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

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.









0 Comments

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.



___________________________________________

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.

__________________________________________

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.


____________________________________________
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.

0 Comments

July 03rd, 2014

7/3/2014

0 Comments

 
THESE ARE NEO-CON AND NEO-LIBERAL POLICIES SO TO ESCAPE BAD POLICY---DO NOT SIMPLY VOTE THE OTHER PARTY-----CLEAN UP THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!

Maryland's Governor Martin O'Malley announced that shortfalls in the 2014 state budget due to a complete stagnation of Maryland's economy and high unemployment  created by control of Maryland's economy by global corporations will focus on programs and services valuable to the citizens of Maryland but not affect the massive giveaway of revenue in the guise of corporate subsidy, tax breaks, or any effort to reign in billions of dollars in corporate fraud. 

O'Malley as a neo-liberal calls this FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY


So, $10 million will be taken from higher education and that includes grants, financial aid, and scholarships to Maryland citizens and employment to 4 public universities essential to middle-class/working class/poor families.

Below you see how a neo-liberals systematically eliminate all public sector employment by saying it is not firing anyone but eliminating positions not filled.  Maryland has had its entire oversight and accountability sectors eliminated in this way.  What I want to focus on today is higher education and the outsourcing of public university jobs to such an extent that the state spends money to support an education system that does not even operate in the US or benefit the citizens of Maryland.  O'Malley spent his 8 years developing the structures for overseas education and made marketing and recruiting foreign students a priority.  This is where our higher education money is spent and media states that never has there been fewer citizens of Maryland unable to attend Maryland universities.  It is not only high tuition----it is the elimination of financial aid, grants, and scholarships.  It hurts the economy in that people are not hired to these state positions to earn the money needed for consumption of goods and this creates a stagnant economy.  O'Malley does this because he works for global corporations that want all state and local revenue spent expanding their businesses overseas,  promoting exports, and bringing foreign students to Maryland to graduate and be sent back overseas to work for US global corporations in other nations.  This entire process leaves out the families in Maryland and their children's ability to attend the best public universities in the state.  Don't worry.....O'Malley and neo-liberals spent hundreds of millions building a separate system of higher education for the citizens of Maryland that cheapen and track all into vocational training programs.  This also increases the number of foreign graduates that are not citizens ready to take high level jobs thanks to Obama's executive order to allow the high-skilled green card worker quotas to rise.  So, Maryland citizens are not able to access the higher education venues that lead to the best jobs.  When people who are not citizens are given these jobs they have no workplace rights and are not free to report abuse or illegal activity within the corporations for which they work.  In these times of systemic corporate fraud and corruption----this is critical.

So, an election year budget that protected labor positions is followed by budget cuts eliminating jobs right after the primary for Governor of Maryland.  Union leaders knew this would happen-----it happens all the time.  Neo-cons would be worse.
  Neo-liberals only pretend to be progressive labor and justice!

Remember, I have for years been explaining that the state was giving a rosy economic picture that was not real and I stated why the economy was indeed stagnant and unemployment high.  Below you see Franchot being the spoiler but the Comptroller's Office is ground zero for corporate tax fraud and the wrongful designation of corporations as non-profits and therefor losses in the hundreds of millions in state tax revenue each year which would happen with a republican in office as well.


State approves O'Malley's $84 million in budget cuts Poor economy prompts spending reductions


By Erin Cox, The Baltimore Sun 1:19 p.m. EDT, July 2, 2014



The lackluster economy prompted Gov. Martin O'Malley to propose erasing $84 million in planned spending for next year.

Just a day after the new state budget took effect, O'Malley persuaded the Board of Public Works unanimously to approve a modest set of cuts to Maryland's $16.1 billion general fund.

About $10 million in cuts come from the state's higher-education institutions, although O'Malley aides said it would not affect tuition rates.

The cuts would not cause any layoffs but would trim 61 vacant jobs from the state's workforce of about 80,000 people, aides said. More than half of those jobs will come from higher education, including 36 vacant posts in the University of Maryland system.

Even though the official estimate of how far revenue lags behind state spending will not be ready until September, the administration chose to begin budget cuts now — before agencies started spending this year's cash. Together, the cuts represent less than half a percent of the state's general fund.

O'Malley said that the cuts "build upon a tradition, a culture of fiscal responsibility." He pointed out the belt-tightening was much smaller than cuts the state took during the recession.

Comptroller Peter A. Franchot voted for the cuts, but said that state leaders need to drop the "political spin" about the state's improving economy and "stop pretending that we made it through the thicket."

"Our citizens don't want to hear the spin anymore, and they're not falling for it," Franchot said.

A federal economic report released last week showed that the U.S. economy contracted more during the first quarter of 2014 than in any quarter during the previous five years. That followed another U.S. Department of Commerce report showing that Maryland's economy had stagnated in 2013.

The sluggish growth means state revenues have fallen lower than officials estimated earlier this year.

O'Malley defended the state's financial health by citing its AAA bond rating and comparing Maryland's relatively small budget shortfall to larger looming problems in other states on the Eastern seaboard, some of which have shortfalls in the hundreds of millions.

"We are coming through this recession faster than a lot of other states," O'Malley said. He added, "there's a lot that is going right, and of course, still, a lot of work to do. In that spirit, I agree with the comptroller that we should have an honest conversation."

In January, O'Malley proposed a $39 billion state budget that increased spending by 4.9 percent and took effect Tuesday, the final state spending plan of his eight years in office.

T. Eloise Foster, O'Malley's budget secretary, said Wednesday's cuts are designed to resolve the shortfall for the entire year. "My plan is not having to do this again," she said.

While O'Malley's staff declined to offer a list of all the $84 million in specific cuts, they said they include $56 million to various government agencies, with some asked to eliminate vacant jobs, forgo software upgrades or pare back other expenses.

In addition to the $10 million cut from higher education, another $10 million will be shaved from the state budget by spending federal cash already in state coffers. And budget experts said they expect $7 million of anticipated expenses to not materialize.

The cuts would not affect the struggling Maryland Health Benefit Exchange insurance website or a series of new economic development programs to expand cybersecurity and biotechnology sectors in Maryland.

All cuts must be approved by at least two members on the state's three-person Board of Public Works, on which O'Malley, Franchot and State Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp sit.

The cuts pale in comparison to the big spending reductions the board approved during the recession. In 2010, O'Malley went to the board three times for a total of $614 million in spending cuts from the general fund. In 2009, he asked for a total of $429 million in cuts over three requests. And in 2008, O'Malley requested a single $213 million spending cut.

_________________________________________________

Below you see where all the money for higher education has gone during the neo-liberal O'Malley's terms in office-----building this network of global PhDs and it has nothing to do with the citizens of Maryland!  This is what the US Senate based their immigration reform bill ------the bringing of foreign students and grads to America and then allowing them to take these US corporate positions often the best positions.  We are not anti-immigrant nor do we want to exclude foreign students from our universities-----quite the opposite, this should be robust.  We are against the simultaneous defunding of higher education for the bulk of Maryland citizens and it is deliberate.

WE CAN FUND HIGHER EDUCATION FOR ALL THAT WANT TO ATTEND OUR MARYLAND UNIVERSITIES BY ENDING CORPORATE SUBSIDIES AND TAX BREAKS AND FOR GOODNESS SAKE MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD.

All this is happening because of global corporate control of the Maryland economy.  We do not need these global connections for a healthy economy------it does just the opposite----it stagnates the economy.

The Global Ph.D.
July 3, 2014 By Holly Else
for Times Higher Education



Internationalizing the doctoral training process could help to overcome negative perceptions about the employability of Ph.D. students outside academia, said participants at a recent conference.

Universities in several countries are beginning to think of new ways to cater for the rising number of overseas doctoral students, speakers at the European University Association’s annual meeting on doctoral education told delegates in Liverpool.

International doctoral students offer a “cost-effective” way for institutions to build international links. But problems surrounding complex visa rules, falling domestic student numbers and the cost of running international joint doctoral programs remain.


The number of domestic doctoral candidates at Australia’s University of Queensland started dwindling in 2008, according to the head of its graduate school, Alastair McEwan. To compensate, the university has enrolled international students, who now make up about 40 percent of the doctoral student body.

The shift is “most dramatic” in engineering, architecture and IT, where departments are “heavily reliant” on overseas students, he said. He added that the university is investing in this area because Ph.D. students “are absolutely critical” to research output and are “a very cost-effective way to promote international linkages.”

McEwan said that the benefits international doctoral candidates bring to the institution “cannot be overestimated”. Their presence offers students a “breadth of knowledge about other cultures.”

“That is an important transferable skill that should be part of a student’s employability development. Internationalization of the Ph.D., or international interactions, could help us overcome some of the negative perceptions about the employability of Ph.D. students outside academia,” he added.

But he said that having overseas students enrolled on doctoral programs was a one-dimensional method of internationalization. “The next stage is to start thinking about other ways,” he said, adding that the answer did not lie in Ph.D.s that are run jointly with overseas institutions.

“These come with a high overhead as they are very hard to manage.... I’m not convinced that this is the most efficient or effective way to manage things in the long run,” he added.


American institutions are also seeing a rise in the number of overseas doctoral candidates in science, technology and engineering subjects. The vice provost and dean of Cornell University, Barbara Knuth, said: “We should be concerned in the U.S. in terms of [what] our doctoral pool will be for economic development purposes.”

She said that the nation’s immigration policies are “complex and quite limiting.”

“Doctoral students are eager to come to the U.S. to study, but we are not very good at encouraging them to stay after their degrees,” she added.

Cornell is now working to internationalize the doctoral experience for all students. Internationalizing the Ph.D. process would help to expand a graduate’s professional networks and employability, she said.

At the institutional level, it will broaden intellectual discoveries, help academics to address complex global problems and increase the visibility and exposure of the institution globally, she said.

Jean Chambaz, president of the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in France, said that universities needed to move beyond memoranda of understanding when it comes to working together internationally.

“We need focused, balanced programs on questions of common interest that include multilateral doctoral candidates and staff circulation,” he told delegates.


______________________________________________
Below you see why more and more staff are being cut from our public universities-----all the jobs are being outsourced to global corporations that are doing the work overseas that people right here in Maryland should be doing and these citizens of Maryland would do a better job.  It is done simply to reduce labor costs as pay is lower overseas and we wouldn't want all of those pesky public sector benefits providing the citizens of Maryland a first world quality of life say neo-liberals.


Is a global corporation needed to process college applications charging fees for doing so -----money which could hire a local person with a public university to do this job?  We all know massive corporate fraud is infused in all these business arrangements so universities are losing far more money by outsourcing these jobs than saving.  So, fighting fraud in court is worth eliminating staff at a university who could be held accountable to do the work right?

THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU---WORKING FOR
WEALTH AND PROFIT SENDING ALL PUBLIC ASSETS TO CORPORATIONS WHILE IMPOVERISHING THE CITIZENS OF AMERICA.


IT IS ABSOLUTELY ABSURD THAT AN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION IS INVOLVED IN ALL THIS INTRIGUE------JUST EDUCATE THE US CITIZENS!


Troubles at Embark

July 3, 2014 By Ry Rivard  Inside Higher Education

Embark, whose software helps colleges to process online applications, has owed graduate and professional schools millions of dollars and misled university officials about why it wasn’t quickly paying up, a former executive of the company is alleging amid an ongoing legal dispute.

In June 2013, Embark owed its clients $4.7 million from student application fees it collected, according to a filing in New York state court by lawyers for Raza Khan, a former chief technology officer and board member at Embark.

Even though payments were supposed to be made in a matter of months, $1.2 million of that had been owed to colleges for more than a year, according to a spreadsheet filed last month that is said to reflect the company’s bookkeeping as of late June 2013.

Khan, who left the company around the same time, alleges company officials improperly spent money owed to colleges in order to deal with Embark’s “cash flow problems.” The money was supposed to go to colleges directly and quickly, but, according to Khan, Embark officials intentionally delayed paying back colleges and “concocted” false stories to cover up the true reason for the delays.

Embark processes admissions applications for colleges across the world, including elite graduate programs. Colleges pay Embark for its services, but Embark is obligated to pay the institutions all or most of the application fees it collects. Khan’s allegations center on Embark’s failure to give colleges their share of those student application fees.

Embark got a judge to partially seal the documents, but they were available on the court’s website for several days last month.  The company’s lawyer declined repeated requests for comment on the merits of Khan’s claims.

Khan is engaged in a bitter legal fight with his former business partner and high school classmate, Vishal Garg.

In June 2013, Embark owed its clients $4.7 million, including student fees collected as far back as 2009, according to Khan’s filing.

The largest single unpaid amount is over $1 million, which Embark is said to owe to Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Sid Dinsay, a spokesman for the medical school in New York City, declined to comment.

When colleges asked for their money, the company sometimes “concocted” reasons that its payments were delayed, according to Khan’s filing.

In a September 2011 email also contained in Khan’s filing, Blake Avalone, then director of client relations, told another Embark official to use a “canned response” to hold off a college that was asking for money dating to the beginning of that year. The response Avalone approved blamed a “credit card processor” for the delay. Khan said in his filing that this was among the “false explanations” Embark gave colleges for payment delays.

Another Embark employee in the same email thread suggests that the email “be sent from ‘Accounting’ if that helps.” In an email chat included in the court filing, the same employee also said, “if we're going to lie, the vaguer the better no.”

Avalone, now Embark’s managing director, did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment. Emails and voicemails were not returned by anyone at Embark over the past two weeks.

Several universities, including the University of Michigan and at least one graduate program at Harvard University, have threatened legal action against Embark. Officials at both those institutions said they were paid by Embark after they made those threats.

At least one other university has recently complained to Embark. The University of California at Davis hired a lawyer to help it collect money it says Embark has owed since spring 2012, according to a letter released by the university.  In mid-May of this year, the university’s lawyer demanded that Embark pay $38,589 by June 15. That didn’t happen.

“No money was received – only a promise from the [Embark] president to follow up,” a UC Davis spokeswoman said in an email last month.

Other universities are being paid back, if only gradually.

A spokesman for Thunderbird School of Global Management said last month Embark still owes it $71,000. The school ended its relationship with Embark last fall for other reasons, the spokesman said. Khan’s filings suggest the school was owed $215,000 at one point. Thunderbird could not confirm that figure.

