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July 24th, 2014

7/24/2014

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Just a few more days on education policy------let's continue to look at higher education and Maryland is ground zero for the dismantling of our public education system at all levels.

Yesterday I showed that Economic students are demanding universities stop teaching only neo-liberal economics-----they said the field had become so narrow as to block all other thought.  Think how that translates to Common Core in our K-12.  They intend to do the same thing in our grade schools as they have done in universities.......narrowed the curricula to corporate policy.  'Competition' replaces personal best......'Getting the edge' becomes bullying........'Taking out the competition' becomes rape.  The level of aggression in our schools and universities is growing because of this corporate mentality.  Attacks on women are soaring even at universities because Chancellor Kirwan does not see himself as a public servant upholding public justice and Rule of Law-----


WE WILL SELECT WHOMEVER WE WANT TO BE HEARD IN ELECTION FORUMS AND THERE WILL BE NO DISCUSSION ON ANY UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND CAMPUS THAT IS ANTI-NEO-LIBERALISM!

We heard recently that UMUC----the online college structure that O'Malley spent hundreds of millions if not a billion dollars to create is failing miserably.  No one wants online education yet neo-liberals funded by Bill Gates and Wall Street are going to push this until we have no choice they say.  O'Malley even went overseas to push our active military to use their GI Bill education benefits on these online degree programs----IT IS A DISGRACE.  As you will see below there is absolutely no research that shows these online education programs are providing any quality or creating higher achievement.  The data is not there.  The only reason they are creating these online venues for 90% of Americans is that it is cheap and only prepares for a job.

FORGET THE WELL-BALANCED EDUCATION THAT IS BROAD AND ALLOWS GRADUATES TO APPLY THEMSELVES TO MANY FIELDS.

First UMUC was going to be made a non-profit so the public could not see how it operates.....now University of Maryland is keeping a failed structure alive but wants to deregulate.  Bill Gates requires online instruction and neo-liberals are going to give it to him!
  The amount of education funding wasted on these global corporate policies mirrors O'Malley's tying the public to Hilton and Hyatt hotels in order to keep them from losing money.  Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are lost every year in all categories of industry in what is clearly public malfeasance and fraud against the citizens of Maryland.  Why do we need a UMUC Asia/Europe?

Meanwhile financial aid and grants are being cut and that aid given is being tied to these cheaper structures as WE THE PEOPLE see our strong public education dismantled by neo-liberals. 

DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN TO CHANGE THIS----THIS IS REPUBLICAN POLICY-----NEO-CONS ARE JUST AS BAD.



UMUC’s Mission in Asia


The mission of University of Maryland University College (UMUC) in Asia is to offer academic programs to United States military communities throughout Asia and the Pacific. While serving overseas, students can take a single course or many courses leading to a certificate, an Associate of Arts degree, a Bachelor of Arts degree, or a Bachelor of Science degree. Since University of Maryland University College is accredited by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, students can take courses with the intention of transferring their credits to other colleges or universities in the United States. Students may also continue their studies with UMUC online. Additional information is available at www.umuc.edu.

Although the educational setting is overseas, UMUC’s programs in Asia are in all respects comparable to those offered at public institutions of higher learning in the United States. Courses are taught by faculty whose credentials meet standards set by appropriate University of Maryland University College academic departments in Adelphi, Maryland. All UMUC courses taught in Asia carry University of Maryland University College resident credit. UMUC is committed to maintaining standards of academic excellence. The past 50-plus years demonstrate that those standards can be maintained in overseas settings.



UMUC Europe offers thousands of courses for students interested in associate's and bachelor's degrees and undergraduate certificates. UMUC also offers graduate-level certificates and several master's degrees in Europe. With UMUC's 150 locations worldwide, and extensive online offerings, students can begin and finish a degree with us regardless of where they are located.


I bet the citizens of Maryland did not even know UMUC was a global corporation.  Meanwhile fewer Maryland citizens are going to 4 year universities.


I don't hold any credence to these online workplace comment programs because they work like American Idol.  It is good to see a consistent referral to 'people needing to be treated with respect'. ' Low pay with no opportunity to grow'.  THIS IS NOT AN ENVIRONMENT WE WOULD WANT IN A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY.  THAT IS WHAT A CORPORATE STRUCTURE LOOKS LIKE.  That is because it IS  a corporate structure.  Under neo-liberals labor is treated as badly as if a Republican were in office yet every election Maryland labor unions get behind these neo-liberal pols.  We need the citizens of Maryland taking back the Democratic Party to reverse this failed neo-liberal/neo-con policy!



“Failing company, horrible management” Academic Advisor (Current Employee) Pros – Great vacation/time off. Get to become a state employee after 3 years.

Cons – Moral is so low! Micromanaged beyond belief, constant layoffs, not worth you time.

Advice to Senior Management – Treat us like the educated adults that we are. Learn to value your employees.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Add Employer Response
  1. Apr 8, 2014
    • Culture & Values
    • Work/Life Balance
    • Senior Management
    • Comp & Benefits
    • Career Opportunities
     

    “Not good. Too many secrets and financial problems” Administrative Assistant (Current Employee) Largo, MD I have been working at UMUC full-time for more than 8 years


    Pros: Convenient location and great benefits Cons: Low pay and minimal advancement Advice to Senior Management: Treat the regular people like people No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company… More

                    

Below you see what the deregulation issues discussed by Mikulski and Kirwan will include----as you see again everyone in the system is in the dark as to what these discussions look like.  WE DON'T ALLOW CITIZENS IN MARYLAND KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING SAY NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.


UMUC considering plan to become independent nonprofit with ties to university system
Under proposal, it would no longer be a state entity; president seeks input from university community




By Nayana Davis, The Baltimore Sun

7:54 p.m. CDT, July 10, 2014

The University of Maryland University College, which has been struggling with declining enrollment, is considering severing some ties with the state university system to avoid burdensome regulations and work more closely with the private sector.

Under the proposal, the university would become an independent nonprofit organization that retains an affiliation with the state system. The school's president, Javier Miyares, said during a Thursday town hall meeting in Largo that the idea came from a task force of experts organized by the university as a response to a shrinking student body.

UMUC, a mainly online institution, has struggled with a competitive online education market and a smaller military. Members of the military or their families make up about half of the college's students.



The main objective of the proposal is to more readily secure partnerships with the private sector, including working with companies to make courses more employer-friendly and building relationships to help students secure jobs. Miyares said such partnerships can be challenging to forge as a state agency.

"This way we would not be bound by all the regulations and statutes that apply to a public state agency," Miyares said.

University officials also hope the move would help it attract more students outside the United States, though it would retain the University of Maryland name. Based in Adelphi, UMUC offers courses to students in 24 countries.

The plan would allow the university to keep ties with the 12-institution University System of Maryland, but the details have not been worked out. "The validity and credibility you get by being part of the University of Maryland system is huge," Miyares said.

No immediate action will be taken on the task force recommendation, as the school begins a process of soliciting feedback from the college community. University officials said there are few concrete ideas on how the effort would be implemented at this stage; Miyares said he wanted to get input first.

UMUC has the support of the University System of Maryland to look into alternate business models.

"The university is facing some significant challenges," said William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the system. "They are appropriately addressing those challenges."

Kirwan said a more concrete proposal would need approval from the system's Board of Regents before implementation, and possibly the governor and General Assembly. The governor's office declined to comment on the plan.

But some higher education experts expressed concern about the university putting out such a proposal with few details.


Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said it's not uncommon for public universities to form private-sector relationships to outsource certain functions, but it's unclear what the change in status would mean for the university.

"Honestly, I don't know what to make of this," he said. "The decision to operate under a different set of rules is interesting. Whether the move is good, I don't know."

UMUC has been struggling with declining enrollment both stateside and overseas since fall of 2011. Although the rate of decline stateside has remained less than 10 percent in the past three years, overseas enrollment declined 20 percent for spring 2014.

The school has struggled to increase enrollment because of competition from traditional academic institutions that have started offering Web-based classes and popular massive open online courses known as MOOCs, university officials said.

A shrinking military, which is facing large-scale budget cuts, also is a factor in loss of enrollment.

University officials said that 90 percent of its budget comes from tuition and 10 percent from the state. Other colleges in the university system get about 30 percent of their budgets from the state.

"We don't know what the future is going to be like," Miyares said. "But if we don't adapt, we will go into a death spiral."

UMUC's struggles are "a reflection of how competitive online education has become," Kirwan said. "What we do need is to explore if operational flexibility is possible."


"UMUC has been quite unique in the university system," Nassirian said. "It had been mostly self-sufficient because it provides excess revenue back to the system, but that [online] business model has not fared well as of late."

Traditionally, changes in business models for colleges have occurred when a struggling nonprofit university becomes a for-profit venture after a large corporation acquires it. Nassirian gave the example of the Clinton, Iowa-based school Ashford University being purchased by Bridgepoint Education.

Miyares said the change could occur as early as next summer. Academic programs and staffing levels are not expected to be affected if the model changes, unless enrollment continues to drop.

The school laid off 70 staff members from departments at the Adelphi and Largo campuses earlier this year, and 58 the year prior. The university employs about 2,000 in the U.S.

"The whole goal is to get enrollment up," Miyares said. "If enrollment is fine, there should be no dramatic difference to the academic side. This is a pivotal moment in our history."

nadavis@baltsun.com



________________________________________________

The article above gives yet another spin----that UMUC and online colleges are being edged out by the popularity of MOOCs-----only MOOCs are not popular.  They are used less frequently then online UMUC.  We are being fed nothing but spin and this happens more and more because the public universities that would be the first to shout THAT IS NOT TRUE ----IT IS SPIN are now the ones handing us spin because they are corporations.  Maryland Assembly was the very first to pass laws that move the accreditation process towards making these online structures legitimate.  NO ONE THINKS THIS IS GOOD POLICY.  Needless to say when it comes to bad education policy it is Johns Hopkins pushing it in Maryland.  Indeed, Baltimore is cursed with a gorilla in the room that pushes the worst of policy all so they can make more profits.


This looks like a Gates Foundation study-------most employers in North Carolina have not heard of MOOCS but 3/4 of them think they are good. Meanwhile, there is no interest in the public for MOOCs outside of simple extracurricular help with existing university structures. Gates says he will buy these policy implementation yet! You know, because he is the 'good billionaire' as NPR always tells us.



All Hail MOOCs! Just Don’t Ask if They Actually Work | TIME.com

Why Do So Many Students Drop Out of MOOCs?www.brighthub.com/education/online-learning/articles/...



Study: MOOCs Viewed Positively Among Employers

April 2, 2014 Inside Higher Education

Most North Carolina employers haven't heard of massive open online courses, but about three-quarters of them view MOOCs as having a positive effect on hiring decisions, a survey conducted by Duke University and RTI International shows. The study, founded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also suggests 71 percent of employers could see themselves using MOOCs for professional development.

Think about how the real world views MOOCs but the article in the Maryland media makes you think they are supported.  It happens all the time because they can get away with it.  Online resources for education are good----everyone thinks online instruction adds to the classroom at any level.  The problem is that corporations have as a goal to replace the classroom with these online products ------aiming at the 90% of Americans becoming trapped by Vocational K-12.......
With all public education funding going to subsidize corporate research and Human Resources we have to make the cost of educating the 90% as cheap as possible say neo-liberals and neo-cons!  Calling MOOCS a democratizing tool in a nation with the strongest public education system in the world is a mockery.  STOP DEFUNDING AND DISMANTLING PUBLIC EDUCATION.


The University of Maryland is now taking a look at bestowing transfer credit to those who are able to demonstrate a specific level of knowledge after completing a MOOC.


- See more at: http://www.educationnews.org/online-schools/can-moocs-be-a-solution-to-the-us-student-debt-crisis/#sthash.uhO1mk7Y.dpuf


Are MOOCs really dead?

  • By Jake New, Editor, eCampus News
June 6th, 2014 Recent studies suggest that MOOCs are very much alive, but are not a threat to traditional higher education For some educators and journalists, the rasping final breaths of massive open online courses (MOOCs) began late last year.

They followed nearly two years of hype and excitement that even the most skeptical of instructors and reporters got swept up in. Many of those who denounced the courses did so in a similarly frantic fashion, writing proclamations and open letters condemning MOOCs, as though they were caught in a great academic war.

Then, suddenly, a blow was struck. And it came from one of MOOCs’ most famous creators.

“Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger,” Rebecca Schuman wrote at Slate in November 2013.

It was a dramatic way of saying that Thrun had announced that his company, Udacity, would now focus its MOOCs more on vocational training rather than traditional liberal arts courses.

That Udacity was only one company of a growing number focused on MOOCs — and that many of these platforms, including its main competitor Coursera, still aimed to disrupt traditional higher education — did little to slow the wave of speculation.

It was the capper on a year of MOOC hand-wringing. If 2012 was the “year of the MOOC,” then 2013 was the “year of the MOOC backlash.” Those who trust Gartner’s “Hype Cycle” believed MOOCs were going through a common “trough of disillusionment,” that would soon be followed by a “slope of enlightenment.”

But by the start of 2014, many were already asking: “Are MOOCs dead?”

The answer is not as sensational as the question. MOOCs aren’t dead — not yet -- but they likely won’t be replacing any traditional means of higher education, either.




Here is the source of creating a massive online system of education for the 90% in Maryland-----Wall Street itself!  The quality of education drops each time they grow this online education industry.  Since it isn't working at the university level they are now talking of sending it to K-12 vocational.  Sitting children in front of computers for online classes the goal of education reform as vocational K-12----YOU BET


Johns Hopkins Offers Nine-Course Specialization in Data ...www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2014/coursera...   CachedThe series of nine MOOCs are now open for enrollment and free to anyone. ... 615 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205. ... Courses Careers Accreditation Web Policies ...

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July 23rd, 2014

7/23/2014

0 Comments

 
THE REASON MARYLAND IS SILENT AS THE REST OF THE NATION BRINGS OUT MILLIONS IN PROTEST OF NEO-LIBERAL AND NEO-CONS POLICIES IS THAT ERHLICH/O'MALLEY HAS WORKED HARD TO PRIVATIZE MARYLAND'S PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES.  IT IS HERE THAT HOLDING POWER ACCOUNTABLE BEGINS AND THAT IS WHY NEO-LIBERALS FROM CLINTON TO OBAMA ARE WORKING AS HARD AS THEY CAN TO MAKE THEM INTO CORPORATIONS.

We saw yesterday that it is University of Maryland's Chancellor Kirwan seeing the need to deregulate universities.  Maryland has allowed for-profit career colleges defraud for a few decades now because of deregulation of private career education so now we need to see the same in our public universities.  Kirwan says we are making money using taxpayer money to patent research but we need to super-size the profits from the products we are now sending to the corporate structures attached to our campuses----YOU KNOW---THE 'BIOTECH FACILITIES'.  Kirwan and Mikulski are not only talking about getting rid of a silly regulation that is out of date----they are intending to deregulate how universities can operate as businesses.  All those requirements for receiving taxpayer money for research that make the public partners in this research need to go.  We have proprietary patents now with that taxpayer funded research and it is heading for the open market for profit! 

Below you see what Kirwan and Mikulski are working towards.  Corporations are dismantling their research facilities because universities ARE THEIR RESEARCH FACILITIES.  University students are now paying tuition to work in a corporate research project for free supported by NIH and NCA research money.  IT'S ALL ABOUT CREATING JOBS!  Actually, college grads are as likely now to remain unemployed now as at the time of the 2008 crash because global corporations and neo-liberals are keeping the US economy stagnant.  So, these students are more likely to work as VISTAs then to get a job in the field for which they received a degree.  Meanwhile, the foreign students coming in to get degrees------doing OK especially if they go back home to work for the US corporation overseas.  FREE LABOR PAID FOR BY TAXPAYERS----NOW THAT MAXIMIZES CORPORATE PROFITS SAY NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.  See why taxes and tuition are soaring on the working and midde-class?  It costs lots to subsidize every corporate activity.

CORPORATIONS NO LONGER NEED RESEARCH FACILITIES------UNIVERSITIES DO THE RESEARCH AND ANYTHING THAT IS SUCCESSFUL COMES TO THE GLOBAL CORPORATIONS THROUGH STARTUPS BUYOUTS.  THE PEOPLE THEY HIRED TO DO THE WORK IN PRIVATE RESEARCH LABS ARE NOW STUDENTS PAYING TUITION.

The process of patenting university research while having corporations 'partnered' with these universities is a mockery as if people cannot see that this is why student tuition is soaring and all of taxpayer money is funding this 'university' research leaving no money for student financial aid and grants. Directors of these 'university' research facilities being paid like corporate executives.

LET'S GO BACK TO PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES AS PUBLIC EDUCATION!


Below you see what deregulation Kirwan and Mikulski are working towards......making universities driven by profit-----



Colleges Urged to Count Patents in Tenure Reviews

April 29, 2014
  Inside Higher Ed


Universities should begin making patents and other industrial and commercial research count toward promotion and tenure, in an effort to stimulate such research nationwide, argues a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. "There is a fundamental disconnect between technology transfer activities and incentives for faculty members in terms of merit raises, tenure and career advancement," Richard B. Marchase, co-author and vice president for research and economic development at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said in a news release. "Beyond the monetary benefit of licensing, which is small in most cases, there is presently little to no benefit to a faculty member's merit raises, tenure and career advancement."

The paper builds on a 2012 report from the National Research Council and other groups saying that business and industry have "largely dismantled large corporate research laboratories that drove American industrial leadership," and which argues that research universities must "fill the gap."
In the new paper, called "Changing the Academic Culture: Valuing Patents and Commercialization Toward Tenure and Career Advancement," the authors argue that filling the research gap will entail changing the university "rewards culture" to value not only large research grants but also professors' patents and other commercial activities. Co-author Eric Kaler, president of the University of Minnesota, notes that this kind of work should not replace but "add to" traditional means of assessing scholarly activity. The paper's lead author is Paul R. Sanberg, senior vice president for research and innovation at the University of South Florida and president of the National Academy of Inventors. An abstract is available here.


_________________________________________________

Keep in mind the same global corporations for whom University of Maryland's Chancellor Kirwan and neo-liberals work are the same entities keeping the US economy stagnant-----and it is deliberate.  Remember, the bond market is going to crash causing a greater recession is so there is no intent to employ these grads----but they do free work and pay to do it with ever-higher tuition.  THIS IS A SWEET DEAL FOR CORPORATE PROFITS SAY NEO-LIBERALS IN MARYLAND!

The media shout that all of this a great education policy.  That more students are being sent to college and graduating with skills that corporations need.  OH REALLY? 

THEY NEED THEM TO WORK FOR FREE WHILE PAYING FOR COLLEGE AND THEN FORGET ABOUT IT AFTER GRADUATION.

The structure neo-liberals and neo-cons are building have the job pipeline coming from the Ivy League schools-----business leaders now come from these schools and any startups that may come from the public universities are simply bought by those corporations in the portfolio of Ivy League schools.  Working and middle-class grads are largely being funneled into poverty jobs or the military.


University of Maryland Baltimore County and Grabinsky were front page news as UMBC is the face of this free labor as corporate university.  While Maryland says its unemployment is 6.1% we all know that is only the number of people receiving unemployment checks.  Maryland's unemployment is 36% and growing with this economic model.  Remember, these are Republican policies of placing corporate profit first so voting Republican will not help----Democrats simply need to shake the corporate neo-liberals out of the Democratic Party!


FOLKS----THIS IS A NEO-LIBERAL ECONOMIC MODEL THEY CALL THE 21ST CENTURY ECONOMY!

All we need is to rebuild state economies having domestic businesses driving the economy and all of this will disappear.


The Deliberate Low-Wage, High-Insecurity Economic Model submitted by pmcovay3 ScienceIndex.com  Dec 2012

In contrast to the general biases of orthodox economists, the jobs crisis in America is not inevitable or natural-and more important, does not contribute to more economic efficiency through lower wages or more productivity. It is the result of deliberate political policy choices the nation has made at least since the early 1980s, when productivity was rising on a secular basis at a slow rate. Also, the policy choices were made before the rise of very low-wage emerging markets like China’s. In sum, there has been a low-wage, high-unemployment policy regime in the rich world, and especially in the United States, for a generation.


Students Call for Reform of Economics Education


May 6, 2014  Inside Higher Ed

Economics students in 19 countries have issued a joint call -- published in The Guardian -- to change the way economics is taught. The students' analysis (similar to that of some professors in the United States and elsewhere) is that economics has become too uniform in its approaches and too removed from real life. "[I]t's time to reconsider the way economics is taught. We are dissatisfied with the dramatic narrowing of the curriculum that has taken place over the past couple of decades," the letter says. "This lack of intellectual diversity does not only restrain education and research. It limits our ability to contend with the multidimensional challenges of the 21st century – from financial stability to food security and climate change. The real world should be brought back into the classroom, as well as debate and a pluralism of theories and methods. This will help renew the discipline and ultimately create a space in which solutions to society's problems can be generated."



All academics and analysts now look at employment figures as below----the employment to population ratio.  We all know some adults of working age may choose not to work but that percentage is not too high.  So, if 58% of the population is working------42% are not.  36% unemployment is about right.  As this article points out----with wages at an all time low people are now forced to have two incomes in a family.  The employment data media and government provides is simply meant to conceal this deliberately high unemployment.

Do you know who is not fooled by the failure of neo-liberalism------ECONOMICS STUDENTS!

The article above shows that university students are fed up with universities that only offer neo-liberal economic models in economic degree programs.  As this article states----WHY STUDY A FAILED ECONOMIC MODEL?  It is the duty of public universities to hold power accountable and give the public real data and we see this is not happening because of this corporate capture.

That is what university heads like Kirwan are doing.....they are appointed to force global corporate policies that no one wants and it is the governor that appoints these people to public universities.

Unemployment Data Manipulation The Economic Recovery is a Lie!
  By Seth Mason
Friday, November 1st, 2013  Wealth Daily

I've argued time and time again that, due to the severity of job losses during the Great Recession, there cannot be a true economic recovery until the labor market has recovered.

Unfortunately, hiring was weak in September, continuing a slowing trend that began in the spring.

To make matters worse, the majority of jobs created last month were menial in nature (nearly 2/3 of them were truck drivers, bureaucrats, salespeople, and temps). These trends have been ongoing throughout this economic depression.

The number of new jobs wasn't enough to keep up with population growth.

And yet the unemployment rate fell.

So, all is well... right?

Clearly, the "headline" 7.2% unemployment rate doesn't tell the whole story about the sad state of the American labor force.

You have to take any data from the Fed with a grain of salt, anyway, as the Obama administration has a vested interest in presenting the best-looking unemployment picture possible, just as all administrations have.

The employment-to-population ratio actually provides a much more accurate gauge of the health of the American job market — and wouldn't you know, it's been showing unhealthy readings since the economy crashed five years ago...

The proportion of Americans in the workforce has barely budged since falling from 63% to 58% during the Great Recession, as you can see on the following chart:



A Precipitous Decline

The last time the employment-to-population ratio was 58% — in the early 1980s — a relatively small proportion of American households sent more than one income earner into the workforce.

Now, in a nation of mostly one-breadwinner households, the 58% employment-to-population ratio was reasonable.

Today, however, due to a decline in real personal income (thanks for the inflation, Federal Reserve), most households send multiple income earners into the workforce.

In fact, it's not uncommon these days for households to have more than two income earners.

Under this paradigm, an employment-to-population ratio stuck at 58% like it's 1982 (when "homemaker" was still a common job title) is very unhealthy.


  Also worth noting is that a large percentage of the 58% of Americans who do work are working lower-quality jobs than they were before the economy crashed.

Although the population of the United States has increased by approximately 20 million since 2008, there are 5 million fewer “breadwinner” jobs in this country than there were before this economic depression.

"Breadwinner jobs" are those positions with a base salary of $35,000 or more that enable one to live independently, however meagerly. 

So the real health of the labor force is even worse than the unsettling 58% labor force participation rate!

Here we are, more than five years since the fall of Lehman, and the job market is still awful... and it's started to backslide again.



Niagara Falls

The Fed's Niagara Falls-scale liquidity pumping measures (I say "liquidity pumping" as opposed to "printing" because QE is only one of the Fed's tricks) clearly haven't had much impact on unemployment — or the federal government's $787 billion spending binge, also known as the grand "stimulus," for that matter.

Remember the laughable estimates of unemployment with and without the "Recovery Plan"?

According to the White House's October 2009 estimate (the dark blue line on the chart above), the Fed/federal government's plan should have taken us back to pre-recession unemployment levels by now...

Yet the unemployment rate sits at an unacceptable 7.2%.

And keep in mind the 7.2% headline unemployment rate belies the true awful state of the job market.

Considering the pitiful 58% employment-to-population ratio and the 5 million fewer breadwinner jobs since 2008, it would be an understatement to say that Washington's stimulus measures have failed to reduce unemployment. (That's assuming they were created for that purpose. More about that in a future article.)

We should expect more of the same from our esteemed central planners.

The Fed, which has officially delayed "tapering," will continue to pump indefinitely.

Uncle Sam will continue to borrow and spend like mad, whether he's wearing a DEM or GOP hat.

As a result, the "mother of all bubbles," as Nouriel Roubini has called it, will continue to expand...

And we'll continue party like it's 2006, only with higher unemployment.

We'll keep ignoring the fact that 2008 is just a couple of years away.

Happy crash 2.0!

Until next time,

Seth Mason for Wealth Daily
_____________________________________________


Having a policy that brings more foreign students into the US with the goal of green cards and employment in high-skilled jobs does nothing for the American people, the high unemployment, or creating quality education and higher achievement in our US students.  It is purely a profit-making scheme that continues to consolidate the wealth at the top.

Maryland pols are all neo-liberals so whether Milkulsi and Cardin working in the Senate on legislation to build corporate universities and send trillions of dollars to expand overseas as corporations-----or the Governor of Maryland O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly appointing these corporate university heads and building the corporate structures in our universities-----

THE SOLUTION IS SIMPLY REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN MARYLAND BY RUNNING AND VOTING FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE.



Currency February 21, 2014

Should Universities Profit From Student Research?
By John Bringardner  The New Yorker





In 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Cornell University and Israel’s Technion would jointly open a new school on Roosevelt Island to help boost New York’s tech sector. The first buildings of the new campus won’t open until 2017, but classes are already under way in borrowed space on the third floor of Google’s New York office. And, on Monday, Cornell Tech, as the school is called, plans to announce that it has enrolled its first batch of post-doctoral researchers in a one-year “Runway” program, designed to launch them into business ventures based on their specialties: urban planning, e-commerce, health care. In an unusual twist, the school will invest in the companies founded through the program, but also allow students to keep ownership of the intellectual property they create on campus; typically, universities profit by keeping the rights to such property.



Cornell Tech isn’t the only institution to invest in student startups. Stanford announced last year that it would invest in companies founded by its students. M.I.T. also takes an equity stake in companies developed on campus. But Stanford and M.I.T. both require those companies to pay royalties on any technologies the students patent while in school.
Rather than negotiate complex patent-licensing rights with their researchers, Cornell Tech will treat the value of each post-doc position it awards—about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—as an angel investment in any business spun out of the program; in exchange, Cornell Tech expects to get an average of a five-per-cent stake in each business. The Runway program echoes the accelerators and incubators popular among venture capitalists—three- or four-month programs in which entrepreneurs get resources to build new startups in exchange for a stake in their companies.

Universities didn’t always have the right to the spoils of the research they sponsored. The government spent heavily on research and development at U.S. universities during the Cold War, but new technologies developed with federal cash became government property. By 1980, the federal government had amassed twenty-eight thousand patents but licensed fewer than five per cent to companies that could turn them into products. That year, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to keep and profit from the patents their students and researchers developed on campus using federal funds. The Economist called it “perhaps the most inspired piece of legislation in America over the past half-century.”

