as a Paralegal.
  • Courses work to familiarize students with the legal system and provide insight into key skills such as investigation, interviewing, and oral communication.
  • Classes are taught by attorneys and paralegals in your area, allowing you to gain real world experience.
  • Earn your degree in Paralegal Studies: AA, BA, and MA programs. Online and local schools are available!
  • _______________________________________________

I wanted to share with you what one Third Way corporate democratic state....Illinois....is doing to protect labor and justice.  These policies always make their way to Maryland so you will no doubt see this soon.  I showed this to illustrate how unions are working together and shouting loudly for all labor in states across the country.  In Maryland, they are silent and compliant.  You only hear them come out to support the policies pushed by Third Way corporate democratic incumbents....even if it hurts the union members in the long run.  WE NEED TO BUILD UNION STRENGTH IN MARYLAND!!!!!

I would add that in Maryland public pensions are simply continuing to be defunded and thrown into a collapsing stock market.


We are One Illinois

is an unprecedented labor coalition working on behalf of over 1 million statewide members to protect public employee pensions. We Are One Illinois coalition members include the Illinois AFL-CIO, Illinois Education Association, Illinois Federation of Teachers, Associated Fire Fighters of Illinois, AFSCME Council 31, Illinois Police Benevolent and Protective Association, Fraternal Order of Police, Service Employees International Union, Laborers International Union of North America Midwest Region, Illinois Public Pension Fund Association, National Pension Coalition, United Transportation Union, Laborers International Union of North America - Chicago District Council, AFSCME International Union, National Education Association, Fraternal Order of Police - Lodge 7 Chicago, Fireman's Association of Chicago - Local 2, Illinois Nurses Association and Teamsters Local Union #700.

October 24, 2012

Vote NO on the pension amendment to the Constitution!

In this fall's election, candidates aren't the only people on the ballot. So are teachers, police officers, fire fighters, nurses and tens of thousands more Illinois public employees and retirees whose pensions are under attack by politicians in Springfield.

You'll be asked to vote on a measure to change the Illinois Constitution to require a three-fifths majority of any public body to improve public-employee pensions. While the measure would do nothing to fix the state's pension debt, it would strip local control from school boards and city councils, lead to more political gridlock and wasteful court battles, and weaken the collective bargaining rights of workers.

VOTE NO on the pension amendment to the Constitution.

NO TO THE POWER GRAB. Put on the ballot by Springfield politicians, the amendment would deny local school boards, county boards and city councils their right to reach agreement with their employees as they see fit and to enact those agreements with a simple majority.


NO TO POLITICAL GRIDLOCK. The amendment would allow the minority party of any governing body to block or obstruct approval of any measure requiring a supermajority for any reason at all. That goes against the basic values of our democracy.

NO TO COSTLY LITIGATION. The amendment is confusing, vague and poorly written. Because no one can tell what type of measures might require supermajority approval, and because hundreds of cities, counties and school districts statewide might be affected, the ballot measure practically ensures that money and time will be wasted on court battles instead of working together to solve problems.

NO TO ATTACKS ON WORKERS. The millionaires and billionaires behind this amendment and other attacks on Illinois workers have carved out special treatment for themselves--they pay a state tax rate just half what most working folks pay! Rather than doing their fair share, the CEO crowd wants to shift the blame where it doesn't belong: To middle-class public employees like teachers and fire fighters who serve our communities.

In reality, politicians caused the pension debt by shorting or outright skipping their required contributions for decades. All that time public employees worked hard and paid faithfully toward their retirement from every check. They earn modest pensions--just $32,000 a year on average--and some 80% of them are not eligible for Social Security.

It's wrong for the politicians who caused the problem to shift blame with this foolish change to the Constitution.

Look who else is voting NO!

Illinois League of Women Voters: "Some people mistakenly assume that the higher the vote required to take an action, the greater the protection of the members. Instead the opposite is true. Whenever a vote of more than a majority is required to take action, control is taken from the majority and given to a minority."

Chicago Tribune: "The proposed pension amendment is a misleading gesture ... please give [it] your enthusiastic vote: 'No.'"

Chicago Sun-Times: "[U]surpation of local control and a violation of basic democratic principles, just one of many reasons why voters should say 'No' to the proposed amendment. ... The amendment also is harmful because it gives campaigning politicians cover."

Bloomington Pantagraph and Decatur Herald & Review: "[C]hanges to the basic frame of government should be well-reasoned and solidly outlined with facts, and this proposed change to the constitution contains neither. ... We strongly recommend a 'no' vote on this misguided attempt to change the state constitution."

Protestants for the Common Good: "Let us not be confused. This amendment does nothing, not one jot, towards solving the public pension problems of our state [but] could have serious unintended consequences. ... To protect recent and future public employees and the quality of public services, vote NO".

NEW! Citizen Action/Illinois: The state's largest public-interest organization "has taken a position to oppose the pension amendment to the constitution. Please vote NO when you are asked to vote on a measure to change the Illinois Constitution to require a three-fifths majority of any public body to improve public-employee pensions."

NEW!Peoria Journal-Star: "The full text of the abysmally written and probably purposely indecipherable amendment - leave it to the lawyers - will not appear on the ballot, so this is the equivalent of signing a contract you haven't read. ... It's a virtual invitation to legal challenge and even greater expenditures of your tax money. You know a measure is flawed when liberal labor groups and some conservative organizations alike oppose it ... Constitutional amendments are big deals. Nothing about this one feels right. Vote no."