As of last summer, Rutgers University’s business school was owed $261,000 for fees dating as far back as April 2011, according to Khan’s filing. Much of that has been paid, the university said last month.


“Since the beginning of 2014, Embark has paid $229,260 to the Rutgers Business School – Newark and New Brunswick,” a Rutgers spokesman said in an email. “The school continues to work with Embark to collect the remaining balance.”

It’s not clear exactly how precise the spreadsheet is in Khan’s filing: It says Georgia State University is owed $81,000 for fees it collecting in 2010 and 2011, though a Georgia State official said that Embark paid it $80,000 several years ago for work done in 2009 and no longer owes the university money. UC Davis, on the other hand, is asking for more money than the spreadsheet shows it is owed.

Khan first made allegations about Embark’s repayments to colleges in July 2013, when he sued his business partner Garg. But Khan provided more details about Embark’s business last month in a separate case in which Embark is suing him.

Garg and Khan founded MyRichUncle, an upstart student loan company that made its name lending directly to students before its parent company, MRU Holdings, went bankrupt in 2009. MyRichUncle was well-known in higher ed circles in the mid-2000s for its aggressive marketing that accused college financial aid officers of engaging in “kickbacks.”

Before the bankruptcy, MRU quietly bought Embark from the Princeton Review in 2007, vowing to invigorate a company that had seen its value and reach tumble during the six years Princeton Review owned it.

Khan’s filing suggests he and Garg were unable to do so. Now, Garg’s wife, Sarita James, is president of Embark. James did not respond to multiple emails over the past two weeks seeking comment.

Khan claims Garg and others at Embark “circulated false financials” to the company’s clients and delayed payments to them because of cash flow problems.

Sometimes, even after threatening legal action, a client would stick with Embark.

In February 2013, a graduate program within Harvard Law School asked Embark for $120,000 owed to it since November and December 2012.

“Despite the promise of wire transfers by Embark (supposedly made on Feb. 1 initially and then again on Feb. 20), and despite our request for actual confirmation of the transfers, we have not received anything, not even evidence that any of the wire transfers were actually made,” Harvard assistant dean Jeanne Tai wrote in a February 2013 email, which appeared in the court filing. Harvard is not a party to the litigation.

Reached last month by phone, Tai said everything had since been squared away.

“They have since made good on everything they owed and since that period of time, we haven’t had any trouble getting what they owed us,” she said.

The Harvard graduate program remains a client.

Khan’s filing said even though Embark knew that it owed money to colleges, Garg, the former head of the company, “did not intend to cause Embark to pay such amounts owed unless and until the schools complained.”

Officials at several other institutions said to be owed money declined to comment in detail or did not return calls seeking comment about their relationship with Embark.

After the MRU bankruptcy filing, Khan and Garg quickly started another company, Education Investment and Finance Corporation, or EIFC, which manages and services private student loans and mortgage-backed securities.
______________________________________________

Bill and Hillary Clinton are the face of these global corporations and neo-liberalism.  They plan to win the White House in 2016 and are getting Hillary into all venues they had a hand in destroying.  High tuition and devastating student loan debt happened because the Clintons started the corporatization of US universities with the goal of creating US global corporate universities.  Bill and Hillary are the face of the 2008 economic crash that has left millions of US college grads without employment----they created these Wall Street banks by deregulating the financial industry and breaking Glass Steagall so these banks could grow to the global corporations knowing they would control the US government and economy.

PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW HILLARY AND NEO-LIBERALS TO TAKE CONTROL OF DEMOCRATIC PARTY CAMPAIGNING----RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES AGAINST ALL NEO-LIBERALS IN DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES.  You can see why, here in Maryland it was critical for Anthony Brown to win-----heaven forbid the candidate wanting to dismantle all of this corporate structure win!


The Clinton's funded Anthony Brown's campaign because he will embrace this global corporate structure as O'Malley did and the marginalization of the citizens of America.
  The Clinton Foundation is a global corporate development institution so all that money she is making will be tax-free.

Scrutiny for Hillary Clinton Speaking Fees at Colleges

July 3, 2014

Inside Higher Ed

At least eight universities have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton to speak on their campuses, The Washington Post reported. Students at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where she is due to be paid $225,000 to speak in the fall, have protested, and that is drawing attention to the likely presidential candidate's high fees, not all of which have been previously disclosed. Some of the payments ($200,000 is believed to be standard) have gone not to Clinton personally, but the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

____________________________________________
Here in Maryland, Baltimore is ground zero for the dismantling of public education from K-college.  Johns Hopkins is the driver of this policy.  They have a corporation that works to recruit overseas education labor and bring them to America to work in K-12 and in universities and colleges.  Why bring immigrant labor to teach in US schools when we have huge unemployment and plenty of teachers?  Well, Race to the Top and all of the teacher accountability that has nothing to do with quality education but everything to do with chasing current teachers out of a hostile system----- will need people to replace the US teachers that leave out of frustration and the fact that no one will want to be exposed to these kinds of working conditions.  There comes the need for foreign workers taking jobs in public schools.

Remember, the goal with K-12 is to have online classes that only need a person like an education tech in the classroom to facilitate an online presentation of material.  That education tech does not need to be a real teacher-----they only need to know how to start the online lessons and administer the tests.  So, neo-liberals have as a goal of completely dismantling our entire public education system and quality democratic education.  Think the absolutely botched rollout of Race to the Top is an accident?  This policy has been in the making since the beginning of the Bush Administration----it is a republican policy written by US corporations a decade ago----it is no accident that teachers are being subjected to the worst of conditions in this education reform rollout----neo-liberals hate labor and unions and want to get rid of public sector unions through privatization with national charter chains and global corporations specializing in education temps.


I cannot tell you how revolting it is that America is behind all of this labor abuse and it is neo-liberals controlling the people's Democratic Party leading this.

Neo-cons write the policy and neo-liberals run as Democrats to implement these policies that kill the labor that votes for them.

Monday, May 26, 2014, 1:00 pm

Trafficked Teachers: Neoliberalism’s Latest Labor Source

BY George Joseph Working In These Times


Recruiting companies in the U.S. are attracting some of Philippines' best teachers with one-year guest worker visas to teach in American public schools, saddling the teachers with hidden fees and furthering the Philippines' growing teacher shortage. (SuSanA Secretariat/ Flickr / Creative Commons)  

Between 2007 and 2009, 350 Filipino teachers arrived in Louisiana, excited for the opportunity to teach math and science in public schools throughout the state. They’d been recruited through a company called Universal Placement International Inc., which professes on its website to “successfully place teachers in different schools thru out [sic] the United States.” As a lawsuit later revealed, however, their journey through the American public school system was fraught with abuse. 

According to court documents, Lourdes Navarro, chief recruiter and head of Universal Placement, made applicants pay a whopping $12,550 in interview and “processing fees” before they’d even left the Philippines. But the exploitation didn’t stop there. After the teachers landed in LAX, they were required to sign contracts paying back 10 percent of their first and second years’’ salaries; those who refused were threatened with instant deportation.

“We were herded into a path, a slowly constricting path,” said Ingrid Cruz, one of the teachers, during the trial, “where the moment you feel the suspicion that something is not right, you're already way past the point of no return." Eventually, a Los Angeles jury awarded the teachers $4.5 million.

Similar horror stories have abounded across the country for years. Starting in 2001, the private contractor Omni Consortium promised 273 Filipino teachers jobs within the Houston, Texas school district—in reality, there were only 100 spots open. Once they arrived, the teachers were crammed into groups of 10 to 15 in unfinished housing properties. Omni Consortium kept all their documents, did not allow them their own transportation, and threatened them with deportation if they complained about their unemployment status or looked for another job. 

And it’s not always recruiting agencies that are at fault. According to an American Federation Teachers report, in 2009, Florida Atlantic University imported 16 Indian math and science teachers for the St. Lucie County School District. Labeling the immigrant teachers as “interns,” the district only spent $18,000 for each of their yearly salaries—well below a regular teacher’s rate. But because the district paid the wages to Florida Atlantic University, rather than the teachers themselves, the university pocketed most of the money, giving the teachers a mere $5,000 each.

Researchers estimate that anywhere from 14,000 to 20,000 teachers, imported on temporary guest worker visas, teach in American public schools nationwide. Such hiring practices are often framed as cultural exchange programs, 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.”

A manufactured problem School districts frequently justify hiring lower-paid immigrants by pointing to teacher shortages in chronically underfunded rural and urban school districts. And it’s true: In poorer areas, classrooms are often overcrowded and understaffed. But this dearth of instructors did not come out of nowhere. Rather, it is an inevitable result of the austerity measures pushed through on a federal, state, and local level after the panic of the 2007 financial crisis.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, between 2008 and 2011, school districts nationwide slashed 278,000 jobs. This bleeding has not stopped: According to the Center on Education Policy, almost 84 percent of school districts in the 2011-2012 school year expected budget shortfalls, and 60 percent planned to cut staff to make up deficits.

Thus, we see a familiar pattern of neoliberal “restructuring” in American school systems: Cut public institutions to the bone, leave them to fail without adequate resources, then claim the mantle of “reform” while rebuilding the institutions with an eye towards privatization.   

In many cities, newly laid-off instructors are left to languish while their former employers employ underpaid replacements to fill the gaps. For example, the Baltimore City Public Schools district has imported more than 600 Filipino teachers; meanwhile, 100 certified local teachers make up the “surplus” workforce, serving as substitutes and co-teachers when they can. 

The manufactured labor scarcity narrative, used to justify the importation of guest worker teachers, provides districts with the opportunity to employ less costly, at-will employees, whose precarious legal status is often exploited. Such moves to pump up the workforce with workers—not here long enough to invest themselves in organizing or bargaining struggles—also serve to weaken shop-site solidarity and unions’ ability to mobilize on a larger scale.

The recruiting contactors’ advertisements to districts are particularly instructive in this regard, noting their recruits’ inability to qualify for benefits and pension contributions. In an extensive study, education professors Sue Books and Rian de Villiers found that recruiting firms tend to appeal to districts on the basis of cost-saving, rather than classroom quality. As one Georgia contractor, Global Teachers Research and Resources, advertises, “school systems pay an administrative fee [to GTRR] that is generally less than the cost of [teacher] benefits. Collaborating with GTRR means quality teachers with savings to the school systems.” Even more egregiously, a Houston based recruiting firm called Professional and Intellectual Resources exclaims that their “bargain-priced” Filipino teachers can “make the most out of the most minimal resources. 

Memorizing isn’t learning This criterion for hiring makes sense in the context of what philosopher Paulo Freire calls “the banking concept of education.” In his 1968 classic, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire critiques the pedagogical tradition of rote memorization, in which the teacher-as-narrator “leads the students to memorize … the narrated content.” Freire argues, “It turns [students] into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is.”

However, Freire’s “narrative” is no longer even in the hands of teachers, who might at least have some understanding of content relevant to students. Instead with the rise of test-based approach to education, forced through with No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, and numerous ramped-up state tests, nameless corporate and federal employees now tie teachers and students’ success to the production of higher test scores. Thus, today’s cutting-edge education reform movement has brought this “banking concept of education” back into vogue, demanding “objective measures” and “accountability” through constant standardized testing. 

The idea that new teachers should be imported from halfway around the world for yearlong stints, knowing no background about the communities they are entering and the content relevant to them, is only justified if the teacher is reduced to an instrument of standardized information transmission. And if teachers are just such instruments, why not search the global market for the cheapest, most malleable ones possible?

As Books and de Villiers point out, many recruiters’ advertisements reflect this logic: “Only two [recruiters’] websites apprise teachers of the socio-economic, racial, ethnic, and religious diversity in many U.S. schools. Only five include useful educational links, and only three provide information about school-based mentoring.” So for corporate recruiters and their district clients, finding the right match for a school is not about teacher quality or experience, but rather cost and expendability.

The phenomenon of teacher trafficking, then, doesn’t rest entirely on recruiters’ mercenary tendencies or districts’ drive to cheapen their labor. It also rests on the larger neoliberal conception of workers. In this case, teachers become moveable parts, switched out in accordance with the iron laws of supply and demand in order to more efficiently output successful test scores, whose value comes to represent students themselves. 

Colonialism in the classroom The American importation of Filipino teachers, as well as educators from other countries, has consequences beyond the United States, too. According to Books and de Villiers, several recruiting agencies only seek out teachers in the Philippines because its high poverty rates and supply of quality teachers make it, as one journalist from the Baltimore Sun put it, “fertile ground for recruits.” Meanwhile, the nation has an estimated shortage of 16,000 educators and the highest student-teacher ratio in Asia at 45:1.

As one Filipino union leader told the American Federation of Teachers, “To accommodate the students, most public schools schedule two, three and sometimes even four shifts within the entire day, with 70 to 80 students packed in a room. Usually, the first class starts as early as 6:00 a.m. to accommodate the other sessions.” And as American corporate forces have exploited the Philippines for its best teachers, pushed across the world by the beck and call of the market, agents of the nonprofit world have taken it upon themselves to send American substitutes in their place.

Launched last year, Teach for the Philippines presents itself as “the solution” to this lack of quality teachers in the country—a claim similar to those of its U.S. parent organization, Teach for America, a behemoth nonprofit that each year recruits thousands of idealistic college graduates to become (and often replace) teachers in low-income communities after a five-week training camp.

The Teach for Philippines promo video begins with black and white shots of multitudes of young Filipino schoolchildren packed into crowded classrooms, bored and on the verge of tears. A cover version of a Killers song proclaims, “When there's nowhere else to run … If you can hold on, hold on” as the video shifts to the students’ inevitable fates: scenes of tattooed gang kids smoking, an isolated girl and even a desperate man behind bars. In the midst of this grotesquely Orientalizing imagery, text declares, “Our Country Needs Guidance,” “Our Country Needs Inspiration,” and finally “Our Country Needs Teachers.”           