Soon, offices focussed on “technology transfer” opened up in schools around the country, staffed with lawyers who poked around campus research labs and flipped through student notebooks to suss out patentable research that they could license to corporations. A new chemical combination might become a blockbuster drug; a technological breakthrough could lead to smaller, faster semiconductors.

In 2012, American universities earned $2.6 billion from patent royalties, according to the Association of University Technology Managers. The tech-transfer model is entrenched in medical schools and in biotech development. But its usefulness in the software world has been less clear. The success of a software startup often depends less on any particular innovation than on how several pieces of technology fit together and appeal to users. A company’s value usually becomes apparent years after it has developed and refined its business model, not at the moment it files a patent application. Plus, the very concept of a software patent hangs in the balance: in December, the Supreme Court agreed to review a case that could eliminate them altogether.

Cornell Tech’s approach—taking an equity stake in each company instead of licensing rights to a handful of patents—may be a more straightforward way for the school to profit from spin-offs. “Universities look to place a value on technology at its inception, finding a fair rate for splitting royalties between the school and the inventor, but that’s not the way digital startups work,” Cornell Tech’s Dean, Daniel Huttenlocher, said. “I think intellectual-property protection, especially in software and digital tech, is a very small piece of commercialization, one that becomes too big a part of the conversation when universities are involved.”

The Runway program is designed to turn deep academic research into a marketable product; its first post-docs have already spent years in the lab, sometimes running into dead ends and starting over in a way that pure academic research allows but investors don’t. “A principal mission of Cornell University is the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit and use of society,” the school’s existing intellectual-property policy reads. Whether society benefits most when knowledge is turned into an I.P.O. is an open question.

“The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” the historian and Stanford professor David Kennedy told Ken Auletta in 2012, in a report from Stanford. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.” And when students showed up for their first classes at the temporary campus, in January, 2013, Isaac Kramnick, a professor of government at Cornell in Ithaca, told the Times, “The university has been at the forefront of big science since the 1940s and 1950s. Now it’s entering an era in which it seems to be interested in for-profit science, and that does require some thinking as to what the fundamental purpose of a university is.” (“Such potential for conflicts is quite manageable with the appropriate procedures in place, enabling this very effective interaction between students, faculty, and companies,” Huttenlocher told me.)

Yet universities are forging ahead with more business-oriented models. Over the past decade, angel investors, the main source of capital for startups, have made high-risk bets, providing money for startups to get off the ground in exchange for the right to a piece of the company’s equity if it succeeds. Most never do. Venture capitalists call their strategy “spray and pray,” sinking money into lots of different startups in the hope that at least one will be the next Facebook. It’s a gamble, but it could be a better way for universities to take advantage of the work their students are doing. The amount of revenue schools generate from patent licensing is small compared with over-all university budgets. Alumni philanthropy brings in far more money. “What would happen if schools gave up rights to their students’ intellectual property?” Adam Shwartz, the director of Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, which runs the Runway program, asked. “Their patent revenue goes to zero, but down the line the successful alumni give back far more money. Here we have the first controlled experiment of this nature.”

Rendering of Cornell Tech by Kilograph.
____________________________________________

Below you see how bad the success rate of this model is for the student /school so a corporation directs the research it wants to fund----gets free labor and a taxpayer funded research facility----and VOILA all the failures are paid for by you and me.  No need for corporate R and D.  In lieu of corporate taxes these investment firms just send there money to these university projects and we are told this is the best mechanism for funding universities.

All work on campus is now product-driven-----professors are judged on patenting rather than academics or teaching.  Tenure is tied to being this corporate executive.  Students are engaged only in what will pay off and not with a broad education limiting their futures.  As this article shows it is the student that loses and graduates with the tuition debt and limited focus degrees.


What is sad is that the student's future success with whatever they create requires handing a percentage of future earnings to these university/venture capitalist and the few that do create successful businesses simply hand them to these global investment firms.  This is all simply universities as corporate facilities.

THE ENTIRE ACADEMIC MODEL HAS BEEN RUINED AND THE US IS AGAIN ON THE BOTTOM ACADEMICALLY IN ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENTS.  THIS IS WHAT MIKULSKI AND KIRWAN ARE SITTING DOWN TO BOLSTER.

DEAR ENTREPRENEURS: Here's How Bad Your Odds Of Success Are
  • Henry Blodget  Business Insider

  • May 28, 2013, 11:03 AM

As a wise investor puts it: "Many turtles hatch. Few make it to the sea."


Everyone knows that starting companies — and investing in startups — is a risky way to earn a living. But few people appreciate just how risky it is.

Thanks to a recent tweet from Paul Graham, the founder of "startup school" Y Combinator, we now have a better idea.

Graham says that 37 of the 511 companies that have gone through the Y Combinator program over the past 5 years have either sold for, or are now worth, more than $40 million.

Most entrepreneurs would probably view creating a company worth more than $40 million as a success (unless the company raised more capital than that). And, on its face, the "37 companies" number seems relatively impressive.

In fact, however, the number tells a scary and depressing story.

This number suggests that a startling 93% of the companies that get accepted by Y Combinator eventually fail.

(Not all companies that sell for less than $40 million are "failures," obviously. Assuming a company hasn't raised much capital, a sale between $5 million and $40 million could be considered a success. But a high percentage of Y Combinator companies likely end up being worth zero. And for companies that are hand-picked by very smart investors, the 93%-below-$40 million rate is still surprisingly low). 

A company accepted by Y Combinator, therefore, has less than a 1-in-10 chance of being a big success.

More alarmingly, the companies accepted by Y Combinator are only a tiny fraction of the companies that apply.

Some have estimated that Y Combinator's acceptance rate is 3-5%.

If we use the 5% rate, we can estimate that Y Combinator has received about 10,000 applications for the ~500 companies it has chosen over the years.

Assuming Y Combinator has even a modest ability to pick winners, therefore, the odds that a company applying to Y Combinator will be a success are significantly lower than the odds of success of the companies accepted into the program.

If only 37 of the companies that have applied to Y Combinator over the years have succeeded, this is a staggeringly low 0.4% success rate.

Put differently, only one in every 200 companies that applies to Y Combinator will succeed.

The reality is that Y Combinator probably misses a few winners, so the actual odds are probably slightly higher.

But in case any entrepreneur or angel investor is deluding themselves into thinking that startups are an easy way to cash in, they might want to think again.









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July 22nd, 2014

7/22/2014

0 Comments

 
Now that universities are corporations we need to get rid of all that public protection stuff that will keep them from being profitable.  Forget all that silly stuff about educating Americans to be citizens and leaders......forget equal opportunity and access for the disabled......you cannot maximize profits that way.  Let's open our universities to the world's rich and let them attend simply because they can pay higher and higher tuition.  THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL AND NEO-CON FOR YOU.....IT'S ALL ABOUT PROFIT AT THE EXPENSE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!

As you can see it is Maryland behind this deregulation attempt just as it leads in corporatization of universities into global systems. 


LOOK----THERE'S MIKULSKI -----MISS NEO-LIBERAL HERSELF.  SHE HANDED A COOL TRILLION OF TAXPAYERS MONEY OVER TWO DECADES TO MAKE JOHNS HOPKINS A GLOBAL CORPORATION AFTER ALL.

Also at the lead is University of Maryland Chancellor Kirwan-----you know----the one Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland is taking to court for rigging the elections for governor by choosing which candidates were heard on public university campuses across the state-----all of which is illegal.  Sure, we solve this corruption by fewer regulations!


WE WILL SELECT ANY CANDIDATE WE CHOSE FOR THESE ELECTION FORUMS FOR GOVERNOR SAYS CHANCELLOR KIRWAN.


Oh, that's how you keep installing legislation no one wants ----you rig the system so we cannot get people in office that will reverse these policies!  THAT'S KIRWAN FOR YOU-----A TRUE GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERAL/NEOCON.  Public universities as the hotbed of democratic political debate?  That's no way to maximize corporate profits!

A New Deregulatory Push

February 13, 2014
By Michael Stratford  Inside Higher Education

WASHINGTON -- The last time the Higher Education Act came up for a vote in Congress in 2008, Senator Lamar Alexander trotted out a five-foot stack of cartons onto the Senate floor to show the enormity of existing regulations governing higher education.

Now that lawmakers are once again contemplating how to rewrite that massive piece of legislation -- which authorizes, among other things, the $150 billion-a-year federal student aid program -- Alexander is returning to his props.

Speaking to a group of community college leaders Wednesday, Alexander unfolded the full paper version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which was taller than he is, to underscore his distaste for the federal government’s bureaucratic reach onto college campuses. And last week he made the same demonstration before a group of private college presidents.

Alexander said Wednesday that his goal is to “simplify and deregulate” higher education in the upcoming renewal of the Higher Education Act -- a process he has said should “start from scratch.”

“What we’re trying to do is establish a continuous process for deregulation to overcome the continuous momentum for overregulation,” he said, noting that the “inertia” for creating new regulations comes from across the political spectrum.

“The conservative senators, from my party, they’re sometimes the worst,” he said, describing how he has to remind his colleagues that they are “the party of federalism, the 10th amendment” when they want to impose conservative ideas on how colleges should be run across the country.

All of their ideas “sound good, but you know what happens when you have to comply with it: it takes time and money away from your mission,” he told a group of community college trustees and presidents.

Alexander has formed, along with three other senators, a task force to recommend ways to reduce federal regulations on colleges and universities.  

That group of higher education leaders gathered behind closed doors at the offices of the American Council on Education on Wednesday to begin producing recommendations on how to deregulate the industry. The panel consists of college presidents from a range of sectors and higher education associations.

Reducing or eliminating regulations on colleges has long been a goal of the higher education lobby in Washington, though previous efforts have largely been unsuccessful.

William E. (Brit) Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland and co-chair of the task force, said he was encouraged by the Congressional interest in reducing regulations.

“What seems different this time is the very strong commitment of these four senators,” Kirwan said. “They are determined to address this issue and get our help in finding some meaningful reforms.”


Alexander and Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, attended Wednesday’s meeting, and two other lawmakers -- Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, a Democrat, and Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, a Republican -- are also on board.

The panel will focus on identifying “the most egregious, excessive regulations," but will also make recommendations on the Education Department’s rule making process in general, Kirwan said.

“The hope is that we can make some suggestions that will enable us to meet our obligations and be accountable to the federal government but to do so in a way that is cost effective and not excessively bureaucratic,” he said.

Kirwan said that one example of the type of regulations that his task force would be targeting is a campus safety rule that requires colleges to collect crime information from local police jurisdictions when students study abroad or when athletes travel to an out-of-town hotel.

The task force hopes to produce a report on its recommendations within the next 12 months, Kirwan said. The group will also be coordinating with the National Research Council, which was directed by Congressional appropriators last month to conduct a $1 million study of the cost of regulations on higher education.

Kirwan, who also chairs the subcommittee at the NRC that will oversee the study, said that work would be focused on all federal regulations that affect higher education, while the Congressional task force would focus only on Education Department regulations.

_______________________________________
This is what Kirwan and his group of global corporate bosses think they are going to do with our universities and deregulating gets rid of all that public justice and civil rights stuff....you know----THE US CONSTITUTION AND OUR STATUS AS AN EQUAL PROTECTION DEMOCRACY.  Who in the world wants people like this deciding what is good.


That is what testing from K onward is about----the state determining how a child will be tracked and into what vocation from elementary school on. Remember, school privatization means the entity deciding will be corporations. This is already happening in Baltimore and it is nothing but autocratic.

O'Malley has made his career as Governor of Maryland building these tracking systems into our schools at every level......it is failing miserably although spin will make it sound a great success.


It is the for-profit colleges AND THAT DEREGULATION that distorted who and how students went to college last decade and it is infused with fraud and corruption so it is not our decades-old system of allowing families to decide where and what that child will pursue that failed----

IT IS THE SAME PEOPLE WRITING THESE PRIVATIZATION POLICIES THAT DISTORTED A GOOD SYSTEM.


This article is long but please glance through!


College material or not: who should decide?


By Valerie Strauss March 26 (The Washington Post)

College, of course, isn’t for everybody, but who should decide — and how and when — which students should go and shouldn’t? In this post, Kevin Welner and Carol Burris ask whether the decision should be made by policy makers and school officials or parents and students after young people have had equitable opportunities to learn in elementary and secondary school.

Welner is the director of the National Education Policy Center, located at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education. He is the author of the 2008 book, “NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling.” Burris is the award-winning principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010, tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.


By Kevin Welner and Carol Burris

Robin should become a printer. That’s what Robin Calitri’s school counselor told his dad in 1965. Robin thought his counselor’s advice was just swell. He wasn’t a motivated high school student. But his dad, who was a professor of English Literature at Hofstra University, made it clear to the counselor that his son was going to college.

Robin later became the principal of Long Island’s South Side High School and was a finalist for the national principal of the year in 1999. He would tell that story about the counselor whenever he explained the harm done by tracking—the sorting of some students into classes that are not designed to prepare those children for post-secondary education.

If his dad had gone along with the counselor’s recommendation, his son would likely have ended up in a trade that was becoming obsolete. To his credit, Robin understood that this was precisely the situation faced by children in working-class and poor families. Research on tracking and choice confirms this; working-class and poor families, as well as parents without a college education, are more deferential to the advice of school authorities and less willing to push back on the system. Robin also understood that a young person’s future hangs in the balance when school authorities are making rules that will cut off college as an option.


Yes, we can all agree: college is not for everybody. But should school officials and top-down policy makers decide based, for example, on Common Core college readiness test scores, or should the decision be left to parents and students after schools have given them meaningful, enriching, equitable opportunities to learn?


While college is not for everybody, opportunities to be prepared for college definitely should be.
When college-educated parents have the capacity to secure the college advantage, they certainly seize it for their own children. It is not unusual, for example, to see upper middle class parents spend thousands on tutoring—including tutors for the SAT and the college essay. College-educated parents understand that a four-year diploma is key to securing financial success.

That’s just one reality that Mike Petrilli, the executive vice president of the Fordham Institute, refuses to confront in his article in Slate, with the man-bites-dog title, “Kid, I’m Sorry, but You’re Just Not College Material” Is exactly what we should be telling a lot of high school students.”

The “we” who are the deciders is left somewhat undefined, but it’s safe to assume that the use of “we” does not give power and capacity to the students themselves.

Before continuing, this is a good spot to pause and acknowledge when we are talking about other people’s children. The two of us, like Mr. Petrilli, represent families where post-secondary education is a given. Accordingly, we’re essentially debating what’s best for those “other” families. As we contemplate tinkering with their fate, it is wise to remember John Dewey’s axiom:

“What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.”

Perhaps we are unwise in working our tails off for our children to go to college. But unless and until we acknowledge this, we should be wary of sending other families down a different path.


The vocational education push isn’t coming from just Mr. Petrilli. As he notes, it’s also coming from a project headquartered at Harvard University (apparently with no irony intended) as well as from policymakers throughout the nation. The Education Commission of the States recently studied the “State of the State” addresses from the nation’s governors and found that “at least 13 governors and the D.C. mayor outlined proposals improving or expanding CTE [career and technical education, aka vocational education] options for students.”

Mr. Petrilli and the governors are correct to the extent that they are simply acknowledging that not all children will go to college and that those who do not should nonetheless have opportunities to thrive. It is also true that the decision to forgo or delay college should be made before graduation day.

From that point on, however, the “sort and select” advocates get almost everything wrong. Their fundamental two-part assumption is, first, that they can and should identify children who are beyond academic hope. Second, they believe that it is possible and beneficial to identify these children early, separate them from their academically oriented peers, and put them on a track that hopefully prepares them for post-secondary employment but does not prepare them for college.


Equitable schools reject such tracking policies because they believe in the American Dream and because they have learned from past mistakes.
History tells us that schools should not be in the business of foreclosing children’s options. At the start of the 20th century, schools faced an influx of immigrants, and policymakers responded by creating programs for those who were called the “great army of incapables.” Vocational tracks prepared immigrants to be factory workers, while the children of well-off parents were given a college preparatory education. This pattern of separating students into different classes was repeated during the era of racial desegregation as a way to maintain segregated classrooms—and then again in the 1970s when students with special needs were increasingly enrolled in mainstream schools.

History and research show that when schools sort in this way, it is the disadvantaged children who are directed toward lower-tier tracks. No matter what criteria are used—scores, recommendations or even choice—the same patterns of stratification occur. Accordingly, when lawmakers adopt these misguided policies, they open up opportunity gaps that inevitably lead to the achievement gaps that these same lawmakers then decry.

Mr. Petrilli concedes that he understands the danger. Describing the bad old days, he writes, “Those high school ‘tracks’ were immutable, and those who wound up in ‘voc-ed’ (or, at least as bad, the ‘general’ track) were those for whom secondary schooling, in society’s eyes, was mostly a custodial function.” Yet he turns back to voc-ed because, as he contends, the odds are otherwise too long for disadvantaged students.

Beginning with the statistic that only 10 percent of these disadvantaged students earn a four-year degree, Mr. Petrilli asserts that if we work really hard as a society maybe this number would rise to 30 percent, which for Mr. Petrilli is not good enough. Since recent data show that 33.5 percent of Americans ages 25 to 29 have at least a bachelor’s degree, that sounds like a pretty good outcome to us. By the way, that’s the highest percentage ever for Americans, and it doesn’t include those who earn two-year degrees as well as certificates in our community colleges and post-secondary technical schools.


The “You’re Not College Material” approach is the same one we use far too often in schools.  Too many kids hear--You’re not ‘honors’ material, or Challenging science and math isn’t for you. And every time that strategy is used, we see the same results—classes that are stratified by social class and race. It’s an approach that reinforces existing inequalities. To say in a supposedly neutral way that not all students will go to college is disingenuous without first acknowledging something else: that what’s really being said is that we should accept that college is for the already advantaged.

On some level, Mr. Petrilli grasps these concerns—when he acknowledges the past harms of tracking and that “when judgments were made on the basis of ZIP code or skin color, the old system was [deterministic, racist, and classist].” What he doesn’t acknowledge is that his new system would be the old system.

It’s interesting to us that the Petrilli article’s argument relies in part on the German system of tiered schooling, where college-bound students head to the Gymnasium while vocation-bound students head to the Hauptschule or Realschule. Yes, it’s true that students attending the German vocational schools do better than voc-ed students here, in part because of a more equitable job sector following graduation. But a team of German psychologists recently published an article in The Journal of Educational Psychology on the effects of the German vocational track on the development of student intelligence—and they found that students in the academic track experienced substantial IQ gains as compared to those voc-ed students. Not only did the learning gap grow, so did the very capacity to learn between German academic and vocational students. That outcome should give us pause.

Our quarrel is not with offering vocational opportunities in high schools. Rather, we favor a smart and fair approach that works for children and families who, at the right time and place, make the choice for a career after high school.
We might, for example, retool our two-year colleges so that they offer more programs in technology and other marketable areas, without making students jump through remedial hoops to stay. We might also follow the lead of Finland and prepare students with a strong and equitable academic education without tracking until age 16, and then allow them to make meaningful career and life choices. We may even look at promising models, such as California’s Linked Learning schools, which integrate career preparation while still preparing students for college. High schools have an obligation to do their best to prepare students for college and career; preparation for both has more overlap than often assumed.


We reject, however, No College for You! proposals that sort  14 year olds into vocational high schools. South Side High School, one of the best in the nation, would likely be a very different place if co-author Carol Burris’ predecessor, Robin Calitri, had obliged his counselor when he was told “Kid, you are not college material.”  That counselor did not have the right to make that decision—and neither does Mike Petrilli.



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Neo-liberals installed the education policy in South Korea after the Korean war that it is trying to install in the US today.  The difference is that the US has a history of public education and people as citizens with the rights to legislate and equal protection laws.  From Korea this policy traveled to China and Singapore and involves very autocratic and pedantic learning where parents in these countries have been fighting for decades to get rid of it.  NO ONE LIKES THESE NEO-LIBERAL EDUCATION POLICIES.  Look below and you see the AFT union leader Weingarten with Arne Duncan praising this neo-liberal model.  Weingarten allowed the AFT to support these Race to the Top and Common Core policies for the first years of Obama's terms but the public outcry and teachers grew too large for Weingarten to follow the neo-liberal lead and as you see in the article after this one-----the AFT is now fighting Obama's and Wall Street's education reform.

IT WAS THE PUBLIC OUTCRY THAT FORCED THIS UNION LEADER TO STOP FOLLOWING NEO-LIBERALS.  WE MUST HAVE THE PUBLIC PROTESTING LOUDLY AND STRONGLY TO SUPPORT TEACHERS IN KILLING THIS VERY BAD EDUCATION REFORM.  NEITHER REPUBLICANS NOR DEMOCRATS WANT THIS REFORM.  IT IS ONLY ABOUT MAKING EDUCATION INTO GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.



I spoke at great length about the Finland model for education that has made Finland number 1 in education.  Finland embraced the American model of the 1950s and 1960s while the US was dismantling the best in the world public education to make this corporatized model they are pushing today. 

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE GOING BACK TO THE PUBLIC EDUCATION BUILT FOR DEMOCRACY AND AWAY FROM THIS AUTOCRATIC CORPORATE MODEL.




Which winning ideas could the U.S. steal from Singapore?


Singapore has one of the best education systems in the world, according to international assessments. President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talk about its performance. United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten visited in 2012 and her counterpart at the National Education Association, Dennis Van Roekel, has praised its teacher training. And in 2012, Singapore was featured in the first-ever International Summit on the Teaching Profession as a country that many places – including America – could learn from.



In light of all this hype, I spent the past week in Singapore visiting schools to find out why they are so successful. But, not surprisingly, there’s no big secret or magic trick that the United States could simply copy tomorrow. Rather, my impressions were of a nation where education is respected, where educators and administrators think critically about their jobs and the qualities they want their students to develop and where self-reflection is ingrained. Those are qualities already found in many American schools, and that reformers are trying to spur in others.

But some of Singapore’s latest strategies go beyond or challenge some of the most popular ideas right now for improving American schools. At the same time, it’s important to remember the vast differences between the two countries that make it difficult to transfer ideas. Here are my main takeaways from my conversations with educators, students and education officials:

- Singapore is looking to revamp their standards. As most states in America continue the rollout of the Common Core State Standards, an internationally benchmarked guide laying out what students are supposed to learn in each grade in math and English, Singapore also has changes planned. But education officials there are more concerned about some less tangible skills, like collaboration and creativity, and coming up with ways to systematically introduce those into the curriculum. In theory, the end goals of Common Core and Singapore’s newest push are similar. They both aim to create individuals with critical thinking skills who can thrive in a modern economy. But as we try to copy Singapore’s methods, like their math sequencing, educators there are already moving on to new ideas.

- Lots of Singaporean students are stressed. The country is looking for ways to reduce this and trying to decrease the emphasis on grades and test scores. The Ministry of Education is trying to reduce the emphasis on the primary school exit exam, which all students have to take to determine which secondary school they will attend, for instance. But many people told me one of the biggest challenges will be changing the mindset of parents. Not all students in Singapore worry endlessly about exams, but several people said that for those that do, parents are a primary source of their anxiety.

- Singapore is small. As several people pointed out to me, if you drive for an hour in any direction, you arrive at the water. While some people told me the small size of the country has disadvantages for education – it severely limits options for field trips for instance – it also has its benefits. Most notably, the country’s size, along with the fact that the schools are run by a centralized authority, allows the Ministry of Education, the National Institute of Education – which trains every teacher in the country – and the schools to be in close communication about research and new strategies. New programs can be implemented quicker and the National Institute for Education can easily keep track of what is actually happening in classrooms to tweak its offerings when needed.

- The schools are big. Half a million students are enrolled in the island’s schools, but most schools have student populations of more than a thousand – even at the primary level. With that many students, classes of 35 to 40 are typical, but nothing seemed disorderly. The atmosphere in the classrooms that I visited switched between formal and relaxed. Students bowed to greet visitors and again to thank them for coming. They stood up to speak whenever called upon, and chatter while a teacher was talking was almost nonexistent. At the same time, though, laughter was common. Teachers would gently tease students and discussion was highly encouraged.

Not everything Singapore does would apply to our much larger, decentralized education system and not everything they do should be emulated. But there are some inspirations we could draw from the country, such as trying to get more high-performing students into the classroom as teachers or being more explicit in the character qualities we want students to develop – without obsessing over how to measure them.

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As a social democrat I do not want to break from the Democratic Party-----I want to take the Democratic Party back from corporate neo-liberals.  The important thing is that more and more people are understanding where this is going and know we can stop and reverse this no matter what political stance you take.  We need Republicans pushing against this as these policies are written by neo-conservative and neo-liberal think tanks.

'The way forward for teachers requires a complete break with the pro-corporate trade unions and Democratic Party.


.......calling for Duncan’s resignation, saying he had championed a “failed education agenda” consisting of policies that “undermine public schools and colleges, the teaching education professionals, and education unions.”




Seeking to regain credibility, US teachers unions criticize Obama’s education secretary
By Phyllis Scherrer
22 July 2014


After spending the last five-and-a-half years collaborating with the Obama administration’s attack on teachers’ jobs and conditions, the two teachers’ unions in the US recently passed resolutions seeking to distance themselves from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his anti-public education policies.

The National Education Association (NEA) passed a resolution at its national convention in Denver, Colorado, on July 4, calling for Duncan’s resignation, saying he had championed a “failed education agenda” consisting of policies that “undermine public schools and colleges, the teaching education professionals, and education unions.”

This was followed by a July 13 resolution at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) conference in Los Angeles, California, which called on President Obama “to implement a secretary improvement plan” for Duncan, modeled on the punitive testing measures used to fire “failing” teachers. “If Secretary Duncan does not improve, and given that he has been treated fairly and his due process rights have been upheld, the secretary of education must resign,” the statement read.

The conventions were held just weeks after Duncan’s enthusiastic support for the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Vergara v. California case, which attacks tenure and another job protections won by teachers over decades of struggle. At the time Duncan hailed the right-wing forces behind the lawsuit, saying, “millions of young people in America” are “disadvantaged by laws, practices, and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students.”

The NEA and AFT resolutions, however, were nothing more than an exercise in damage control by the unions, aimed at reviving the credibility of both unions, which have been undermined by their collaboration with Duncan and the administration’s pro-corporate “school reform” agenda. The resolutions will have no affect whatsoever on the continued collaboration of the teachers’ unions with the Obama administration.

In fact, the day the NEA convention passed its resolution, officials from the rival AFT were at the White House meeting with Duncan to collaborate on the implementation of a new “teacher equity plan,” another teachers “evaluation” plan to rid poor school districts, with the assistance of the unions, of higher paid, more senior teachers.

Duncan dismissed the NEA resolution with the contempt it deserves, saying, had NEA officials not been at their convention, “I think they would have stood with us on this” today, too. He congratulated new NEA President-elect Lily Eskelsen Garcia and added, “We’ve had a very good working relationship with the NEA in the past.”

In addition to concealing their own role, by presenting Duncan as the author of this anti-teacher agenda, the unions are seeking to protect President Obama and the Democratic Party. The teachers unions promoted the lie that Obama would reverse the attacks of his Republican predecessor. In fact, the Democratic president has gone well beyond the attacks associated with Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001.

Under Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT) the administration allocated $4.35 billion to fund a “competition” designed by the Bill & Melinda Gates, Eli Broad, Boeing, Walton Family and other Foundations. School districts were forced to vie against each other for funds already severely reduced under Bush’s NCLB—federal funds that under the War on Poverty reforms of the 1960s were allotted directly to districts serving high percentages of students in poverty.

Under RTTT “winning” districts are those who agree to fire teachers and close or privatize schools based on poor standardized test scores, which are chiefly the result of poverty and decades of budget cutting, not bad teachers. Since the implementation of RTTT, public schools have been starved of funding, 330,000 teachers and other public school employees have lost their jobs, at least 4,000 public schools have been closed, and the number of students enrolled in charter schools has doubled.