NEW! Southern Illinoisan: "It’s a smoke-and-mirrors, feel-good measure to make it appear the General Assembly is doing something about the problem. ... This amendment is unnecessary, confusing and could have unintended consequences. Sink it."

NEW! Better Government Association: "In addition to doing nothing to address Illinois’ growing unfunded pension liability ... the amendment presents several technical problems. It uses new terms found nowhere in the pension code or in the regulations governing pension funds, making it impossible to understand the practical implications of the proposed language."

__________________________________________________

Maryland has a Fair Student Funding as well because Maryland embraces all that is Wall Street and Bloomberg.  It is basically a tiered per student funding formula that values underserved students less than performing students and then special needs students even less.  Meanwhile, schools and students are selected by private donors for all kinds of private funding making the entire funding system not only unfair......but illegal.  This is Maryland's O'Malley.


You won't find this report in Maryland because all research data is released by the same institutions creating this policy!!!

WHEN YOU ARE USING EDUCATION FUNDING TO PAY FOR JOB TRAINING THERE REALLY ISN'T ENOUGH TO USE FOR ACTUAL STUDENTS!!!


Budget Office Finds Fair Student Funding Not So Fair Apr. 12, 2013
4:33 pm
by Maisie McAdoo
2 Comments Filed under: Education Funding

The Independent Budget Office, in a report released on April 10, finds that the Bloomberg-era school allocation formula, known as Fair Student Funding, actually underfunds 94 percent of schools and “has a ways to go” towards creating a readily-understood and transparent formula.

The IBO report says the formula, which gives schools per-student funding weighted for need levels (extra dollars for an English language learner, for example) has more closely tied school funding with student needs. For example, middle school students, who were historically short-changed, now get an amount closer to their actual formula needs. But overall, schools are coming up short, the budget office writes.

“Effective per-capita [per student] funding is below per capita funding under the FSF formula in each year,” according to the report, which means that actual per-student funding in schools is generally below what the DOE’s own formula says they need — “a reflection of both the limited funding available and how available funds were distributed.”

Students funded below what the formula called for last year and at least two more out of the last five years were 1) middle school students below academic standards; 2) elementary and high school ELLs; and 3) high school collaborative team teaching students.

So as a budget strategy to direct money to students with the highest needs, Fair Student Funding doesn’t appear to have worked so well.

The UFT’s issue with Fair Student Funding was its potential effect on a school that had more senior teachers. Waving the banner of equity, the DOE began funding schools for their average teacher salary rather than the system wide average. This amounted to charging schools for the actual cost of salaries at their schools. The idea was to equalize funding for poor and wealthier schools. But the effect was to penalize some schools, forcing them to leave vacancies unfilled, raise class sizes and avoid hiring experienced teachers in order to meet budget.

But a 2007 IBO report found that teacher salaries were not even close to the main cause of inequities in school budgets. The main reason for disparities in spending was the numbers of students per teacher, it found, not teacher salary. That argument is not made in the new report. In fact, the new report perpetuates the idea that teacher salaries cause the inequities in school funding, a myth the IBO previously disproved.

The report is a major contribution on an important issue. If Fair Student Funding isn’t succeeding in creating fairness or sufficient funding, what is it actually accomplishing? Of course, the final irony is that Bloomberg’s insistence on principal empowerment means that when all the formulas have gone to bed, principals spend their budgets however they want, with little oversight of which students are getting extra help.

________________________________________________
AS YOU SEE CITIES ACROSS AMERICA HAVE FOUND ALL OF THIS 'EDUCATION REFORM' TO BE A BUNCH OF HUEY AND ARE STARTING TO PUSH AGAINST THE CURRENT PLANS AND GO WITH REAL POLICY TO STRENGTHEN EXISTING PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

HERE IN MARYLAND THEY JUST KEEP PUSHING TRASH POLICY BECAUSE JOHNS HOPKINS HAS ALL POLICY CAPTURED!!




Market-Oriented Reforms Really Don’t Work. What Should We Do Instead?

May. 3, 2013
11:11 am
by Elaine Weiss


[Editor's note: Guest blogger Elaine Weiss is the national coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.]

As many of us have long suspected, the impacts of popular market-oriented reforms are not as positive as their proponents would have us believe. Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and then-CEO and now-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who ran the school systems in New York, Washington, DC and Chicago, respectively, along with the mayors who controlled the school systems they led, all exaggerated their successes. In fact, the report I recently co-authored as National Coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, “Market-Oriented Reforms’ Rhetoric Trumps Reality,” discovers that using student test scores to make high-stakes decisions did little good and more than a little harm.

We found that across all three cities, student NAEP test scores rose less than they did in comparable high-poverty urban districts. In Chicago, reading scores, already below average, fell further. New York City students achieved the second-lowest average test score growth across fourth and eighth grade reading and math of the ten districts studied, beating only Cleveland. And Washington, DC students, who had been gaining ground in both subjects, saw that growth stop or even begin to fall. Moreover, what small gains did accrue went heavily to white and higher-income students, so many achievement gaps grew rather than narrowed. Closing schools neither helped students nor saved money, and drove teacher turnover, not teacher quality.