Teach for the Philippines recruits young Filipinos both domestically and internationally, with special outreach to Filipino Americans. Though still in its start-up phase, with only 53 teachers in 10 schools, the program presents a disturbing vision for the future of teaching in the context of a global workforce. While the Filipino teachers imported to America are not necessarily ideal fits, given their inability to remain as long-term contributors to a school community, at least they are for the most part trained, experienced instructors. Within the Teach for the Philippines paradigm, however, Filipino students, robbed of their best instructors, are forced to study under recruits, who may lack a strong understanding of the communities they are joining and have often have never even had any actual classroom experience.

But Teach For the Philippines is just one growing arm of Teach for America’s global empire, now spanning the world sites in 33 countries and enjoying millions in support from neoliberal power players like Visa and even the World Bank. So while austerity-mode Western nations may seek to cut costs by employing no-benefits guest workers, countries such as the Philippines will be forced by the unbending logic of the market to plead for international charity—summer camp volunteers looking to “give” two years of their lives to really make a difference.           

In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire argues, “It is to the reality that mediates men, and to the perception of that reality held by educators and people, that we must go to find the program content of education.” But for such a reality to be approached, teachers and communities must have the opportunity to grow together, to listen to each other, and to understand the reality that they seek to transform. By pushing teachers into a globalized pool of low-wage temp workers, teacher trafficking precludes this possibility.








0 Comments

June 03rd, 2014

6/3/2014

0 Comments

 
TALKING ONE MORE TIME FOR NOW ON THE DISASTER OF PRIVATIZING PUBLIC HEALTH THROUGH PRIVATIZING UNIVERSITIES AND THE EFFECTS OF AFFORDABLE CARE ACT.  WE CAN SEE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT IN THE WAY THE PRIVATIZED PATENT SYSTEM AND THE LACK OF FDA OVERSIGHT IS MAKING OUR HEALTH SYSTEM DANGEROUS!

ALL OF MARYLAND CANDIDATE'S FOR GOVERNOR WILL CONTINUE THIS GLOBAL CORPORATE STRUCTURE FOR HEALTH CARE EXCEPT CINDY WALSH FOR GOVERNOR



I listened to a NPR------corporate media all the time----report on the escalating problem of medical procedures and devices passing FDA approval and failing and sometimes killing the American people.  The numbers are soaring as the FDA is now working to send these products to market for profit and allowing the failures to be discovered after the fact by harming the citizens of America.  This NPR article looked at one medical procedure that was approved by the FDA after a supposed 'clinical trial' of a few hundreds of people.  The entire process looked to be filled with false data and sketchy connections with who and how the medical research was conducted and if any of the results were reproducible or if the efficacy was real.

  ERGO-----THE ENTIRE PUBLIC HEALTH CLINICAL TRIAL PROCEDURE IS BEING DISMANTLED AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC WILL NOW BE THE TEST SUBJECTS.  IF HARM IS DONE-----TOUGH LUCK AND WE WILL ALLOW THE BAD MEDICAL PROCEDURE TO CONTINUE REGARDLESS IN ANOTHER FORM.

This is what a corporate state looks like and it is Trans Pacific Trade Pact already in action as Obama has filled his Federal agencies with the same kinds of people that Bush did-----people committed to global corporate control of all public policy.

THIS IS WHAT YOUR ELECTIONS FOR GOVERNOR AND MAYOR ARE ABOUT-----WE THE PEOPLE MUST WIN THESE ELECTIONS!

What is happening as well is that Obama and your neo-liberal Congress person sent hundreds of billions of dollars to higher education under the guise of building stronger education but what they are building are corporate university research facilities complete with patenting of research done at this university.  Most institutions receiving those hundreds of billions to build their corporate R and D?  Ivy League universities like Johns Hopkins.  What this policy does is make these universities corporations that receive tons of public taxpayer money to subsidize research in the guise of education while it is simply a patent machine for corporate R and D.  When you see BIOPARK outside of Johns Hopkins or University of Maryland Medical System in Baltimore (a quasi-institution, not public so they say)   ---you are seeing the public subsidizing with what is called education funding the profits of what are now corporations.

More important is combining this with the fact that the clinical trial structure and fast FDA approval of these patented procedures, devices, or medications that are simply rubber-stamped and you have ABSOLUTELY NO PUBLIC OVERSIGHT OF ANY OF THE HEALTH INDUSTRY ACTIONS.  Remember, universities----especially public universities ------were the one institutions charged with making sure the data and research of products protected the people.  These corporate structures built by neo-liberals like O'Malley and neo-cons like Erhlich are now doing just that.......creating an unaccountable and fraudulent system in our medical research structure.

OBAMA AND NEO-LIBERALS IN CONGRESS-----ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS------DELIBERATELY SENT MONEY TO BUILD WHAT THEY KNOW WILL HURT AND/OR KILL CITIZENS IN THE NAME OF CORPORATE PROFIT.


This is what Trans Pacific Trade Pact and the Affordable Care Act is all about.....consolidating the health industry into global corporate health systems that are deregulated and unaccountable and that will do harm without a second thought in pursuit of profit.  This is what the Maryland Health reform has done these several years under O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake in Baltimore-----created the structures to allow all this to happen and with no oversight or accountability structures.

SEE WHY CINDY WALSH FOR GOVERNOR OF MARYLAND AND HER PLATFORM MUST BE KEPT OUT OF THIS ELECTION????


'The 510(k) loophole

Although the FDA requests clinical data in about 10% of cases, one concern over the 510(k) system is that testing is insufficient and so products that are either unsafe or ineffective could be released to market'.


Please read below to the 510 loophole.....it has made the FDA just as the SEC----working for corporate interests against the people's interests.  That is what a corporate state does.

How does the FDA 'approve' medical products?

Thursday 20 February 2014 - 8am PST

Written by David McNamee  Medical News Today



  You may have seen medical products that claim to be "FDA cleared," "FDA registered," "FDA listed" or "FDA approved" - but what do these labels mean? You would be forgiven for feeling confused.

In this feature, we look at what the differences in Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classification actually mean, what you need to be aware of as a consumer and what the future holds for the regulation and classification of medical products in the US.

Though you may see labels on a wide variety of medical products - from implantable defibrillators to smartphone apps - bearing legends such as "FDA registered," in reality these claims are often disingenuous. But regulation over the correct terminology is rarely enforced.

Class 1, 2 and 3 In truth, the only products that the FDA specifically "approve" are drugs and life-threatening or life-sustaining "Class 3" medical technology (such as defibrillators). These are submitted to a rigorous review process called "pre-market approval" (PMA), to prove that the benefits of the products outweigh any potential risks to the health of the patient.


The only products that the FDA specifically "approve" are drugs and life-threatening or life-sustaining "Class 3" medical technology. Scientific evidence from clinical trials must be provided by the manufacturers demonstrating the safety and effectiveness of their product. Just 1% of products pass PMA.

Over-the-counter drugs are monitored by the FDA, but they are submitted to a less rigorous testing procedure, especially if they are assumed to be safe.

Vitamins, herbs and supplements are not tested by the FDA unless they are an active ingredient in a drug that requires FDA approval - so manufacturers of supplements are not allowed to claim that their products can treat any specific disease, only that they "promote health."

Despite this, some supplement companies are known to illegally claim their supplements are "FDA approved." It is thought that the FDA are unable to intervene in every instance due to limited resources.

Low-risk medical devices, such as stethoscopes and gauze, are known as "Class 1" and are exempt from FDA review.

"Class 2" medical devices are defined as not life-sustaining or life-threatening, though this category covers a wide spectrum of devices, from X-ray machines to some exercise equipment.

The level of scrutiny attached to Class 2 devices is much lower than Class 3. The devices do need FDA "clearance" before they can be marketed and sold, but rather than submit their products for clinical trial, the manufacturers are required instead to convince the FDA that their products are "substantially equivalent" to products that have been previously cleared by the FDA.

Substantially equivalent means that the device has the same intended use and approximate technical characteristics as an existing product.

Products that pass this clearance process may be referred to as "FDA cleared" or "FDA listed," but this is not the same as "FDA approved," which only relates to the prescription drugs and Class 3 devices that have passed PMA.

This approval method for Class 2 devices has been the subject of mounting controversy. The process is known as "510(k)" - named after its section in the law.

The 510(k) loophole


Although the FDA requests clinical data in about 10% of cases, one concern over the 510(k) system is that testing is insufficient and so products that are either unsafe or ineffective could be released to market.


Under 510(k), devices that have passed clearance, but have later been found dangerous or ineffective and are recalled, are not automatically removed from the FDA's list of cleared products. Another worry about this process is that the more "substantially equivalent" (but not identical) products are listed, the more a chain grows of FDA-cleared products that increasingly move away from the original product.


But perhaps the most concerning feature of 510(k) is that devices that have passed clearance, but then have later been found dangerous or ineffective and are recalled, are not automatically removed from the FDA's list of cleared products.

This is a loophole that allows any new products bearing the same faults to remain eligible for FDA clearance through 510(k).

In a 2012 report, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommended that 510(k) be replaced with an "integrated pre-market and post-market regulatory framework that effectively provides a reasonable assurance of safety and effectiveness throughout the device life cycle."

But these recommendations - though popular with consumer advocacy groups - were rejected by the FDA.

A congressman (now senator) for Massachusetts, Ed Markey, campaigned for the reform of 510(k) and proposed a 2012 bill to close the loophole.

But the bill was not passed. It received opposition from medical device manufacturers and members of Congress who claimed that the existing FDA review processes are already too time-consuming and unpredictable, compared with other countries, so inserting more safeguards and regulatory steps would have the effect of strangling innovation.

Medical News Today spoke to Dr. Michael A. Carome, director of the non-profit consumer rights organization Public Citizen's Health Research Group, about 510(k).

Dr. Carome cites a report that Public Citizen issued in 2012 highlighting "a concerted lobbying campaign intended to weaken the already lax regulatory oversight of medical devices."

"For example, in 2011 the medical device industry spent $33.3 million on lobbying, raising its total to $158.7 million since 2007. This lobbying campaign has been very successful and has generally drowned out calls for stronger medical device regulation from consumer advocates like Public Citizen."

Carome also sees a second obstacle in the FDA itself, "which has been very resistant to proposals to strengthen or replace the 510(k) system."


"The FDA seems beholden to the medical device industry and the mantra that promotion of 'innovation' is the most important goal in the regulation of medical devices," he adds.


More recently, Sen. Markey wrote to the FDA, appealing directly for them to reform 510(k).

Sen. Markey was satisfied with the FDA's response, announcing in December 2013 that database modifications proposed by the agency "will help decrease the dangers and increase the awareness of medical devices that may be made based on flawed models."

Dr. Carome feels, though, that the FDA's proposed measures "fail to adequately address the underlying flaws in the 510(k) premarket clearance process."

The central issue remains that new Class 2 medical devices found to be "substantially equivalent" to recalled but previously cleared devices are still obliged - by law - to be cleared by the FDA, despite whatever flaws the devices contain.

"The slightly improved transparency provided by FDA's revised database for 510(k)-cleared devices does not close this dangerous loophole in the existing law that threatens patient safety," Carome concludes.

But what are the Class 2 devices that have caused patient safety concerns?

Carome points to the DePuy metal-on-metal Articular Surface Replacement (ASR) hip implant - an "example of a medical device heavily promoted as being innovative and better than earlier types of devices."

In November 2013, DePuy - an orthopedics company owned by Johnson & Johnson - announced a $2.5 billion settlement to resolve more than 8,000 of 12,000 public liability claims filed in US courts after their metal-on-metal hip was recalled in 2010. The ASR was found to shed metallic debris as it wears, causing pain and injury to the patient.

The Myxo ring In 2008, a surgeon named Dr. Patrick McCarthy at Chicago's prestigious academic medical center, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, was found to be installing a device he had invented - the McCarthy Annuloplasty Ring - into the hearts of cardiology patients without the informed consent of the patients.


"If you are planning to receive a medical device in a US hospital, there is no way to confirm whether the device is FDA approved, investigational or registered," says Dr. Rajamannan. Concerned patients were even more alarmed when they discovered that the ring had also not been submitted to the FDA for review.

"There are no guideposts for us. You don't learn about this stuff in med school," McCarthy was quoted by the Chicago Tribune as saying, when questioned on why he had bypassed FDA approval.

The ring's manufacturer, a company called Edwards Lifesciences, later falsely claimed that the device was exempt from the 510(k) process and so did not require FDA clearance.


When a concerned colleague of McCarthy's, Dr. Nalini Rajamannan, contacted the FDA, an investigation was triggered, which ultimately saw the ring cleared for use - despite having already been sewn into the hearts of 667 patients.

But further controversy surrounded the FDA's clearance, which simply relied on a clinical study Dr. McCarthy himself had written as evidence that the ring - now rebranded "Myxo dETlogix" - was safe and effective.

Dr. Rajamannan - who was co-author on that study before withdrawing when she learned that the patients involved were not giving informed consent - later wrote a book detailing the controversy and continues to campaign on behalf of patients installed with the Myxo ring.

Speaking to Medical News Today, she says that the concerns over the Myxo device have still not been addressed by the FDA:


"The FDA has written a formal letter stating that they would not be investigating the matter any further. These heart valve rings that are being cleared under the 510k process for Edwards Lifesciences are associated with over 4,000 adverse events and over 645 deaths."

"The other major heart valve manufacturers have less than 20 events for their rings in the FDA database."

What does the future hold for FDA regulation? As we have shown in this feature, the confusion over the various stages of FDA "approval" and "clearance" is not limited to patients. These examples show that FDA classifications and processes can also - naively or wilfully - be misinterpreted by manufacturers and medical professionals.

The concerns from doctors, patients and consumer advocacy groups on the lack of regulation of medical products and the conflicts of interest within those regulatory processes remain.

Dr. Carome recommends that the IOM's 2012 guidelines be implemented and suggests that more of the Class 2 products sped through to market under 510(k) need to be reclassified as Class 3, for which the PMA process is much more stringent.

"Manufacturers do heavily promote their devices as being new and innovative, and many health care providers and patients believe that a 'newer' or 'innovative' device must be better," reasons Carome. "However, in most cases, there is no evidence that the newer medical devices are any better than older devices or other less-invasive treatments that don't involve a medical device."

"It is a real safety problem," agrees Dr. Rajamannan, who adds: "If you are planning to receive a medical device in a US hospital, there is no way to confirm whether the device is FDA approved, investigational or registered."