Obama and the Democratic Party have embraced the anti-teacher nostrums long associated with the most right-wing sections of the Republican Party. This is underscored by the fact that former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and several other former Obama aides are spearheading a national public relations drive to support lawsuits in New York and other states, modeled on Vergara, to overturn teacher tenure, seniority and other job protections.

On the local level, Democratic mayors and school officials from Chicago, Philadelphia and New York to Detroit, New Orleans and Washington, DC, have spearheaded the attack on public education and expansion of for-profit charters.

The well-heeled executives who run the teachers’ unions--including AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel who received salaries of $543,150 and $306,286 respectively in the last year alone—are not opposed to the pro-corporate school “reform.” On the contrary, they are only looking to be partners in this process, as the AFT slogan, “School reform with us, not against us,” makes clear.

Both the NEA and the AFT were direct recipients of Gates’ money for the implementation of the so-called Common Core curriculum, which will be used to further attack teachers, while subordinating public education to the needs of profit-making technology and publishing companies. In 2012, the AFT accepted $4.4 million in order to “work on teacher development and Common Core Standards.” In July 2013 the NEA endorsed the Common Core and was awarded $6.3 million to assist with developing the Common Core Curriculum.

As teachers became wise to the character of Common Core, and every more disdainful of the AFT’s support of it, AFT officials tried to distance themselves from Gates last March by refusing to take any additional money from the Gates Innovation Foundation Fund, only one of several conduits of the billionaire’s money to the AFT.


Part of the grandstanding against Duncan is the increasing turf war between the AFT and NEA and their competition for dues money among a shrinking number of teachers. The AFT convention passed a dues increase by 45 cents per month this year and 55 cents per month next year, for a total monthly dues bill of $18.78 for each member by September 2015—largely to offset the loss of Gates money—and is increasingly seeking to get a foothold among low-paid charter teachers, as well as non-teaching members like nurses.

The NEA, the nation’s largest union, with just over three million members, including teachers, paraprofessionals and higher education instructors, has seen a significant drop in membership. Since the 2010-2011 school year, which coincides with the recession and the election of Obama, union membership for the NEA is down by 201,000 of its teacher members.

Under conditions in which more states are enacting Republican-backed “right-to-work” laws, which end automatic dues deduction from teachers’ paychecks, and sections of the Democratic Party are openly discussing dispensing with the services of the unions altogether, the AFT and NEA are doubling down to ensure state and local officials that they can be relied on to slash costs, destroy teachers’ conditions and suppress opposition to the closing of schools and the attack on education.

Over the last five years there have been growing struggles of teachers—in Wisconsin, Chicago, Portland, Oregon, St. Paul, Minnesota, and other cities—which have led to a direct clash between teachers on the one hand and the Democratic Party and their servants in the trade unions on the other.

Well aware of the growing anger of rank-and-file teachers, a section of trade union bureaucracy and its supporters in pseudo-left movements like the International Socialist Organization, whose supporters have gained union positions in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City and other districts, are doing everything they can to refurbish the image of the teachers’ unions.

Their model of “social justice unionism” has proven to be a dead end as the betrayal of the 2012 teachers strike, by Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis and Vice President Jesse Sharkey, a supporter of the ISO, showed. The CTU shut down the nine-day strike by 26,000 Chicago teachers before it could develop into a direct political confrontation with Mayor Rahm Emanuel—Obama’s former White House Chief of Staff—and the White House.

This betrayal gave Emanuel the green light to close 50 schools and lay off 3,500 teachers and school workers. As a reward, an AFT-affiliated union was given the franchise to “organize” low-paid teachers at the Chicago United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) charter schools run by one of Emanuel’s closest supporters.

Lewis and the CTU are now promoting the idea of running “independent” political campaigns in Chicago. Far from challenging the Democratic Party and advancing any independent political strategy for the working class, these campaigns fully accept the domination of society by the corporate and financial elite and are solely aimed at pressuring the Democrats to more effectively use the unions as partners in the dismantling of public education.


The way forward for teachers requires a complete break with the pro-corporate trade unions and Democratic Party and the fight to mobilize the working class as a whole against the profit system and to defend all of the democratic and social rights of the working class, including access to high quality public education.


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Below you see how other states still have democratic debates and open elections while in Maryland any politician that speaks against neo-liberals and neo-cons are censured.  We must fight for free and fair elections to make sure we can vote these neo-liberals out of office.

Remember, Common Core is not about quality education.....it is about controlling what is taught.  Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math are already standardized and we do not want our humanities and liberal arts standardized because that is what makes the US a plurality and democracy-----differing points of view.  So this is simply a policy meant to give global corporations control of what our children learn in classrooms.

We have the AFT, the CTU, and it looks like the UFT moving against these education reforms and now we need parents and communities fighting with them.  It does not matter your political stance----these policies hurt all Americans.


New York Now Leads the Way in the Movement Against Common Core- At The Polls | With A Brooklyn Accent
20 Jul 2014   | Common Core · New York Share NPE News Briefs

Something truly extraordinary has happened in the New York State Gubernatorial race-something with broad national implications.  A big money Democratic Governor, Andrew Cuomo, who thought he was going to make himself a front runner in the 2016 Presidential Race by ramming through legislation requiring teacher evaluations based on Common Core aligned tests, has generated so much opposition among teachers and parents that there are now three different Gubernatorial candidates who oppose Common Core- the Republican candidate, Rob Astorino, the Green Party candidate, Howie Hawkins, and the new and quite formidable challenger in the Democratic Primary, Zephyr Teachout.

There are two reasons this situation is “game changer”

First, it shows how much opposition to Common Core is emerging  across the political spectrum.  For the last year, Common Core supporters in the media, the corporate world, and the US Department of Education have tried to portray Common Core opponents as extremists whose views should be rejected out of hand, but the what we have in New York is a mainstream Republican, a strong candidate on the left, and a liberal Democrat all saying that Common Core is untested, undemocratic and a threat to strong, locally controlled public schools.  And this position is going to be put forward strongly from now until election day. Even if Andrew Cuomo wins the Democratic primary, he will be facing two strong anti-Common Core voices in the general election.

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July 15th, 2014

7/15/2014

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I spend time talking about labor and unions in a State of Maryland that is not union-friendly because whether Republican or Democratic voter-----it is unions that will be able to counter the power of global corporations.  Republican Party used to be a supporter of unions and needs to come back to this.  I qualify my support with the fact that we need to rebuild our union leadership and models as they are currently often tying themselves to what neo-liberal politicians tell them to do.

PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO CONSIDER THESE LABOR ISSUES NO MATTER THE SUPPORT OF UNIONS.  CITIZENS CAN SUPPORT UNIONS WITHOUT BEING A UNION MEMBER AS THE WORKPLACE LAWS WON BY THE UNIONS OF LAST CENTURY BENEFIT ALL!

Check out this Facebook page:   the movement is growing!

US Uncut
June 30 ·


The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a corporate trade deal that places profits over everything and would affect half of humanity, but the mainstream media refuses to cover it at all.

Share to break corporate media's censorship.


I want to make clear, it is not only the working class and poor being driven deeper into poverty.  The middle-class employee is feeling it as well.  I spoke of public universities now filled with part-time adjuncts and we are watching as nursing staff and other medical employees with strong middle-class salaries feeling the cuts of Affordable Care Act reform.  Post Office employees were strongly middle-class as were MTA bus drivers and all are under attack from privatization.  Doctors know they are next as their profession becomes a cog in a profit-driven system.  The problem is global corporations having complete control of our US and state economies.  Ending that power is the solution to protecting all US workers AND IT CAN BE DONE! 

WE NEED EVERYONE ENGAGED IN POLITICS----RUN OR ADVOCATE!

It is a bad sign for democracy when US universities attack the very professors who for centuries were the ones charged with holding power accountable.  Taking away tenure and making professors predominately adjunct was meant to kill political activism on US university campuses.....and is why there is silence today.  I am glad to see the movement below.






Wednesday, Feb 19, 2014, 3:10 pm

UIC Faculty Rekindle Fight for Public Education With Historic Strike

BY Rebecca Burns

University of Illinois----Chicago



As a tenured professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC), Josh Radinsky never expected to participate in a strike—or to see so many of his colleagues ready to do the same. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like a ghost town today,” Radinsky marveled as he and a group of colleagues picketed outside an empty academic building yesterday morning.

Tuesday marked the start of an unprecedented two-day walkout staged by UIC United Faculty (UICUF), the union that represents more than 1,100 tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members at the state university. Strikes by university professors are a rare occurrence: The first of its kind at UIC, the faculty strike is also one of only a handful at U.S. colleges and universities during the past five years. Since gaining recognition in 2012, though, UICUF has been locked in a stalemate with university administrators over its first contract. In December, faculty members voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike if progress wasn’t made at the negotiating table.

This week, the union made good on its threat: Faculty members walked out of their offices on Tuesday morning, fanning out into picket lines across campus. 

Though the sight of picketing professors may be novel, it’s become increasingly evident to many that the union and administration were coming to loggerheads. As Radinsky, who’s taught for 14 years in the university’s College of Education, says about the strike, “This needed to happen—I think it’s about time.” 

As it’s geared up for a strike, UICUF’s central contention has been that the university is not as cash-strapped as it claims to be. The union argues, based on reports of auditors and bond ratings, that UIC has more than $500 million in unrestricted reserves. And during the past five years, according to UICUF, even while the school has deferred faculty raises and withheld other benefits in the name of tough fiscal times, it has also increased the number of administrators by 10 percent.

Though the union says that some progress has been made during negotiations on non-economic issues such as academic freedom, the two sides are still sorely at odds about pay and benefits. Specifically, UICUF has put the penurious conditions of non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty at the center of its struggle: NTT faculty members currently make a minimum of $30,000 annually, and the union is demanding a $45,000 wage floor. Though the university offered $36,000 in its most recent counter-proposal, union negotiators say this does not constitute a good-faith negotiation.

“We don’t see that as an actual compromise,” says John Casey, a non-tenure-track lecturer who is a member of the union’s bargaining team. Casey teaches a freshman writing course and says his low wages impact his ability to give his students the attention they deserve. He says he’s had to take a string of outside jobs, including a recent one as a bicycle tour guide, to make ends meet while teaching at UIC.

For its part, UIC maintains the union’s proposals for tenure-track faculty would lead to a 23 percent hike in costs for the university; its proposals for non-tenure-track faculty would increase costs by 27 percent. “A work stoppage or strike is not in the best interest of the faculty, the University, or our students,” the university said in a statement issued last week on its website. “However, under Illinois law, educational employees in a bargaining unit without an applicable no-strike clause in a contract have a right to strike. Each professor or instructor has the right to strike, or to work.”

The UIC strike represents a new height of coordination between tenured and non-tenure-track faculty, who often bargain contracts separately and sometimes see their interests as divergent. As I’ve reported previously, UICUF has found a unique way to maintain solidarity between the two groups. In 2011, the university successfully blocked tenure-track and NTT faculty members from forming a single bargaining unit—a move union activists say was an attempt to “divide and conquer.” But the two groups have maintained the same core demands and the same bargaining team, operating as a unified group even though they must ultimately bargain two separate contracts.

Though the last major wave of faculty unionization took place in the 1970s, labor organizing in the academy is on the rise again. A surge of organizing among adjunct professors during the past year has won new, adjunct-only unions at several private universities, including Tufts University in Massachusetts. This resurgence is “a direct outgrowth of the large increase in the use of low-paid contingent faculty,” says William A. Herbert, a distinguished lecturer at CUNY and executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions.

However, he notes that the labor action at UIC is fairly unique because of the “apparent [tenure-track and NTT] faculty unity and prioritization for improving the working conditions of contingent faculty.”

Casey, who was an adjunct activist even before UIC unionized, tells In These Times that he was initially uncertain whether working with tenured professors would be the best path to improvements in his own conditions.

“I was skeptical when we first started about how the relationship would work,” says Casey. “[But] our tenure-track faculty have been amazing allies.” Among the benefits of working in conjunction with tenured faculty, he says, is that the most vulnerable faculty members may be shielded from retaliation. “I mean, my boss was out here today on the picket line,” Casey notes. “That’s pretty remarkable.” (Department heads at UIC are not included in the union, but many have expressed support for the strike.)

Many labor activists are hailing today’s walkout as a historic development whose impact could extend beyond Chicago. For example, faculty members at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the flagship campus in the state system, are currently in the midst of their own union drive. And many of those professors have their eyes on UIC as a bellwether for the rest of the state.

Given the expanding ranks of NTT faculty at Urbana-Champaign, UICUF’s ability to secure a higher wage floor for equivalent positions at UIC “would be a huge boost for us here,” Susan Davis, a professor in the Department of Communication at Urbana-Champaign and a member of the pro-union Campus Faculty Association, tells In These Times via e-mail. 

Davis also points out UIC higher-ups could be taking a hard line in contract negotiations with UICUF in an attempt to stem the tide toward faculty unionization at other campuses.  “We think the administration is playing hardball with UICUF in part because they could set a dramatic precedent for the University of Illinois as a whole,” she continues.

Spokespeople for UICUF estimate more than 1,000 faculty members participated in the first day of the strike and that about half of all classes were cancelled. More than 200 people, including students, attended a midday rally on Tuesday. The group chanted, “Chop from the Top!” and “No Contract, No Peace!” while many marched with distinctly professorial picket signs, such as “I Teach, Therefore I Am (Exploited)” and “The Inductive Method: No Contract, No Work!” 

Campus service and maintenance workers represented by SEIU Local 73, who are in the midst of their own contentious contract negotiations and could strike in March, also came out to demonstrate solidarity.

“We’re hoping that this will show us a way towards a stronger contract,” says Michael Schmitt, a member of the union’s bargaining team, who says the $13 to $17 an hour wages in Campus Parking Services aren’t enough for him and his co-workers to make ends meet. Though other campus unions have clauses in their contracts that prohibit them from striking in solidarity with faculty, many still attended pickets during their free time on Tuesday.

Faculty strikes are distinct from those at other workplaces in that they don’t actually cut into the university’s bottom line—though they can disrupt day-to-day business on campus, students have already paid tuition for the classes being cancelled. Therefore, faculty strikes are most often a short-term, symbolic tactic aimed at gaining public attention and support, says Herbert.

UIC faculty members insist, however, that their two-day walkout is a warning to the university before bargaining sessions resume again on Friday. “We’re out here today to show urgency,” says Casey. “If we don’t see any progress ... we will go out on indefinite strike.”




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Wednesday, Apr 30, 2014, 8:10 pm

College Adjuncts Union Scores Victory at Maryland Institute College of Art

BY Bruce Vail Email Print MICA adjuncts celebrate after filing their petition to unionize.   (SEIU 500)

BALTIMORE—Part-time college faculty members at the historic Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) scored an impressive win on Tuesday when they voted overwhelmingly to bring a labor union on campus for the first time since MICA’s opening in 1826.


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When I speak of shareholder class this article does a good job showing what this means.  You and I may have pension funds but with boom and bust of bubbles lose most of what we gain every five years.  This is not really being a shareholder.  Neo-liberals and neo-cons work for the shareholder class and that is at most 5% of the US population.  Also, you can see how the people controlling these global corporations are increasingly becoming the same 1% and-----the banks.

So, labor has to fight across industry and not only for one corporation.  I shout out that we do not want labor unions taking the structure of global corporations as they expand overseas to organize and that is what we are seeing.  Demand your labor union works locally and remains controlled locally.  It is this International status of unions like the AFL-CIO and SEIU that has them paired to neo-liberal pols.


UPS, FedEx owned by most of the same monopoly banks


Highlights the need for industry-wide organizing, unionizing FedEx workers
By Dave Schneider and Dustin Ponder

Jacksonville, FL – Despite ‘competing’ as the world's two largest parcel delivery and shipping companies, UPS and FedEx are owned by many of the same banks. According to NASDAQ's ownership summary of both companies, 12 of the top 20 owners of UPS and FedEx are the same banks, investment groups and financial institutions.

Both multi-billion dollar corporations are under 'institutional ownership', which means that a majority of their shares are owned by financial institutions, banks and other large monopoly corporations. According to NASDAQ's ownership summary of UPS on April 11, nearly 71% of UPS shares are owned by institutions. FedEx, a smaller company than UPS, actually had greater institutional ownership, with 83.94% of the company's shares owned by institutions, according to NASDAQ.

However, most of the largest institutional owners of both UPS and FedEx have substantial interests in both companies. For instance, Vanguard Group Inc., a Pennsylvania-based investment bank that manages nearly $2 trillion in assets, is the single-largest owner of UPS and the third largest owner of FedEx. Vanguard Group is a massive financial institution that boasts the largest ownership in many other large, well-known corporations including Apple, Exxon Mobil and Microsoft.

Primecap Management Company, based in Pasadena, California, is the largest owner of FedEx, holding nearly 19 million shares of the shipping company, according to NASDAQ. However, Primecap is also the 16th largest owner of UPS stock, holding more than 6.3 million shares, also according to NASDAQ.

In all, 60% of the top 20 owners of both UPS and FedEx are the same banks, investment groups and financial institutions.

Institutional ownership is incredibly common among the largest 500 publicly traded companies.

Despite this fact, companies like UPS stress to workers the need to “compete” against rival workers in their industry, like those at FedEx. UPS's collective bargaining agreement includes an entire article on competition that states: “The Union recognizes that the Employer is in direct competition with…other firms engaging in the distribution of express letter, parcel express, parcel delivery, and freight, both air and surface.”

The company leverages this poison pill of competition to justify subcontracting union work and undermining union standards. It creates an adversarial relationship between workers of UPS and FedEx, when in reality the owners at the top are united in extracting the most profit possible from workers at both companies. When the owners of UPS and FedEx are one in the same, ‘competition’ means which management team can exploit their workers the most and extract the most profit for the banks that own the whole industry.

A prominent argument used by UPS claims that workers must accept concessionary contracts to remain ‘competitive.’ They argue that employing tried-and-true militant tactics, like striking as the Teamsters did successfully in 1997, will result in FedEx stealing UPS’s customers. Historically, the union movement addressed this by organizing entire industries, instead of single worksites or employers. This meant one industry, one union, and at times - one contract. At its best, this method of organizing and bargaining takes wages out of competition and sets industry-wide standards to prevent subcontracting and a race to the bottom through ‘competition.’ Tactically, if the 1% owners of both brands are united, then to combat them and win, workers across the entire industry must also unite.

The attempts of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to organize FedEx have been foiled by U.S. labor law, which misclassifies workers and stifles their ability to unionize. FedEx Ground drivers are misclassified as independent contractors and are legally barred from union representation, even though in practice, they are effectively workers directly employed by the company. FedEx Express drivers are also misclassified under the Railway Labor Act (RLA), as opposed to the National Labor Relations Act. The company claims their employees are ‘airline’ workers, and thus would need to unionize nationally all at once. The RLA also places many more restrictions on workers’ rights, including the ability to strike. It also forces the workers into binding arbitration, which often serve the interest of the boss instead of the workers.

The banks and financial institutions that own both UPS and FedEx are united in their push for lower wages, part-time poverty jobs, fewer benefits and weaker contracts. To effectively fight their race to the bottom, union workers at UPS must organize FedEx workers, regardless of the legal fictions created by politicians in Washington.

Dave Schneider and Dustin Ponder are both rank-and-file Teamsters and members of Part-Time Power at UPS, which is a national group for UPS part-timers.


______________________________________________
All across the nation nurses have been out protesting the most of any union.  They are on the front-lines of the Affordable Care Act and the Obama/neo-liberal cuts of almost $1 trillion from Medicare.  We all know those cuts were allowed to be designed by health corporations and hit the patient access and health industry labor.....nurses for one.  If health industry and education industry are going to be drivers of the 21st century economy then driving these groups to poverty is not a solution for a healthy economy or quality health service.  It's not meant to be say neo-liberals----it's all about the corporate profits!

Did you know there is actually growing unemployment for nursing after decades of being told there were shortages?  So much for this 'growth' industry.  It is a combination of staff layoffs and importing immigrant labor to work in the health field that has this strong middle-class employment under attack.

In Baltimore, it is Johns Hopkins who makes a living recruiting foreign health care workers to the US to replace US workers and they do it to exploit these immigrant workers.  I have a friend who works in Hopkins' research labs from the Middle East who says she is simply used to do the most mundane of lab work-----the assembly line of lab research and has no chance of anything better.  She will leave to return home after being assured a good life in America.  Meanwhile, Baltimore has 50% unemployment in the black community and 36% in the general community.  It is these policies that have to go and these situations permeate the health industry.

We thank the nurses unions for shouting out for patients rights and fighting for labor justice!


Private equity firms are being handed all public health especially in Maryland and not coincidentally fraud and corruption is soaring!

Using the excuse of  Medicare budget cuts was the plan for dismissing staff and creating a structure for maximizing profits.  Remember, the Medicare Trust is low because these same health institutions spent a few decades robbing it through fraud.

' at a time when more health care is shifting from in-patient to outpatient services'.

The Affordable Care Act is about denying most people the ability to access the most basic of medical procedures and private equity firms say----get used to it because people will be getting the only care they can afford at home.


Nurses walk out at Quincy Medical Center

By Robert Weisman and Jessica Bartlett  | Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent   April 12, 2013


QUINCY — Hundreds of nurses marched in a drizzly chill Thursday, carrying signs, waving union flags, and drumming on plastic bins in a 24-hour strike to dramatize their complaints about staffing levels they say compromise patient safety at Quincy Medical Center.

They called in big political guns, notably US Representative Stephen F. Lynch, the South Boston Democrat who is running for US Senate, at a noon rally. They even rolled out an inflatable Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of the underworld. The private equity firm that owns the hospital’s parent, Steward Health Care System, is named after the mythical creature.

“The dog came out of retirement,” said David Schildmeier, spokesman for the Massachusetts Nurses Association, who said the hellhound’s only previous appearance was at a protest last year outside the New York headquarters of Cerberus Capital Management, which formed the Steward hospital and doctors group in 2010.

Inside the hospital, doctors and administrators said it was largely business as usual — except that they canceled elective surgeries for the day and brought in about 60 replacement nurses. They also hired trucks with billboards proclaiming the union was living in the past. Nurses stood in the street trying to block the trucks and attach their own signs to the vehicles.

“In today’s economy, nurses sitting by empty beds making $52 an hour is not feasible,” said Daniel Knell, who took over in 2011 as president of Quincy Medical Center.

Barry Chin/Globe Staff

Dr. Nissage Cadet (left) and hospital president Daniel Knell discussed the strike.

At the end of the day, nothing was resolved. Nurses were set to return to their jobs Friday morning without a contract. And there was no agreement between the two sides on the basic facts of what prompted the unusual one-day strike. While the nurses cited inadequate staffing, management insisted the union was pushing for higher wages and benefits.

The walkout took place against a backdrop of looming cuts in government funding for Medicare and Medicaid, the public insurance programs for older and low-income people.

“There is a lot of pressure being put on the hospitals,” Lynch told more than 200 nurses and their supporters. “The reimbursement rates are not there. They are being put under pressure to reduce costs, and they are looking at making nurses work longer hours with fewer nurses on staff. That’s not the way we need to be going.”

The strike got underway at 6 a.m., when unionized nurses walked out of the hospital to join nurses from Norwood Hospital, Morton Hospital in Taunton, and other Steward-owned and nonprofit hospitals who came to show their support.

“We need to bring it to the community to support the issues,” said Paula Ryan, a recovery room nurse at Quincy Medical who chairs the union local. “It’s been a long time coming. It’s been a struggle every day, nurses trying to provide the better care.”

Regulators from the state Department of Public Health showed up before dawn to make sure replacement nurses were certified and had been trained by hospital officials. A contingent of Quincy police officers — paid for by Steward — kept watch at the protest. “The financial impact for today alone is exceptional,” Knell said. He warned the hospital could be hurt further if patients chose to go to competing hospitals in Boston, Milton, or Weymouth because of what he said were false charges of safety problems.

“If the community doesn’t support the facility because of the rhetoric, it could do financial damage to us,” Knell said.

Nurses authorized the strike last month after their negotiators failed to reach agreement with Steward on a new contract. Their last contract expired before Steward acquired the bankrupt hospital in October 2011. Through an understanding between labor and management, they have been working under the terms of a separate Steward contract with union nurses at Steward-owned Carney Hospital in Dorchester.

Barry Chin/Globe Staff

A nurse from another Steward hospital waved a sign outside Quincy Medical Center to drum up support.

The union was notified in February that the hospital will close a 40-bed medical surgical floor and lay off 30 nurses who worked there along with 40 technicians, orderlies, and laborers, though the cuts have yet to take effect. Union officials contend that will aggravate already overcrowded conditions, but hospital officials insist there are often empty beds.

Steward and Cerberus executives are more interested in making money from their for-profit community hospitals than caring for patients, union members said. But hospital officials said the Quincy strike was part of a national union effort to inflate wages and keep staffing unnecessarily high at a time when more health care is shifting from in-patient to outpatient services.

“I consider nurses as our colleagues, and I value the work they do for patients,” said Dr. Nissage Cadet, chief of surgery at Quincy Medical Center. “But health care is changing, and that’s the right thing for patients. Steward came in and bailed out a hospital that was about to close in months. The quality of the institution has never been this good.”

On the picket line, however, nurses said conditions have gotten so bad that patients are being “boarded” in the emergency department for long periods while waiting to see a doctor. Department nurse Kathleen LeBretton said such episodes happen two to three times a week.

Hospital officials insisted they only board psychiatric patients in a section of the emergency room while they await transfer to other hospitals because Quincy Medical does not have psychiatric beds.

The nurses were supported by Dr. Robert Noonan, a private practice physician who sometimes works with Quincy Medical Center. “There was a patient last month who was a patient of mine in her 80s,” he said. “The closed surgical floor was full, and she was boarded in the emergency room for 18 hours.”

Hospital officials contended the nurses and their backers were making false claims in an effort to get more money.

“I’ve been a nurse myself,” Knell said. “And when I took my oath to take care of my patients, I meant it. I don’t know that I would ever walk away from the bedside of my patient for financial reasons.”


________________________________________________


These agreements are often small gains for the union members but what is most important is the citizens of the state and communities coming out to say enough is enough.  The workers cannot bear any more of the cuts designed to save money to be sent to corporate subsidy rather than people's paychecks.

For those not liking unions we need to remember everyone benefited from the policies built on union activism.  It is the only organized group which advocates for workers and I would suggest that what most people do not like about unions has more to do with bad union leaders and not the mission.  We need strong labor policy and law enforcement to reverse this wealth inequity and rebuild a healthy economy so everyone should be fighting for these issues.


We do need to see these unions fighting for the losses of the economic crash and fraud----we do not want to simply pretend we are starting again in the 1960s as union members lose these decades of accumulated wealth to corporate fraud and public malfeasance.  It is not public sector benefits and wages emptying government coffers---it is the corporate fraud and government corruption.

PROTECTING UNION MEMBER'S WEALTH IS AS IMPORTANT.   

Maryland is privatizing its Maryland Transportation Authority piece by piece and are now handing buses to VEOLA----busting wages,  benefits and unions themselves all under neo-liberal control of government.

Friday, Apr 11, 2014, 1:01 pm

With Solidarity in Spades, Vermont Bus Drivers’ 18-Day Strike Results in Big Win


BY Jonathan Leavitt

An outpouring of students, community members and allies from other unions turned out to support the strike. (All photographs by Jonathan Leavitt.)  

At 6am on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, 40 bus drivers and a dozen community members defied negative-10-degree weather to picket outside the Chittenden County Transportation Authority (CCTA) bus garage in Burlington, Vt. The action marked the beginning of nearly three-week-long transit strike over concessionary contract demands that would capture the imagination of much of Vermont and culminate in victory.

“Management misjudged us,” said CCTA driver Jim Fouts, speaking to In These Times from the impromptu victory rally on April 3. “We don’t drive together, we don’t have a lunch room to eat together,” said Fouts. But on the picket line, he says, “we turned into icicles together and we started to get to know one another.”