These would be terrible findings for any districts. They are particularly troubling, however, given these districts’ power (mayoral control), money (NYCDOE increased spending far more than other large urban districts, and DC Public School spending rose throughout the post-recession years), and the fact that they are held up as models by their own leaders and by philanthropists, policymakers, and organized advocates who advance their agenda.

The question, then, is not just how these three districts should change course, but how we can derive lessons from the findings that other districts, states, and the federal government can use to advance smarter policies.

We would say, first, look to the districts’ own small, less visible successes, which tell the flip side of the quick-fix reform story. New York City’s small schools delivered their best results by focusing on strong, sustained teacher-student relationships and hands-on learning experiences. Chicago’s multifaceted college-and-career readiness strategy contrasts sharply with test preparation that deprives students of real knowledge and skills. DCPS’ high-quality universal pre-kindergarten program nurtures all of children’s developmental domains and increases the diversity of the early childhood education setting.

Second, listen to teachers and principals. Stripping teachers of their morale and professionalism, and the teacher pool of the expertise that principals need to build strong teams, is a recipe for disaster. Montgomery County, Maryland’s Peer Assisted Review system, which leverages excellent teachers to assess and mentor novices, builds trust and promotes continuous improvement, not churn.

Third, pay attention to poverty. In urban, rural and, increasingly, suburban districts, student and community poverty pose impediments that, unaddressed, stymie even the best reform efforts. New York City and Chicago both house large clusters of full-service community schools that acknowledge, tackle and alleviate the effects of poverty. If the next mayor advances this supports-based approach, outcomes could look more like those in Cincinnati — more engaged, higher-achieving students, taught by satisfied and motivated educators.

Achievement gaps are driven by opportunity gaps: in kindergarten readiness, access to health care, qualified teachers, the capacity to navigate the college application process, and others. Only reforms that address those gaps in opportunity can deliver real change.



_________________________________________________
THEY ARE FAILING AT THE HIGHER EDUCATION SIDE AND THEY ARE FAILING AT THE K-12.......

They will tell you that they have all kinds of foreign students filling these public university slots and that is the goal, so no failure to a corporate democrat.

They will tell you that we are trying to weed students that can't achieve as fast out of the system .....that is what these high-stakes policies are all about.

We all understand that all of this education reform could have taken place over time and allowed for transition and identifying what works and what does not work.  That would have been the policy if the goal were child/student oriented.  THIS EDUCATION REFORM IS ONLY ABOUT WHAT IS BEST FOR CORPORATIONS AND PROFITS!


VOTE YOUR THIRD WAY CORPORATE DEMOCRAT OUT OF OFFICE AND RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!!!!!


Fear, Frustration, Failure and State Tests

Apr. 18, 2013
11:43 am
by Mr. Thompson


This will be the fourth year that my students and I have suffered through the New York State high-stakes elementary school tests.  Although the mayor and the chancellor tell us this year’s tests are all new, my stories from the classroom are similar to years past.

As a new teacher and New York City transplant, I was astonished to discover 3rd-, 4th- and 5th-grade students were held over based on their scores from a series of limited assessments.  After that realization, I was much less surprised to see the effect of these tests in the classroom.  Both schools I have worked at ended regular instruction in early February to opt for test prep units designed to milk a few extra points on the state exams. Students’ and teachers’ health began to slowly decline around the same time of year, and behavioral incidents began to rise.

In my own classroom, I have fought to ameliorate the stresses of testing season by reminding my students how hard they have worked and telling them that their only job on state testing days is to try their best. But my efforts have been less than successful. One year a 9-year-old 4th grader asked me if it was okay to put the classroom trash can near her desk in case she got sick to her stomach during her English language arts exam.  The next year a mental block caused a little boy to flip his desk over in a moment of panic and frustration while trying to craft an extended-response essay. Just last week, Natashi, a girl in my 5th-grade class who has only been in the country for two years and is still transitioning to English, asked me whether I would be disappointed in her if she tried her best and still wasn’t able to pass. “What if I just need another year in 5th grade to keep practicing, Mr. Thompson?” she said to me with tears in her eyes.

With a broken heart and tears in my own eyes, I turned to Natashi and told her I would always be proud of her. “You have fought so hard this year!  I will be proud of you no matter what score you get!” Natashi feigned a smile and asked to go to the bathroom to wash the tears off her cheeks.

My students, Natashi included, have been attending an extended-day program on Tuesdays and Wednesdays after school all year long. We have spent the last few months keeping students late on Mondays and Fridays for an hour and a half of extra instruction focused on test sophistication.  For the past two months, we have asked students to come to school from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturdays for extra help to boost scores on their state tests.

Still, all the Common Core-aligned data I collect are telling me that my students are not showing mastery on the vast majority of Common Core standards. Many of the “grade level” reading passages and math problems I share with my students are far beyond their ability levels. The confusion these tasks generate leads to an overwhelming sense of failure among my students. And, of course, when my students feel like they are failing, I feel like a failure myself.

Should it surprise any of us that high-stakes tests, coupled with new standards, little-to-no teacher training, and no citywide curricula are a recipe for disaster? Should cheating scandals, state test boycotts, low teacher retention rates, and teary-eyed students come as a shock to the American educational system?  Should I be surprised that my students score 30 percent lower than last year, as predicted by many educational experts? No!