"The patients in the US are at major risk and the FDA is doing nothing to help the patients."
_______________________________________________
As I said, Maryland TV is plastered with injury law firms gathering patients that are victims of this horrendous system.  As we all know, the injury lawyers get all the money in the end and the patients are harmed for life.  This is what a third world nation looks like----citizens cannot even seek medical help without being fearful the procedures are happening in their interests and not for profit.

In Maryland, the Maryland Assembly has passed laws that make it as hard as possible for the public to seek justice in medical malpractice and it does not require medical malpractice insurance---meaning doctors prone to bad practices would love to come to Maryland.  NONE OF THESE POLICIES ARE DEMOCRATIC----YET MARYLAND IS CALLED A 'PROGRESSIVE' STATE.  It is a neo-liberal/neo-con state.





New Jersey Personal Injury Blog FDA Failed to Properly Test Medical Devices before Approval

By Blume Donnelly Fried Forte Zerres & Molinari
on March 9, 2011

CNN
recently reported that a review of recall data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found that the majority of the 113 Class III medical devices that were recalled between 2005 and 2009 for serious, life-threatening dangers, did not undergo the FDA’s more rigorous pre-market approval process, also referred to as “PMA.” Instead, the agency cleared the devices using a less stringent process known as the 510(k) process, under which clinical testing is not required. This discovery brings to light that many medical products that were given clearance, such as automated external defibrillators (AEDs), artificial hip joints, and heart valves, were marketed to and used on consumers without undergoing clinical testing in advance.

Under FDA policy, all Class III devices are required to undergo the PMA premarket approval process, including clinical testing, in order to determine if “sufficient valid scientific evidence” is found that the medical device is safe for its intended use.

However, a report from the Government Accountability Office in 2009 discovered that approximately 66 percent of all Class III devices were approved using the less demanding 510(k) process instead of the PMA because it was “less burdensome”. An additional study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Archives of Internal Medicine, found that approximately 71 percent of the 113 medical devices recalled between 2005 and 2009 were given approval through the 510(k) process.

Many believe the reasons for the shortcomings in testing are because the agency does not have the necessary funding and staff to conduct a clinical study for all medical devices requiring same. While a medical device’s manufacturer does pay for a fraction of the expenses related to a PMA approval, the majority of the cost falls to the FDA, which is under-funded. Choosing to approve a medical device under the 510(k) process is much less expensive.

The FDA has admitted that the 510(k) approval process needs to be toughened, and has stated it intends to take action to improve the process in 2011. Additionally, the FDA has stated it will evaluate all remaining Class III devices slated for the 510(k) process to determine if the device should undergo the PMA process. As a result, there may be dangerous medical devices on the market that have not received proper government approval.

If you believe that a defectively designed or manufactured medical device may have seriously affected your health or the health of a loved one, contact a New Jersey product liability attorney at Blume Goldfaden. Call 973-635-5400 to schedule a no-cost consultation with one of our lawyers.





____________________________________________________
Keep in mind that a republican Bush slashed funding for most Federal agencies as a way to make oversight and accountability go away.  So, when Obama makes an increase of 2-3% he is doing nothing towards rebuilding these agencies.  In fact, much of the funding that makes it to these agencies is simply lost in private outsourcing with all its fraud and corruption.

When they say 'it's the sequestration and the national debt' 

WE SAY----NO, IT'S THE FAILURE TO RECOVER TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD THIS LAST DECADE.

This funding status quo simply keeps our Federal agencies in a mode of 'doing no harm' to corporate profits.

STOP ELECTING NEO-LIBERALS!  DO YOU HEAR YOUR POLS SHOUTING TO BRING BACK TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN CORPORATE FRAUD!  MARYLAND POLS LOVE FRAUD AND CORRUPTION SO THERE IS NOT A WORD


Once again republican think tanks are crying foul but they are the ones behind all of the dismantling of these agencies creating the fraud and corruption and loss of trillions of dollars.  Their figures are right---$900 billion from Medicare will be taken from the patient's care and not hospital profits.


Reaction to Obama's 2015 HHS funding:

Various health care providers and organizations have responded to the proposal, with many calling for increased funding for health-related agencies and initiatives.

The Federation of American Hospitals criticized proposed funding cuts to Medicare, with FAH President and CEO Chip Kahn saying they would "further threate[n] seniors' access to vital hospital services" and noting that both Republicans and Democrats oppose such reductions (Demko/Zigmond, Modern Healthcare, 3/4). According to National Journal, the group is hoping to persuade Congress against the cuts by touting a new study estimating over $900 billion in Medicare savings over the next 10 years through cost cutting resulting from changes to the way providers deliver care (Ritger, National Journal, 3/4).

American Hospital Association President and CEO Richard Umbdenstock said the proposal contained some "problematic policies" that would hurt hospitals' abilities to improve the health care system and place patients' at risk of losing access to services (Demko/Zigmond, Modern Healthcare, 3/4).

Kasey Thompson, president and chair of the Alliance for a Stronger FDA and vice president of policy, planning and communications for the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, called for additional FDA funding, saying, "Given that FDA regulates about 25 cents of every dollar of the gross domestic product, it does not have enough money to fulfill its public health mission."

Alliance for a Stronger FDA Deputy Executive Director Steven Grossman added that the group plans to ask Congress for more FDA funding (Lee, Modern Healthcare, 3/4).

The proposed increase in NIH funding also generated backlash. Research! America President Mary Woolley in a statement said that the U.S. "simply cannot sustain [its] research ecosystem, combat costly and deadly diseases ... and create quality jobs with anemic funding levels that threaten the health and prosperity of Americans," adding, "These funding levels jeopardize our global leadership in science -- in effect ceding leadership to other nations as they continue to invest in strong research and development infrastructures" (Viebeck, "Healthwatch," The Hill, 3/4).




_____________________________________________________


This is how crazy things have gotten.  California is indeed ground zero for this university as corporation model starting with Stanford and now consuming all public universities.  Remember, California had the best education system in the world----I had the pleasure of attending California schools at all levels-----but this move to corporatize has ruined the entire higher education system and they are now creating the tiered higher ed as they are in Maryland with working and middle class being tracked into vocational K-career college.

This is critical to health care because these large universities whether public or private are the source of public protections for health.  If the data is corrupt at universities-----no one is watching the health corporations either.  So, if you think funding universities by making them corporations is a good idea----THINK OF ALL THE FACTORS CONNECTED TO THIS.

It is interesting to note that Governor Brown-----who will try to run for President as a 'progressive' on his old record as a real progressive in the 1970s---appointed Napolitano-----HEAD OF HOMELAND SECURITY WITH NO EDUCATION BACKGROUND as Chancellor of California Higher Education School System.

THE CONTINUED USE OF INSIDERS FILLING APPOINTED POSITIONS AT ALL LEVELS.


When they talk of 'start ups from this university research' they do not tell you that 9 times out of ten those start-ups that are successful are simply absorbed into global corporations.  IT IS A PIPELINE.  Keep in mind that these corporate universities sell this corporate structure as funding schools but it is this structure that has student tuition sky high subsidizing this research and patenting process.  Maryland has done the same to its universities as this article shows in California and it is where all public funding for education is now going.  Johns Hopkins has had so much money funneled to it from our Congress neo-liberals that it owns much of the land in Baltimore's downtown and city center and it is all simply businesses connected to Hopkins.  THIS IS HOW YOU BUILD A GLOBAL CORPORATION THAT CONTROLS A REGION----

Patent-reform legislation spurs controversy among universities

Tina Pai/Staff By Tahmina Achekzai

Last Updated April 28, 2014

In 1994, Michael Doyle, then the director of a computer lab at UCSF, patented software that allowed doctors to view embryos online — the first “interactive” application on the web.

A few years later, the University of California licensed a patent to a company Doyle created called Eolas, which, claiming rights to the idea of embedding interactive content on web pages, sued Microsoft in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

The university, a co-plaintiff in the case, took a $30.4-million cut in what is now widely regarded as a classic case of “patent trolling.”

This week, Congress is marking up legislation in hopes of combating patent trolls — companies that purchase patents not to commercialize a product but to reap licensing revenue.

The UC system holds nearly 4,000 U.S. patents that have led to thousands of inventions and hundreds of startup companies. The University of California leads the nation’s universities in patent development, but pending legislation may change that.

Politicians vs. trolls

Traditionally, researchers apply for patents that give them full ownership of their idea or invention and then sell the rights to outside companies, hoping to take their discoveries from the lab to industry. But when the inventions seem to have little hope for commercialization, “patent trolls” may step into the picture.

Trolls, more formally known as patent-assertion entities, will find and subsequently sue businesses they accuse of infringing patent rights. Serving as a middleman between inventors and businesses, trolls collect licensing fees, a portion of which the inventors may receive.

According to the 2013 White House Patent Assertion and U.S. Innovation Report, suits filed by patent trolls tripled from 2010 to 2012, at which point they comprised 62 percent of all patent-infringement cases.

Experts say that because it costs millions of dollars to ascertain what a patent covers, companies faced with these lawsuits may choose to settle rather than to fight.

In November, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., introduced a bill hoping to increase transparency within the patent system and to curb the emerging trend of patent trolling.

The bill would require any patentee who has filed a lawsuit to disclose any financial interests. It also requires the Federal Trade Commission to exercise authority over the misuse of demand letters: notices to companies claiming restitution for breach of license.

Academic qualms

Though the legislation is designed to serve as a deterrent to patent trolls attempting to sue other parties, universities worry it will invariably impede their efforts to enforce their own patent rights.

Earlier this month, the Association of American Universities — of which the UC system is a part — signed a joint letter addressed to Leahy outlining its concerns. The letter was also signed by the Association of University Technology Managers, made up of representatives from “technology transfer” offices at many universities who guard university research.

“Much of the legislation that is currently under discussion in Washington goes far beyond what is necessary simply to prevent that abuse of the patent system,” said David Winwood, the vice president for advocacy at the Association of University Technology Managers.

Of particular concern among both universities and members of Congress is the possible addition of a fee-shifting provision, which would require the losing party in a lawsuit to cover fees and expenses incurred by the opposing party.

Carol Mimura, UC Berkeley’s assistant vice chancellor of intellectual property and research industry alliances, explained that the threat of incurring additional fees could discourage universities from filing lawsuits against actual infringers.

“The provision favors large, deep pockets, not the little guys,” Mimura said in an email. “Big companies and deep pockets create a David and Goliath situation that discourages investment, as opposed to encouraging it.”

While the university protects its employees, co-inventors are sometimes undergraduate students who are not protected and would have to pay for the damages. As a result, she said, they may be discouraged from filing patents — and, consequently, inhibited from advancing “innovation.”

Gary Falle, UC’s associate vice president for federal government relations, argues Congress needs to take a more “balanced approach” when addressing patent abuses.

“The UC is the lead in the nation in the number of patents (awarded annually), and we want to make sure that is protected,” said Falle. “We just want to make sure that the patents the university is awarded are able to move into technology, commercialization and innovation.”


Trimming the troll

Yet Robin Feldman, a law professor at UC Hastings College of the Law who researches patent trolling issues extensively, believes the legislation is vital to the abused patent system.

Feldman suggested universities might have underlying incentives in opposing the legislation. She noted that universities, while not filing patent lawsuits directly, may deliberately ally with nonpracticing entities to increase revenue.

“They do appear to be feeding the patent trolls at least to some extent,” she said. “There’s so much pressure on universities to find funding sources, and it is difficult for them to resist the temptation to sell to those who won’t make any products.”

Still, according to Mimura, UC Berkeley only licenses patents to commercial entities in accordance with university patent policy. And, despite what history may suggest, Mimura said the University of California does indeed support patent reform and has even reached out to Sen. Dianne Feinstein thanking her for support of patent reform.

In regard to current legislation efforts, the UC system only wants to shift the discussion in the right direction, Falle said.

“We believe that addressing bad behavior by stopping those who send multiple demand letters in the hope of extracting fees out of fear will be the focus of reform — not shutting down the entire patent system that is the goose that laid the golden egg,” Mimura said.

0 Comments

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.
__________________
STEM labor shortages?: Microsoft report distorts reality ...www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages... 
__________________
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

________________________________________
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."


0 Comments

April 17th, 2014

4/17/2014

0 Comments

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

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



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

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

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

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


WHO'S SCHOOLS?  OUR SCHOOLS!!!!


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Students protest college costs Rally at OSU part of national event


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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



Thursday, Mar 20, 2014, 2:15 pm

Academic Labor Unrest Spreads to Maryland Colleges

(UPDATED) BY Bruce Vail Email Print

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bargaining unit will include about 350 employees.


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

THIS IS NOT WHAT DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION LOOKS LIKE.

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


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

  • The Guardian, Monday 18 November 2013 17.10 EST

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

Photograph: Mark Benedict Barry/Corbis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


_______________________________________

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

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

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

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

Hundreds of academics protest against mass surveillance

Politics
03 January 14 by Olivia Solon  WIRED UK




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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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









__________________________________________

Act Locally » March 26, 2014

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


BY Sarah Jaffe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


0 Comments

March 12th, 2014

3/12/2014

0 Comments

 
Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland stands for strong public, private libraries, and research institutions  


NEO-LIBERALS WORK FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT AND CONTROL THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!  HEATHER MIZEUR SAYS SHE IS PROGRESSIVE?  HAVE YOU HEARD HER SHOUT AGAINST ALL OF THIS? SHE SUPPORTS PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS AND WALL STREET CREDIT BOND LEVERAGE FOR THESE KINDS OF THINGS!



MOVING ALL FEDERAL AND STATE FUNDING OF EDUCATION TO PRIVATE CORPORATE NON-PROFITS AND EDUCATION BUSINESSES IS DELIBERATELY MEANT TO PRIVATIZE AND CLOSE PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS DEDICATED TO PUBLIC INTEREST.  THIS SHOULD HAVE EVERYONE ON THE STREETS.



  To:  Citizens for Maryland Libraries

I would like to share my views of policy that will concern the vision and mission of Maryland libraries.  As an academic currently working as a research professional I live in libraries and archives so I am one of the most frequent users of the institutions for which you advocate.  I would be a real friend to public and private libraries and research institutions. 