Traven Leyshon of the Vermont AFL-CIO leading Teamsters 597 members and supporters in chants on a negative 10 degree picket line. (Full disclosure: The author was part of the strike's solidarity committee and is a member of the Vermont Workers' Center, which supported the strike.)

After months of failed negotiations and working without a contract since June 30 of last year, drivers voted 54-0 on March 12th to reject CCTA management’s final contract offer. Drivers could not stomach monitoring disciplinary procedures that they saw as “abusive," such as being tailed by supervisors, reviewed via bus videotapes, and suspensions of as long as a month. The added demand that drivers work eight hours over the course of an exhausting 13.5-hour “split shift,” which could be extended through forced overtime to 15 hours, sparked concerns among bus drivers and community members that CCTA management’s demands risked “community safety.” 

A new generation of strikers St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Monday, a school day, and the temperature was negative 5 degrees, but at 7a.m., a steady stream of parents dropped off their students to march the picket line. Seventy-one Burlington High School (BHS) students walked the proverbial mile in another’s shoes, shoulder to shoulder with their bus drivers in a show of solidarity that harkens back to a much older, bolder labor movement. The students accompanied the bus drivers every foot of the circuitous 2.3-mile bus route from the Cherry Street picket line to the front office of the high school, where administrators greeted the students with applause and excused absences. The handmade signs students carried would paper the lobby for the duration of the strike.

“This is Vermont, and even record cold temperatures cannot keep us away from supporting the workers of our state,” says Sabine Rogers, a senior at BHS. “Students showed how much they support fair working conditions and how much they support the work that you bus drivers do each and every day.” 

“As we started to walk, we went from a fairly quiet group to chanting with a bullhorn and really getting into it,” says BHS senior Henry Prine. “One quiet student told me he doesn’t like loud noises or large crowd, but it was such an incredible experience. He fell in love with organizing in that moment.”



BHS Students on the picket line beside their CCTA drivers.

Prine detailed the prefigurative movement-building BHS students did before the strike. Through his student delegate position on the school board, Prine convinced the body to pass a resolution stating the school district would not hire scab bus drivers to cross picket lines. Prine says that as negotiations broke down and a strike appeared imminent, he began talking with other seniors ("and underclassmen too") about ways BHS students could take an even more powerful public stand. The students drafted a petition calling on CCTA management to meet the drivers’ demands, and Mayor Weinberger and the Burlington City Council to support the bus drivers.” According to Prine, the petition drew more than 500 signatures in one day’s time. “That’s more signatures than people get to keep the hockey program,” he says.

This petition would be presented to Democratic Mayor Miro Weinberger in a March 10 City Council meeting by ten BHS student organizers. Weinberger and his City Council allies had earned a reputation as anti-labor for gutting Burlington’s Livable Wage Ordinance despite popular support for policies to reduce the growing disparity of wealth.

Rogers, motivated by her experience on the strike line, would build out a student carpool in solidarity with drivers, using some dusty ward maps to collectivize students’ overlapping routes to school. In the strike’s final week, students organized teachers to host bus drivers in their classes. Striking drivers presented labor history and origin story of their job action to 80 students in four classes in the three days leading up to the strike settlement.

Rogers believes the experience transformed a culture of alienation at her school. “The solidarity and community and sense of activism that has been such a big player in this whole past few weeks—I definitely see that continuing as part of the atmosphere at BHS,” she says. 

‘This is the movement of the people’  Nine days into the strike, the drivers would face a massively heavy lift. With the backing of Mayor Weinberger, eight of the 14 members of Burlington's City Council co-sponsored a resolution calling for the contract negotiations to enter “binding arbitration.”


According to a statement in responde to the resolution by the Vermont Federation of Nurses and Healthcare Professionals (a local of AFT Vermont), binding arbitration decreases the likelihood of a favorable outcome for workers and communities by placing “all decision-making in the hands of a third party, someone with no relationship to the workplace or community directly affected by his or her decision” and who is not accountable for the results.

To speak against binding arbitration, 150 drivers and supporters marched upon the City Council's March 26 meeting, chanting “We are the union, the mighty, mighty union!" After they filed into the chamber, City Council President Joan Shannon informed the crowd that the customary public comment period at the beginning of the meeting would be delayed by a special executive session. At that point, the entire driver solidarity march assembled outside the chamber door and unleashed perhaps the most boisterous rally City Hall has ever seen.



Bus drivers, other unions and community solidarity activists lead a speak-out in Burlington City Hall on March 26.

The hallway and steps leading to City Hall’s second floor and the Mayor’s office were suffused with swelling throng of students, members of United Electric (UE), the Vermont Workers’ Center, the Vermont State Employees Association, Vermont National Education Assocaition (Vermont NEA), the newly formed Vermont Homecare United (a local of ASFCME) and many bus drivers. Loud applause and chants of "What do we want? Fair Contract! When do we want it? Now!" resounded in hallway’s marble and into the City Council chamber in a scene many would compare to the 2011 occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol by pro-union protesters.

"Where is the freedom? Where is the chance?” bus driver Noor Ibrahim, an immigrant from Somalia, asked the impromptu rally. “I was told there is a chance here in this country. Where is the right of the poor people? [CCTA management] are misusing the money of the taxpayers. From now on we have this strike as experience, we don’t need to back down.”

Noor detailed how three years ago his wife was pregnant and “the doctor said the baby wasn’t moving.” He set up an appointment on his day off so he could support his wife, even filling out the vacation paperwork as an extra precaution. Less than 24 hours before the appointment, he said, CCTA’s management told him he would have to work. “When I asked them, they said ‘We don’t care about you, we don’t care about your family all we care about is the bus moving,’ " said Noor.

As drivers continued telling personal stories like these and the raucous rally spilled over into public comment, two of the eight resolution sponsors, Karen Paul and Tom Ayers, pulled their names off. Councilor Paul was evidently moved by the driver’s stories; she introduced a successful amendment to “remove the resolution from the agenda” entirely, adding, “I’ve learned a great deal tonight. If we go forward with the agenda, I’ll remove my name from the resolution.” By the council meeting’s denouement, the focus had shifted from binding arbitration to a discussion led by progressive councilors of whether or not to sanction CCTA management.

“This is the movement of the people,” Nigerian CCTA driver Ade Fajobi told In These Times. “The voice of everybody changed the votes of City Council.”

‘Every step you take on your picket line is our step’ On Saturday, March 29, the 12th day of the strike, an all-night, 18-hour negotiation session broke down, yet again, over CCTA management’s demand to increase drivers’ split-shifts 12.5 to 13.5 hours. “They basically tossed the same pile of dung back in our faces,” said Jim Fouts. In response, hundreds of supporters gathered at Burlington City Hall, beneath a 12-foot wide bright blue banner reading “Work With Dignity” and “Fair Contract Now.” A massive University of Vermont (UVM) feeder march and brass band joined, and Vermont residents lent their voices to the drivers’ cause.



A brass band joins the picket line on the second day of the strike.

“By using your right to strike, you're creating a stronger movement of workers,” said Amy Lester, a member of Vermont NEA and the vice-president of the Vermont Workers’ Center. “Your strength is our strength. Your courage is our courage. Your momentum is our momentum. Every step you take on your picket line is our step. We all have your back, keep fighting and don’t give up.” 

To loud applause, FaRied Munarsyah, a Workers’ Center member and 20-year CCTA rider, called for “temporary replacement managers.” Michelle Gałecki of UVM’s Student Climate Culture said, “Livable jobs and public transportation is a green issue, but it’s also a human rights issue.” 

“We have been swallowing this pain for the last ten years,” said Noor Ibrahim, from the steps of City Hall, with dozens of CCTA bus drivers behind him. “We cannot live in this hostile environment. We deserve respect.” 



Chief Steward Mike Walker, driver Noor Ibrahim, and many more drivers leading the March 29 march.

Just days later, after threatening picket line-crossing scab drivers, CCTA management would finally capitulate. CCTA agreed to a contract with language limiting monitoring and discipline, reducing "forced overtime" to 13.5 hours a day instead of 15, and maintaining drivers’ split shifts at the current 12.5 hours. Though drivers conceded an increase from 13 to 15 part-time drivers, the union was able to win language preventing CCTA from using retirement or termination to reduce the entire bargaining unit slowly to part-time status. On April 3, inside the local VFW’s Eddie Laplant ballroom, drivers voted 53-6 to adopt the new contract.

 A growing movement for work with dignity According to James Haslam, director of the Vermont Workers Center, "In the current context of the attack on public transit, the public sector and the labor movement nationally, this is a tremendous victory for work with dignity that benefits all working people in the long haul.”

Indeed, the solidarity unionism that blossomed in Vermont’s late-winter snow could be—like the Chicago Teachers Union, Portland Teachers Union or Boeing Machinists—another harbinger of rebirth for rank-and-file reform movements buttressed by community solidarity.


The successful 18-day job action “really shows what happens when a few people speak out and continue to speak out towards a common goal of having a strong union,” said driver Jim Fouts in the bus terminal, in the afterglow of the victory celebration. “When I first came here the union was weak, because it was a business-as-usual union. Then some activists started saying, ‘This is wrong. We can vote on things. This is supposed to be a democracy.’ And really it was a bottom up movement to change our union.” 

According to former drivers Chuck Norris-Brown and Scott Ranney, a reform caucus with the local solidified over breakfasts in local restaurants in the spring of 2009, around a petition circulated amongst drivers that helped win stewards elected by drivers, not merely appointed by Teamsters higher-ups. The caucus, nicknamed the Sunday Breakfast Club, soon began coordinating with Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a national, independent rank-and-file movement within the Teamsters. In 2011 contract negotiations, Breakfast Club members did the shopfloor organizing and the local outreach to community members and other unions to build public support. "A seed was sown which kept the Teamster Local to the grindstone, and almost all of the community action that resulted in major support for the recent drivers strike was based on earlier Sunday Breakfast Club contacts and strategies," says Ranney, who also believes the caucus empowered rank-and-file members and paved the way for the unanimous rejection of the concessionary contract.

Tearing up, Fouts describes how Local 597 followed the advice of a Labor Notes organizer Ellen David Freidman, to build power and beat back concessions: “ ‘Turn enemies into neutrals, you turn neutrals into activists and you turn activists into leaders,’ ” he quotes. “That’s what we did.”

"We won this fair contract because of our unity and the tremendous support from our community,” says Rob Slingerland, CCTA bus driver and spokesperson for the drivers.

Many drivers, even in the midst of the victory party, said they’d already begun reciprocating the solidarity unionism they experienced from other unions during their strikes. “We were talking about solidarity with other unions before we even went over our contract today,” says Slingerland. He says that drivers have already volunteered to join marches on the boss at Vermont's HowardCenter, a counseling and medical-services center where workers are in the process of unionizing with AFSCME. “We got the help and now we’ve got to give the help," he says. "Vermont is so small, but this movement is so big."

Slingerland described an “umbrella of fear,” his co-workers used to work under and how the victorious strike changed workplace power relations and gave drivers a sense of dignity. “A lot of drivers have discovered the power that they have within as a person,” said Slingerland, “you put that together as a group and you end where we are today, with a victory.”

AFSCME is a sponsor of In These Times. Sponsors have no role in editorial content.



Striking bus drivers lead the March 29th community solidarity march with hundreds of supporters. .

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July 04th, 2014

7/4/2014

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As I listen to republican voters in Maryland shout out against Race to the Top and Common Core I have to remind them that both are republican education policies written mostly in the Bush/Cheney Administration by US corporations.  These are corporate policies and neo-conservatives are behind them.  Neo-liberals are pushing the implementation of these corporate policies.  THE PROBLEM IS CORPORATE POLS.


'but as Timothy Noah of the New Republic points out—in this case about Maryland’s Prince George County—“When 10 percent of a school district’s teachers are foreign migrants, that isn’t cultural exchange. It’s sweatshop labor—and a depressing indicator of how low a priority public education has become.”'

That sounds pretty different than what Anthony Brown and O'Malley say out on the campaign trail.  Indeed, I have spent years outing the lies regarding education achievement in Maryland as pure propaganda used to pretend these education privatization policies are providing quality.  THESE EDUCATION REFORMS LOWER QUALITY AND ACCESS THEY DO NOT RAISE THEM!  The intent is to eliminate access to strong humanities and democratic education for 90% of the US population......the entire middle/working class and poor.  That means Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland, coming from a middle-class family would not have the multiple degrees I have and the career opportunities that I have had.

Below you see how spin occurs.  Education Week places Maryland as tops on a few issues and O'Malley and neo-liberals milk those rankings for all their worth.  Look at the overall record and Maryland is ranked at the bottom for most measures in education policy and achievement.  That is because neo-liberals do not care about achievement and quality for 90% of Marylanders.  They are working only for those they deem the 'best' students......and that is 10% of Maryland citizens. 

WALL STREET'S MEDIA 'MARKETPLACE MONEY' LAUGHED THAT MOST US STUDENTS ATTENDING PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE POOR BECAUSE THE MIDDLE-CLASS HAS BEEN LOOTED OF ITS WEALTH BY MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD.
  INDEED, THE ATTACK CONTINUES AND IF YOU THINK YOUR UPPER-MIDDLE CLASS STATUS IS SAFE YOU DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THE COMING ECONOMIC CRASH!

What we see is a funding level for K-12
that appears at higher levels than in the past.  Look at the distribution-----most of that funding is going to the schools having students that are scoring the best on tests----they are identified in elementary school as the 'best' students and receive a bulk of that education funding.  Again, these students are only 10% of the population so 90% of students are receiving far less.  In Baltimore, neo-liberals and neo-cons have built a system that is far more repressive in that the tiered funding is tied to decentralizing the city's school system into 'schools as businesses' and has created individual schools most of which receive so little funding as to barely pay for toilet paper and a few that receive enough to create the best of programs within the schools.  Add to that the practice of charter schools receiving private donations and the entire public school system and equal opportunity and access is thrown out the door.  Remember, over 70% of Americans are at or near poverty and growing fast so 90% of people will be exposed to this education funding scheme.  Mike Miller of the Maryland Assembly says that state funding of public schools will stop altogether so that 90% will be thrown into the hands of private corporations for support----national charter chains.


Maryland has a second problem with funding in that with no oversight and accountability we do not know that money actually ends up where it is supposed to go.

Take a look at these charts----I am not going to post them in this blog.....just note that what looks to be good is not good for 90% of Marylanders and it is reflected with actual achievement stats which again are skewed by elected officials and the media.  Achievement in Maryland was low to begin with because of poor standards of funding and resourcing schools....it is now only slightly better and that may simply be a statistical error.

State-By-State Report Card Unearths Inequities In School Funding
Education Week

“Is school funding fair"?


A report by that name was released this week. And it answered its own question with a resounding ‘no’ … The authors find that school funding was flat between 2010 and 2011, with about half the states making cuts and 14 spending less in 2011 than in 2007, even without adjusting for inflation … Most states did not allot more money for high-poverty districts, where report authors contend that students have higher needs … All but three states spent a smaller percentage of their GDP on education in 2011.”

Table 2. Fairness Measure #1: Funding Level

Maryland ranked 8th in funding level

Maryland$11,41711
$13,1109
$1,694
$13,4858
$375$12,971

Table 3. Fairness Measure #2: Funding Distribution

Maryland ranked at the bottom for distribution

Maryland89%D
94%D
99%C
93%D
$13,656 $13,167 $12,695 $12,240
90%F

I am not bragging but I would have fallen into this high achieving category and as a student having the skills to achieve early on----I did not need the resources other children needed because I was able to find what I needed and I excelled.  That is what high-achieving students do. 

THEY DO NOT NEED THE BULK OF SPENDING.

It is those children not having the benefit of learning skills that need the funding to allow them the opportunity to achieve in later grades.  So, this funding leaves the children needing that development most without the funding and resources to reach this goal.


Let's not forget that this dynamic moved more children from poverty to graduating with high achievement in the 1950s - 1970s than in any period in history----IT WORKS AND THERE IS NO REASON TO STOP THIS FUNDING EQUITY.

Note as well that Maryland has placed so much emphasis on reading and math to the exclusion of all other courses that children are graduating today with little or no background in humanities and liberal arts----which is what neo-liberals and neo-cons want----children in Baltimore in schools deemed low performance are sitting in front of Rupert Murdoch online lessons for goodness sake.  In Baltimore this is driven by Johns Hopkins.

THIS IGNORES ALL OF THE EQUAL PROTECTION LAWS REGARDING ACCESS AND OPPORTUNITY IN EDUCATION.

Consequently, students are graduating not knowing anything about history, civics, social studies, and culture and I dare say that the methods of instruction are so bad in Maryland that even the constant emphasis on math and reading are achieving little.  Again, it is Johns Hopkin infusing the Baltimore education system with methods that do not work and that looks to be the goal.

This is what happens when a state is captured by neo-liberal and neo-con politicians-----the policy is all about corporate profit and benefit and not people's rights and what is best for them.  This is not a black, brown, or white issue.  It is not even a class issue because middle-class is facing the same discrimination.  It is a complete dismantling of a public education system for 90
% of Americans that allows for the movement of students into higher achievement and ability to access the best schools.

Funding Student Needs: Per Pupil Weights

How are schools funded under Student Based Budgeting (SBB)?

PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS14201 SCHOOL LANE, UPPER MARLBORO, MD 20772



High Performance.

Students in grades 3 to 8 receiving the “High Academic Performance” weight have scored advanced in both Reading and Math tests, while students in high school receive the weight if they have passed all HSA exams by the 10th grade.

Low Performance.Students in grades 3 to 8 receiving the “Low Academic Performance” weight have scored basic in both Reading and Math tests, while students in high school receive the weight if they have failed all HSA exams.

________________________________________

As Maryland citizens know our schools were allowed to crumble as the heyday of market boom and bust brought plenty of money to government coffers but all that money went to expand corporations like Johns Hopkins----now a global corporation and its Baltimore headquarters----and to rebuild downtown into global corporate meccas.  So, there is no excuse for crumbling school infrastructure except that neo-liberals and neo-cons do not value public education.  Remember, this happened from the Reagan/Clinton years forward----neo-liberalism took hold of the Democratic Party.

We have the bulk of public schools not receiving the funding they need and these schools are being rebuilt with a funding scheme designed specifically to hand huge profits to Wall Street along with the deed to the school building itself as the coming economic crash will cause the state and city to default on these building funds.

THE ENTIRE FUNDING SCHEME SURROUNDING PUBLIC EDUCATION IS DESIGNED TO HAND OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM TO PRIVATE CORPORATIONS WITH A DISMANTLING OF THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION 90% OF PEOPLE RECEIVE.  THERE GOES OUR SCHOOL BUILDINGS!


This is another reason for public banks -----another issue Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland supports!  Boy, no wonder corporate Maryland censured my campaign!

People were brought out to support this scheme not knowing the implications-----
and this happens because there is NO CONVERSATIONS ABOUT PUBLIC POLICY IN MARYLAND!

School districts pay dearly for bonds…ANOTHER reason for publicly-owned banks!

by Administrator Trey Bundy and Shane Shifflett, California Watch • http://www.sfgate.com • January 31, 2013

The Napa Valley Unified School District had a quandary: The district needed a new high school in American Canyon, but taxpayers appeared unwilling to take the financial hit required to build it.

So in 2009, the district took out an unusual loan: $22 million with no payments due for 21 years. By 2049, when the debt is paid, it will have cost taxpayers $154 million - seven times the amount borrowed.

...This form of borrowing has created billions of dollars in debt for taxpayers and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for financial advisers and underwriters. Voters are usually unaware of the bonds' high interest. At least one state, Michigan, has banned their use.


_________________________________________

Each year we listen to O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly tout their funding levels in Maryland and each year they fail to provide close to what is required according to legislation...the Thornton formula.  Each year they pretend to have met or exceeded a goal and that does not even bring them to what they should be doing. 
The Maryland Education Coalition works hard to demand these Thornton requirements are met, but the problem with lobbying is that a group becomes afraid to alienate pols----this makes citizens beggars for policy and not drivers of policy. The reason an education coalition has become a beggar of policy is that the entire Maryland Assembly are neo-liberals and neo-cons---not a democrat to be found. Yet every election labor and justice back the same incumbents killing their membership.  Now, how can politicians act as though they make education in Maryland a priority when all of the education advocacy groups are pushing just to get funding up to where it should have been a decade ago?  The media selects stats and makes it appear that pols are doing something when they are not.
Remember, Maryland has a record amount of money going to corporate subsidy and tax breaks......there is no shortage of revenue.....



'We are currently $700 million per year behind the original Thornton formula for state aid to public schools, and our bill is designed to prevent the State from falling further behind the funding levels necessary to achieve these goals'. 


Maryland Education CoalitionMEC Newsletter
April 1, 2013 


The 430th Maryland General Assembly Legislative Session is drawing towards an end.  This is our second newsletter, and we will publish a Session wrap-up edition in April. Please feel free to email David Beard at dbeard@acy.org if you have any questions, thoughts, or concerns.    MEC Priorities 


We worked hard on MEC’s main policy initiative for the 2013 session – to make the State actually protect public school funding. House Bill 1474 and Senate Bill 958 would directly advance our mission and our current priorities
Directly countering a very serious threat to learning – the eroding power of school funding under the current inflation  cap on State aid;  Protecting the Geographic Cost of Education Index (GCEI) so that children in higher-cost jurisdictions have fair funding.  Setting a goal for State capital aid that updates the target– set by the Kopp Commission nine years ago - to reflect current construction costs.  In the Thornton Commission process, the State very carefully considered the cost of providing an adequate education and closing achievement gaps.  We are currently $700 million per year behind the original Thornton formula for state aid to public schools, and our bill is designed to prevent the State from falling further behind the funding levels necessary to achieve these goals.  Considering the past five years of structural deficits, it was an accomplishment to win the support of well-positioned sponsors: Sen. Madaleno of the Budget and Taxation Committee and Del. Luedtke of the Ways and Means Committee, but we missed the filing deadline.  The Ways and Means Committee heard HB 1474 on March 19th.  The local school boards, the State teachers’ union, and the Budget and Tax Policy Institute provided strong support and testimony.  Baltimore City English teacher Iris Kirsch told her compelling story of how less funding in the classroom is affecting students.  To date, however, the bill has not been brought to a vote.  


_______________________________________

This is a message from a teacher to a parent in Chicago----we know this is happening in Maryland.  Teachers are so pressed to have students appear to be improving under an education regime that is the worst of possible approaches to educating students----that they will naturally look for any means possible to raise scores.  This is what pushes the best teachers out of the teaching profession and it pushes education right into the same corruption that has our corporations and government---

FORCING TEACHERS TO REACH GOALS THAT ARE UNATTAINABLE IN THE CURRENT CLIMATE WILL CREATE A CORRUPT EDUCATION SYSTEM.  WHEN THE GOAL IS SIMPLY SKEWED DATA---THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM.



CPS test cheating – focus on “bubble” kids From a parent who received this message from a teacher:

This kind of thing is happening all over, and it’s awful. This idea of concentrating on kids “on the bubble” is terrible educational practice (or malpractice…)

Begin forwarded message:

From: (teacher wishes to remain anonymous)
Date: February 12, 2014 at 9:39:42 AM CST
To: ******
Subject: NWEA

Today we had a grade level meeting about the NWEA scores for the fourth grade students at my school. We teachers were all given printouts of our students’ most recent scores: RIT bands, percentiles, the whole shebang.

Then we were instructed to highlight the students in our classes who had scored between the 37th and 50th percentile. These students, the admin informed us, are the most important students in the class; they are the ones most likely to reach the 51st percentile when students take the NWEA again in May.

Making the 51st percentile is VERY important to CPS, and thus to principals, literacy coordinators, test specialists and teachers-who-don’t-want-to-lose-their-jobs.

It might not be important to individual students, their parents or anyone else, but it is life or death in Chicago Public Schools.

We nodded, wide-eyed.  These students, our guide continued, should be your primary focus.  Make sure they get whatever they need to bring them up to that percentile. Sign them up for any and all academic programs, meet with them daily in small groups, give them extra homework, have them work with available tutors…whatever it takes.

What about the kids at the very bottom, one teacher wondered, the kids under the 20th percentile…shouldn’t they be offered more support too?  The admin squirmed a bit. Well, they don’t really have any chance of hitting the goal, so for right now, no.  There was silence.

Left unsaid was what might, could, will happen to any school that does NOT have enough students meet that magic number. No one really needs to say it. We all saw the 50 schools that got closed down last year.  We see the charters multiplying around us.  We’ve also seen the steady stream of displaced teachers come through our school doors as substitutes.  We know that we could be next.

- See more at: http://pureparents.org/?p=21149#sthash.KYq3Vl6C.dpuf

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I use reports from other cities and states because there is no education activism in Maryland....there is only collected voices by private non-profits aligned with the education privatization groups.  In Baltimore, that is the Baltimore Education Coalition----BEC, a Johns Hopkins organization of charter school, Teach for America, and Michelle Rhee supporters.  They, like this article below are the ones who bring bus loads of citizens from Baltimore to support policy that works against the interest of the communities where the policy is being implemented.  Charter and Teach for America advocates seem less worried about the tiered funding and closing of schools then they are about the right to have charters used in Baltimore as development tools.  If you think using  schools as development tools is OK since you are in the midst of needing better schools----please look at the longer term implication of these policies----they do not stop with moving the poor out of neighborhoods----these policies will effect your schools as well!

All across the country we know the stats on charters are largely fictional and skewed.  Yet, we are subjected to these reports because we have pols simply moving these privatization policies forward with no regard to citizens and the quality of education children will receive.

PLEASE STOP RE-ELECTING THESE VERY INCUMBENTS EACH ELECTION CYCLE.  IF THEY ARE NOT SHOUTING THESE EDUCATION POLICIES ARE BAD FOR EVERYONE-----THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS OR NEO-CONS AND NEED TO GO.


In Baltimore, the stats on charters are not online and when you call Baltimore School Board they pretend they do not have a problem.  All of this is illegal and has nothing to do with public education.



PSAT for 4-8-14: Let Springfield know the truth about charter schools Today, charter school advocates will be taking out their checkbooks to fund Springfield trips for folks to lobby for less oversight of and more money for charter schools.

Mayor Emanuel says that the truth about charter schools’ mediocre performance compared with regular schools is “yesterday’s debate.”

Not really. The truth always matters, and the truth about charter schools is only beginning to get front page coverage.

So, while Bill Gates’ and the Walton’s minions are trudging down to Springfield to echo the Mayor’s efforts to brush off the truth about charters, please call, fax, or e-mail your state representative and senator with the truth.

Here’s what I faxed to every member of the Illinois House:

Look at charter school evidence, not expensive PR


Yesterday, Chicago’s two major newspapers made it very clear that charter schools can be very problematic and DO NOT provide better academic results.

But today you will be approached by busloads of well-financed charter school advocates trying to spin the facts while they ask you to ignore the truth and pave the way for more money and  “freedom” for charters.

Here’s the truth about charter schools:

The Chicago Tribune reported on the drastic, regressive discipline policy of one of the largest of these charter franchises, the Noble Network of Charter Schools. Even as the Chicago Public Schools is working toward more effective, positive discipline policies that keep students in school and learning, Noble is suspending and expelling students at a vastly greater rate than the district, and making their families pay significant dollars in the process.

The Sun-Times reported that Chicago’s charter school achievement rates are no better than that of the district overall, and far worse than the more comparable district magnet schools which have similar non-selective lottery enrollment systems. This confirms years of research which has been largely ignored as corporate reformers demand an ever-expanding “marketplace” for privately-run charter schools.