The only surprising part about this whole process is the process itself. We have created a demoralizing atmosphere of fear, frustration and failure for teachers and students.
I will always be proud of the hard work my students put into their education, and I sincerely believe they will succeed regardless of what their state test scores suggest. But if the mayor or the chancellor were ever to come up to me like Natashi did to ask whether I was proud of the reforms they had made to education, my answer to them would be quite different from my answer to her.

Mr. Thompson is the pseudonym of a fourth-year elementary school teacher in Brooklyn. A version of this post first appeared on the UFT blog edwize.org, where “New Teacher Diaries” is a regular feature. If you’re interested in writing a New Teacher Diary entry for edwize, send an email to edwize@uft.org.



0 Comments

January 24th, 2013

1/24/2013

0 Comments

 

  UNEMPLOYED?  IF YOUR LABOR AND JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS ARE NOT RUNNING LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES AGAINST THESE CORPORATE POLS.......THEY ARE NOT WORKING FOR YOU AND ME!!!!!




The gentleman from New Jersey who was the contractor losing the bid for the telecom job after having bid 1/2 of what the company given the bid did talked with me afterwards and gave me his card as I work to investigate this deal further.  He was incredulous that anyone could lose a bid like that and told me that NEVER happened in New Jersey.  He could not believe the level of corruption in the Baltimore system.  Keep in mind that New Jersey was once the most corrupt in the nation.....Maryland now has that spot.....and was forced by Federal justice department to reform a decade ago.  The Center for Public Integrity's State Corruption Study identified New Jersey as having a model government system of reforms in cleaning up crime and corruption.  It didn't say New Jersey was the cleanest.....it said that it had all of the systems in place to move it in that direction and this New Jersey contractor was telling me it works in New Jersey.

WE ARE DEMANDING THAT MARYLAND IMPLEMENT THE SAME TYPES OF CORRUPTION REFORMS AS NEW JERSEY AND STOP DENYING THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH CRIME AND CORRUPTION IN MARYLAND!!!!!

We know this is no where near happening now as I attend yet another Baltimore City Council labor meeting that same evening and have to confront yet another government scam of the people.....it is never ending.  Again I am looking at Curran who as usual is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. This meeting is about the casino jobs coming to Baltimore and just to refresh memories, Mayor Rawlings-Blake and Governor Martin O'Malley recruited their standard coalition of labor and justice organizations to promote his agenda of gambling and as usual labor and justice were screwed as per this meeting.  Now, I spent all last year telling these labor and justice organizations they were being used and would not get jobs, but they tried one more time to believe in their leaders and backed the issue, even as gambling hurts these same people.  THIS IS ORWELLIAN!!!

I enter the room for the labor meeting early and heard Curran saying out of one side of his mouth to the casino people 'you have to give some union work on this casino site.....only the construction laborers for instance.....don't worry about those inside'.  Then, as the room filled with black, underserved union labor ready for work guaranteed them, Curran speaks out of the other side of his mouth in saying 'As head of Baltimore's labor committee I'm a strong supporter of unions'!  Remember, I have said that Baltimore has the most repressive labor environment for the working class in the nation and this committee is the driver of that.  So we listened to the casino owner and all of the Mayor's staff talking about what needs to be done to get ready for the casino opening in about a year and there are all kinds of repeated words of '1,800 jobs for the Baltimore area and strong, good-paying work' just as we heard in those casino referendum commercials.....ONLY NONE OF IT IS TRUE.....THEY WERE ALL LYING RIGHT TO OUR FACES ........ AGAIN.  I THINK THEY WILL FIND THAT THIS WILL BE THE STRAW THAT BREAKS THE CAMEL'S BACK AS FAR AS LABOR AND JUSTICE  BELIEVING THESE POLS.

Rawlings-Blake's staff then went on to talk of needing to build all kinds of job training programs for these jobs....making these same non-profits/private parnerships to ready the future casino workers.....community colleges as the focal points for training.  They talked about Obama's Federal job training money and the need for local taxpayer money to meet these goals.  THERE WAS UNLIMITED REFERENCE TO MAKING ALL THIS AVAILABLE TO THE BLACK AND WORKING CLASS IN BALTIMORE WHO HAVE OUTRAGEOUS UNEMPLOYMENT STATS. 

THEN THE PIGS STARTED TO FLY.....THE PIGS STARTED TO ACCUMULATE SLOWLY AND BY THE END OF THE COUNCIL MEMBERS 'QUESTIONING PERIOD' THOSE PIGS FLYING FILLED THE ROOM.

Helen Holton who always speaks out about how bad a policy is after it has happened played her usual role in not knowing that a contractor job fair had happened and it did not include any black/minority contractors.......because they did not know of the job fair.  Holton and other council members  pretended not to have known themselves....we see this all the time.  I reminded Holton when my time came to speak that this contractor meeting was on all media outlets as they all made clear there were no minority contractors present.  The problem as is normal is that it hit the airwaves after the event so no publicity would happen and only the connected would sign up and register.  THESE CITY COUNCIL PEOPLE WERE LEFT IN THE DARK THEY SAID AS THE FIRST PHASE OF JOB DEVELOPMENT LEAVES OUT THE SAME LABOR AND JUSTICE PEOPLE WHO WERE SOLD ON THE JOB CREATION!

THESE POLS ARE ANIMALS!!!!!!