First, let me clarify a policy stance that drives my policies on education and by extension how libraries fit into education at all levels.  We have watched these few years of Governor O’Malley’s term the embracing of a Federal policy advanced by the Obama Administration under the direction of his Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Race to the Top and this policy guides any questions regarding libraries and Common Core materials.  As a progressive labor and justice candidate I see Race to the Top as an assault on public education K-12 and with it Common Core.  I will work hard to restore rigor and accountability in all public schools as I too agree that we have failed to assure these standards in public schools these few decades.  I think Race to the Top and Common Core are not the best approach for doing this.  Indeed, I feel these policies work against the very goal stated by politicians pushing this agenda.  The method of implementation of Race to the Top shows what I feel is a desperate attempt to move education policy that Federal officials know the public does not want and they are doing as quickly as possible with such a lack of transparency as to have no avenue for public comment and input in what is the cornerstone to our democratic society-------democratic education and equal opportunity and access to all education.  Common Core sold as a standardization of curricula is not progressive but regressive.  It is not even about making sure there is consistency across America in subject content and rigor.  As anyone who has a background in science and education as I do knows……STEM courses are already standardized.  Facts are facts and courses from science, technology, engineering, and math are fact based.  Now, some people may say that areas like evolution and environment have prejudice in political beliefs, but if students are required to know science standards for existing national tests, those requirements will continue to drive course content.  My concern with Common Core is more with the humanities and liberal arts where standardization greatly jeopardizes democratic freedom of thought and speech as each region of this nation has its own experiences with socio-economic evaluation, civics, history, music, literature, etc.  We do not want to standardize that which makes a nation a plurality.  As a progressive I do not like conservative states writing out the labor and civil rights era every opportunity they get, but I also would not like having the Bush Administration writing the Common Core history lesson on their administration’s foreign policies on War and torture.  Standardization never works well at a time when government is controlled by what we all know to be corporate culture that does not have the public interest in mind in writing policy.  So, just as a general statement on education policy I will open with my intent to fight Race to the Top implementation in Maryland.  My appointments would be strong public education advocates and my bully-pulpit as governor would address the Maryland Assembly as regards the movement of policy that has so little research showing its legitimacy in creating the achievements it states and the unwise decision to move forward so quickly with policy that has not had public comment, development of core materials to be used, and the discussions as to where these policies lead the state in the long-term.  I believe the majority of citizens in Maryland, both democrat and republican are not comfortable with these policies and particularly their being implemented without discussion and thought.     Please see my website Citizens Oversight Maryland.com for very clearly written policy stances on this education policy.  Keep in mind I am an activist and this site is written to be populist.  Accountability and public oversight is the passion of my campaign.  

Now, on to  three specific questions directed at libraries: 

1.        One of the greatest achievements of our last economic revolution, the Industrial Revolution, was philanthropy that gave us the public institutions of learning and the public library system we have today.  The idea that all people living in America were to be educated in a way that prepares them to be leaders and to be citizens is central to our Founding Father’s writing of the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution.  Public places were key to the American people being both.  The legal case of Brown vs Board of Education was successful in that the dictate of equal opportunity and access to public education was already a given; it was simply the acknowledgement, as if this needed to be acknowledged, that all men are created equal includes people of color.  So, simply having this philosophy of education identifies me as someone who by extension values the library system in providing that access and opportunity to all.  If we look at the future as regards digitization of all information and the ability of citizens here in America to afford the tools needed to access this digital information we know that libraries will be even more necessary to open access to many people.  Right now, for many it is libraries that offer the only access to the internet and as public schools become more wired and computers become integrated in lessons, access to computers outside the classroom is critical.  Funding for this transition in classrooms is a good thing and we need to see that libraries and community centers are viewed as equally needing of funding to meet these changes.   We are seeing a movement in Maryland of using private education non-profits to serve in providing after-school programs and even in-school programs.  Libraries on the other hand are being left to feel that budgets could be slashed or branches closed at any time.  The movement of these educational outlets from the public to these private non-profits shows a desire to privatize our public sources and services.  I write extensively on the negative impact of public-private partnerships and where I do see good coming from some of these partnerships the goal is clearly to make these relationships the rule and not the exception.  This will not end well for libraries whether public or private.  As a researcher I know that access to research is becoming limited as even universities are making research protected from public view through patents and by extension librarians are now having to tell consumers of the library sources that once accessible data is now proprietary.  This also limits what librarians can say in the course of their duties while on the clock and as we all know, Federal rules regarding surveillance of public records has librarians forced to operate in ways they may find disagreeable.  We see this as an assault on free speech and freedom of information.  All of this falls into policy that attempts to privatize our public spaces.    In order for an education policy to be dynamic and promote success for all Marylanders, we cannot restrict our public spaces and the flow of public information with these categorization of quasi-governmental or public private.  It is repressive and it hurts everyone.  We want to build community educational programs, we want to make libraries center of these communities and a vital part of each school’s structure.  This requires strong funding to public schools and I will say that the current policy of allowing corporations to donate rather than pay taxes skews all attempts at making educational opportunities equal.  Tiered-per-pupil funding in Baltimore for example with the desire to run individual schools as businesses has some schools pressed to buy toilet paper for the children’s bathrooms so whether that school has a good library falls to the whim of private donation.  This is not democratic and public education.  It does not meet the US Constitutional requirement of democratic and equal opportunity.  Libraries that are tied to private donation rather than by public funding are then under the restrictions that come with that donation and, indeed, that is the point of this policy.  Libraries whether private or public will not serve their consumers if policy is dictated by private donation only.  I know, Carnegie was one big private donation but he had the foresight of placing them in the hands of public operation.   We must continue the public funding of library resources of all kinds and with it public access and programming developed with the public in mind.  In Baltimore, small libraries have been defunded and public access ended because of cuts to library budgets and branches are in fear each budget season that the axe may fall.  Politicians thinking all information is online will be the ones who view physical buildings for libraries as extraneous.   In conclusion, I value private non-profits operating as a source for after-school programs.  I feel that libraries are already in the position of providing these programs as well.  A well-resourced library already in a community is necessary for any well-developed education mission.  In this age of technology we would want our libraries to have the same resources as our classrooms so the connection to after-school consumers is there.  

2.        Since I am not a supporter of all of the testing and evaluation policy I do not see a need to expand preparation for testing to libraries more than what exists right now.  Education that is broad and experiential needs to have more opportunity in group projects and exposure to any number of learning skill development tools.  Classroom teachers are not able to do the level of educational skills development needed for achievement and this is where libraries can be an excellent source for parents and students in their after-school choices.  We desperately need all hands on deck with skills development and I do not feel that private non-profits are the only avenue for this.  Our Pratt Central Library has wonderful programs for children and with a bigger budget would have the space to expand as a meeting place for after-school programs.  Having library staff coming to public community centers to help build and implement these programs, funding of mobile library buses all are extremely valuable in attaining educational goals in Maryland.  The upside down education policy of having students going online after school to prepare for classroom lessons is an excellent opportunity for libraries so having the software and materials used in the classrooms at the library is a must.  Parents have never needed more resources than now in learning how to help their children meet these new classroom requirements.   I cannot begin to share the importance for every student in having a library to which to retreat for all kinds of reasons.  Libraries are not only about classroom K-college.  They have as a mission to be the sight of Lifelong Learning.  To be able to meet this mission libraries must be well-resourced.  It is expensive to outfit a library for those with disabilities or to make sure the library collections cater to all kinds of tastes and cultural backgrounds.  All attempts to cut budgets makes the libraries less able to do this and in turn make them attractive to fewer people.  If your goal was to be rid of libraries, that would be the mechanism.  Look to the US Post Office to see this strategy for dismantling a national public treasure!  

3.       I will say as Governor of Maryland my responsibilities to move forward policies regarding Race to the Top will remain until a time comes that this policy can be changed.  It is my intent to push for this.  That said, as State Executive it will be my responsibility to move forward policy dictated by past legislation and indeed, MCC-RS and Common Core are those policies.  That said, I will be sure to see that libraries have what is needed to make them central in implementing this policy and support public school teachers in their classrooms and with promoting the success of students in achievement on these tests.  The amount of education funding going into implementing these Race to the Top policies is outrageous for people knowing all our public schools need are resources and rigor.  So, it would be my job to look carefully at all of the private consultants, all of the private educational businesses tied with this Race to the Top and assess how we might better implement these policies by using the resources such as libraries already in our community.  Since Race to the Top is mostly about growing an education business industry, corporate politicians working for these corporations are no doubt bringing the state into lots of business deals that may not be needed or effective.  I would look at these contracts to see how we can bring libraries and public community centers into the loop in assuring student readiness for these tests.  As a former classroom teacher I know these teachers are overwhelmed and really have little ability to accomplish all that is being placed upon them so quickly.  I would make it my goal to give relief to these classroom teachers in whatever way I can and that would extend to bringing in existing educational sources like libraries and librarians.     


WALSH FOR GOVERNOR IS A GREAT BIG FAN OF LIBRARIES AND ALL RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS AND IN PROTECTING US CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF FREE SPEECH, CIVIL LIBERTIES, AND CIVIL RIGHTS THAT GO WITH EDUCATION AND EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS! 


Update: Vermont Library Lays Off Whole Staff; Librarians Protest

By Meredith Schwartz on January 8, 2013 This article has been updated to include video footage of the “Hug” of the Athenaeum on January 12.

On December 3rd, 2012, the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum Board of Trustees announced it would lay off its entire library, docent, and information technology staff, then “ask them to consider applying for the newly formed Athenaeum positions,” Bill Marshall, chair of the Athenaeum Board of Trustees, said in a letter.

The first goal of the radical restructuring is to reduce costs: the library is eating into its endowment. It could be depleted in as little as seven years if spending continues at the current rate, which the Athenaeum’s Executive Director, Matthew Powers, said was between 10 and 20 percent per year, rather than the recommended 4.5 percent. The plan will cut personnel spending by eight percent, or about $40,000. Powers told LJ that personnel is the “single highest line” in the library-cum-museum’s budget. “Last year personnel costs were roughly $340,000 out of a total budget roughly of $500,000, and that doesn’t take into account the deficit,” he explained.

Although it is the staff restructuring that is raising the most controversy, Powers told LJ it’s far from the only cut. “Within the overall budget we reduced about $150,000; so we didn’t just look at the personnel budget,” said Powers. Other cutbacks affected general expenses and facilities. “No stone was unturned,” Power continued.

The other stated goal of the restructuring is to gear the Athenaeum up to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing world of librarianship, including a new focus on digitization, research and technical assistance, super-broadband Internet access, and off-site services, as well as more emphasis on programs and collaboration with other institutions. However, it is not entirely clear how the restructuring would place more emphasis on technology use and support, since it replaces a dedicated employee with an IT contractor.

According to Laurel Stanley, a retired academic library director, public library trustee, Athenaeum member and donor, and member of the Vermont Library Association Board, a new focus on these goals isn’t necessary. “They’re saying that the Athenaeum is behind in new services and technology and that’s just not true,” said Stanley. “The Athenaeum is definitely a leader in the Northeast Kingdom [section of Vermont], and measures well compared to other libraries in the state.”

According to a second letter from the Board, the Athenaeum is moving from a team of eight people working in the library—most part-time—to a team of four people, two of whom are full time. (Plus a new curatorial position which requires museum, not library, expertise, and a full time development position.) The letter compared the decision to the also-controversial restructuring at Harvard University, and also includes a Q&A section describing some background:

Q: Is there a future for public libraries?

A: Yes! Absolutely yes! There is an important role for public libraries, but it’s going to be different. Preparing for this new role for our library is the fundamental reason we are restructuring. Moreover, this change is occurring with great speed and we have some catching up to do. This is the reason we felt we needed to take a bold step forward, instead of small, incremental changes.

The Athenaeum’s new library positions include a full time librarian and assistant librarian, a part time assistant librarian, and a part time youth services librarian. Although the Board’s letter stated that the people hired into the four new positions will be qualified librarians, according to the job posting, an MLS is not required for any of the positions. While Vermont considers someone with a department of library certification to be a qualified librarian, Stanley told LJ, “it is highly unusual that a library the size of the Athenaeum would not have at least one MLS. You can’t tell me you’re going to do catching up and then say you don’t need an MLS.”

While the Athenaeum says the restructuring does not result in any significant cut in staffing, Stanley disagrees, saying the 130 hours of library staffing that the new positions provide will be insufficient to both staff the Athenaeum’s two service desks and children’s room for the library’s current 42-43 open hours per week, and provide the additional outreach services and programming called for by the plan. Likewise, expanding non-library positions such as a curator, a development director, a book keeper, and a custodian, while reducing library staff hours, is not focusing on library services, claims Stanley.

Stanley agrees that the budget must be balanced, but feels that “they’ve put far too much money into this art gallery, and library services has been far down” on the list of priorities.

Rural Librarians Unite (RuLU), a newly formed volunteer group, is organizing opposition to the cuts in the form of a “hug” for the library. On Saturday, January 12 at noon, the group will join with the Vermont Library Association and citizens of St. Johnsbury to hold hands around the library.

The demonstration is similar to that organized by 2012 LJ Mover & Shaker Christian Zabriskie in 2011. Zabriskie, founder of Urban Librarians Unite, coordinated a “hug” of the New York Public Library’s main branch, and Lydia Willoughby, spokersperson for RuLU, says that’s not a coincidence. “We contacted ULU before starting anything up here, and got their blessing. The ‘hug’ event was definitely influenced by their work at NYPL.”

The Vermont Library Association (VLA) said in a statement, “While the Vermont Library Association understands the Board’s responsibility for setting direction for their library during a time of financial stress, now, more than ever, Vermonters need libraries–and librarians. The Vermont Library Association feels that the board’s actions demonstrate a devaluation of libraries and the library professionals capable of leading them through a time of intense change in information resources and society.  Librarians are not replaced by the Internet–their skills and training enrich the Internet and facilitate access for all Vermonters.”

Both RuLU and VLA also called on supporters to contact the Athenaeum directly, as well as their elected representatives.

Willoughby told LJ, “While the timing of Rural Librarians Unite was definitely in response to the Athenaeum situation, the story was never about just the Athenaeum library staff…RuLU will serve as an activist force that libraries and librarians can go to whenever they want to get a campaign off the ground for any reason.”