PURE ASKS YOU TO :

  • Pay attention to the research, not the rhetoric about charter schools.
  • Support HB3937, (HCA1) which extends the moratorium on virtual charter schools.
  • Support HB4591, which would require charter schools to return pro-rated funds for the kids they “counsel out.
  • Support HB5328, LSCs and other accountability for charter schools.
  • Support HB5887, which puts reasonable financial accountability on virtual charter schools.
  • Support HB6005, a major charter school accountability act.
Thank you!

- See more at: http://pureparents.org/?p=21237#sthash.6dWJajMn.dpuf

0 Comments

May 24th, 2014

5/24/2014

0 Comments

 

This is not a done deal-----we can reverse this but people must become engaged in politics and stop voting the same global corporate pols into office!!!


ANTHONY BROWN, DOUG GANSLER, AND HEATHER MIZEUR WILL ALL CONTINUE THIS PRIVATIZATION AS WILL THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES.


Folks, do not allow neo-liberals play on this----'we have to teach evolution in the classroom' as an excuse for standardization of all information. This is not about bringing education quality up----it is about controlling all information students receive. So, republican states will be the first to reject this-----but remember, Common Core was started in the Bush Administration and is a very neo-con policy.

Remember, in Maryland simply reinstating Rule of Law and oversight and accountability will have State Treasury flush with revenue to fully fund all public schools.


Published Online: May 23, 2014
Okla. House Votes to Repeal Common Core Standards

By The Associated Press

Oklahoma City The Oklahoma House has voted overwhelmingly to repeal standards for math and English instruction that more than 40 states have adopted and to replace them with standards developed by the state.

The House voted 71-18 Friday to reject the Common Core standards. The bill now goes to the Senate.

Supporters say it gives the state control over its education system and prohibits the federal government from having authority over state education standards. Rep. Jason Nelson of Oklahoma City says state educators want to control Oklahoma education standards regardless of whether it makes sense to the federal government.

But opponents say the standards were developed by a group of states, not the federal government. Rep. Ed Cannaday of Porum says the measure politicizes education.


_______________________________________________
As citizens of Baltimore know, our schools are already eliminating these critical courses under the guise of integration into English Language.  We see time and again media questioning the average person on the street who doesn't know very basic history, geography, and civics. 

THIS IS HOW THIRD WORLD EDUCATION WORKS.  YOU DO NOT WANT 90% OF CITIZENS KNOWING HISTORY OR CIVICS......THAT IS FOR THE FEW SELECTED TO LEAD.

The Age of Enlightenment is a period in European history after the citizens of nations across Europe sent an aristocracy packing through revolution declaring that all people are citizens and would be educated in humanities and liberal arts so as to be well-rounded citizens.  YOU CANNOT LEAD IF YOU DO NOT HAVE PERSPECTIVE.  What neo-liberals and neo-cons are doing is trying to take the US back to the days that had 99% of people with access to only vocationally tracked education.

THIS HURTS ALL US  CITIZENS

BUT IT ESPECIALLY HURTS WOMEN AND PEOPLE OF COLOR.  Do not think this will happen to someone else----it will take all public schools.

Remember, Boston is Harvard which is Wall Street.  Baltimore is Bloomberg which is Wall Street.  We are ground zero for this Wall Street capture and we must stop it NOW.


Network H-High-S

Boston Public Schools to Eliminate History & Social Science Departments

Joseph J Ferreira, Jr.Wednesday, May 21, 2014

It was announced today that the Boston Public School department is "reorganizing" by eliminating all Departments of History & Social Sciences in all schools and folding the departments into the Department of English Language Arts as a "Humanities Department" with the currciculum determined by the ELA Common Core Standards.  Certified history department heads/chairs are being laid off and, apaprently, no certified history specialist will be hired to replace any of these teachers. This essentially eliminates history and the social sciences as one of the core academic departments in the Boston Public Schools and subordinates HSS to ELA.  This appears to be the first major metropolitan school district to reduce history and the social sciences to merely a supporting role in the education of students.

As it might appear to be a political issue, I will leave it to H-High-S network members to research this issue and the various petitions, political issues, etc. that are circulating about this matter, but as this addresses a core element of our network's raison d'etre, history education, I hope this will generate both interest and discussion.



_____________________________________________
Baltimore and across the nation are seeing Catholic churches taking the lead in charter schools and often in urban areas where they have historically played an expanded roll.  They are doing it so their religious schools can be funded with public money.  Now, I am not against private religious schools---they often provide strong education.  I want these Catholic leaders to know that Wall Street will not be allowing religious charters-----there will be no homeschooling----everyone will be forced into this autocratic school system being built by Wall Street and pushed upon us by neo-liberals. 

REMEMBER----NEO-LIBERALS ARE NOT DEMOCRATS---THEY HAVE SIMPLY TAKEN CONTROL OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.  GET RID OF THEM.


There is nothing wrong with parents of children having high learning skills wanting their children in classrooms that offer stronger learning environments.  We can have that in each school in all communities----that is how it worked for decades.  You do not have to send your child across town to find a good school because equal protection, opportunity, and access will have advanced placement classes right in your community.

So, why are these privatizers creating separate facilities?  Because they say education is wasted on 90% of students and those will only have access to vocational K-community college tracking.  You know what?  I may have fallen into this category growing up as my family was working class.  Instead, I had access to as much education I needed everywhere I moved in the country.  When the rich and corporations are not paying taxes then education must be cheapened.



THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRATIC AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EDUCATION LOOKS LIKE.


Catholic Churches need to stop supporting this charter movement you know will end badly for all.

Cash-Strapped Catholic Schools Resurrect as Charters To combat declines in enrollment and tuition revenue, they close and rent properties to charters. Many Catholic schools are transforming into charters during times of financial distress.


By Allie Bidwell May 1, 2014


Niya White began her teaching career as a member of AmeriCorps – a national community service organization that in 2003 brought her to what used to be known as Assumption Catholic School in Washington, D.C. 

After serving as a fourth-grade teacher, a fifth-grade teacher and a middle school English teacher for several years, she says the school's staff – along with those from six other inner-city Catholic schools – were told a hard story about the dire financial situation of the schools. 

"We were losing families because of the economy," White says. 

[READ: Common Core: A Divisive Issue for Catholic School Parents, Too]

At that time, the executive director of what was known as the Center City Consortium suggested that rather than closing their doors for good, the schools would submit an application to transform into charter schools as a way to remain as a school choice for the same families and communities they had begun to lose. 

Now known as the Congress Heights campus of the Center City Public Charter Schools, the school is just one example of a growing trend: Catholic schools are dropping their religious affiliations and becoming charters to have a chance of survival.

Private school enrollment has been on the decline for years, and is projected to continue to do so, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In the last 10 years alone, there have been almost 600,000 fewer students in Catholic schools, according to Christian Dallavis, senior director of leadership programs at the University of Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education. 

In the same time, more than 1,800 Catholic schools have closed their doors, he says. 

"Most of those are in urban areas and serving low-income communities," Dallavis says. "It's a real challenge our schools are facing, as the cost to educate rises and our ability to collect tuition, especially in communities that serve low-income families, doesn't rise with the cost."



"We really struggle to find ways to sustain our schools," he adds. 

In a report released Monday, Andrew Kelly and Michael McShane of the American Enterprise Institute found the schools that do choose to make the switch generally see increases in enrollment and growth in the percentage of minority students served. 

While it's good for the communities, it can be a blow for the Catholic schools. Charter schools offer for no cost some of the same benefits – uniforms, discipline and a strong focus on character development – for which parents once turned to Catholic schools. 

White says she chose to stay in the same school – regardless of its secular affiliation – because she didn't want to lose the community she had built over several years. 

"No one ever wants to lose the students and parents and families they fall in love with," White says. "You don't want to look at a building that has helped you grow developmentally [as an educator] and watch the doors get closed."

White says that since she took over as principal in 2012, the students have thrived. Student test scores have risen by double-digit percentages in one year, she says. 

[ALSO: AFT, Advocacy Group Want More Accountability for Charter Schools]

"It's the best offer in education I've ever been given, as the Congress Heights campus has been able to rock and roll," White says. 

Although more schools are making the switch (there are just 18 noted in Kelly and McShane's report) the decision is often met with strong opposition among Catholic leaders, Dallavis says. 

"There's a sense in some ways that closing your school to make it a charter is … sacrificing your core identity for money," Dallavis says. "That's something that really challenges a lot of Catholic school leaders who find themselves in a difficult financial situation."


But it's not all bad news for the Catholic schools. They may lose students to the charters that take their place, but the schools that do not make the switch in dioceses where others do change over have seen a large revenue stream, Kelly and McShane write. The properties for Catholic schools are typically owned by parishes or dioceses. When Catholic schools close and charters open in their places, they rent the property to the charter operators. In the 2011 fiscal year, the Center City Public Charter Schools paid more than $3.2 million in rent, according to the AEI report. And a large portion of that money goes to fund scholarships and tuition assistance for low-income students at the remaining Catholic schools.

And in Indianapolis, where two Catholic schools closed and reopened in 2010 as Andrew Academy and Padua Academy, $1 million of annual funding from the archdiocese is split between four schools rather than six, Kelly and McShane write. 

Catholic schools are also attempting to combat declines in enrollment and revenue by supporting policies that provide incentives for families to be able to choose the schools their children attend. That can come in the form of tax credits or voucher systems, which are championed by Republicans but criticized by Democrats and teachers' unions who say they siphon money from traditional public schools.



Dallavis says his organization works with three Catholic schools on the south side of Tucson, Arizona, that were on the verge of closing a few years ago. During the last four years, he says, the schools have seen enrollment growth of more than 25 percent, largely by mobilizing the resources the tax credits make available but also focusing on the academic quality of the schools.

He says policies that allow parents, especially those below certain income thresholds, to receive funding to send their children to the school of their choice, is a continuation of the Catholic schools' legacy to serve the poor. 

"We see those policies as essential to our families' ability to choose the best school for their children," Dallavis says. "There's clearly a lot of demand among parents for their kids to be in Catholic schools. It's just a matter of whether they can afford it and whether there are policies that make it possible for them."


Charter Schools' Expulsion Rate Vastly Higher Than... As it continues to modify strict disciplinary policies in an effort to keep students in the classroom, Chicago Public Schools released data on Tuesday showing privately-run charter schools expel students at a vastly higher rate...


____________________________________


All unbiased education research shows that Race to the Top is lowering achievement in great bounds.  It is not only the implementation----it is the model.  No academic in education would support this as all of the learning research over decades has been tossed out to simply push a policy with a goal of privatization and not achievement.  Foundations pushing Race to the Top will fund research to 'prove' success but parents, teachers, and communities know they are seeing achievement decline and the broad and detailed subject matter and disappearing.  AS ONE PARENT IN MARYLAND'S HOWARD COUNTY SHOUTED -----YOU ARE DUMBING DOWN OUR SCHOOLS.  Indeed, they are.

This is not a democratic or republican issue-----everyone hates this.  It is being pushed by global corporate pols working to create Wall Street businesses out of our public school system.  In Baltimore Johns Hopkins Education is pushing this and O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake are allowing our education schools in the area be taken with teaching this philosophy to our education students.  

STOP ELECTING GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS IN BOTH PARTIES FOLKS!!!
  THE GOVERNOR APPOINTS PEOPLE TO STATE EDUCATION THAT EMBRACES STRONG PUBLIC EDUCATION OR EMBRACES PRIVATIZATION AS IS THE CASE NOW.

This is why in Maryland you hear the Maryland State Education Association---MSEA backing this reform----they are appointed by O'Malley.  Meanwhile, American Federation of Teachers AFT----not supporting this reform.  Look as well at PTA/PTO organizations that are being co-opted into this reform.  You will not hear the Maryland PTA shout out against this even as parents across Maryland do.

The Maryland AFL-CIO joined the Baltimore Teachers Union to campaign for Anthony Brown------WHO WILL SHOVE THIS REFORM THROUGH NO MATTER WHAT!  Why would Baltimore's Teacher's Union support a Wall Street privatization that will kill the teaching profession, kill unions, and kill the opportunity children in these communities might have in the future?

BALTIMORE CITY SCHOOLS ARE BEING STACKED WITH EDUCATION PRIVATIZERS---FROM TEACH FOR AMERICA AND VISTAS----TO PRINCIPALS GRADUATING FROM THESE HOPKINS EDUCATION PROGRAMS.


This is not a done deal-----we can reverse this but people must become engaged in politics and stop voting the same global corporate pols into office!!!

News from EPI

New Report Examines Realities of Race to the Top ImplementationFailure to address root causes of achievement gaps and mismatches between states’ goals and their resources have hindered educational improvements

September 12, 2013

Race to the Top has done little to help most states close achievement gaps, and may have exacerbated them, according to a new report by Elaine Weiss, National Coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. In Mismatches in Race to the Top Limit Educational Improvement: Lack of Time, Resources, and Tools to Address Opportunity Gaps Puts Lofty State Goals Out of Reach, Weiss takes a comprehensive look at the Obama administration’s signature education initiative, and finds a few notable successes but many more shortcomings.

Race to the Top offered federal funding to states that committed to meeting a series of goals—including developing new teacher evaluation systems that rely substantially on student achievement, identifying alternative teacher certification systems, turning around low-performing schools, and substantially boosting student achievement and closing achievement gaps. In her report, Weiss examines how much progress states have made over the first three years of the grant period. With a year to go before funding is scheduled to end, states are largely behind schedule in meeting goals for improving instruction and educational outcomes.

“This report should be a wake-up call, not only to states and districts implementing Race to the Top, but to states implementing No Child Left Behind waivers and those beginning to roll out the Common Core State Standards,” said Weiss. “Real, sustained change requires time and substantial, well-targeted resources. Raising standards in schools cannot work without accompanying supports that make attaining them possible for all students, not just the most advantaged.”

Key findings of the report include:

  • States made unrealistic promises in order to secure Race to the Top funding, and have found greater-than-expected challenges to meeting their goals.
  • The narrow policy agenda and short time frame prescribed by Race to the Top have hampered state and district abilities to improve teacher quality, while failing to address other core drivers of opportunity gaps.
  • Shortcomings in Race to the Top have spurred conflicts between states, school districts, and educators that have further hindered progress.
This report draws on studies from the U.S. Department of Education and others, state and local reporting, as well as a survey of district superintendents and interviews with parents, teachers, and state and community education leaders. The report also includes in-depth case studies of two Race to the Top states, Ohio and Tennessee. Weiss’s analysis provides the most comprehensive picture to date of the successes and challenges states have faced throughout Race to the Top and the policy implications at both the state and federal level.

“This paper details the results of careful examination of implementation of Race to the Top and whether or not it has produced the game-changing improvements proponents promised,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director, AASA, The School Superintendents Association. “The report represents the first comprehensive look at the program, the challenges states face in implementing grants and key implications for moving forward, and bolsters what AASA has long advocated—while Race to the Top has some positive impact on education, there are better alternative strategies for improving education, including prioritizing existing federal statutes like ESEA and IDEA, and ensuring that all students in all public schools benefit from limited federal funding. AASA applauds Broader, Bolder for its leadership on this report and we’re grateful for the opportunity to collaborate on the project for the past two years.”

It is especially important to look at challenges posed by Race to the Top as states adopt and implement the Department of Education’s Common Core standards. States’ struggles to reliably and productively hold schools and teachers accountable, and to raise student achievement under the current standards, are likely to grow as demands increase while time, staffing, and other resources remain flat or are further diminished.


0 Comments

May 23rd, 2014

5/23/2014

0 Comments

 
'In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on compe­tition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland'.


PRIVATIZING YET ANOTHER PUBLIC SERVICE------THE FOUNDATION OF DEMOCRACY-----PUBLIC EDUCATION.

WHETHER YOU SUPPORT THE IDEA OF SEGREGATION IN EDUCATION IN EMBRACING THESE CHARTER/SCHOOL CHOICE POLICIES-----PEOPLE ARE CARING LESS ABOUT THE SEGREGATION AND SIMPLY WANT GOOD SCHOOLS IN THEIR COMMUNITIES.


One thing I do with my campaign is educate as to what is happening with these public private partnerships that corporate pols pretend are for the public good.  I've spoken of communications and the Post Office and public energy/water utilities and VEOLA/Exelon.  I am passionate about public education so much is shared on the road about the privatization of public education in Baltimore.  Wall Street chose urban communities for this push for two reasons.  One, these poor communities are desperate for jobs and to be small business owners and they are desperate for any means of quality education.  It is no coincidence that the majority of organizations supporting this privatization plan are black churches/ministers who are connecting to charter schools.  Do they know that these schools will be taken by Wall Street national charter chains that will not care about children or that the plan will end public education and equal opportunity and access?  I think many of these churches and ministers simply see a need-----and they want an opportunity to operate a small business and are not thinking what vocational K-community college means especially for people of color.  That is what is happening in Baltimore.  BUILD is a great group of people but they embrace this charter movement and they endorse the most global corporate of candidates that work against the interests of people in the communities they represent.  These pols work against all people's interests except the wealthy corporate crowd.

The Baltimore Education Coalition is only a Johns Hopkins organization that is basically a Michelle Rhee education privatization group of Teach for America, charters, school choice, and national corporate non-profits that come into a schools and take over all school policy.  If you take a look at these non-profit websites it is clear they are a standard site with very little information and absolutely no feel on local community.

THIS IS WHAT CORPORATIONS ARE USING TO TAKE OVER COMMUNITY MOVEMENT TOWARDS CHARTERS.  Remember, Hopkins = Bloomberg =Wall Street so the intent is to make businesses out of each individual school.


When I tell people Mike Miller of the Maryland Assembly said he would work to end state funding of public education I have only a case of he said-she said.  If I remind people that all corporations in Baltimore are receiving tax breaks excluding property taxes-----that corporations like Hopkins are still categorized as non-profits and pay no property taxes-----and that the Baltimore City Hall is shouting for large cuts to residential property taxes-----WHICH IS THE ONLY SOURCE OF FUNDING FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS----where is the money for funding schools going to come?  So, if we are eliminating resources locally----then is it likely that those state funds will disappear?  I encourage people to think what filling our school board with business people, Teach for America, and charter school owners means to public education.  Think about KIPP as the national charter chain that already has gone private in many states across America and is just waiting to do so in Baltimore.  Ending public funding will force schools to partner with corporations and national charter chains will be there to expand.

This Wall Street plan is happening in cities across America and the goal will be to build this private charter platform in these cities and then expand them across the state.  It only takes a few pieces of legislation to do this and we all know how quickly all of this Race to the Top and Common Core legislation passed the Maryland Assembly.  So, this is the goal and ending public education will take yet another cornerstone of democracy into the hands of Wall Street.  Controlling what people are taught is a must in an autocratic society.


I especially talk with religious communities about the intention and how Wall Street will not allow for religious teaching in the system they are developing.  The Catholic Church is taking most of its private schools to charters no doubt to receive education funding giving this charter movement more legitimacy.  I let these leaders know the intent and most are surprised but when they look at the big picture-----

THE CANARY IN THE COAL MINE IS CLEAR.  BALTIMORE'S SYSTEM OF CHARTERS AND SCHOOLS AS BUSINESSES ARE SIMPLY A PLATFORM FOR TAKEOVER BY NATIONAL CHARTER CHAINS.


Below you see an article that does a good job looking at both sides. I want to emphasize that when KIPP says the bulk of private donations go to building space for its schools----KIPP in Baltimore simply converts existing space as does most of KIPP across the country.  KIPP is already privatized in some states and as we see these charters are not public schools----they are simply getting the public money other public schools that are closed would be getting.  I have looked at how achievement data and demographic data in Baltimore schools is collected and shared and I know that KIPP in Baltimore just as around the country is allowed to hide much data under guise of 'charter' and that much of the data raises concerns.


So, KIPP is the Wall Street national charter chain of choice and heavy funding up front will end in massive profits when KIPP takes over most public schools across America.  Remember, these national charter chains are made to look good now but believe me----once they are allowed to replace our public schools----if left to move forward this could be in a decade----all of that private donation would stop, quality fall, and these schools will only be vocational tracking into what will be mostly low-wage employment.

Look at some of Baltimore's highest achieving public schools having their funding taken for advanced programs -----while achievement is truly excelling----and you see the future.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE REQUIRED TO FOLLOW THE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF EQUAL PROTECTION AS WITH ACCESS AND OPPORTUNITY.  USING CHARTERS TO SKIRT THIS IS ONE STEP TO ENDING THIS REQUIREMENT.  WHAT HAPPENS TO 90% OF AMERICANS IF EQUAL PROTECTION LAWS DISAPPEAR?  THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT DISAPPEARS-----WHERE ALL PEOPLE ARE CITIZENS DESERVING A HUMANITIES/LIBERAL ARTS BASED EDUCATION.


Below you see the direct connection with the policy of advancing this one national charter chain.  Maryland is making it harder and harder for low-income families to receive any kinds of financial aid for 4 year institutions like U of M College Park.  Below you see a scholarship directed specifically at KIPP students.  If getting a scholarship to UMD requires attending KIPP----then more parents move their children to KIPP.  College Park and Wallace Loh is the most corporate of public universities and their desire to move public K-12 education to that of corporate is no secret.  More students graduating from KIPP going to college-----WELL, THAT IS WHY!

So, these are the clues one sees to which national charter chains will get the nod as all state funding for public education moves from public schools to these charters.


UMD Forms Partnership with KIPP Charter Schools Network

August 15, 2013 
Contacts: Beth Cavanaugh, UMD, 301-405-4625
Steve Mancini, KIPP, 415-531-5396

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The University of Maryland and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) announced today the creation of a formal partnership to attract and recruit KIPP students, including those in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. regions.
Through this partnership, KIPP students will have access to existing programs and resources created for low-income or first-generation college students, as well as scholarships created through a gift from Charles Daggs, UMD class of 1969 and a KIPP Bay Area board member. This partnership will also help to support KIPP's mission to increase college competition rates for underserved KIPP students throughout the country.

"We all win by creating new opportunities and upward mobility," says University of Maryland President Wallace D. Loh. "This new partnership extends our success with talented, low-income students, and our progress closing the achievement gap. It creates a much richer learning environment for all students. Congratulations to KIPP and our alums, whose vision makes this possible."

This fall, four KIPP students – three from Baltimore City and one from Washington, D.C. – will enter UMD's freshmen class. Three of these students have been awarded full scholarships through the Daggs gift and the UMD Incentive Awards Program.

"This partnership will support our hardworking KIPP students as they work toward a degree from one of the best public universities in the country," says Richard Barth, CEO at KIPP. "We are so grateful for Chuck Daggs's generous gift, which is helping to support this partnership and providing much-needed resources to some of our top graduates who have excelled in their schools and communities, to help them attain an excellent college education."

Established in 2002, KIPP Baltimore consists of two schools – one elementary school and one middle school. In Washington, D.C., KIPP operates nine schools – one high school, three middle schools, and eight elementary schools. All schools are free, open-enrollment charter schools that offer a rigorous, college preparatory education.

KIPP Baltimore and Washington, D.C. are part of a national network of 141 KIPP public charter schools. A report released this year by independent research firm Mathematica showed that KIPP middle schools nationwide are producing positive, significant and substantial achievement gains for students in all grades and four subjects—math, reading, science, and social studies. Mathematica researchers found that KIPP achieved these academic gains with students that entered middle school with lower achievement scores than their peers in neighboring district schools.

KIPP – the Knowledge Is Power Program – is a national network of open-enrollment, college-preparatory public charter schools with a track record of preparing students in underserved communities for success in college and in life.  KIPP was founded in Houston in 1994 and has grown to 141 schools serving more than 50,000 students in 20 states and Washington, D.C.  More than 95 percent of students enrolled in KIPP schools are African American or Latino, and 86 percent qualify for the federal free and reduced-price meals program.

Read a story from The Baltimore Sun on the new KIPP partnership here.


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Keep in mind that Baltimore City schools perform so badly because they have been starved of revenue for decades.  The state underfunded them for decades, Baltimore City is left with systemic fraud and corruption that extends to the school funding....so, students of Baltimore City schools have been victims of misappropriation of education funds they were legally required to receive.  These funds mostly ended up in affluent and corporate development in Baltimore with a few corrupt education administrators joining in to the fleecing of the Baltimore education budget.

THIS IS WHY BALTIMORE CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE IN SHAMBLES AND NOT PERFORMING SO SIMPLY MAKING SURE THEY ARE FULLY FUNDED AND RESOURCED----THAT TEACHERS RECEIVE HELP IN THE CLASSROOMS IS THE ANSWER. 

What education privatizers are doing is sending all the funding, resources, and help to charters instead while most Baltimore public schools cannot even afford toilet paper.  Your warm and fuzzy community charter will be taken over by these national charter chains.

THE MIDDLE-CLASS NEEDS TO KNOW THAT THIS GOAL OF NATIONAL CHARTER CHAINS WILL NOT STAY WITH THE POOR STUDENTS----IT WILL BECOME ALL PUBLIC SCHOOLS.




March 31, 2011


New study of KIPP says the charter chain pulls in more cash than other schools
By Sarah Garland

Charter schools that post unusually high academic gains are often accused of having unfair advantages over traditional public schools, including more advantaged students and more private money at their disposal. A new and highly contentious study released today attempts to prove that the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), the largest charter-school network in the country, is inundated with both in comparison to its regular public-school counterparts and other charter schools.

The study is likely to give ammunition to charter-school critics as evidence that KIPP’s high test scores can be attributed to extra cash and a population of students that’s easier to educate.
But the study’s findings are far from conclusive: The data used in the financial analysis are limited and, according to KIPP, often inaccurate, and the methodology used to examine KIPP students is problematic.

In the national battles over whether to increase the number of charter schools, research has been a weapon wielded aggressively by both sides. (Teachers’ unions and their supporters are typically on the anti-charter side, and ed-reformer-types like Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the D.C. schools, and Joel Klein, former chancellor of the New York City schools, are on the other.)

But this study is different than many others because it accepts the fact that KIPP’s academic outcomes are indisputably extraordinary, and seeks instead to dig more deeply into “the reasons for its success.”

Most notably, the study, by Western Michigan University researchers at the Study Group on Educational Management Organizations, addresses the question of whether KIPP receives more money per student from government and private sources than other schools. Critics have wondered whether the chain’s reliance on philanthropic dollars, which have helped fund its rapid expansion, can be maintained as the network continues to grow.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at a KIPP school in Newark (photo courtesy of Gary He for Facebook)

“Are KIPP schools sustainable, and are we overly reliant on philanthropic dollars?”
are questions that KIPP also asks itself, Steve Mancini, a spokesperson for the charter network, told The Hechinger Report yesterday. The possibility that KIPP is getting more money per student than its traditional-school counterparts also raises the question of whether it’s reasonable to expect regular public schools to match KIPP’s achievements, and whether increasing the number of charter schools is an efficient use of money – an important question in tough economic times.

Here is what the study found:

In the 2007 school year, 12 KIPP school districts encompassing 25 schools received $12,731 per pupil from local, state and federal governments. Public-school districts where the KIPP schools were located received $11,960 (a few dollars more than the national public school average). Charter schools in general received much less on average: $9,579. Compared to regular public schools and other charters, KIPP received much more federal money, as well as more than double what other charters received in local funding.

Besides the extra government money that KIPP receives, the study found that the 12 KIPP school districts reported $37 million to the IRS in private donations in 2008, about $5,760 per pupil on top of the nearly $13,000 per pupil they received from the government.

“We were surprised they were getting so much,” said Gary Miron, a researcher at Western Michigan University and lead author of the study.

But KIPP vigorously rejected the study’s data after reviewing it yesterday. “This report has multiple factual misrepresentations,” Mancini said.

Mancini noted that the study focused on only 25 KIPP schools out of 58 open at the time when researchers calculated the financial data — missing schools in California, for example, which allocates much less money to charter schools than other states. According to KIPP’s own estimates, its schools receive about $9,000 to $10,000 per pupil, on average, from government sources, a figure that is closer to what other charters receive.