To wind up this situation I spoke to all of the hypocrisy by saying this "  I spoke to the AFL-CIO and the SEIU in early December as they were happy over winning the casino referendum and thinking of the jobs.  Both unions told me that they SHOOK HANDS AND WERE ASSURED BY BOTH CASINOS.....MGM AND CAESARS IN BALTIMORE THAT THEY EMBRACED CASINO UNIONS AND THESE CASINOS WOULD BE UNION CASINOS.  GOVERNOR O'MALLEY AND MAYOR RAWLINGS-BLAKE ACTIVELY SOUGHT AND TOLD UNIONS THEY WOULD GET THE JOBS AND THESE JOBS WOULD BE GOOD JOBS AND WOULD HIRE LOCALLY.

What I was hearing at this meeting was the opposite of all of this.  The Mayor's office deliberately left out minority contractors from the start.....they were obviously planning to move ahead without union participation and contrary to what your city council member says......they knew this...... and we already hear in there voice that none of the policy needed to circumvent criminal background issues for many Baltimore workers has even been discussed.  SO THEY DO NOT INTENT TO HIRE THE VERY GROUPS THEY HAD LEADING THIS FIGHT FOR THE CASINOS.  I made very public that all across the nation I am seeing these casinos leaving Vegas and going to states bringing the high-paying jobs and staffing with them.....not hiring locally and the are hiring part-time, not full-time leaving people with poverty jobs.  WE KNOW THAT IS THE INTENTION AND WE ARE SAYING WE WILL NOT HAVE THIS!!!!

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!!

This is of course happening all across the nation and people are wakening to the fact that these Third Way corporate pols are working for corporate and wealth at the expense of labor and justice.

UNEMPLOYED?  IF YOUR LABOR AND JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS ARE NOT RUNNING LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES AGAINST THESE CORPORATE POLS.......THEY ARE NOT WORKING FOR YOU AND ME!!!!!

___________________________________________________

Baltimore residents hear casino jobs plan; Some skeptical Some residents angry that casino exec.'s left before public commenting

Published  8:25 AM EST Jan 24, 2013 WBAL TV



The local hiring plan was presented as part of a City Council public hearing on the issue.

"What I realize is that the American dream, for the last four years, I haven't been having," said city resident James Commander.


Commander is one of thousands hoping to land a job at the new Caesars casino complex that plans to open in 2014 on a parcel of land in the shadow of M&T Bank Stadium.


"We need these jobs. We want these jobs," Commander said.


At the hearing, the mayor's office revealed details of a memorandum of understanding between the city and Caesars that promises to give priority to qualified city residents to help fill close to 1,800 jobs at the Horseshoe Casino.


"It is really our job to make sure that we do everything possible to do a very, very broad outreach for a community hiring effort," said Karen Sitnick of the mayor's Office of Employment Development.


"I need people that know the city. I need people that are passionate about the city -- that can answer questions about the city. You don't get that if you're not from the city," said Caesars spokesman Chad Barnhill.


But later at the hearing, a group of community leaders and local labor union members cornered the Caesar executives in the hallway. They were upset that the executives left the hearing just as the public comment period began.


"If you're not concerned enough to stay around and hear their concerns, it doesn't lend well to the idea that you're trying to give back to the city," said community organizer Richie Armstrong.


The union members said the early exit reinforced their distrust of the hiring memorandum of understanding between the city and Caesars.

"It doesn't hold anybody accountable, because you can say, 'I tried to reach the goal but somehow we failed.' That still leaves the residents out in the cold," Armstrong said.


As part of the memorandum of understanding, Caesars has agreed to submit workforce reports to the city twice a year to show how many of its workers live in Baltimore. 
___________________________________________________

THIS WAS THE PROPAGANDA PUBLISHED IN MEDIA AND SOLD BY MAYOR RAWLINGS-BLAKE AND CITY COUNCIL......WE KNOW NONE OF THIS IS EXPECTED TO HAPPEN.

SEE WHY RAWLINGS-BLAKE IS MOVING TO A NEW AND HIGHER POSITION IN THE PARTY?  SHE AND O'MALLEY HAVE HANDED MARYLAND AND ITS CITIZENS OVER TO THE 1% BETTER THAN ANY OTHER!!!!!!

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!!

Baltimore to vote on deal to boost local hiring at Caesars casinoLas Vegas company agrees to make outreach, training efforts in Baltimore
Stephen Martino, State Lottery Agency, left, has a word with… (Kim Hairston, Baltimore…)December 18, 2012|By Scott Dance, The Baltimore Sun


City officials are expected to sign off Wednesday on a deal that promises to help residents seeking the 1,700 jobs planned for Horseshoe Casino Baltimore — addressing one of the main arguments made by gambling supporters in the debate over expanding casinos in Maryland.

A Caesars Entertainment subsidiary has agreed to fund a temporary employee in the mayor's employment development office to lead hiring efforts in Baltimore, to print informational materials targeting potential employees in the city, and to report twice a year to city officials on hiring progress toward its workforce development plan.

"The agreement will go a long way to ensure that city residents are prioritized and have the first chance to seize these new job opportunities at a time when people need it most," said Ryan O'Doherty, a spokesman for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

City workforce advocates welcomed the move but said efforts with previous projects show it will take persistence to ensure that residents learn of the opportunities and have access to specialized training needed for many jobs. Extensive background checks could also pose a challenge to getting some residents hired, a city councilwoman acknowledged.

Caesars officials said local hiring is always a priority when building in a new community.