RuLU’s future plans include building library and literacy services for correctional facilities and reentry programs in Vermont, an alternative email listserv for rural librarians to make action plans and share resources, support for safe physical spaces for vulnerable learners and library users, meet ups at independent bookstores, unconferences, collaboration with Every Library on State-wide advocacy, and reaching out to ARSL and other peer organizations. While RuLU is focused on Vermont right now, Willoughby doesn’t rule out expanding nationally/or and working with nearby Canadian libraries.


__


The “Hug” drew a crowd of about 200 people, according to RuLU. Video of the event can be seen below:



HUG the Athenaeum - The People Make the Library

- Jan 12, 2013 RuralLibrariansUnite·1 video
2 864 views 16     0 Published on Jan 13, 2013

In December 2012, the board of trustees at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum laid off 11 library staff and invited them to reapply for 3.25 positions. Rural Librarians Unite organized a rally in response. Here is some footage! We love libraries!

Find out more on our website: rurallibrariansunite.org
facebook: facebook.com/rurallibrariansunite
twitter: @rurallibrarians


___________________________________________
This article shows the same happening in Maryland.  While I do fault union leadership for not shouting and using labor lawyers to fight worker wealth lost to fraud and corruption,these unions need the citizens of the state to come out in support of labor and public services.  When neo-liberals partner with republicans to privatize all that is public.......labor and justice must have public support.

PLEASE MOBILIZE AND SHOUT, PROTEST, PETITION AND RUN FOR OFFICE AT ALL LEVELS!  WE NEED TO TAKE BACK THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE.

Remember, budget shortfalls come from failure to recover tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud at the national level and tens of billions at the state and local levels.  IT IS ALL ABOUT REINSTATING RULE OF LAW AND ACCOUNTABILITY!




SCOD Public Blog
Sustainable Cooperative for Organic Development

Maryland Budget Cuts = Drastic Library Layoffs Maryland State Budget Cuts Public Services




County library workers in unions, pay more than $500 a year in dues. What have all those dues done for them? That is the sum total effect that paying all those union dues has done for thousands of workers in 21st Century Maryland. Luxurious Legislators have waited until the State deficit is almost $800 million, before they decided to radically chop down the life-long careers of countless loyal State workers and their families.

Montgomery County Executive Dictator Isiah Leggett is calling for a reduction in government spending for the first time in more than 40 years. Regardless of political party, there is nothing “democratic” about his legacy. He spent all the County’s money on bullet-proofing his personal security, and a gold-leaf bathroom in his office. Now in his $4.3 billion budget Monday, he calls for cuts across the state, including libraries and other services. The plan also gives schools $137 million LESS than required by the state. Leggett is calling for an energy tax that would cost about $3 per month for the average household. He has called for a $62 million ambulance fee that was rejected by the county council in the past.

All of these drastic cuts are his attempts to address his own political follies that have aggregated into one of the largest budget deficits in the region. Leggett is proposing no pay increase for county employees. He would eliminate hundreds of currently filled jobs and impose 10 days of furloughs for non-public-safety employees. The overall job reduction amounts to well over 750 work years.

This massive reduction in much needed public service, is almost as bad as the General Assembly cuts to Baltimore’s highway aid from the state. The evidence is clear that the public demands more access to these services, yet the wrong decisions are made. There are many ways to cut budgets over a period of years, without forcing a mass exodus.

The future of civilization in Maryland does not look good. Already homeless and people without internet access clamor at the doors of the libraries. What will all those thousands of people do? Get a job with all these cuts? Yeah, right.


________________________________________

Libraries are now one of the last places for the public to meet in a public space especially in Maryland.  The intent is to take that away as well.  With loss of net neutrality and consolidation of the communications industry, prices will soar and content standardized across the nation in the hands of global corporations.  THE INTENT IS TO CONTROL INFORMATION AND ACCESS TO THIS INFORMATION.  Libraries are and will become the only outlet for people to computers and content online. 

Meanwhile, librarians are being threatened by Federal Security agencies against making public illegal searches, illegal blocking of information, and privacy issues libraries have always protected.  Free speech and free flow of information is threatened by neo-liberals.



Librarians Protest Against Budget Cuts At City Hall October 31, 2011 1:32 PM Library Generic (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)

CHICAGO (CBS) – It was reading time and protest time for more than 100 city librarians and supporters Monday morning at a rally outside Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office at City Hall.

WBBM Newsradio’s Bernie Tafoya reports that one librarian read to children at City Hall about a “big green monster,” but what librarians found even scarier were the mayor’s planned cuts to the library system.

LISTEN: WBBM Newsradio’s Bernie Tafoya reports




“At a time we’re taking more and more things away from our kids, we need to give them something to expand their imaginations,” said Beverly Cook, who has been with the library system for more than 25 years.

The mayor plans to trim $11 million from the budget for public libraries next year by eliminating 268 vacant positions and laying off 284 workers – including two dozen various librarians, 112 clerks and all 146 pages charged with shelving books.

Library student Megan Russell said, “The effect will be horrendous for both children and people that cannot afford Internet and cannot afford books.”

Library supporters arrived at City Hall with more than 4,000 petition signatures backing up their opposition of the library cuts.

________________________________________
You may not understand the outrage over issues with Trans Pacific Trade Pact (TPP) like intellectual property protections and IT protections but the article below shows the problem.  Since universities are being made into corporations and patenting their research, what was free and open sharing of all academic research internationally will now be threatened.  Proprietary means that the decades of building an international system of sharing academic information to cut the costs of taxpayer funding of costly research will be closed to the public.  Librarians used to be the experts on finding all of this information to share with the public and now those resources are mostly accessible to only university personnel.



Bill Clinton placed privatization of universities on the fast track once he and Reagan tag-teamed global corporate rule.  Obama has sent hundreds of billions of dollars to build these university research centers that are now simply corporations while sending relatively small funding connected to Race to the Top to fund K-12.  Most of that too attached to building private education structures.  Meanwhile, researchers like myself cannot access what Federal, state, and local taxes fund in research because patented research is proprietary.

Why have library staff when most of what libraries did is now being lost.....the public does not need to know!  'Innovation startup' is just a political phrase for spending all taxpayer money on the R and D costs for new product development.  All these startups that are successful are simply folded into global corporations and the university department heads are paid as if they are manufacturing executives. 

NEO-LIBERALS WORK FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT AND CONTROL THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!  HEATHER MIZEUR SAYS SHE IS PROGRESSIVE?  HAVE YOU HEARD HER SHOUT AGAINST ALL OF THIS? SHE SUPPORTS PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS AND WALL STREET CREDIT BOND LEVERAGE FOR THESE KINDS OF THINGS!


Academic Patenting: How universities and public research organizations are using their intellectual property to boost research and spur innovative start-ups

Mario Cervantes, Economist, Science and Technology Policy Division, Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry, OECD1

Introduction Universities and other public research organizations are increasingly protecting their inventions – from genetic inventions to software – helping raise additional funding for research and spurring new start ups. The rise in university patenting has occurred against a broader policy framework aimed at fostering a greater interaction between public research and industry in order to increase the social and private returns from public support to R&D. The general strengthening of intellectual property protection world-wide as well as the passage of legislation aimed at improving technology transfer are additional factors that have facilitated the expansion of patenting in academia in OECD countries.

Indeed, in 1980, the United States passed what is widely considered landmark legislation, the Bayh-Dole Act, which granted recipients of federal R&D funds the right to patent inventions and license them to firms. The main motivation for this legislation was to facilitate the exploitation of government-funded research results by transferring ownership from the government to universities and other contractors who could then license the IP to firms. Although patenting in US universities did occur prior to the passage of Bayh-Dole Act, it was far from systematic.

At the end of the 1990s, emulating the US policy change, many other OECD countries reformed research funding regulations and/or employment laws to allow research institutions to file, own and license the IP generated with government research funds. In Austria, Denmark, Germany and Japan, the main effect of these changes has been the abolishment of the so-called “professor’s privilege” that granted academics the right to own patents. The right to ownership has now been transferred to the universities while academic inventors are given a share of royalty revenue in exchange. There has also been debate in Sweden on whether to follow a similar path and transfer ownership to institutions. For now at least, the status quo remains and policy efforts are focusing on developing the ability of universities to provide professors with support for patenting. 

In Canada, where rules on IP ownership by universities vary across Provinces, efforts have nevertheless been made to harmonize policies at least with respect to R&D funded by federal government Crown Contracts. In Ireland and France, where institutions normally but not always retain title, the government has chosen an alternate path: issuing guidelines for IP management at institutions in order to foster more consistent practices. Such reforms are not only confined to the OECD countries. China has recently made legislative reforms to allow universities to protect and claim IP, but implementation of such reforms remains a challenge. One lesson from all this is that despite the importance of patent legislation in fostering technology transfer, different national systems may require different solutions.

Institutional ownership of IP is not sufficient Encouraging universities to commercialize research results by granting them title to IP can be useful but it is not sufficient to get researchers to become inventors. The key is that institutions and individual researchers have incentives to disclose, protect and exploit their inventions. Incentives can be “sticks” such as legal or administrative requirements for researchers to disclose inventions. Such regulations are often lacking in many countries, even in those where institutions can claim patents. Government rules that prevent universities from keeping royalty income from licenses are another disincentive to institutions. Incentives can also be “carrots” such as royalty sharing agreements or equity participation in academic start-ups. Recognition of patent activity in the evaluation and recruitment of faculty can also provide incentives for young researchers. Tsinghua University in China offers its young researchers prizes for inventions that are commercialized. 

Given the diversity of research institutions and traditions, it is important that incentives are set at the institution level, but national guidelines can help bring about coherence and the sharing of good practices. As important as incentives is the need for research institutions to clarify IP rules and disseminate them among faculty, staff as well as graduate students- who are increasingly involved in public research activities.

Building critical mass in IP management To bridge the gap between invention and commercialization, universities have established "technology transfer offices" (TTOs), on campus or off-campus intermediaries that carry out a wide range of functions, from licensing patents to companies to managing research contracts. Results from an OECD report on patenting and licensing at public research organizations2 show that there is a large diversity in the structure and organization of TTOs within and across countries (e.g. on or off -campus offices, arm’s length intermediaries, industry sector-based TTOs, and regional TTOs) but the majority appear to be dedicated on-site institutions and integrated into the university or research institution. Many of the TTOs are in their infancy; most are less than 10 years old and have less than five full-time staff. Still, the number of new TTOs is growing, to the order of 1 per year per institution.

In terms of performance, the report also found enormous variations in terms of the size of patent portfolios as well as revenues obtained from licensing. In 2000 the United States had a huge lead over other OECD countries in academic patenting: universities and federal labs received over 8 000 patents (5% of total patenting, rising to 15% in biotechnology). Academic patenting in other countries, as measured by the number of patents granted to public research institutions, ranged from the low hundreds in Japan, the Netherlands and Switzerland, to close to 1 000 at German public labs and Korean research institutions in 2000-2001. While leading universities and public research organizations in countries such as the United States, Germany and Switzerland may earn millions of dollars or euros in licensing revenue, the gains are highly skewed – a few blockbuster inventions account for most revenue. Furthermore, income from licensing academic inventions remains quite small in comparison to overall research budgets. Academic patenting is thus more about boosting research and transferring technology to industry than about making a profit. In fact, evidence from the US show that the break even point for TTOs is between 5 to 7 years.

A main barrier to the development of TTOs is access to experienced technology transfer professionals. Not only are the skills sets of such professionals in short supply but sometimes government employment rules and pay-scales prevent public institutions from being able to provide competitive salaries to such professionals. Governments are nevertheless trying to help universities build IP management capacity. Denmark and Germany have both invested several millions of euro to spur the development of technology transfer offices clustered around certain regions or sectors such as biotechnology. The UK government has increased expenditures on the training of intellectual property management at universities. Even in the United States and Japan, universities pay reduced patent application fees. National patent offices are also involved in reaching out to universities to provide training in intellectual property.

Start-ups versus licensing to other firms One of the questions facing technology transfer managers and inventors is whether to license a technology or to create a start-up firm to commercialize it. Governments and university managers, especially in some European countries, have tended to favour start-ups as opposed to licensing strategies. Part of this stems from the rise in government funded venture funds that aim to promote new firm creation. The key question, however, is: which is the best channel for transferring the technology to the marketplace? The answer in fact depends on the technology in question, the market for such a technology, the skills set of the staff and researchers involved the invention, access to venture capital, and finally the mission of the institution. Certain “platform” technologies with a wide range of applications may be commercialized via a start-up company for example while others may be licensed to larger firms with the business capacity to develop the invention further and integrate it into its R&D and business strategy.

Balancing IP protection with the need to maintain public access Despite the relatively small amount of (formal) academic patenting activity that takes place, the increased focus on patenting academic inventions and licensing them to companies has raised a number of concerns common to countries throughout the OECD area and beyond. These concerns range from the impact of patenting on the traditional missions of universities, the effect on the direction of research, on the actual costs and benefits of patenting and licensing, to the effects on the diffusion of and access to publicly funded research results.

What has been the impact of IP and technology transfer activities on the direction of research? Quantitative studies tend to show that patenting has led universities to conduct more applied research. By making university research more responsive to the economy, is there a danger that basic research will suffer? On the one hand, several studies in the United States have found that universities and individual researchers that have seen the largest increases in patenting are also those which experienced the greatest gains in academic publications. On the other hand, the rate at which academic patents are cited in other patents fell (relative to the average) between the early 1980s and late 1990s in the United States and is now lower than the citation rate of patents granted to business. This could suggest a possible drop in the quality of public research – or at least of its patented component. Alternatively, it may reflect the inexperience of newly founded technology transfer offices.

Exclusive versus non-exclusive licensing Should universities and other public research organizations grant exclusive licenses to firms for inventions that have benefited from public funds? Licensees often require exclusive licenses as they offer more protection for the necessary development to be conducted before a university-provided invention can become a marketed product. The issue is particularly crucial for start-ups which have few assets other than their IP. On the other hand, by definition, exclusive licenses limit the diffusion of technologies. The OECD report has found that the mix of exclusive and non-exclusive licenses granted by public research organizations is fairly balanced, and that exclusivity is often granted with restrictions on the licensee side. Research institutions often include clauses in license agreements to protect public interests and access to the IP for future research and discovery. Licensing agreements in many institutions include a commitment to exploit the invention on the part of the licensee, particularly if the license is exclusive, and to agree on milestones in order to assure that commercialization will take place. Such safeguards can be used to ensure that technology is transferred and that licensed patents are not used simply to block competitors.