As for the private money, Mancini said the study does not take into account the fact that a significant part of the donations goes toward paying for buildings, often a large cost for charter schools in districts that don’t give them facilities. Miron, the study’s author, said that school districts must also pay for buildings, but Mancini countered that these costs are generally not included in per-pupil calculations.

KIPP estimates that it receives only about $2,500 per student from private sources, putting the total (including government money) at around $11,500 or $12,500 per pupil, right around what regular public schools receive. The study does not include data on the amount of private money other charter schools receive, but, keeping in mind that KIPP is the largest and best-known charter network in the country, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume KIPP does better at fundraising and that other charters receive less.

The takeaway is that KIPP’s model is not especially cheap, although KIPP does offer extras that traditional public schools don’t — like Saturday school and longer school days — for a similar amount of money.

“I think what this study does is at least give us pause about inferring that the KIPP model is a low-cost model,” said Jeffrey Henig, a political scientist at Teachers College who briefly reviewed the study before it was published, and who is affiliated with the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, housed at Teachers College. (The Hechinger Report is also located at Teachers College.)

The New York Times and Washington Post coverage of the study focused on the money issues, but articles in Education Week and Bloomberg News focused on the study’s examination of KIPP students.

KIPP uses a “no-excuses” model in which students and parents are required to sign performance contracts. Most of the students it educates are low-income. In fact, the WMU study found that KIPP enrolls higher percentages of low-income students than the public-school districts in which its schools are located.

But the idea that charter schools “cream” the best students from surrounding neighborhood schools and push out students who don’t perform well academically is a persistent critique of the schools, and the study claims to have found that the hardest-to-educate KIPP students tend to leave the schools at high rates.

A study finds that 40 percent of black males quit KIPP schools, a figure contested by KIPP (photo courtesy of brookesb)

In particular, the researchers argue that 40 percent of African-American male students, a group that generally posts lower test scores, “drop out” of KIPP schools between sixth and eighth grade. (Most KIPP schools are middle schools.)

“KIPP schools are cycling out those low-performing students, but they’re not replacing them,” said Miron. This is thought to be advantageous to KIPP for two reasons: first, the schools get to keep the funding tied to the student for that academic year even after he or she leaves the school; and, second, a school’s test score average goes up when low-performing students quit.

KIPP aggressively contests this finding, however. Mancini pointed to a study KIPP commissioned from the nonpartisan research group, Mathematica, which followed individual students over time. The WMU study used aggregated data taken as a snapshot and compared KIPP attrition rates to the rate of students who moved out of the school districts in which KIPP schools were located. Mathematica researchers said that a student leaving an individual school is not the same phenomenon as a student leaving a district.

“You have to do a school-by-school comparison,” said Brian Gill, one of the co-authors of the Mathematica report, which found that, on average, attrition at KIPP schools is about on par with schools in surrounding neighborhoods. “There’s a real danger from people drawing inferences from this that aren’t supported.”

The WMU study also assumes that all missing students have left the school and that none are held back a grade. In fact, many KIPP schools have policies that require low-performing students to repeat a grade, and they have been shown to enforce such policies at higher rates than other schools. Miron contends that students who are held back are more likely to leave, a phenomenon that we examined in a previous story. That some KIPP schools don’t replace students if they leave is true, however, and both Mancini and the Mathematica research team said they have been looking into this phenomenon.

Next week, Mathematica will release a new study on the matter, but as with most charter school studies, it’s unlikely to be the last word.


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The designation of charter schools as public is ridiculous and is done simply to allow taxpayers to pay to build the infrastructure for these national charter chains.  Once the structure is built in a city like Baltimore then all pretense to private will end and you will see these schools listed on the Wall Street stock exchange.

Charters fail to meet all the requirements of public schools as regards equal access and opportunity, public transparency with data, and any oversight of whether information provided is accurate.  It is when large institutions do extended research into these areas that all of the data becomes questionable.

We know that all of the pressure on teachers and administrators of both charter and public schools is forcing some to falsify data because it is impossible to make these changes as fast as these programs are implemented.  Remember, Bush created the No Child Left Behind laws that are now being used to close schools and force these evaluations and tests in the classrooms-----but it was unfunded and never advanced.  This push now for immediate change-----

IS A WALL STREET PLOY TO MOVE A VERY, VERY BAD PUBLIC POLICY THROUGH BEFORE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE CAN STOP IT.


I want to emphasize------some charters are good----they do indeed offer choice and do so under the rules of public education.  The problem is that those that do not are gobbling up charter growth at tremendous speed.  That is what a corporation does----expands and takes the market share.

Public or Private: Charter Schools Can’t Have It Both Ways

Email to a friend Permalink Saturday, January 05, 2013

Aaron Regunberg, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™





Are charter schools public? Are they private? Are they somewhere in between? There is a lively debate in the education community over these questions. Charter advocates claim that charter schools are, of course, public schools, with all the democratic accountability that this entails. The only difference, they say, is that charters are public schools with the freedom and space to innovate. On the other side, charter critics argue that contracting with the government to receive taxpayer money does not make an organization public (after all, no one would say Haliburton is public) and if a school is not regulated and governed by any elected or appointed bodies answerable to the public, then it is not a public school.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was recently forced to weigh in on this question. It came out with a clear verdict that charter schools are not, in fact, public schools.

The ruling came in response to a case regarding a charter school in Chicago, the Chicago Math and Science Academy (CMSA). In 2010, two thirds of CMSA’s teachers voted to unionize, in accordance with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act, which grants the employees of all public schools the right to form unions. In an attempt to invalidate this vote, charter officials filed papers with the National Labor Relations Board arguing that CMSA should not be covered under the state law because it does not qualify as a public school.

And that is precisely what NLRB concluded, ruling that CMSA is a “private entity” and is consequently covered under the federal law governing the private sector. According to the federal government, the debate is settled—charter schools are not public schools, and that is all there is to it.

Of course, that is not the whole story, because the charter movement is diverse. On the one hand, there are some community-based charter schools that are very much of and by and answerable to the communities they serve, which to me is what the word “public” is all about. On the other hand, there are corporate charter chains that have been widely criticized for discriminatory practices and unaccountable governance, which do not seem public at all. We should acknowledge these differences, and carve out a place for some nuance in the public-or-private debate.

What we should not do, however, is allow the charter movement or any particular charter chains to have it both ways. The Chicago Math and Science Academy has taken at least $23 million in taxpayer money since it formed in 2004, so it is perfectly willing to be “public” with regards to whose money it spends. But when its teachers want to join a union, now it is a “private entity.” That is hypocrisy, plain and simple. The situation is similar regarding many charter schools’ demographic situations. Chains like KIPP claim they enroll the same student populations as public schools and, like public schools, do not turn any students away. Yet widespread evidence suggests these schools use a variety of tactics, such as counseling certain students out, to create unrepresentative student bodies. In fact, a recent study found that in 2008, 11.5 percent of KIPP students were ELLs, compared with 19.2 percent of students in their local school districts, while 5.9 percent of KIPP students had disabilities, compared with 12.1 percent of students in the local school districts. Likewise, I have written a number of posts about similar irregularities found in the Achievement First charter chain, whose cadre of well-paid lobbyists could not stop stressing the “public” nature of their schools during last year’s hearings in Rhode Island.

That is not how it works. If you’re public, you’re public—you take all students, not just the ones who are easiest to educate; you offer fair protections to your employees; you play by the same rules on an even playing field. And if you’re private, stop claiming otherwise—stop saying your schools are public schools when they are not. Charters cannot have their cake and eat it too, and it’s about time we stopped letting them do so.



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Remember, Finland's education system is based on the US public education of my time----before the Reagan/Clinton education reforms and defunding of public education.  We have a successful model that allowed for the best and the brightest in the world and moved more poor students into the middle-class in history.  So, why are we moving towards something with no research, no proof of achievement, and that takes the entire public education system down?

THAT'S WALL STREET------AND THEIR POLS FOR YOU


As you see below the Finns transformed their schools system 40 years ago----that was when the US system was thriving.....
now the Finns are performing as the US used to.


Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? The country's achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework

By LynNell Hancock Smithsonian Magazine

It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.


Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.

“I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn.

Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. “You helped me,” he told his former teacher. Besart had opened his own car repair firm and a cleaning company. “No big fuss,” Louhivuori told me. “This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”

This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools.

“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”

The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide. “I’m still surprised,” said Arjariita Heikkinen, principal of a Helsinki comprehensive school. “I didn’t realize we were that good.”

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on compe­tition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”






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May 14th, 2014

5/14/2014

0 Comments

 
IF OBAMA ISN'T MAKING EXECUTIVE DECISIONS TO BUILD STRUCTURES TO END SOCIAL SECURITY----myRA, MEDICARE AND MEDICAID----THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT-----HE IS BUILDING THE STRUCTURES FOR IMMIGRATION NEEDED TO MOVE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT FORWARD.......THE HIGH-SKILLED GREEN CARD POLICY AND GENERAL LIFTING OF IMMIGRATION NUMBERS EACH YEAR.

WE LOVE IMMIGRANTS BUT NOT POLICY THAT SEEKS TO LEAVE ALL WORKERS  EXPLOITED AND IMPOVERISHED.

Do you hear your labor unions shouting and fighting this? 


As republicans pretend to fight this high-skilled immigration reform policy now fast-tracked by Obama remember again-----the immigration policy that allows high-skilled immigrants only is a republican policy so it is not the democratic party moving these bad policies forward----it is neo-liberals and republicans.



As we see below, NPR's favorite 'good billionaire' Bill Gates is now being exposed as really, really bad.  When he isn't off pushing the Trans Pacific Trade Pact that seeks to end public health and health care subsidy so his PHARMA can maximize profits----ending public education so his education tech industries and selling of computers for online lessons can maximize profits---and while at it let's garner a majority share of militarized food with the Monsanto/Blackwater corporate merger. 
WHAT A GUY.

He just keeps on taking and killing democratic societies all for market share.  Below you see he and his tech buddies are now building an immigration policy that kills not only US workers, but Hispanic workers already in the US and even the foreign grads indentured to jobs that exploit them.

Obama just used Executive privilege yet again to move immigration reform to only high-skilled immigrants and their spouses.  So, he is single-handedly putting into place the structures for Trans Pacific Trade Pact while your neo-liberal incumbents are silent. 
Remember, TPP allows global corporations to bring people from developing nations to work in the US under the conditions of that third world nation....say India or China.  This is especially true for low-wage immigrant workers but it affects high-skilled workers as well.  The path to citizenship never comes for 99% as buying your citizenship is now the policy and the cost is prohibitive.

These are not democratic policies----they are neo-liberal and neo-con policies meant only to maximize profit at the expense of further impoverishing workers.


Remember as well each time the President uses Executive privilege.....we move away from having a legislative branch.  Clinton started using this once rarely used executive practice, Bush increased the use, and now Obama is moving the most controversial polices through this practice.  If your pol is not shouting loudly about how bad this is for US democracy no matter what party does it----they are not working for you and me.

THOSE HISPANICS WHO THINK NEO-LIBERALS ARE WORKING FOR THEM----THINK AGAIN.  ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.

The foreign grads falling into these high-skill jobs become indentured into often the most menial of jobs.
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STEM labor shortages?: Microsoft report distorts reality ...www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages... 
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We had a glut of nursing staff last decade as college students were told nursing would always be a strong field for hiring.  Then, neo-liberals and neo-cons starting bringing immigrant labor over to the US to take those health care jobs.  Now we have high unemployment for nursing and professional health positions.

The American people and especially progressive labor and justice love immigrants and work to protect their rights as workers just as all workers.  Immigrants already in the US must see that flooding the labor market now while unemployment is at 36% and hirer for Hispanic workers already in the US-----that this kind of immigration policy means to hurt all workers.


So, when we hear the mantra of STEM in K-12 and we see a steady stream of health care and tech industry layoffs and grads with no jobs-----we are not getting accurate data. 

This article does a good job showing that media is deliberately misinforming the American people and research data is being skewed by corporate universities and a corporate run government.


Columnist Diane Ravitch: Why Are So Many STEM Graduates Unemployed?

By Wired Academic on July 24, 2012


By Diane Ravitch, Guest Columnist

How many times have we heard the President, the Secretary of Education, and leaders of corporate America tell us that we must produce more scientists? That there are thousands of jobs unfilled because we don’t have qualified college graduates to fill them? That our future depends on pumping billions into STEM education?

I always believe them. Science, engineering, technology and mathematics are fields critical for the future.

But why then, according to an article in the Washington Post, are well-educated scientists unable to find jobs?

Three years ago, USA Today reported  high unemployment among scientists and engineers.

Some experts in science say there is no shortage of scientists, but there is a shortage of good jobs for scientists.

Some say that the pool of qualified graduates in science and engineering is “several times larger” than the pool of jobs available for them. And here is a shocker: The quality of STEM education has NOT declined:

Despite this nearly universal support for upgrading science and math education, our review of the data leads us to conclude that, while the educational pipeline would benefit from improvements, it is not as dysfunctional as believed. Today’s American high school students actually test as well or better than students two decades ago. Further, today’s students take more science and math classes, and a large number of students with strong science and math backgrounds graduate from U.S. high schools and start college in S&E fields of study. 

Why don’t our leaders tell us the truth? Why don’t they tell us that many of our highly trained young people will not find good jobs in research labs or universities or anywhere else?

I have said before on this blog that the economy is changing in ways that no one understands, least of all me.

Over the past century, whenever reformers told the schools to prepare students for this career or that vocation, the policymakers and school leaders were woefully inadequate at predicting which jobs would be available ten years later. When the automobile was first invented, there were still plenty of students taking courses to prepare them to be blacksmiths. The same story could be repeated over the years. We are not good at prognosticating.

My own predilection is to believe that all young people should get a full and rounded general education, which will teach them to think and evaluate new information. I prefer an education that includes the usual range of disciplines, not because of tradition but because each of them is valuable for our lives.

We don’t know what the future will bring, but we all need to learn the skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. We don’t know what jobs will be available in ten or twenty years, but we all need to study history, so that we possess knowledge of our society and others; we need an understanding of science so we know how the world works; we need to be involved in the arts, because it is an expression of the human spirit and enables us to think deeply about ourselves and our world. I could make the same claims for other disciplines. The claim must be based on enduring needs, not the needs of the job market, because the only certainty is that the  job market will be different in the future.

Ravitch is a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University. This post first appeared on DianeRavitch.net

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This is a long article but a good one.  You see Mikulski's office is targeted as Johns Hopkins is the worst for exploiting foreign green card professionals.  I have a friend here in Baltimore working at Hopkins from India left with the mind-numbing tasks of repetitive lab tests garnering only a grad assistant wage and after years in this position------no hope in site for citizenship or a better job.  Hopkins is of course now a corporation so is using this Indian immigrant purely to maximize profit.  Meanwhile------unemployment across America and in Maryland is 36% and as you see US STEM grads are the largest group.

Remember, this immigration reform was never about giving justice to Hispanic workers already in the US.....neo-liberals are trying to create a third world system of deeply impoverished professional workers-----even doctors, lawyers, and Indian Chiefs are impoverished in the third world.  There is more to these policies.  When heading for the third world status those in power always surround themselves with administrative professional that are not citizens----they have no rights as US citizens and are kept in an indentured state with fear of deportation to maintain loyalty as conditions worsen in the US.  This is why you always see an exodus of immigrant workers fleeing a collapsing dictatorship. 

AUTOCRATIC SOCIETIES NEED LOTS OF PEOPLE WORKING KEY JOBS HAVING NO RIGHTS AS CITIZENS.


Meanwhile, the Hispanic workers fighting for REAL immigration reform are left with no hope for the pathway to citizenship or enforcement of labor laws to their benefit-----because abuse of labor is the goal of neo-liberals and republicans.

AS LONG AS WE HAVE NEO-LIBERALS AND NOT PROGRESSIVE LABOR AND JUSTICE RUNNING IN DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES!  STOP ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL PARTY CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES----LET'S REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!



'But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them'.


12:00 AM - May 1, 2013

It doesn’t add up A science writer questions the conventional wisdom of US-born STEM workers

By Beryl Lieff Benderly  Columbia Journalism Review


Homegrown President Obama, seen here visiting at technical college in North Carolina, supports bringing more foreign STEM workers to the US, despite high unemployment among US workers. (Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images)

In late February, Christine Miller and Sona Shah went to the Capitol Hill office of Miller’s senator, Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, to talk about immigration reform and the job market for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers. Miller, an American-born MIT grad with a PhD in biochemistry, had 20 years of research experience when Johns Hopkins University laid her off in 2009 because of funding cuts. Shah, an Indian-born US citizen with degrees in physics and engineering, had been laid off earlier by a computer company that was simultaneously hiring foreign workers on temporary visas. Proposals to increase admission of foreign stem workers to the US, Miller and Shah told Erin Neill, a member of Mikulski’s staff, would worsen the already glutted stem labor market.

According to Miller, Neill told them this is not the argument “she normally encounters on this issue.” The conventional wisdom is that tech companies and universities can’t find enough homegrown scientists to hire, so they need to import them from China and India. Neill suggested to Miller and Shah that “we would have more impact if we represented a large, organized group.”


Miller and Shah are, in fact, part of a large group. Figures from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, and other sources indicate that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are unemployed or underemployed. But they are not organized, and their story is being largely ignored in the debate over immigration reform.


The two main STEM-related proposals currently part of that debate in Congress would increase the number of temporary high-skill worker visas (also called guestworker visas), and give green cards to every foreign graduate of an American college with a master’s or PhD in a STEM field. Media coverage of these proposals has generally hewed, uncritically, to the unfounded notion that America isn’t producing enough native talent in the science and engineering fields to satisfy the demands of businesses and universities—and that foreign-born workers tend to be more entrepreneurial and innovative than their American-born counterparts. Allowing more stem immigrants, the story goes, is key to adding jobs to the beleaguered US economy.

It is a narrative that has been skillfully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups as essential to the national interest, but in reality it reflects the economic interests of tech companies and universities.

High-tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are repeatedly quoted proclaiming a dearth of talent that imperils the nation’s future. Politicians, advocates, and articles and op-eds published by media outlets—including The New York Times, Forbes, CNN, Slate, and others—invoke such foreign-born entrepreneurs as Google’s Sergey Brin or Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, as if arrival from abroad (Brin and Yang came to the US as children) explains the success of the companies they founded . . . with partners who are US natives. Journalists endorse studies that trumpet the job-creating skills of these entrepreneurs from abroad, while ignoring the weaknesses that other scholars find in the research.

Meanwhile, The National Science Board’s biennial book, Science and Engineering Indicators, consistently finds that the US produces several times the number of STEM graduates than can get jobs in their fields. Recent reports from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, and the American Chemical Society warn that overproduction of STEM PhDs is damaging America’s ability to recruit native-born talent, and advise universities to limit the number of doctorates they produce, especially in the severely glutted life sciences. In June 2012, for instance, the American Chemical Society’s annual survey found record unemployment among its members, with only 38 percent of new PhDs, 50 percent of new master’s graduates, and 33 percent of new bachelor’s graduates in fulltime jobs.
Overall, STEM unemployment in the US is more than twice its pre-recession level, according to congressional testimony by Ron Hira, a science-labor-force expert at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

And yet, a bill introduced in Congress last year that would have heeded the NIH recommendation by limiting visas for biomedical scientists was attacked in a Forbes article that suggested it could delay progress on the search for a cure for cancer by keeping out able researchers.

* * * Foreign-born scientists and engineers have, of course, contributed significantly to American society as innovators and entrepreneurs—and the nation’s immigration policy certainly needs repair. But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them.


Temporary visas allow employers to pay skilled workers below-market wages, and these visas are valid only for specific jobs. Workers are unable to take another job, making them akin to indentured servants. Universities also use temporary visas to recruit international graduate students and postdoctoral scientists, mainly from China, to do the gruntwork for professors’ grants. “When the companies say they can’t hire anyone, they mean that they can’t hire anyone at the wage they want to pay,” said Jennifer Hunt, a Rutgers University labor economist, at last year’s Mortimer Caplin Conference on the World Economy.

Research by Hira, Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis, Richard Freeman of Harvard, and numerous others has shown how temporary visas have allowed employers to flood STEM labor markets and hold down the cost of tech workers and scientists doing grant-supported university research. Wages in the IT industry rose rapidly throughout the 1990s, but have been essentially flat or declining in the past decade, which coincides with the rising number of guestworkers on temporary visas.

In his new book, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, Peter Cappelli, a human-resources specialist at the Wharton School, concludes that companies’ reported hiring difficulties don’t arise from a shortage of qualified workers, but from rigid recruitment practices that use narrow categories and definitions and don’t take advantage of the applicants’ full range of abilities. Companies so routinely evade protections in the visa system designed to prevent displacement of American citizens that immigration lawyers have produced videos about how it is done. For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.

The temporary-visa system also facilitates the offshoring of STEM work, particularly in the IT field, to low-wage countries. Outsourcing companies use the temporary visas to bring workers to the US to learn the jobs that the client company is planning to move to temp workers’ home country. The 10 firms with the largest number of H-1B visas, the most common visa for high-skill workers, are all in the business of shipping work overseas, and former Indian commerce minister Kamil Nath famously labeled the H-1B “the outsourcing visa.”


These practices have helped to reduce incomes and career prospects in STEM fields drastically enough to produce what UC Davis’s Norman Matloff calls “an internal brain drain” of talented Americans to other, more promising career opportunities such as Wall Street, healthcare, or patent law.


The proposal before Congress to automatically grant green cards to all STEM students with graduate degrees—regardless of field, origin, or quality—would exacerbate the problem of already overcrowded markets,
according to new research by Hal Salzman of Rutgers University, Daniel Keuhn of American University, and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University. It also would benefit universities facing tough financial times by dramatically increasing the allure of American graduate schools, and thus the income potential to universities. And, as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said at a 2011 hearing,
it would “further erode the opportunities of American students. Universities would in essence become visa mills.”

Academic departments generally determine how many graduate students they admit, or postdocs they hire, based on the teaching and research workforce they need, not on the career opportunities awaiting young scientists. Unlike companies, universities have access to unlimited temporary-worker visas. This allows universities to hire skilled lab workers and pay them very low, “trainee” wages. Postdocs are an especially good deal for professors running labs because they don’t require tuition, which must be paid out of the professors’ grants, notes Paula Stephan, a labor economist at Georgia State University, in her book How Economics Shapes Science.

* * * Immigrants constitute the nation’s “only shot at getting a growing economy,” because they “start more jobs than natives,” declared New York Times columnist David Brooks on Meet the Press in February. “Every additional 100 foreign-born workers in science and technology fields is associated with 262 additional jobs for US natives,” he had written in the Times, adding that “a quarter of new high-tech companies with more than $1 million in sales were also founded by the foreign-born.”

These claims, cited by Brooks and many others, arise from a body of research that has been the subject of scholarly dispute—though you’d never know it from the media coverage of this issue. The overwhelming majority of coverage presents the conclusions reached in studies like the one conducted by Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa, who publishes widely in popular media and speaks frequently on immigration issues. About a quarter of the 2,054 engineering and technology companies that responded to Wadhwa’s telephone survey said they had a “key founder”—defined as a chief technology officer or a CEO—who was foreign-born. Extrapolating from that figure, the study credits immigrant-founded companies with employing 450,000 people nationally in 2005.

But a nationwide survey by political scientist David Hart and economist Zoltan Acs of George Mason University reached a different conclusion.
In a 2011 piece in Economic Development Quarterly, Hart and Acs note that between 40 and 75 percent of new jobs are created by no more than 10 percent of new businesses—the so-called high-impact firms that have rapidly expanding sales and employment. In their survey of high-impact technology firms, only 16 percent had at least one foreign-born founder, and immigrants constituted about 13 percent of total founders—a figure close to the immigrant share of the general population. But the more fundamental problem with Wadhwa’s study, Hart and Acs suggest, is that it does not report the total number of founders at a given company, making conclusions about immigrants’ overall contribution impossible to quantify.

Evaluating the issues of statistics and sample selection that divide the academic researchers is beyond the purview of most general media, but informing readers that reputable researchers reached different conclusions is not. Though real, the immigrant role in high-tech entrepreneurship could be considerably less dramatic than many writers claim. Research on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in 1999 by AnnaLee Saxenian, for example, found that 36 percent of high-tech companies owned by Chinese immigrants were doing nothing more groundbreaking than putting together computers for sale from components.

* * * As Erin Neill, of Senator Mikulski’s staff, pointed out, no one in the immigration debate speaks effectively for US-born STEM workers. The IT world’s libertarian ethos, the relative poverty among young scientists and their unemployed and underemployed peers, and a fear of antagonizing present or potential employers all hamper efforts to organize these workers
. National scientific associations and advocacy groups sponsored by industry and universities, meanwhile, represent the interests of those who benefit from the system—tenured faculty, university administrators, and company executives, including those at companies whose donations support scholarly conferences and other association activities. These organizations and their lobbyists frame their policy arguments with feel-good abstractions about the inherent value of science and research and innovation, suggesting they are a panacea for America’s economic ills.

Which brings us to the story of Xianmin Shane Zhang, a software engineer in Minnesota. According to his LinkedIn page, Zhang earned his BS in engineering in his native China, one MS in physics at Southern Illinois University, and another in computer science at the University of Houston. His profile next lists a series of IT jobs at US companies. In 2005, 43-year-old Zhang was one of a group of workers over 40 who sued their former employer, Best Buy, for age discrimination, when the company laid them off after outsourcing their jobs. The suit ended in an undisclosed settlement.

After being laid off by Best Buy, Zhang eventually fulfilled the rosy forecast of those advocating increased STEM-worker immigration by becoming an entrepreneur, though hardly following the innovation and jobs-for-Americans script. His Z&Z Information Services in St. Paul helps US companies outsource their IT and programming needs to China. “Giving green cards to foreign students can lead to offshoring as well,” notes Norman Matloff, who uncovered this tale. That’s because young scientists and engineers from abroad get older, and wind up facing the same age discrimination and glutted market as their native-born colleagues. Why isn’t that reported, too?


______________________________________
Below you see Pritzker-----Hyatt heiress as Obama's Commerce Secretary.  She is of course the face of impoverishment and workplace abuse of many immigrant workers coming through her hotel chain.

This Senate Immigration bill was never about a pathway to citizenship or even Hispanic immigrants....it was always about a market-based immigration policy that seeks only to lower US global corporation's labor costs using immigrant labor mostly from Asian nations and mostly at the high-skilled level.  So, the millions of Hispanic immigrants who are always made the face of these immigration reforms are being relegated to the same underserved and underfunded schools as US children having little opportunity to access the higher education paths needed to land anything other than poverty jobs.

The foreign graduates that are allowed to stay are trapped in an indentured state with low wages never truly advancing from the most menial of jobs in the high-skilled areas.  At the article above made clear------there are fewer than 20% of foreign grads that go on to building viable corporations that contribute to the US economy.

The other side of this is that these foreign grads now allowed to work in US corporations are hired to work on overseas expansions of global corporations giving little value to the US economy------and in fact contributing to the stagnation of the economy by displacing thousands of US citizens graduating with STEM degrees. 

OBAMA AND NEO-LIBERALS ARE DELIBERATELY CREATING THE CONDITIONS TO KEEP UNEMPLOYMENT HIGH FOR US WORKERS AND GRADUATES LEFT WITH TONS OF STUDENT LOAN DEBT AND WITH A WALL STREET STUDENT LOAN COLLECTION PROCESS-----STUDENTS ARE NOT ONLY UNEMPLOYED----THEY ARE PREY TO WALL STREET FEES, FINES, AND HARASSMENT.


Obama to ease rules for foreign high-skilled workers

Alan Gomez, USA TODAY
5:48 p.m. EDT May 6, 2014(Photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images)


The Obama administration wants to let nearly 100,000 spouses of foreigners working in high-tech fields to work here as well in a move critics say is harmful to nearly 10 million jobless Americans.