"Working within the local community is always going to make the most sense," said Jan Jones Blackhurst, an executive vice president for Las Vegas-based Caesars. "If you want to be an integral part of the community, local hiring is your first step."

Casino jobs were the focus of many campaign commercials during the run-up to the November referendum, when Maryland voters approved Question 7 to allow table games and a sixth casino in the state. Proponents, including Rawlings-Blake, urged votes in favor the measure for the tax revenue and jobs it could create.

"Question 7 means thousands of jobs and millions for our schools," she said in one ad, with former Ravens offensive tackle Jonathan Ogden towering behind her.

The agreement with Caesars helps ensure that those jobs benefit city residents, said Councilwoman Rochelle "Rikki" Spector. State law encourages casino operators to hire within a 10-mile radius of the facilities, but city officials are seeking to narrow that scope to provide opportunities for thousands of unemployed residents who live near enough to the casino's Russell Street site that they could commute by public transit.

"That's not good enough for Baltimore City," Spector said of the state policy. "These are new kinds of jobs for us."

Spector plans to gather representatives from the mayor's employment office, the casino, unions and other stakeholders at a televised public hearing Jan. 23, when more details of hiring and training needs will be discussed.

The agreement requires the mayor's employment office to develop "talent scout reports" to find and market qualified residents to Caesars and its subcontractors. Jobs are expected to include construction, initially, but then positions on the casino floor, in restaurants and other parts of the facility.

Given the specialized nature of many jobs, city officials are emphasizing the need for training. Caesars is also being required to, if possible, establish employee mentoring programs.

"Of course we won't find table game operators in the general public," said Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke. "We can be a city with lots of them, as soon as you train us."

But there will also be hurdles, Spector acknowledged.

Those offered jobs working at a casino in Maryland must fill out a 14-page gaming employee license form, which is reviewed by staff from the state lottery and gaming commission. Applicants must indicate if they've been charged with a crime, but also must reveal if they've been the subject of a criminal complaint or an investigation by any government agency or organization.

Those filling out the form must also disclose if they or any business they worked for has filed for bankruptcy.

The Maryland State Lottery Commission warns applicants that it "will make inquiries to establish whether the identified individuals have had any involvement with law enforcement agencies" and says failure to disclose past incidents will "be take into account in assessing the applicant's character, honesty, and integrity."

A spokesperson for the commission said staffers spend about 40 hours completing a background check for executive-level employees, and 20 hours for table game dealers and others who work directly with gamblers. Sixteen new employees will be hired to deal with the license applications.

The outreach needed to find potential applicants will also be a challenge, said some who have experience in workforce development on city projects. Caesars has agreed to pay up to $80,000 to employ a community recruitment coordinator in the mayor's employment office for a yearlong period around the opening of the casino, which is expected in 2014.
_________________________________________________

HERE YOU SEE LOCAL UNIONS FIGHTING FOR THIS GAMBLING ISSUE BECAUSE THEY ARE TOLD THEY WOULD HAVE LOTS OF JOBS AND THAT THE CASINOS WOULD BE UNIONIZED INSIDE AND OUT.  THIS GAMBLING ISSUE WOULD NOT HAVE PASSED IF THE LABOR UNIONS DID NOT MOBILIZE......THESE SAME POLS......O'MALLEY AND ALL OF MARYLAND'S INCUMBENTS USE LABOR TIME AND AGAIN FOR ISSUES AND THEN NEVER USE THEM.

VOTE ALL THIRD WAY CORPORATE DEMOCRATS OUT OF OFFICE!!!!

Local: Maryland Unions slam Md. leaders for gambling-expansion debacle

June 25, 2012 | 3:53 pm | Modified: June 25, 2012 at 3:55 pm

  Ben Giles Staff Writer - Crime Beat The Washington Examiner


A local union leader accused Maryland lawmakers Monday of "playing games" with people's lives by derailing a deal to expand gambling in the state, a move that could add nearly 4,000 jobs in Prince George's County.

Maryland lawmakers have struggled through a debate over gambling that could lead to a sixth state casino in Prince George's County and the authorization of table games such as blackjack and roulette at all state casino sites.

However, voters in a statewide referendum also must approve any expansion of gambling, and four out of five Marylanders want to the opportunity in November to make the choice themselves, according to a new poll conducted on behalf of the Building Trades for the National Harbor, site of a proposed $800 million casino.

And 53 percent of voters think there's room for improvement in Maryland's slots program, which some have criticized as uncompetitive compared with other local states', the poll by Annapolis firm OpinionWorks found.

Ten percent of those polled think the state's gambling program is the best that it can be.

Not allowing voters to have a say on measures that would bring thousands of construction jobs to Prince George's and increase tax revenues for the state would be a shame, said Vance Ayres, executive secretary-treasurer of the Washington D.C. Building Trades Council.

"You're putting people's careers on the backburner," Ayres said. "You've got people here [in Annapolis] bickering about things they shouldn't even be bickering about."

Ayres joined leaders from the SEIU and AFSCME labor unions to deliver a letter to Gov. Martin O'Malley, House Speaker Michael Busch, D-Anne Arundel, and Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., D-Calvert and Prince George's, asking for a speedy resolution to the gambling debate.