As academic inventions arise in areas closer to basic research, scientists and policy makers are also concerned that patenting certain inventions could block downstream research. One example is that of research tools, in which granting a patent could inhibit diffusion by increasing the costs and difficulty of using such tools in applied research. In response, the National Institutes of Health in the United States (NIH) have espoused a policy that discourages unnecessary patenting and encourages non-exclusive licensing (see link). Such guidelines are now being emulated by funding agencies and research institutions in other countries.

Research exemption Another area of debate concerns the use of the so-called “exemption for research use” that has been in use in universities in both the United States and in EU countries, either formally or informally. Traditionally, universities have been exempted from paying fees for patented inventions they use in their own research. The rationale is that universities fulfill a public mission. As more public research is carried out with business and generates monetary rewards, the divide between public mission and commercial aims becomes less stark. The extent and status of this exemption differs across countries and is often ill-defined. This research exemption – or rather its interpretation – has recently been the subject of policy debate and litigation: recent court decisions in the United States have restricted its meaning.

Conclusions Making universities and other public research organizations more active in protecting and exploiting their IP means not only actively promoting faculty and student research, but also determining how best to pursue any relationship with business clients while protecting the public interest. Many of the concerns or issues related to balancing IP protection with public access will take time to resolve. The growing reliance of public research institutions on various sources of funding, including from industry and contract research, as well as demands by society for greater economic and social returns on investment in public R&D, have made academic patenting a reality that is more likely to increase than decrease. At the same time, it should be recalled that intellectual property is but one of several channels for transferring knowledge and technology from publicly funded research which include publication, the movement of graduates, conferences as well as informal channels. While research institutions and firms are working to find solutions to problems as they arise, governments and research funding agencies have a role to play in providing guidelines on academic patenting and licensing and in fostering debate.





_________________________________________

Keep in mind that Maryland and especially Baltimore are ranked at the bottom for fraud, corruption, and the lack of transparency.......billions of dollars are lost in Baltimore alone to the richest.  This is the structural deficit for all government budgets and it is being used to privatize and close all that is public.

Neo-liberals are doing to the US what Gorbachev did to USSR during Perestroika......privatizing all public wealth to create Oligarchs.  The US has a Constitution and Equal Protection under law that protects Americans from these actions. 

WE SIMPLY NEED PEOPLE IN OFFICE THAT ARE NOT COMPLICIT



Maryland Historical Society cuts operating hours, staff

Budget gap of $670,000 to blamemuseum, library open on Thursdays, Saturdays onlyDecember 03, 2009|By Liz F. Kay | liz.kay@baltsun.com

A $670,000 budget shortfall caused by the dismal economic climate has prompted the Maryland Historical Society to cut hours at its Baltimore museum and library and to eliminate several staff positions, according to the president of its trustee board.


In addition, Wednesday was director Robert Rogers' last day with the society, board president Alex G. Fisher said. Rogers' departure is unrelated to the 165-year-old organization's budget problems, according to Fisher. The board will name an interim director until it can conduct a search for a new leader.

The society was able to close nearly half of its budget gap by cutting the equivalent of seven full-time positions. To make up the rest, it also limited operating hours at the museum and library to noon to 8 p.m. Thursdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, and the 28 trustees agreed to double their gifts to the society's annual fund.

Many charitable organizations have been struggling to remain solvent during the economic downturn.

"It's no secret that all nonprofits are suffering as a result of the economy," Fisher said.

Although financial markets have recovered somewhat, they are still lower than they were several years ago, which affects the income drawn from the historical society's endowment, as well as the confidence of supporters who make contributions, Fisher said. State funding for the society has also decreased by $450,000 in the past three years, according to Fisher.

He described the decrease in hours as "regrettable." However, "if you're going to be fiscally responsible, you just have to do that," Fisher said. The library and museum were formerly open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday, though the library would close during lunch.

Scholars and historians worry that the decision to reduce hours will make it difficult for researchers to conduct their work.


"If you're an out-of-town researcher, you can't even go back-to-back days," said Jessica Elfenbein, an associate provost and professor of history at the University of Baltimore. "It's going to be very hard for any researcher to do justice to Baltimore if you can't get to the collections it supports."

Said Robert Brugger, senior editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press: "That means that people who would like to be doing research are not going to do it, or need to find more money than would otherwise be needed to get work done."


Fisher acknowledged that was a legitimate concern. The society is hoping to restore some operating hours at its Mount Vernon facilities by relying on volunteers.

"But it will take time to get that accomplished," Fisher said.

The society is also revamping its Web site.

"Once that's done, access to library material will expand dramatically to anyone off-site," courtesy of the Web, Fisher said.

Education programs in Maryland schools will also be curtailed through the remainder of the school year, according to Fisher. As student tours of the museum have dwindled in recent years, outreach in schools has filled that void, he said, and the society would send staff to train teachers to use replicas of museum holdings for Maryland history lessons. But next summer, the society will transition to offering more Web-based resources.

______________________________________




0 Comments

March 10th, 2014

3/10/2014

0 Comments

 
We are seeing much research and organizing against Race to the Top and the intent to privatize all of K-college to Wall Street.  If you listen to corporate NPR/WYPR you hear that their sponsors are in fact these corporate education businesses having the goal of being handed our public schools.  As I said, Wall Street is using cities to build the charter structures that will then be expanded across the states and the absurd categorization of charters as 'public' will disappear to the private category in which they now fall.

Unlike what Maryland media and neo-liberals present, teacher's unions across the country as well as university academics are fighting Race to the Top and are succeeding in stopping this Wall Street funded policy.  It will be reversed as will the corporatization of our universities.

IN MARYLAND, BROWN, GANSLER, AND MIZEUR ALL SUPPORT RACE TO THE TOP AND THE PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP THAT IS EDUCATION PRIVATIZATION.  THEY WILL CONTINUE O'MALLEY'S KILLING OF PUBLIC EDUCATION BECAUSE THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS.

CINDY WALSH FOR GOVERNOR WILL REVERSE THESE POLICIES BY APPOINTING PEOPLE WHO VALUE STRONG PUBLIC SCHOOLS!



Parent 'Manhandled', Arrested While Speaking Out Against Common Core At Meeting

www.youtube.comhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBSodYYlYu0

Good for YOU...Cindy Walsh!!!


Please watch this video of a public forum on education by Maryland Department of Education.  The Maryland media passed this protest off as a fringe group of republican voters, but if you look there I am-------as progressive democratic voter can be shouting that the public must have voices in these public policies and not be threatened with jailing for demanding this right.  I told you people in the audience actually said to me that the procedure now was to stand up and shout your views as you walk to the door so security does not throw you out.  THIS IS CRAZY STUFF FOLKS!




Thanks to the AFT for getting in the stop privatization protest.  Please shout out in Maryland as Baltimore is building a template for the
state!
 
Whether it is Parents Across America or PURE in Chicago, these parent groups are helping teachers and academics fight this dismantling of what makes the US a democratic nation.  Why do we not see these groups in Maryland and Baltimore?  The leadership is silent and fearful.  If they had a governor that supported them and not Wall Street-----they would be just as active.

CORPORATE POLS IN MARYLAND USE THE MARYLAND STATE EDUCATION ASSOCIATION AS AN EXAMPLE OF TEACHERS SUPPORTING RACE TO THE TOP.  YET, BELOW YOU SEE THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS----THE LARGEST UNION HAS NOW SAID ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.


Check out
Cashing in on Kids

and help us spread the word by sharing with your social networks.

American Federation of Teachers


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


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

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

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

The site profiles five for-profit charter school operators:

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


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

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

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

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

In unity,

Randi
Weingarten
AFT President

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

____________________________________________

Chicago is home of these Race to the Top privatizers from Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to Obama's Education Secretary of privatizing all that is public education Arne Duncan. So, these brave teacher's unions, parents, and justice groups are fighting for all public education and schools across America......we thank them for their activism!

Baltimore is the Maryland center for building this same platform for privatizing and if left to continue will be expanded across Maryland.  Don't think it will remain in the urban centers!     



Monday, Mar 3, 2014, 7:19 pm

CPS Threatens Teachers Over Standardized Test Boycott

BY Yana Kunichoff Email Print Sarah Chambers, a teacher at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy, will not be administering the Illinois Standard Achievement Test this year—nor will any of her colleagues at Saucedo. (Chicago Teachers Union)  

Beginning Monday, teachers in schools all across Chicago are expected to sit their third- through eighth-graders down for two weeks of standardized testing. On students’ desks will be the Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT), a state-level assessment that, thanks to the nationwide move to Common Core, won’t have any bearings on school ratings, grade advancement or instructor evaluations this year.

But teachers at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy and Drummond Thomas Montessori School, which joined the educator-led boycott of the ISAT last week, have declined to participate. Teachers from both schools say they are willing to risk disciplinary action so their students can get two weeks of teaching, not testing.

In response to their decision, Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said in a letter this week that teachers who "advocate against the ISAT on work time"—referring, the Chicago Teachers Union believes, to an instructor boycott—risk disciplinary action. Although teachers say they have not encouraged any students to opt out of the test outright, Byrd-Bennett also wrote, "The State Certification Board may take action to revoke the certification of any employee who encourages a student to boycott the ISAT."

And some administrators have taken part in the pushback, too. In a letter distributed to teachers last week, the principal of Saucedo, Isamar Vargas Colón, wrote, “Failure to conduct yourself in a manner befitting your profession will subject you to serious disciplinary consequences up to and including termination of your employment and possible action by ISBE [Illinois State Board of Education] with respect to your educator’s license.”

In an email to Saucedo teachers sent over the weekend, Colón said she would ask each individual teacher Monday morning whether they would or would not be administering the test. Colón did not respond to requests for comment.

A teacher at Saucedo, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, says the warnings are particularly concerning for the handful of untenured educators at the school.

Overall, it is unclear to what degree CPS will discipline teachers. But the union contract negotiated following the Chicago teachers’ strike in fall 2012 includes a progressive discipline clause, which, among other requirements, forbids an employer from going to the harshest disciplinary action without probation and mandates warnings from employers.

The CTU has said it doesn’t consider the district’s reaction to be an “idle threat,” and is working with lawyers on the best ways to support boycotting teachers. Jesse Sharkey, vice president of the union, called the proposed disciplinary actions “really absurd and harmful.”

Nationwide, there are few precedents for the testing boycott, and none incurred any discipline against participating teachers.

Around the same time last year, teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle—alma mater of Jimi Hendricks and Macklemore—voted unanimously not to administer the standardized Measures of Academic Progress test. Like in Chicago, Garfield teachers had the support of the many parents who had also chosen to opt out their children.

Though teachers at Garfield were initially threatened with a ten-day suspension, the Seattle Public Schools superintendent eventually backed down when several other schools joined the boycott.

In 2002, a group of teachers in Chicago at Curie Metropolitan High School boycotted the Chicago Academic Standards Exam (CASE), despite the risk of losing their jobs, because, they argued, the test took away valuable instruction time.

The test had been an issue of contention for years, and even led to the firing of one teacher who published the test in its entirety in Substance News, a teacher-run education newspaper. Eventually, district administrators, including now-Education Secretary Arne Duncan, agreed to drop the CASE and develop a new test.

Even at schools where the test is still being administered, many students and parents decided to join the boycott. More Than a Score, a national anti-high-stakes-testing group of parents and community groups, says that more than 1,000 students across the city have opted out of the ISAT tests this year. A spokeswoman for CPS confirmed that students who opted out of the test wouldn’t have to take it, but was not able to give a definitive number of opt-outs. 

Teachers, for their part, say the opt-out process was rife with disinformation and confusing signals for students, parents and instructors. In a voicemail message directed to parents and obtained by In These Times, Saucedo principal Colón said, “ISAT testing doesn’t take away two weeks of instruction …  [it] will prepare out students to take next year’s Common Core-aligned questions … also helps our school tailor better instructions.”

These claims have been refuted by Saucedo teachers in their arguments against administering the ISAT: They say the test takes more than two weeks, because teachers must help students prepare for it, and that it does not assist in educational planning in any way.


Zerlina Smith, a Saucedo parent, says she believes the teachers have the students’ best interests at heart; she hopes the ISAT boycott will go down in history as a successful one. “We send our kids to school to learn,” she says. “We put our kids in the hands of these educators, and we have to trust their decisions.”
___________________________________________
NEO-LIBERALS AND REPUBLICANS MAKE A GAME OF FLIPPING BLAME TO EACH OTHER AS BOTH PUSH THE SAME POLICIES OF HANDING ALL THAT IS PUBLIC TO WALL STREET.  DO YOU HEAR ON YOUR MEDIA OUTLET THAT PROTESTS ARE GROWING LARGER AND PROTESTORS ARE NOT THE RIGHT WING REPUBLICANS......NOT THE FAR LEFT DEMOCRATS......IT IS EVERYONE.

PLEASE REMEMBER, RACE TO THE TOP IS A REPUBLICAN POLICY WRITTEN BY CONSERVATIVE THINK TANKS AND CORPORATIONS.  SO, HATING RACE TO THE TOP UNDER NEO-LIBERALS IN CONGRESS AND OBAMA IS NOT HATING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BECAUSE THESE POLS ARE NOT DEMOCRATS....THEY ARE GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS.  DO NOT VOTE FOR A REPUBLICAN BECAUSE YOU HATE RACE TO THE TOP. 

GEORGE BUSH AND DICK CHENEY WROTE MOST OF COMMON CORE AS A CAPTURE OF DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION.  CHENEY FAMOUSLY SAID HE THOUGHT HISTORY WOULD TREAT HIS ADMINISTRATION KINDLY-----WELL, THAT IS BECAUSE CHENEY AND BUSH WROTE THAT COMMON CORE HISTORY LESSON!