The administration also hopes to ease the process for foreign professors and researchers who are trying to extend their stays in America.

The proposed changes, announced Tuesday by Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, come as high-tech companies and university officials continue pressing Congress and the Obama administration to ease restrictions that they say make it difficult to import highly skilled foreign workers.

Groups like FWD.us, created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech organizations are lobbying Congress for expanded visa programs they use to hire foreign workers.

Mayorkas said the proposed rule changes keep America competitive as more countries offer incentives to attract the workers.

"The proposed rules announced today provide important support to U.S. businesses while also supporting economic growth here in the U.S.," he said. "This enhances our country's competitiveness to attract skilled workers from other countries."

But critics accuse the pro-visa groups of wanting cheap labor, and say Obama should be helping U.S. citizens get jobs rather than making it easier for foreigners to expand their employment opportunities in the United States.

"The U.S. already provides businesses with 700,000 temporary guest workers every year to compete against unemployed Americans, in addition to the annual flow of 1 million permanent legal immigrants," said Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who has opposed efforts to import more foreign workers.

"The administration's unilateral decision to increase that number will hurt already-struggling American workers."

The proposed changes will be published in the Federal Register this week and then be open to 60 days of public comment before the administration can implement them.

The first proposed change affects holders of H-1B visas, which are granted to foreigners trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Current rules allow their spouses to move to the U.S. with them, but restricts them from working.

The new rule would allow the spouses of those H-1B holders who are in the process of applying for a green card to find work.

Mayorkas estimated that 97,000 people could benefit from that rule change in the first year, and 30,000 each year after.

The second proposed change focuses on a series of visa holders who come from Chile, Singapore, Australia and the Northern Mariana Islands. Current rules allow workers from those countries who have at least a bachelor's degree in a specialized field to extend their stay, but they must produce certain evidence of the success they've had. The proposed change would extend the time those workers could stay in the U.S. and allow them to use new forms of evidence to win their stay in the U.S.

Microsoft vice president of government affairs Fred Humphries said they remain committed to getting a broader immigration fix through Congress. But in the mean time, he said the two "thoughtful, commonsense changes" would help them recruit abroad.

"These changes will improve American competitiveness for the best talent in the world," Humphries said.

Critics say the changes are not being implemented for economic reasons.


"The administration's political motivation in announcing this change now is to throw a bone to the tech firms to keep them in the (comprehensive immigration reform) camp and not try to cut a separate deal with Republicans," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower levels of immigration.

Mayorkas and Pritzker said the changes will help U.S. business and universities retain the workers they need, but they stressed that Congress needs to find a broader immigration solution to address all the deficiencies in the system.

"As the president said in his State of the Union Address, we are committed to achieving a lasting solution," Pritzker said. "Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle can make this happen."


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May 13th, 2014

5/13/2014

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PLEASE DO NOT LOOK THE OTHER WAY AT ATTACKS ON CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE HAPPENING TO THE WORKING CLASS AND POOR-----THE MIDDLE-CLASS KNOWS IT TOO IS VICTIM AND THESE ASSAULTS BELOW WILL COME TO YOU AND I.


As a middle-class professional I try in my blogs to encourage the upper-middle and middle class to not be complacent with the loss of civil rights and liberties of the working class and poor in our country.  Remember, neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism is about making all but a very few impoverished so you and/or your children and grandchildren will be facing this dismantling of public justice and Bill of Rights.  Residents in cities may think its good to push out the poor but let's think how an injustice to one becomes an injustice for all.

There is a social media meme circulating that says----

the richest are telling the richer
to tell the middle-class the problem is the poor.

Well, the problem is that the richest have stolen tens of trillions of dollars from the US economy and off-shored it to overseas accounts and our entire democracy and public justice and public sector works and services are being dismantled.  This is causing poverty to soar and crime and violence with it.  So, the problem is the richest have yet to have Rule of Law brings back the loot THEY STOLE FROM GOVERNMENT COFFERS AND INDIVIDUAL'S POCKETS.

The US is now in a state of propaganda as is found in second and third world countries.  When corporations control data creation-----they will skew it to their benefit and not the public interest.  Whether at the Federal level with Obama or the State level with O'Malley, or the city level with Rawlings-Blake-----ALL DATA BEING PRODUCED IS SKEWED. Below you see how corporate media now simply reports the propaganda as news.  For people liking public radio, NPR in 2009 was doing a fine job holding power accountable.  In 2010 NPR was reorganized to corporate control and the reporters made clear that they were being forced to report 'spin'------propaganda----and not journalism.  This is what you see below.  Maryland is king of spin.....Baltimore is supreme.  The middle-class in Baltimore now have to watch as citizens are completely stripped of all rights as citizens-----they are stripped of any way to earn money and are reduced to crime to survive------and of course it is the small businesses and middle-class who become the targets of desperate attempts to get money.  The violence of poverty is skyrocketing with the huge increase in poverty in Baltimore and will come to all communities as people lose hope and embrace retaliation.  THAT IS WHAT THIRD WORLD SOCIETIES LOOK LIKE.  This is Baltimore City today.

Gentrification is a natural process.  It has happened throughout civilization.  It can be done equitably and within Rule of Law.  The State of Maryland and Baltimore lose billions of dollars each year to fraud and corruption that should be going to these communities to rebuild opportunity. 

STOP THE FRAUD AND CORRUPTION AND SEND MONEY TO DEVELOP THESE UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES FOR THE UNDERSERVED.

That does not mean the poor cannot be moved or ratios of populations cannot change.  It means that development will be fair in making sure people stay in the communities or areas they have lived all their lives.  It means that development funded with Federal, State, and local tax money be held to the laws of equal opportunity and access in housing and education.  You do not use Federal money from HUD to dismantle public housing buildings and then not provide public housing nearby.  It may not need to be public housing if grants allowed low-income and homeless to occupy these thousands of blighted houses all through these neighborhoods.

Instead, public policy written by Johns Hopkins and the Baltimore Development Corporation are set on forcefully removing all working class and poor from city center and downtown and go so far as using city services to bankrupt low-income homeowners with deliberately inflated water bills and tax bill and fines----driving these homeowners into bankruptcy and foreclosure.  As I have said----Johns Hopkins is the most neo-conservative institution in the world having Baltimore democrats pushing these undemocratic policies. 

WE NEED TO REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AWAY FROM CORPORATE CONTROL AND BACK TO THAT OF PUBLIC INTEREST AND CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES.


When a society allows the deliberate targeting of communities with fraud and corruption in order to advance development----you have an autocratic society.  Using police brutality and misconduct to scare people away and jailing people known not to have committed a crime is all intimidation tactics used in covert warfare folks.  IT IS AUTOCRATIC AND IGNORES ALL RULE OF LAW----IT DOES NOT BELONG IN AMERICA.

If you do not care if the poor lose their rights as citizens think of what is happening to the middle-class with the attack on retirements, home equity, pensions, health care coverage and Medicare, and even our children's students loans----all losing wealth from corporate fraud and government corruption.  So, this is not simply something hitting the lower class-----it pushes all of us into impoverishment and loss of rights as well.

WAKE UP======AN INJUSTICE FOR ONE WILL BECOME INJUSTICE FOR ALL!
Below you see martial law being implemented in Baltimore City because City Hall has defunded communities and community services, have put minority and women contractors and the people they hire out of business......they have eliminated the public sector and cleansed the school system of the city's middle-class killing all of the ability of families to provide support for  extended family.  City Hall allows people's homes to be stolen, police brutality to run wild, fraud and corruption to take a billion and more from city coffers each year -----money of which would help these youth.  They are doing it because the goal is to make it impossible for the working class and poor to survive in the city.  Two decades of these kinds of attacks on the poor with O'Malley and now Rawlings-Blake and the neo-conservative Baltimore City Hall has succeeded in pushing some of the poor out to the counties-----but you know what-----these people simply come back because there is no support mechanism for these families.

THE ENTIRE SOCIAL SERVICES AND SOCIAL WELFARE SYSTEM IN BALTIMORE IS BROKEN.


Mind you-----these children are living in homes torn with drug abuse and parents incarcerated on and off through life.  This children have parents having to work 3 jobs because Baltimore has a system of enslavement in lieu of wages that allow citizens to actually support themselves-----all driven by Johns Hopkins.  Closing community recreation centers where youth could go for support?  REALLY???????  The use of national corporate/ church non-profits  etc.  to replace these public community centers takes the one avenue for social gathering and organizing, developing of leadership, for political discussion out of the communities
. 

YOU MUST NOT BRING POLITICS INTO THESE NON-PROFITS AND IF WE DO-----WE WILL DECIDE WHO TALKS AND ABOUT WHAT. 


That is what Baltimore City Hall is creating in Baltimore.  It is totalitarian in its exclusion of the public and in enforcement of law.
  Mind you-----Baltimore has some fine private non-profits and community groups doing good work-----they are fighting for funds and support and these connected groups receive the bulk of funding.  The #1 institution receiving and then deciding how public policy as regards the working class and poor unfold-----JOHNS HOPKINS IS BALTIMORE'S PUBLIC SECTOR.

There's no doubt these children need to stay off the streets and especially at night.  If they have no computers, cannot afford phones, have no real parks and amusement facilities.....and now, no rec centers-----WHAT DO YOU EXPECT THESE YOUTH TO DO?

An autocratic society crushes these families with more fines, penalties, and exposure to police action.


Council approves tough new curfew for city youths Some kids would be required to be inside by 9 p.m.




By Luke Broadwater, The Baltimore Sun 8:24 p.m. EDT, May 12, 2014

A tough new curfew forcing kids off the streets as early as 9 p.m. was approved Monday by the Baltimore City Council over objections it will place too much stress on the Police Department and lead to conflicts between youths and officers.

The legislation requires one more vote for final passage, which is expected next month. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has said she'll sign it into law.

The bill's sponsor, Councilman Brandon Scott, said it is intended to keep small children from wandering the street, becoming victims of crime or suffering from neglect.

"We have to do something," Scott said. "Young children are out there. ... This bill is not about arresting kids. This bill is not about dropping crime. It's about connecting young people and their families with the services they need."

The legislation, approved 11-2, calls for youngsters under 14 to be indoors year-round by 9 p.m. Youths ages 14 through 16 could stay out until 10 on school nights and 11 on other nights.

Currently, all children and teens younger than 17 can stay out until 11 on weeknights and until midnight on weekends. Parents can be fined up to $300 if their children are caught outside after curfew.

TALK ABOUT IT: Should Baltimore enact an earlier curfew for city youths?

The legislation increases penalties to $500, though they could be waived if parents and children attend counseling sessions provided by the city.

"We all know that when children are on the streets late at night without proper supervision, they are more likely to either become the perpetrators or the victims of violent crime," Rawlings-Blake said in a statement. "I believe this legislation will be another much needed tool to help reduce the number of juveniles on the streets at night, while furthering a commitment my administration has made to provide more services for young people we know are vulnerable."

The bill was opposed the American Civil Liberties Union and criticized by the head of the city's police union. City Councilmen Carl Stokes and Warren Branch voted against it.

Branch, the chair of the council's public safety committee, said he worried the legislation would force yet another responsibility on police.

"There should be more agencies involved instead of putting the stress and pressure on our Police Department," he said.

Sonia Kumar, an attorney at the ACLU of Maryland, sent a letter to council members expressing concern about the "constitutionality and policy implications" of the curfew.

"The bill is a very significant expansion of Baltimore's curfew laws," she said. "Whatever the intention of the bill, there's no evidence that the bill will accomplish those goals. There are really significant reasons for not entangling young people and their families in the criminal justice system."

Kumar said she saw difficulties in enforcing the legislation fairly without police stopping kids and demanding they produce an ID card.

"The breadth of what is proposed is deeply troubling and a poor use of city resources," she said.

Rawlings-Blake has announced plans to expand the city's curfew center to become two year-round Youth Connection Centers for kids and teens who violate the curfew.

"We continue to invest in programs such as basketball leagues, jobs programs and rec center improvements that provide constructive alternatives for our young people," she said. "We need an all-hands-on-deck approach."

The legislation continues current exemptions from the curfew, including a provision for youths to be out late if they're with a parent, or going to or from a job, religious event, or school or recreational activity. The legislation eliminates an exception that has permitted young people to run errands for their parents.

Scott said those opposed to the bill have an outdated view of the curfew center.



_____________________________

The City of Baltimore loses a billion dollars and more to fraud and corruption, gives a billion more to subsidize global corporate wealth in development, and loses hundreds of millions more in waste and mismanagement of Federal and State funds----this is why it just cannot seem to find a million to fund strong public recreation centers for the citizens of all communities.

REMEMBER, THE GOAL IS TO PRIVATIZE ALL THAT IS PUBLIC INTO THE HANDS OF GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.

Keep in mind that these rec centers being closed are run by the communities themselves.  The goal of tying the new recreation centers to charter schools-----which will be the new school buildings identified as where these new rec centers will be built----is that charter schools will be taken private and run by corporations----yet another end of public gatherings and freedom to discuss, organize, and implement policy as the community sees fit.

Lack of funding could close Baltimore City rec centers
11:26 PM, Oct 24, 2011 5:31 AM, Oct 25, 2011 BALTIMORE -

Advocates say the 55 recreation centers around Baltimore City give kids a safe place to play and learn after school. But now there's a controversial plan that could result in the closing of many of those rec centers.

The Cecil Kirk Recreation Center doesn't look like much from the outside. In fact, the sign on the wall is missing some letters. But "The neighborhood kids come here. We're packed all the time in there," said parent Russell Smith, who also coaches basketball at Cecil Kirk.


It's packed, he says, day after day -- with kids from this neighborhood near North Avenue. "If I wasn't here I would probably be at home, but being at home wouldn't be as much fun as being at the rec," said Alanna Jones, who visits the center every day after school.

They come after school to find a safe place to play, meet friends, and get help with homework.


"There are some of us who are still barely making it and we need places like Cecil Kirk," said Angelique Jones, Alanna's mother.


A plan proposed by City Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake would shift the funding and operation of many of the city's 55 rec centers to private companies, or charities.

But a call for bids on running them brought only six viable entries. A spokesman for the mayor tells ABC-2 news that could mean many of the centers will be forced to close in just a couple months.

"If they're closing the recs where are we going to send our children to? What are we going to do?" Angelique Jones said.


Several members of city council say they have concerns with the mayor's plan.
Monday night, Councilman Bill Henry (D-4th) called for a public hearing on the issue. "This is not something that the city can step away from. We say all the time, the kids are our future. But if we mean that, we would spend money on them," he said.

Ian Brennan, a spokesman for Mayor Rawlings-Blake, said "The (privatization) plan is part of a larger effort to revitalize the rec center system. We need to stop doing things because that's the way we've always done things."


But parents outside Cecil Kirk say the old way, still works for them. "They're still serving their purpose because kids still come here," Smith said. "I could see if the kids weren't coming. That's a different story if the kids are not showing up. But the kids are here, and what are you going to do with them?"
The mayor's spokesman says they are looking for more companies and organizations to bid on running those rec centers.

The councilman's hearing, in which the head of the Rec and Parks Department is expected to come before council and explain how the plan would work, is expected to be on November 2nd.
_____________________

This is just one example of the largesse sent to national corporations for no reason at all----this case was actually racketeering.  Downtown has mortgaged tax collection for the richest of corporations and developments while the city residents send their tax revenue to maintain and build this infrastructure. 

Meanwhile, the citizens of Baltimore simply want small and small and regional businesses in their communities.....not corporations that are ground zero for massive fraud and corruption.

City Council votes on controversial Harbor Point tax plan $100M tax break is on the line for developer


UPDATED 7:07 AM EDT Aug 13, 2013
A $100 million tax break from Baltimore City is on the line for a developer who wants to rebuild a piece of land between Harbor East and Fells Point.

The most controversial part of the measure is the tax break. The city wants to use tax dollars to help finance the Harbor Point project.

The City Council took a preliminary vote on that strategy Monday night and passed it.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called this a once in a generation project that she and supporters said will eventually mean thousands of jobs and a much bigger tax base for the city.

Plans call for Harbor Point to house the new regional corporate headquarters for Exelon and other businesses. There's also supposed to be high-end living space and retail, along with a hotel.

The tax break from the city is supposed to help pay for infrastructure and other improvements to the site of the project.


But opponents of the tax break deal are skeptical about it and who it will actually benefit. Some said the developer, William Beatty, should give a portion of his tax break to the surrounding impoverished neighborhoods and city schools.

"It really doesn't contribute to uplifting the people who live in that community. This seems to be an intentional, direct benefit to a developer and all of the hangers-on of this developer, and I don't see that the residents or the surrounding community are going to benefit," concerned citizen Kim Trueheart said.

A final vote on the whole project is expected to happen Sept. 9.

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The idea that we want Baltimore's youth coming into contact with a police force known nationally as being one of the most brutal in the country----the idea we want these working class and poor families ticketed and fined right into jail===where by the way they will find a job as private prison and jail contractors now work the incarcerated for $2 an hour doing formerly public sector work-----a middle-class job.

From stop and frisk to high speed police chases ending with citizens shown to have nothing but maybe a previous arrest record----to police deliberately planting drugs and guns to create the reason for apprehension.....we all know this is happening and using yet another assault on public justice and rights on youth----is a disgrace.  It is a policy written by Johns Hopkins----the City Hall are neo-conservatives running as democrats!

Baltimore City Officer Suspended On Allegations Of Excessive Force

July 30, 2013 5:52 PM

Christie Ileto Christie Ileto joined WJZ's News Team in the fall of 2012.

BALTIMORE (WJZ)– A city police officer is suspended for allegedly using excessive force on a suspect in their custody.

Christie Ileto has more on the incident being investigated by top brass.

Sky Eye Chopper 13 caught the aftermath of a car crash Baltimore City police say started as a pursuit on Belair Road on Monday evening.

“During the course, the vehicle went off the road and collided,” said Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez.

Members of the regional auto theft task force were trying to stop a car they believed to be stolen.

“By the time I got the corner, a little young dude, a teenager, was laying on the ground,” said a witness.

Baltimore City police say it wasn’t the pursuit of the young driver, but what happened after he crashed into an auto car lot that had top brass concerned.

“They threw him on the ground, and it looked like the other police smacked him,” a witness said.

“The message is clear. We will not tolerate officers breaking the law in order to enforce the law,” Rodriguez said.

Police brass say the alleged assault occurred after the juvenile was on the ground.

And rather than a citizen filing a complaint, Rodriguez says police initiated the investigation themselves.

“While the age of the individual certainly gives us concern, we want everyone to be treated fairly and professionally,” Rodriguez said.

City police have policies that allow them to use force and instruct them when it’s appropriate to initiate a pursuit. But Rodriguez couldn’t tell us at this point if any rules had been broken.

This case is under investigation.

Police have not been able to confirm the age of the driver or his name.

The department says not only will they investigate the officer allegedly involved, but his supervisor’s actions as well.



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Congress included in the Affordable Care Act that authorities can now sedate a citizen without their consent -----setting the stage for the kinds of imprisonment of political dissidents in third world countries.  More importantly, our children are being subjected to high levels of drugging all in an effort to control behavior.  Behavior problems in city youth often come from chemical exposures like lead----from parents with drug addiction and abuse at home.  All of this is tied with poverty.  So, to reverse these problems you end poverty......NOT SUPERSIZE IT. Are these youth reacting to dosing with anti-psychotics and hyperactivity drugs in a negative way-----?   Wealth inequity is a myth.  The rich at the top simply stole tens of trillions of dollars and left massive amounts of impoverishment at the lower levels. 

SIMPLY REINSTATING RULE OF LAW AND RECOVERING THOSE FRAUDS WILL BRING RELIEF FROM POVERTY AND MANY OF THE SYMPTOMS.


If the middle-class cannot see how these policies will come to your neck of the woods----WAKE UP!!!!
Dosing children with drugs known to have serious side-effects and physical reactions is unethical and immoral.  It is policy you would find in China and Soviet Russia to control citizens.  We do not do this in America. 

THINK WHO YOU ELECTED TO OFFICE IN BALTIMORE CITY HALL AND MARYLAND ASSEMBLY TO SEE WHO IS ALLOWING THESE POLICIES TO ADVANCE.  THEY ARE NOT DEMOCRATS.


Antipsychotic Use Skyrockets in America's Poorest Children


Fran Lowry

March 12, 2013

Investigators from the University of Maryland in Baltimore found that from 1997 to 2006, use of antipsychotic medications in this population increased 7- to 12-fold, with most of the increased use associated with treatment for behavioral problems.


"Awareness of the expanding use of antipsychotic medications in the emotional and behavioral treatment of children has been noted in several studies of community-based pediatric populations," lead author Julie Magno Zito, PhD, from the University of Maryland, told Medscape Medical News.

"But," she added, "additional information is needed on trends in our neediest youth, namely according to how antipsychotic users differ in terms of their eligibility for Medicaid insurance coverage and the reasons for use. Such information would help to characterize the 'who' and 'why' of expanded antipsychotic use."

The study is published in the March issue of Psychiatric Services.

Call to Action

In the current observational, cross-sectional study, Dr. Zito and colleagues analyzed claims data for 456,315 youths aged 2 to 17 years who were continuously enrolled in Medicaid in a mid-Atlantic state from 1997 to 2006.

They focused on the use of antipsychotic drugs in the following Medicaid-eligibility categories: foster care; State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), currently known as the Children's Health Insurance Program; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), for children whose family income was at or below the federal poverty level; and Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

The researchers found that the prevalence of use of antipsychotic medications almost tripled, from 1.2% in 1997 to 3.2% in 2006.

This growth was greatest in youth enrolled in SCHIP (adjusted odds ratio [AOR], 5.9), followed by those in foster care (AOR, 4.1) and TANF (AOR, 3.6), and least among children with SSI (AOR, 2.8).

"The children on SSI are the ones we would presume to be the sickest," Dr. Zito noted. "This 6-fold increase for near-poor or SCHIP children and the 3.6-fold increase among poor or TANF children in a decade means that there was increasing use among the vast majority of enrollees and not, as one would expect, among the small minority, approximately 10%, on SSI, who qualify as the most vulnerable."

During this decade, 9320 children received a prescription for an antipsychotic. The growth in prescribing was most pronounced for pediatric bipolar disorder (AOR, 3.77) and behavioral conditions such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct disorder (AOR, 3.48).

The researchers also found that the proportion of children using antipsychotics from 1997 to 2006 increased significantly more among African Americans and Hispanics than among whites.


"These data support a call to action for outcomes research to better establish clinical appropriateness and to encourage system-wide oversight for quality assurance," Dr. Zito said.

Postmarketing surveillance studies are also needed to assess the outcomes of community-based psychiatric treatment, she added.

"This is particularly true when medications are used for off-label conditions that have minimal or no evidence of benefit relative to medications with FDA labeling for a particular diagnosis," she said.

Psychotherapy Undervalued

"This is a continuation of the important work by Dr. Zito and her group," R. Scott Benson, MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in private practice in Pensacola, Florida, told Medscape Medical News.

In this article, the researchers acknowledge that there are many factors involved in the increased rate of prescriptions for antipsychotics in children, Dr. Benson pointed out.

"There is always the suggestion that these children are given a diagnosis without the benefit of the comprehensive assessment that these psychiatric conditions demand. And there is the suggestion that the reimbursement system undervalues effective psychotherapy interventions and overvalues prescribing medication," he said.

He added that the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have developed guidelines for the evaluation of children and the use of evidence-based treatment.

"Florida and other states have developed consultation services for physicians who are providing care to these children, and we have seen a reduction in the prescription of these medications. Also, when they are prescribed, there is closer monitoring for safety and effectiveness," Dr. Benson said.

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SPEAKING OUT:

Baltimore’s Poverty Cleansing Program


by Brendan Walsh      

REMEMBER the game of musical chairs? Players circle around assembled chairs until the music stops. Then everyone rushes for a chair. There are never enough chairs for each player. The object of the game is to gradually eliminate the players until one player grabs the last chair. During the game, stronger players often knock weaker ones off the chairs. It can be a fierce game if you want to win. And you can always assure victory if you control the music and own the chairs.
      We are playing this game in Baltimore. It’s a “poverty-cleansing” game, and the poorest of the poor are gradually being eliminated. No one is assessing the ramifications of the policies that are causing people to lose life’s necessities--a home, a just living wage, a real chance at an education, and even basic food stamps.
      According to “Plan Baltimore,” more than 156,000 Baltimoreans live in poverty. That’s 24% of the city’s population struggling to hold on to the “chairs” that sustain life.
      To live a human life, to raise a family, to build a community, you need housing. You need meaningful work that pays a living wage. You need food, a sense of dignity, human recognition and respect, and hope in large doses. Poor people are being denied each of these necessities.
      Keep a close eye on our housing programs, our jobs and wages, our incarceration rates, and our educational disasters. We are developing a “zero tolerance” for poor people. We are, intentionally or through neglect, cleansing Baltimore of poor people.
      On July 3rd, when the Murphy Homes were demolished, there was rejoicing. Buildings designed to “teach the poor a lesson” were leveled in a controlled implosion. Bleak, sterile, cheap places of confinement were removed from the landscape. It also means the loss of 658 units, housing for 1,500 to 1,700 people.
      One decade ago there were 18,162 public housing units, 18,526 “other subsidized” units, and 53,002 families “still in need” in Baltimore City. These numbers represent at least 90,000 families--more than 200,000 Baltimoreans, some of the poorest of the poor--all of them desperate for housing.
      But, as we enter the new millennium, we learn that the federal government is getting out of the housing business. When they level places like the Murphy Homes, they do not build new units for the majority of those displaced. The major fact in Baltimore is demolition. Houses are bulldozed without rhyme or reason. There is no comprehensive plan. Of the 66,000 rowhouses in center city, the plan is to demolish 20% by the year 2004. Virtually all of these houses are in the poorest neighborhoods.
      Think about it. We have a poverty rate of 24%. We are in the process of tearing down all public housing and 20% of the existing affordable rowhouses. So where will the poor go?
      We are told that the private sector, through programs like Section 8, will take up the slack. It is suggested that the poor should just get themselves to the five surrounding counties and “things” will work out. The unbinding of Baltimore will save us all. Does anyone believe there is a welcome mat in Baltimore, Howard, Carroll, Anne Arundel and Harford counties?
      The reality is that the poorest of the poor will just go wandering--a forced march to nowhere. Or they will “double up” with a relative or friend, or simply hide out in whatever abandoned building is still standing.
      If you are one of our 50,000 addicts, you will not be considered “housing-ready.” Thus, you will not be eligible for any subsidized housing. If you have been arrested for some drug-related offense, you too will not be eligible for subsidized housing. The number of people not “housing-ready” grows daily.
      Look at jobs and wages in the Baltimore metropolitan area. According to the recent report of the Job Opportunity Task Force, 62% of all jobs in the region are “low skill” jobs, and two out of three of these jobs are located outside the city. A “low-skill” job means a “low-wage” job--a poverty wage. The economic boom of the ’90’s has clearly created a sharp division between “high-skilled,” well-paid workers and “low-skilled” underpaid workers, and more and more unemployed. For every “low-skill” job, there are three “low-skill” job seekers.
      Our response to this crisis is abominable. We continue to remove the necessary chairs. There are more cries for “quality of life” arrests and we build more and more prisons. We lock people up and add fuel to the fire. People get out of jail fully enraged and then return to poor neighborhoods with no skills, no hope.
      One big result of our “welfare to work” program is that young children often have no adult parent or guardian at home when they return from school, or during the summer months. At our soup kitchen, more and more children are coming without an accompanying adult.
      When we began Viva House 30 years ago, we only saw single men over the age of 50. Now women and children are 70% of our guests. By the year 2004, will it be only children coming to soup kitchens?
      We are going in exactly the wrong direction.
      It is time to end the game of musical chairs. We can’t eliminate poverty by eliminating the poor. The federal government can’t drop out of the housing business at precisely the moment people are in dire need of housing. We can’t permit 62% of our labor force to work “low-skill,” “low-wage” jobs, while a few people pile wealth on top of wealth. We need to invest in the poor. In their lives. In their schools. In their neighborhoods.
      We can either change priorities, or that big bulldozer will level all of us.
      Everyone is entitled to a chair at the table.
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The same people creating the subprime fraud are now receiving all the foreclosures and state funding for affluent development using the subprime mortgage fraud while victims remain homeless.  This article shows the plan to corner people forced into renting in a captured real estate market that will be predatory and criminal. 