The Building Trades for the National Harbor has begun running a television ad to go with its radio campaign supporting gambling expansion.

bgiles@washingtonexaminer.com




_________________________________________________
I just read a mainstream media write-up on Geithner that praised him for his work in Treasury as did Obama.  Geithner was the equivalent of the mob's handlers in what was the largest looting of government coffers and citizens in history.  You see how the mainstream news are trying to paint a revisionist history even as journalism all around them provide evidence and real investigative analysis.......THIS IS CAPTURED STATE MEDIA JUST AS EXISTS IN CHINA AND WE SHOULD BE OUT IN THE STREETS IN THE MILLIONS OVER THIS!!!!!!!

GET OUT AND PROTEST AND VOTE THESE CRIMINALS OUT OF OFFICE!!!!! 


Economy   The Guardian / By Glenn Greenwald

Obama's Failure to Punish Banks Should Be Causing Serious Social Unrest

A new PBS Frontline report examines outrageous steps Obama's administration took to protect Wall St. Wall Street from prosecutions. January 23, 2013  |

PBS' Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a  new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the  Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008  financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering. What this program particularly demonstrated was that the Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable.

What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with impunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans  continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.

Worst of all, Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs (who, just by the way,  overwhelmingly supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign) as they simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned powerless Americans for far more trivial transgressions. As Harvard law professor Larry Lessig  put it two weeks ago when expressing anger over the DOJ's persecution of Aaron Swartz: "we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House." (Indeed, as "The Untouchables" put it: while no senior Wall Street executives have been prosecuted, "many small mortgage brokers, loan appraisers and even home buyers" have been).

As I documented at length in my 2011 book on America's two-tiered justice system, With Liberty and Justice for Some, the evidence that felonies were committed by Wall Street is overwhelming. That evidence directly negates the primary excuse by Breuer (previously offered by Obama himself) that the bad acts of Wall Street were not criminal.

Numerous documents prove that executives at leading banks, credit agencies, and mortgage brokers were falsely touting assets as sound that knew were junk: the very definition of fraud. As former Wall Street analyst Yves Smith wrote in her book ECONned: "What went on at Lehman and AIG, as well as the chicanery in the CDO [collateralized debt obligation] business, by any sensible standard is criminal." Even lifelong Wall Street defender Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chair,  said in Congressional testimony that "a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud."

A New York Times editorial in August explained that the DOJ's excuse for failing to prosecute Wall Street executives - that it was too hard to obtain convictions - "has always defied common sense - and all the more so now that a fuller picture is emerging of the range of banks' reckless and lawless activities, including interest-rate rigging, money laundering, securities fraud and excessive speculation." The Frontline program interviewed former prosecutors, Senate staffers and regulators who unequivocally said the same: it is inconceivable that the DOJ could not have successfully prosecuted at least some high-level Wall Street executives - had they tried.

What's most remarkable about all of this is not even Wall Street had the audacity to expect the generosity of largesse they ended up receiving. "The Untouchables" begins by recounting the massive financial devastation the 2008 crisis wrought - "the economy was in ruins and bankers were being blamed" - and recounts:

"In 2009, Wall Street bankers were on the defensive, worried they could be held criminally liable for fraud. With a new administration, bankers and their attorneys expected investigations and at least some prosecutions."

0 Comments

    Author

    Cindy Walsh is a lifelong political activist and academic living in Baltimore, Maryland.

    Archives

    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012

    Categories

    All
    2014 Economic Crash
    21st Century Economy
    Affordable Care Act
    Affordable Care Act
    Alec
    Americorp/VISTA
    Anthony Brown
    Anthony Brown
    Anti Incumbant
    Anti-incumbant
    Anti Incumbent
    Anti Incumbent
    Attacking The Post Office Union
    Baltimore And Cronyism
    Baltimore Board Of Estimates
    Baltimore Board Of Estimates
    Baltimore Development Corp
    Baltimore Development Corp
    Baltimore Recall/Retroactive Term Limits
    Bank Fraud
    Bank Fraud
    Bank Of America
    Bank Settlement
    Bank-settlement
    B Corporations
    Bgeexelon Mergerf59060c411
    Brookings Institution
    Business Tax Credits
    California Charter Expansion
    Cardin
    Career Colleges
    Career Colleges Replacing Union Apprenticeships
    Charters
    Charter School
    Collection Agencies
    Common Core
    Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
    Consumer-financial-protection-bureau
    Corporate Media
    Corporate-media
    Corporate Oversight
    Corporate-oversight
    Corporate Politicians
    Corporate-politicians
    Corporate Rule
    Corporate-rule
    Corporate Taxes
    Corporate-taxes
    Corporate Tax Reform
    Corporatizing Us Universities
    Cost-benefit-analysis
    Credit Crisis
    Credit-crisis
    Cummings
    Department Of Education
    Department Of Justice
    Department-of-justice
    Derivatives Reform
    Development
    Dismantling Public Justice
    Dodd Frank
    Doddfrankbba4ff090a
    Doug Gansler
    Doug-gansler
    Ebdi
    Education Funding
    Education Reform
    Edwards
    Election Reform
    Election-reform
    Elections
    Emigration
    Energy-sector-consolidation-in-maryland
    Enterprise Zones
    Equal Access
    Estate Taxes
    European Crisis
    Expanded And Improved Medicare For All
    Expanded-and-improved-medicare-for-all
    Failure To Prosecute
    Failure-to-prosecute
    Fair
    Fair And Balanced Elections
    Fair-and-balanced-elections
    Farm Bill
    Federal Election Commissionelection Violationsmaryland
    Federal Election Commissionelection Violationsmarylandd20a348918
    Federal-emergency-management-agency-fema
    Federal Reserve
    Financial Reform Bill
    Food Safety Not In Tpp
    For Profit Education
    Forprofit-education
    Fracking
    Fraud
    Freedom Of Press And Speech
    Frosh
    Gambling In Marylandbaltimore8dbce1f7d2
    Granting Agencies
    Greening Fraud
    Gun Control Policy
    Healthcare For All
    Healthcare-for-all
    Health Enterprise Zones
    High Speed Rail
    Hoyer
    Imf
    Immigration
    Incarceration Bubble
    Incumbent
    Incumbents
    Innovation Centers
    Insurance Industry Leverage And Fraud
    International Criminal Court
    International Trade Deals
    International-trade-deals
    Jack Young
    Jack-young
    Johns Hopkins
    Johns-hopkins
    Johns Hopkins Medical Systems
    Johns-hopkins-medical-systems
    Kaliope Parthemos
    Labor And Justice Law Under Attack
    Labor And Wages
    Lehmann Brothers
    Living Wageunionspolitical Action0e39f5c885
    Maggie McIntosh
    Maggie-mcintosh
    Martin O'Malley
    Martin O'Malley
    Martin-omalley
    Martin-omalley8ecd6b6eb0
    Maryland Health Co Ops
    Maryland-health-co-ops
    Maryland-health-co-ops1f77692967
    Maryland Health Coopsccd73554da
    Maryland Judiciary
    Marylandnonprofits
    Maryland Non Profits
    Maryland Nonprofits2509c2ca2c
    Maryland Public Service Commission
    Maryland State Bar Association
    Md Credit Bondleverage Debt441d7f3605
    Media
    Media Bias
    Media-bias
    Medicaremedicaid
    Medicaremedicaid8416fd8754
    Mental Health Issues
    Mental-health-issues
    Mers Fraud
    Mikulski
    Military Privatization
    Minority Unemploymentunion And Labor Wagebaltimore Board Of Estimates4acb15e7fa
    Municipal Debt Fraud
    Ndaa-indefinite-detention
    Ndaaindefinite Detentiond65cc4283d
    Net Neutrality
    New Economy
    New-economy
    Ngo
    Non Profit To Profit
    Nonprofit To Profitb2d6cb4b41
    Nsa
    O'Malley
    Odette Ramos
    Omalley
    O'Malley
    Open Meetings
    Osha
    Patronage
    Pension-benefit-guaranty-corp
    Pension Funds
    Pension-funds
    Police Abuse
    Private-and-public-pension-fraud
    Private Health Systemsentitlementsprofits Over People
    Private Health Systemsentitlementsprofits Over People6541f468ae
    Private Non Profits
    Private-non-profits
    Private Nonprofits50b33fd8c2
    Privatizing Education
    Privatizing Government Assets
    Privatizing-the-veterans-admin-va
    Privitizing Public Education
    Progressive Policy
    Progressive Taxes Replace Regressive Policy
    Protections Of The People
    Protections-of-the-people
    Public Education
    Public Funding Of Private Universities
    Public Housing Privatization
    Public-libraries-privatized-or-closed
    Public Private Partnerships
    Public-private-partnerships
    Public Transportation Privatization
    Public Utilities
    Rapid Bus Network
    Rawlings Blake
    Rawlings-blake
    Rawlingsblake1640055471
    Real Progressives
    Reit-real-estate-investment-trusts
    Reitreal Estate Investment Trustsa1a18ad402
    Repatriation Taxes
    Rule Of Law
    Rule-of-law
    Ruppersberger
    SAIC AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
    Sarbanes
    S Corp Taxes
    Selling Public Datapersonal Privacy
    Smart Meters
    Snowden
    Social Security
    Sovereign Debt Fraudsubprime Mortgage Fraudmortgage Fraud Settlement
    Sovereign Debt Fraudsubprime Mortgage Fraudmortgage Fraud Settlement0d62c56e69
    Statistics As Spin
    Statistics-as-spin
    Student-corps
    Subprime Mortgage Fraud
    Subprime-mortgage-fraud
    Surveillance And Security
    Sustainability
    Teachers
    Teachers Unions2bc448afc8
    Teach For America
    Teach For America
    Technology Parks
    Third Way Democrats/new Economy/public Union Employees/public Private Patnerships/government Fraud And Corruption
    Third Way Democratsnew Economypublic Union Employeespublic Private Patnershipsgovernment Fraud And Corruption
    Third-way-democratsnew-economypublic-union-employeespublic-private-patnershipsgovernment-fraud-and-corruptionc10a007aee
    Third Way/neo Liberals
    Third-wayneo-liberals
    Third-wayneo-liberals5e1e6d4716
    Third Wayneoliberals7286dda6aa
    Tifcorporate Tax Breaks2d87bba974
    Tpp
    Transportation Inequity In Maryland
    Union Busting
    Unionbusting0858fddb8b
    Unions
    Unionsthird Waypost Officealec3c887e7815
    Universities
    Unreliable Polling
    Unreliable-polling
    Van Hollen
    Van-hollen
    VEOLA Environment -privatization Of Public Water
    Veterans
    War Against Women And Children
    War-against-women-and-children
    Youth Works

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.