This is what Baltimore City Hall thinks is great!  This is what has Baltimore youth disconnected and disenfranchised.
  These residents are what is replacing public housing and section 8-----


Last Updated: March 31, 2014

Delancey Closes on 3rd Baltimore Multifamily

By Erika Morphy | Baltimore

BALTIMORE—"We feel that Class B multifamily is the right place to invest due to the opportunity to buy properties below replacement cost that generate significant yield, and have a captive renter base," says CEO Daniel M. Kline.


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WPC is a market-based policy group pushing privatization of public education.  Baltimore is ground zero for ending public education and handing all education to corporations, creating schools as businesses and vocational tracking from K-college.  Underserved children and schools are taken first because they have no advocates protecting public education.  Once established in Baltimore---this privatized system will expand across Maryland.

Underserved schools are subjected to tiered funding---principles literally cannot afford toilet paper.  Students are placed in front of computer terminals and online lessons that do not engage and have the students feeling negatively about education.  This is what youth in Baltimore have to face as the one community source that should be positive.  Making these youth travel by buses to reach schools that offer enriched programs means students will drop out or be truant more times than necessary.  These are the public policies that create negative youth behavior.  If you do not respect a person----that person will not respect the system.


As you see below, Baltimore is one of a few that subject its schools to tiered funding -----deliberately defunding schools for underserved and special needs creating a warehousing that ends democratic public education.  These schools will simply become Wall Street charter chains---and this will expand to middle-class public schools as well.

Alonzo is a Bloomberg---Wall Street ax-man willing to dismantle American public education for corporate control and profit.
  Students drop out rates and truancy are soaring in Baltimore with Alonzo's and Wall Street's reforms.  Remember, this is Johns Hopkins policy pushed by Baltimore City Hall and Maryland Governor O'Malley---formerly of Baltimore's neo-conservative pols running as democrats in Baltimore.  Anyone in Baltimore can tell you this article below is pure propaganda.....schools are not doing well, the curricula is hated, the students are falling in performance and leaving school----ergo, the problems that extend to the streets.

What We Can Learn from Baltimore City Public Schools


By Liv Finne, Director, WPC’s Center for Education

, October, 2010 Forward-thinking school superintendents, like C.E.O. Andres A. Alonso of Baltimore City Public Schools, are reorganizing the way they run their schools, and achieving dramatic gains for students. They are implementing Fair Student Funding. This reform shifts control over school spending from central districts to individual school principals. Under Fair Student Funding, school principals are able to control the actual dollars in their school budgets, instead of having to manage a building already staffed by the district. Principals with budget power are then able to customize their programs to meet the individualized educational needs of their students. In return for this new flexibility and control, school principals are held accountable for student performance.

Thirteen other school districts across the nation have adopted Fair Student Funding, also known as Student-Centered Funding, student “backpacking,” or Weighted Student Formula.
The idea is the same. Instead of providing funding based on staffing ratios or categorical program, the money follows and funds the child, weighted according to his educational needs. The districts employing this strategy for funding schools include the following: Belmont Pilot Schools in Los Angeles, Boston’s Pilot Schools, Renaissance 2010 Schools in Chicago, Cincinnati, Clark County (which includes Las Vegas), Denver, Hartford, State of Hawaii, Houston Independent School District, New York City, Oakland, Poudre School District in Colorado, St. Paul, and San Francisco.

The story of how Baltimore City Public Schools achieved this reform is well worth telling. It started with a visionary leader: Andrés A. Alonso. He was selected as Chief Executive Officer of Baltimore City Public Schools in the summer of 2007.

Elements of Fair Student Funding

  1. Create a system of great schools led by great principals who have the authority, resources and responsibility to teach all students well.
  2. Engage those closest to the students in making key decisions that impact them.
  3. Empower schools, then hold them accountable for results.
  4. Ensure fair and transparent funding that schools can count on annually.
  5. Size the district appropriately -- schools and central office -- to address the realities of revenues and expenditures.
  6. Allow dollars to follow each student.
  7. Put the resources in the schools.
Read the full Policy Note here








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May 08th, 2014

5/8/2014

0 Comments

 
THE LEVEL OF AUTOCRATIC POLICY COMING FROM BUSH AND NOW OBAMA IS TAKING THE US TO A TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY.  NOAM CHOMSKY CALLS A CORPORATE STATE-----WHERE NEO-LIBERALS ARE TAKING THE US-----A TOTALITARIAN STATE.  YOU BETCHA!

All candidates for Governor of Maryland except Cindy Walsh will continue this global corporate takeover of our government----and MD AFL-CIO and MD AFSCME backs the

LET'S REVIEW THE SURVEILLANCE AND SECURITY SYSTEM THAT IS HOMELAND SECURITY:


Remember, the reason the US suddenly has all these people wanting death to America is that US policy went with global corporations with Reagan and Clinton and since then the IMF has attempted to capture developing world governments and economies just as they are doing now in the US.  All we have to do is run and vote for labor and justice and reinstate Rule of Law to downsize these global corporations----EASY PEASY.


Below you see University of Maryland is the nations leader in spying/surveillance/drone technology right behind Johns Hopkins University-----you can see why they kept a candidate for Governor of Maryland out of the forums taking place on their campuses-----all of Maryland public universities have refused my campaign a spot in primary debates/forums and it is because of my platform of reversing the loss of civil liberties and public justice and replacing global corporations with a domestic economy driven by small and regional businesses.  Remember, public universities were the bedrock of political discussion and debate and political freedoms.  Now, in Maryland they are locked and captured because they are corporate.

LOTS OF AUTOCRATIC CORPORATE STATE ACTIVITIES IN MARYLAND AND OUR PUBLIC UNIVERSITY SYSTEM IS GROUND ZERO FOR THIS!


Baltimore is home of Johns Hopkins which is NSA and drone extraordinaire so the first to build militarized policing would be Baltimore and NYC.  Bloomberg is tied to Hopkins so all policy is shared.  Baltimore has a population of around 650,000 people most of which are poor and working class and Hopkins through a development corporation has been forcing huge numbers of poor and working class out of city center just as with NYC with many more wanted to go.  This brings social unrest and with it all kinds of security build-up.  We just had another spy plane fly over testing for radiation (dirty bombs).  The other problem will be the really bad policy of making Baltimore a world-class Port for international shipping.  It will kill our bay and Port but that does not matter.  With international shipping comes cargo containers that may have dirty bombs.

For those living in Baltimore and Maryland we know there is a common denominator in drones, NSA surveillance, and Smart Meters of which I speak below.....JOHNS HOPKINS AND BROOKINGS INSTITUTION.  Hopkins owns VEOLA ENVIRONMENTAL that will be overseeing Smart Meters for waste and energy and profiting from recycling and tiered energy pricing.....not to mention all of that personal data heading to the super computer on the Hopkins campus.



Why is a Gigantic War-Blimp About to Fly Above the Skies of Suburban Baltimore?

Posted on January 23, 2014

One of the most disturbing and relentless trends over the past several years has been the redirection of war technology and equipment from the battlefield abroad toward domestic use in the USA. This has resulted in a militarization of police across the nation and has encouraged small towns to use Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants to purchase ridiculous items such as tanks.

Sadly, it appears this trend is only accelerating. With billions of dollars already spent, and failed wars abroad, the military-industrial complex needs to continue to generate cash flow. May as well just use it against the American people.

We find out from the Washington Post that:

They will look like two giant white blimps floating high above I-95 in Maryland, perhaps en route to a football game somewhere along the bustling Eastern Seaboard. But their mission will have nothing to do with sports and everything to do with war.

The aerostats — that is the term for lighter-than-air craft that are tethered to the ground — are to be set aloft on Army-owned land about 45 miles northeast of Washington, near Aberdeen Proving Ground, for a three-year test slated to start in October. From a vantage of 10,000 feet, they will cast a vast radar net from Raleigh, N.C., to Boston and out to Lake Erie, with the goal of detecting cruise missiles or enemy aircraft so they could be intercepted before reaching the capital.

Interesting, I didn’t realize we were at war. When was the last time cruise missiles were shot into the United States?

Aerostats deployed by the military at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan typically carried powerful surveillance cameras as well, to track the movements of suspected insurgents and even U.S. soldiers.

Defense contractor Raytheon last year touted an exercise in which it outfitted the aerostats planned for deployment in suburban Baltimore with one of the company’s most powerful high-altitude surveillance systems, capable of spotting individual people and vehicles from a distance of many miles.


The Army said it has “no current plans” to mount such cameras or infrared sensors on the aerostats or to share information with federal, state or local law enforcement, but it declined to rule out either possibility. The radar system that is planned for the aerostats will be capable of monitoring the movement of trains, boats and cars, the Army said.

“No Current plans.” What a bunch of assholes. You know they can’t wait to attach an ARGUS surveillance system to these puppies.

“That’s the kind of massive persistent surveillance we’ve always been concerned about with drones,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert for the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s part of this trend we’ve seen since 9/11, which is the turning inward of all of these surveillance technologies.”

The Army played down such concerns in written responses to questions posed by The Washington Post, saying its goal is to test the ability of the aerostats to bolster the region’s missile-defense capability, especially against low-flying cruise missiles that can be hard for ground-based systems to detect in time to intercept them.

The Army determined it did not need to conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment, required for some government programs, because it was not going to collect any personally identifiable information, officials said in their written responses to The Post.

Did the FISA court rubber stamp this assessment?

Technologies developed for battlefields — weapons, vehicles, communications systems — long have flowed homeward as overseas conflicts have ended. The battles that followed the Sept. 11 attacks have produced major advances in surveillance equipment whose manufacturers increasingly are looking to expand their use within the United States.

Aerostats — basically big balloons on strings — grew popular in Iraq and Afghanistan and also are used by Israel to monitor the Gaza Strip and by the United States to eye movement along southern border areas. Even a rifle shot through an aerostat will not bring it down, because the pressure of the helium inside nearly matches the pressure of the air outside, preventing rapid deflation.

So equipment used to control people in war zones are coming to America and there’s nothing to be concerned about?

The Defense Department spent nearly $7 billion on 15 different lighter-than-air systems between 2007 and 2012, with several suffering from technical problems, delays and unexpectedly high costs, the Government Accountability Office found in an October 2012 report.


“They are bringing this to the East Coast, close to Washington, to get the Pentagon guys and Congress to say, ‘Whoa, we could really use this,’ ” said Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute, a military think tank with ties to the defense industry. “This is re-purposing. You’ve already spent the money.”

Have fun Baltimore.

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U of M College Park is no longer a public university----it is now a lean, mean corporate machine with all the course work it takes to keep US global corporations safe around the world.  All this is important for job creation you know!

Hitler took over a nation's industry and used it for his war of expansion, taking the public's wealth to do it.  He had the largest Secret Police and surveillance service making everyone fearful that someone else was a spy.  If you cannot see that happening with these NSA scandals and the expanded roll of policing and drone/surveillance technology in Maryland-----WAKE UP!!!!!

MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD OF TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND PUBLIC MONEY USED FOR EXPANSIONS OF GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND BUILDING SECURITY/SURVEILLANCE APPARATUS!!!!  REALLY?????



University Of Md. Among Schools Developing Drone Concepts For Civilian Use

January 2, 2014 5:08 PM

COLLEGE PARK, Md. (WJZ) — Maryland airspace may not be involved, but the state’s brain power definitely is.

Alex DeMetrick reports the FAA will include research at the University of Maryland into the job of integrating drone aircraft into civilian airspace.

At the University of Maryland, they’re trying to do more than pilot drones by hand. Researchers are trying to figure out how insects navigate through the air without big brains or GPS.

Figure that out, and:

“We can leverage that to navigate and also possibly for sense and avoid technology in the national airspace,” said Dr. Darryll Pines, Dean, University of Maryland School of Engineering.

Right now, that airspace takes humans to fly in. But the FAA has selected Virginia and five other states to develop and test drone technology in unrestricted airspace–research the University of Maryland will also join in.


MEANWHILE-------


There is absolutely no way this technology will not be abused as they pretend they can simply allow these drones to fill the airways.  Do we really need drones to do the work of our Department of Natural Resources employees?  This is yet another step of taking the public out of all loops in knowing what is happening in the state and being accountable to the public. 

YOU WILL NOT HAVE ANY EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY ONCE YOU WALK OUT THE DOOR THEY TELL US-----OH REALLY????????  THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU.

Please check out this group and get involved!!!!



No Drones Maryland

Tuesday, April 2, 2013


April Days of Action Against Drones in MARYLAND Advanced Physics Laboratory, home of drones research at JHU. Maryland has been an important site of protest activity against drones, particularly protests against drones research at Johns Hopkins University.

Numerous Maryland events are planned as part of the nationwide April Days of Action Against Drones.

UPCOMING MARYLAND EVENTS

TOWSON - Friday, April 5, through Sunday, April 7, 2013 - The Politics of Drone Warfare and the University - Topics in this important 3-day conference will include:
  • "Distancing Acts: Imperial War from Counterinsurgency to Drones"
  • "The Politics of Drone Warfare and the University"
  • "Teaching the War on Terror"
Speakers will include:
  • Rashid Khalidi - Columbia University
  • Nick Turse - TomDispatch.com
  • Phyllis Bennis - Institute for Policy Studies
  • Ray McGovern - Ex-CIA White House briefer
  • Irene Gendizer - Boston University
  • Judith Le Blanc - Peace Action
  • David Swanson - War is a Crime.org
  • Jerry Lembcke - College of the Holy Cross
  • Vinay Lal - UCLA
  • Paul Joseph - Tufts University
  • Carolyn Eisenberg - Hofstra University
  • John Prados - National Security Archive
Friday Keynote Session: Friday evening, April 5, St. John's Methodist Church, 2640 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, MD. Keynote speakers: Col. Ann Wright, former Army officer and State Department diplomat; Alfred McCoy, University of Wisconsin.

All Saturday, April 6 and Sunday April 7 sessions will be held at the College of Liberal Arts Building, Towson University, 8000 York Road, Towson, MD 21252

For additional details see: Historians Against the War

BALTIMORE - Friday, April 12, through Sunday, April 14, 2013 - Exhibit: Drone Warfare Exhibit and Luminous Light Intervention . . . Tuesday, April 16, 2013 - Exhibit: Workshop on the Legal, Political, and Ethical Implications of Militarized Drones . . . Tuesday, April 16, 2013 - Exhibit: "DRONECOMING" - Mobile drone warfare exhibition at Johns Hopkins University homecoming events.

(Add additional Illinois events to the master list of national April Days of Action actions.)


What about YOU? Become part of the No Drones movement!
Read about ALL the ways YOU can be involved  in the April Days of Action Against Drones!


____________________________________________

Do you think a government willing to allow massive fracking and exporting raw energy and global agriculture that drain and contaminate all of our fresh water is really concerned with energy conservation?  What a LOL thought!

This would have once been thought a conspiracy theory but we now see this article as mainstream as people across the country now believe that these Smart Meters are only meant to ration and restrict the public as needed.  I've spoken of the intent to end subsidy and tie product to what can be afforded.  As this article indicates, it goes further than that.  Wall Street and corporations will be allowed access to your energy consumption data for bill collection purposes----are you at home when not at work?  Will I hire someone who can only afford to keep energy running part of the day or will that make someone easily exploited?

This is not hyperbole.....it is in fact what a totalitarian society would do.  Control of every aspect of your life.

THIS IS WHY SNOWDEN OUTED THE NSA-------AS HE SAID -----YOU WILL NOT HAVE AN AVENUE OF PRIVACY AT ALL IF THIS IS LEFT UNCHECKED!


I included an article from the UK because it needs to be seen as a global effort.  There is no shortage of natural gas or electricity.....so the reasons are a ploy.




Smart meters could be 'spy in the home'

Smart meters could become a 'spy in the home' by allowing social workers and health authorities to monitor households, adding to concern at Britain's surveillance society. Smart meters will eliminate the need to take readings from traditional electricity and gas meters.

10:30AM BST 11 Oct 2009 UK Telegraph



The devices, which the government plans to install in every home by 2020, will also tell energy firms what sort of appliances are being used, allowing companies to target customers who do not reduce their energy consumption.

Privacy campaigners have expressed horror at the proposals, which come as two million homes have 'spy' devices fitted to their rubbish bins by councils who record how much residents are recycling.

The government wants every home in Britain to have smart meters, which give users information on how to save energy and send real-time data direct to utility companies, eliminating the need for customers to stay at home for meter readings or to receive estimated bills.

The devices also pave the way for a national 'smart grid', backed by David Cameron's Conservatives, which would use the data to manage national demand more efficiently and advise households when it is cheapest to switch on appliances.

In its impact assessment, however, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) says there "is theoretically scope... for using the smart metering communications infrastructure to enable a variety of other services, such as monitoring of vulnerable householders by health authorities or social services departments."

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It adds: "Information from smart meters could also make it possible for a supplier to determine when electricity or gas was being used in a property and, to a degree, the types of technology that were being used within the property. This could be used to target energy efficiency advice and offers of measures, social programmes etc to householders."

Doretta Cocks, founder of the Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection, said: "This is Orwellian. We're already under surveillance for what we put outside the home in bins and now we could be watched for what we're doing inside as well.

"Most of us are happy to reduce our energy consumption or reduce waste but these measures always seem to come at the expense of our privacy. If I want advice on energy efficiency I will ask for it."

Guy Herbert, general secretary of NO2ID, said: "Information from smart meters might be useful to energy providers and perhaps even their customers, but there's no reason for any public authority to have access to it – unless they've a warrant to do so.

"This document is a prime example of government efforts to shoehorn data sharing and feature creep into every new policy. For example, it suggests that NHS or social services could use the system to monitor 'vulnerable

householders', or that companies could use the system to spam customers with adverts for their services – having paid the government for the privilege, no doubt."


The DECC document adds households could even have their power to some appliances turned off remotely to help the national grid if there is too much demand. It says: "In terms of potentially intrusive non-physical behaviour unrelated to data, smart metering potentially offers scope for remote intervention such as dynamic demand management, which is designed to assist management of the network and thus security of supply. This could involve direct supplier or distribution company interface with equipment, such as refrigerators, within a property, overriding the control of the householder."

It also says potential extra uses for smart meters would need to be checked to ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act.

The Information Commissioner's Office said it had already discussed the issue of smart meters with some suppliers, including Eon, Scottish Power and British Gas. A spokesman said the ICO would "continue to maintain a close dialogue to ensure that their introduction does not compromise customers' privacy".

He added: "Important issues include what information is stored on the meters themselves, in particular whether information identifying the householder will be held. In any event energy companies will clearly need to hold records linking meters with householders and all the information must be held in line with the requirements of the Data Protection Act."

A spokeswoman for the DECC said: "The accurate, informative data that smart meters provide will be of great value to consumers. Rules and safeguards governing access to, and the use of, the data from smart meters will be reviewed as part of the Government's work in preparing for the start of the mass smart meter roll-out."

Consumer Focus, the watchdog, has also expressed concern about the privacy implications of the meters, saying consumers are "at risk of unfair, excessive, inequitable and inefficient charging" because energy companies could use the new data to introduce more complex tariffs to maximise profits at peak times.


The government has yet to decide who will pay for replacing Britain's 47 million meters, which could cost up to £8bn over the next 20 years. Its preferred option is for the cost to be met by energy firms, who stand to gain the most from meters as they remove the need to employ meter readers or calculate estimated bills.

More than two million households in Britain have microchips in their council bin. Sensors and weighing equipment fitted to the back of each rubbish lorry allow the council to collect data as each bin is raised. Information collected from outside each household is downloaded to a database that allows officials to monitor how much waste each household is producing for waste and for recycling. Officials then use the data to target errant streets and households in a bid to increase recycling rates from 43 per cent to 60 per cent.


I want to be clear, when we are made to use our energy a particular way.....forced to recycle because it is now a corporate profit factor......charged more to use energy at prime time......and having all our data sold to corporations for their marketing/research needs we have lost all of our freedoms.

Keep in mind that when there is a water shortage or an electrical shortage the government simply has local news tell people not to water lawns or wash cars or not to use air conditioners at peak hours AND THAT WORKS JUST FINE!  So, this is NOT about conservation.....it is about control and surveillance.

The complaint about detecting marijuana growers is mute......the problem is far greater than that.


Smart Meters: Surveillance Devices

Smart Meters Are Surveillance Devices That Monitor The Behavior In Your Home Every Single Minute Of Every Single Day  

Today's Date:  Friday, January 24th, 2014 Decrypted Matrix

Have you heard about the new “smart meters” that are being installed in homes all across America?  Under the guise of “reducing greenhouse gas emissions” and “reducing energy bills”, utility companies all over the United States are forcing tens of millions of American families to accept sophisticated surveillance devices in their homes.  Currently, approximately 9 percent of all electric meters in the U.S. have been converted over to smart meters.  It is being projected that by 2012, the number of smart meters in use will rise to 52 million, and the federal government is spending a lot of money to help get these installed everywhere.  Eventually the goal is to have these smart meters in all of our homes and if that ever happened there would essentially be no more privacy.  Once installed, a smart meter monitors your home every single minute of every single day and it transmits very sophisticated data about your personal behavior back to the utility company.



So can’t we just tell the utility companies that we don’t want these stupid things?

Unfortunately, in many areas of the country you can’t.  For example, one outraged resident of California contacted the utility company and was told that if he did not consent to taking a smart meter he would receive no service.

So unless you want to live “off the grid”, what are you going to do?  Can any of us really survive without electricity these days?

The sad truth is that these things are being forced upon us.

It is happening in Europe too.  The European Parliament has set a goal of having smart meters in the homes of 80 percent of all electricity consumers by the year 2020.

Sadly, as these smart meters have gone in there have been reports all over the country of electricity bills increasing dramatically.  There have been mountains of complaints about these things and yet their use keeps spreading.

But of course the biggest issue with smart meters is how they will strip us of our privacy.

The concern is that the incredibly detailed data that these surveillance devices collect will be given or sold to a vast array of third parties.


For example, smart meters are already being used by police to bust marijuana growers.

It is also feared that insurance companies, credit agencies, lawyers, marketing firms and even criminals will be able to get their hands on this data as well.

A recent article posted on the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation summarized some of the concerns….

“Without strong protections, this information can and will be repurposed by interested parties. It’s not hard to imagine a divorce lawyer subpoenaing this information, an insurance company interpreting the data in a way that allows it to penalize customers, or criminals intercepting the information to plan a burglary. Marketing companies will also desperately want to access this data”

For law enforcement officials, these surveillance devices are a dream come true. According to the Columbus Dispatch, police in central Ohio have been filing at least 60 subpoenas every single month for the energy-use records of those that they suspect are growing pot in their homes.

Well, it turns out that sometimes police are raiding homes that are using a lot of energy and they don’t find any marijuana at all.  Instead, sometimes these raids reveal others kinds of activities….

Sometimes, high electricity use doesn’t lead investigators to drugs. A federal investigation in the Powell area turned into a surprise for detectives.

“We thought it was a major grow operation … but this guy had some kind of business involving computers,” Marotta said. “I don’t know how many computer servers we found in his home.”

So do you want police raiding your home if you start using a little bit too much electricity?


Jerry Day, an electronics and media expert from Burbank California, recently detailed many of the ways that smart meters act as surveillance devices when they are installed in our homes….

1. They individually identify electrical devices inside the home and record when they are operated causing invasion of privacy.

2. They monitor household activity and occupancy in violation of rights and domestic security.

3. They transmit wireless signals which may be intercepted by unauthorized and unknown parties. Those signals can be used to monitor behavior and occupancy and they can be used by criminals to aid criminal activity against the occupants.

4. Data about occupant’s daily habits and activities are collected, recorded and stored in permanent databases which are accessed by parties not authorized or invited to know and share that private data.

5. Those with access to the smart meter databases can review a permanent history of household activities complete with calendar and time-of-day metrics to gain a highly invasive and detailed view of the lives of the occupants.

6. Those databases may be shared with, or fall into the hands of criminals, blackmailers, law enforcement, private hackers of wireless transmissions, power company employees, and other unidentified parties who may act against the interests of the occupants under metered surveillance.

7. “Smart Meters” are, by definition, surveillance devices which violate Federal and State wiretapping laws by recording and storing databases of private and personal activities and behaviors without the consent or knowledge of those people who are monitored.

8. It is possible for example, with analysis of certain “Smart Meter” data, for unauthorized and distant parties to determine medical conditions, sexual activities, physical locations of persons within the home, vacancy patterns and personal information and habits of the occupants.

Jerry Day has also produced a terrific YouTube video in which he explains many of these points more fully.  If you live in an area where these insidious smart meters are going in, then please share this video with as many people living near you as you can….

The time to object to these smart meters is before they go in.  Once they are in all of our homes it is going to be too late.

This is all part of the radical green agenda that is being forced down the throats of people all over the world.

Everything that we do has to be watched, monitored and tightly controlled for the “good of the environment”.

To the control freaks running things, that also means that the liberties and freedoms that we cherish so much must be greatly restricted.

If you don’t know about “Agenda 21“, you should learn about it.  The UN has a plan for the future of this planet, and once you find out about this plan you probably are not going to like it very much.  The entire globe is rapidly becoming one big prison grid as the elite implement their vision of the future.

If you want to get a really good idea of what they are planning, just watch this video.

If the control freaks get their way, there will eventually be no more privacy for any of us.

Unless we speak out now, the surveillance devices are just going to become more and more sophisticated.  At some point, none of us is even going to be able to sneeze without someone knowing about it.

So what do all of you think about these smart meters?  Does anyone out there have a smart meter horror story?  Please feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….
_____________________________________________


Those of us in Baltimore already know the debacle that is speed cameras and we know as well that it took constant media shaming and huge public outrage to stop what all knew were faulty tickets actually stealing money from citizens.  Between Smart Meters that are already showing skewed pricing for utilities and these ticketing schemes all of which record our movement by car.......the WAR BLIMP will follow us by train or bus!

Who are these people preparing all kinds of escape from whom our Homeland Security pretend to protect WE THE PEOPLE?  Probably the world's citizens coming to recover their tens of trillions of dollars stolen with massive corporate fraud!


Cordon multi-target photo-radar system leaves no car untagged


(video) BY Amar Toor October 31st, 2011 at 8:37AM ET

engadget


Go easy on the gas, Speed Racer, because Cordon is on its way. Developed by Simicon, this new speed sensor promises to take highway surveillance to new heights of precision. Unlike most photo radar systems, which track only one violator at a time, Simicon's device can simultaneously identify and follow up to 32 vehicles across four lanes. Whenever a car enters its range, the Cordon will automatically generate two images: one from wide-angle view and one closeup shot of the vehicle's license plate. It's also capable of instantly measuring a car's speed and mapping its position, and can easily be synced with other databases via WiFi, 3G or WiMAX. Plus, this device is compact and durable enough to be mounted upon a tripod or atop a road sign, making it even harder for drivers to spot. Fortunately, though, you still have time to change your dragster ways, as distributor Peak Gain Systems won't be bringing the Cordon to North America until the first quarter of 2012. Cruise past the break to see some footage of a field trial that's currently underway -- cars tagged with a green dot are traveling below the speed limit, those with a yellow marking are chugging along within an acceptable range above the limit, while vehicles with a red tab are just asking for trouble.
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    Cindy Walsh is a lifelong political activist and academic living in Baltimore, Maryland.

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