Below you see the groups organizing against this kind of education involve all socioeconomic groups and political leaning.  As this article tells------THIS EDUCATION POLICY SHOULD DECIDE WHO YOU ELECT AS GOVERNOR AND IT IS GOVERNORS PUSHING THESE REFORMS FOR WALL STREET. 

You will hear none of this on Maryland media because Maryland media is captured by Wall Street as are all of the democratic party by neo-liberals.
          
Education Spring ‘Year Of Action’ Revs Up


When President Barak Obama, in his State of the Union address, called for a “year of action,” he probably didn’t have this in mind.

An extensive and diverse coalition of forces opposed to the education policies pushed by his administration, and many state governors, is organizing on an unprecedented scale to spur a variety of protest actions, including street rallies, sit-ins, walk-outs, strikes, boycotts, and disruptive legislative actions and lawsuits.

It’s clear, last year’s emerging Education Spring that revealed a nationwide movement of diverse factions opposed to unpopular education policies has now developed substantial new organizational capacity and a more powerful voice.

The “new populism,” as my colleague Robert Borosage reveals, that is defining the economic debate in 2014 is also firing a new populist movement to reject failed education policy mandates and call for new reforms of our public education system.


“Movements grow,” Borosage reminds us, “only when harsh reality is combined with dedicated organizers and teachers.” Well, the “dedicated organizers and teachers” for a populist education movement have arrived.

Meet The Organizers And Teachers

This week, hundreds of activists are gathering in Austin, Texas for the first annual meeting of the Network for Public Education, a group with a stated opposition to the status quo education policies pushed by federal and state governments, including “high-stakes testing, privatization of public education, mass school closures,” and “for-profit management of schools.”

Headlining the meeting are prominent critics of the nation’s current education policies, including education historian Diane Ravitch, Texas superintendent John Kuhn, and Chicago Teachers’ Union President Karen Lewis. A contingency is expected from a group calling themselves the Bad Ass Teachers Association that has the expressed “aim to reduce excess testing, increase teacher autonomy, and include teacher-family voices in legislative processes.”

This gathering comes on the heels of recent news stories about Testing Resistance and Reform Spring, “a new coalition of national groups,” explains a report in Education Week, that “hopes to bring together a growing number of grassroots boycotts, protests, and petitions aimed at reducing and revamping student testing.”

Valerie Strauss on her blog at The Washington Post explains, “The emergence of the alliance represents a maturing of the grassroots testing resistance that has been building for several years locally in states, including Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.” This opposition, notes Strauss, contends that the Obama administration has gone beyond the excesses of high-stakes standardized testing mandated by No Child Left Behind legislation under the administration of President George W. Bush.

Among the first actions promoted by TRRS is an event in Denver Colorado, March 28-30, convened by United Opt Out, an organization “dedicated to the elimination of high stakes testing in public education” by advocating for boycotting standardized tests that are used to make “high-stakes” decisions about students, teachers, and schools.

Other events are being planned across the country.

Not to be left out of this new education populism are the students. Student activist Hannah Nguyen writes, “Students all over the United States, from Portland to Chicago to Providence, are tired of feeling powerless when it comes to decisions that affect their education … They’ve begun to organize together, forming student unions and fighting back against threats to their education, such as budget cuts, high stakes testing, and school closings. From mass walkouts and sit-ins to creative street theatre and flash mobs, these students are demanding that their voices be heard.”

Nguyen is widely known from a video that went viral over the Internet showing her taking on former Washington, DC chancellor Michelle Rhee and saying, “I used to stand by reformers, I will admit it, I did. But after seeing the facts, and the data and everything, and my own lived experience, I cannot –  I’m sorry – stand by what you preach if it has to do with high-stakes accountability, this ‘school choice’ … [and] charter schools, and how they push out certain students.”

Nguyen is now involved with the grassroots Students United for Public Education, “a national network of students who are committed to fighting for educational equity in America and to work collectively to organize action that works towards this vision.”


SUPE has worked with other student activists to organize the event EmpowerED: Los Angeles Student Power 2014 on March 29. The meeting claims to be “the first education conference led by students, for students,” drawing student organizers from Chicago, Newark, Portland, Providence, and Baltimore to “work with the student organizers in workshops to build organizing skills, discuss their ideas for education, and collaborate on developing a student power movement in their community.”

This spreading network of activist, organizers, and advocates is accompanied by teacher union activism that pushes the needs of students to the fore.

New Form Of Union Activism Emerges

Along with the grassroots direct action ramping up, a new form of union activism is connecting teachers’ labor grievances to their students’ learning conditions.

Earlier this month, when teachers in Portland, Oregon threatened to strike they made students learning conditions – particularly class sizes – a focal point of their grievances. District administration conceded to “hire 150 teachers to reduce class sizes and teacher workloads,” fewer than the 170 new positions teachers requested, but vastly exceeded the 88 new teacher hires proposed by the district.

When teachers made class size a main rationale for the threatened strike, they drew widespread approval from students and parents in Portland.


Also this month, in St. Paul, Minnesota, when negotiations faltered and the union considered authorizing a strike, the teachers made clear their actions were not over salary and working conditions, but over the students’ learning conditions. Those conditions included, according to a local report, limits on class sizes, less instructional time devoted to testing, increased student-support personnel, and expanded slots in the district’s pre-k program. It’s clear from the report that students and parents vocalized strong support for the teachers’ demands.

When a deal was reached and terms were announced this week, teachers got most of what they wanted: limited class sizes, less time spent on testing, and more consideration of increased student support staff and expanded Pre-k.

Too often in recent times, teacher unions have been portrayed as motivated by the narrow self-interest of their members. But the strategies exemplified by teachers in Portland and St. Paul turned that perception on its head.

Voices Louder, Stakes Higher

A year ago, the nation was roiled by the widespread, unified backlash to top-down education mandates driven by corporate interests, private foundations, and promoters of a market-based philosophy for education. The protests had huge impacts on elections for mayor in New York City and school board in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

This year, the voices of dissent are louder and the stakes are far higher. More states are pausing education mandates and challenging the status quo of high-stakes testing. “Testing season begins soon in U.S. public schools … But this year is filled with tumult,” reports Lindsey Layton for The Washington Post.

State elections this year will determine the fate of three-dozen governors and more than 6,000 legislators. Education, always a more important issue in these local races, could make or break some political contests. No candidate can afford to ignore the new education populism.


___________________________________________
This article shows how a candidate runs as a progressive and then simply serves as a neo-liberal.  Those who follow politics knew de Blasio was a Clinton neo-liberal embracing a few progressive bones to be electable.  Indeed he was elected by a landslide showing what the citizens want.  But, as with Obama, what we elect and what we get are now two different things as it is now OK to lie about platforms.  IT IS GOOD THAT THE OUTPOURING OF VOTERS WAS PROGRESSIVE.  WE SIMPLY NEED TO MAKE SURE OUR CANDIDATES ARE TOO!  You need to look beyond the standard 'progressive issue of the day' that neo-liberals put out to appease the masses......like minimum wage increases.

Baltimore education reform is controlled by Bloomberg and Wall Street through Johns Hopkins and all of this current public schools building fund leverage has to do with exactly the same issues Diane speaks to in the article.  The intent is to hand all of the remodeled schools over to charters having the public paying for the infrastructure for what will become private charter schools run by national chains.  Same thing happening with the MTA privatization of public transportation.

Leveraging school reconstruction of one billion dollars at a time government budgets are strained from the massive corporate frauds of last decade still waiting for justice-----at a time when Wall Street is imploding the economy again-----is simply a plan to have these Wall Street contracts in place so at the time of collapse government default will hand all these schools over to the private investors protected against the crash by CDS....credit default swaps.  HANDING OVER THE SCHOOL BUILDINGS AS THEY ARE FILLING THE SCHOOLS WITH CORPORATE PRIVATE NON-PROFITS CONTROLLING ALL POLICY IN THE SCHOOL BUILDINGS while parents are told this is what they want.

Remember, what is happening in NYC is happening in Baltimore.  You see Cuomo as with O'Malley behind pushing these policies and by no coincidence----they are both running for President in 2016.  NEO-LIBERALS GETTING THE PRESS!

DID YOU KNOW THAT BERNIE SANDERS IS AGAINST THIS PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND IN FACT VERMONT HAS LITTLE OF THIS POLICY BEING IMPLEMENTED!


THAT IS CORPORATE TOTALITARIANISM AS NOAM CHOMSKY SAYS!


Look for you education news at websites of groups fighting this reform!

Diane Ravitch's Blog: The Big Lie about Mayor Bill de Blasio and Charters



Diane Ravitch March 6, 2014
  • Diane Ravitch's Blog
  • Andrew Cuomo
  • Bill de Blasio
  • New York City
  • Success Academy
  • Charter Schools
  • Politics
  • Privatization
The New York City tabloids–whose owners are zealous about charter schools–have whipped up a frenzy against Mayor Bill de Blasio because he did not approve every single charter application rushed through the Bloomberg board at its last meeting in October 2013. That board, which never said no to Mayor Bloomberg, approved an unprecedented 49 charter applications, some of which are co-locations.

A co-location means that a charter, which is operated by a private board of directors, gets public space in a public school. The public school has to surrender “empty” rooms that were previously used for art, music, resource rooms for special education, and any other space that is not considered a classroom. The regular public schools–attended by 94% of all public school children, must be overcrowded to make room for the charters. Because the charters are heavily subsidized by private funding, they typically renovate the space (not good enough for them), and their students have the latest and best of everything. In New York City, the term “academic apartheid” is becoming a reality, in the very same building. In some co-located spaces, the children in the charters have separate entrances, to keep the others out of their space.

De Blasio had to decide what to do with so many co-locations. The city already has 183 charters.

He approved 39 of the 49. He turned down 9, and one is under review.

Let me say that again. He approved 39 of 49. That is hardly anti-charter. In fact, many public school parents are outraged that their schools will now be forced to give up space to a charter that operates under different ownership (private).

Of the 9 that were denied, three were destined for Eva Moskowitz’s charter chain called Success Academy.

But of the 39 that were approved, Eva won three.

Instead of celebrating the addition of three new charter schools to her growing chain (the largest in the city), Eva has gone on the warpath, claiming that de Blasio is anti-charter and wants to hurt the poor black and brown children she serves.

The media do not know that her schools do not serve the same demographic as the children in the public schools. She enrolls fewer children with special needs and fewer English language learners. Her schools have a high suspension and attrition rate.

Her logic seems to be that since she gets high test scores (note the above sentence as one does tend to get high scores by keeping out low-scoring students), she deserves to get whatever space she wants, rent-free.

By that logic, the city should give extra privileges to students with high scores, and should take away space and privileges and programs from those with low scores.

This makes no sense.

Public schools must serve all children, not just those who can get high scores on standardized tests. Public schools must serve children who don’t speak any English. They must serve children who have severe disabilities. They must serve those who have emotional and social problems. They must serve those who have all kinds of problems and who are unwilling or unable to walk in a straight line.

It is sad that Governor Andrew Cuomo threw his political weight on Eva Moskowitz’s side. As governor of the state, he is responsible for all children, not just the precious few in charter schools.

Everyone understands that the hedge fund managers and equity investors are supporting Eva’s fight against de Blasio. He has already annoyed them by saying he wants them to pay a slightly higher tax rate to fund universal pre-kindergarten. The charter school fight gives them a chance to strike back at him, while pretending “it’s all about the kids.” They would like nothing better than to take down New York City’s first progressive mayor in at least 20 years (some one say even longer).

De Blasio has not declared war on charters. He has made a judgment. Many public school parents are angry that he approved 39 out of 49 charter co-locations. Eva and the tabloids think she should have whatever she wants.

The question before the Mayor is whether he will continue to fund a dual school system–one sector able to choose the students it wants–and the other sector serving all. He is trying to have it both ways, and it doesn’t work. He gave the charter lobby almost everything it wanted, and they still came after him as if he had given them nothing at all.

This blog post, which first appeared on the Diane Ravitch's Blog (http://dianeravitch.net) website, has been shared by permission from the author.
Readers wishing to comment on the content are encouraged to do so via the link to the original post.
Find the original post here:


_________________________________________


For those wanting to know the goal of all of this privatization policy look to conservative and neo-liberal think tanks like Fordham Institute and Brookings Institution where all this policy is written.  You see the goal is online K-12 which falls with the policy of ending teachers in the classroom and having education techs who just facilitate the classroom connection to these online lessons.  Common Core works with this standardization and control of all information content as these few online instructors come to all schools across America.

None of this has to do with quality teachers......what is good for achievement......what is good for developing strong community and business leaders.  It is about building the cheapest model to educate children for specific vocations with tracking determined
by pre-K testing of children.  Businesses will profit off of selling education data.  IT IS ALL ABOUT PROFIT AND CORPORATE EXPANSION OF EDUCATION GLOBALLY.


FOR THOSE REPUBLICANS IN MARYLAND PRETENDING AS THOUGH THEY FEEL THEIR CONSERVATIVE VOTER'S PAIN......ALL OF THESE POLICIES ARE WRITTEN BY WALL STREET IN CONSERVATIVE THINK TANKS.  BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS THE SOURCE OF COMMON CORE AND RACE TO THE TOP. 

So, to stop this we need to shake the neo-liberal bugs from the democratic party rug by running and voting for labor and justice!!!!!


NOTICE YOU WILL NOT HEAR CINDY WALSH FOR GOVERNOR TALKING ON MARYLAND MEDIA ABOUT MY PLATFORM ISSUES.  YOU WILL ONLY HEAR BROWN, GANSLER, AND MIZE


Overcoming the Governance Challenge in K-12 Online Learning



John E. Chubb Fordham Institute February 14, 2012

Michael K. Barbour March 22, 2012 Press Release → Media Citations →

This fifth and final paper in the Fordham Institute’s series examining digital learning policy is Overcoming the Governance Challenge in K-12 Online Learning. The purpose of this report is to outline the steps required to move the governance of K-12 online learning from the local district level to the less restrictive state level and to create a free market for corporate innovation in K-12 online learning. Unfortunately, the report is based on an unsupported premise that K-12 online learning will lead to increased student achievement. The body of research to date suggests that there is no learning advantage for virtual schools. Further, no evidence is presented that supports the wisdom or efficacy of centralizing governance at the state level or that moving to a market model is a superior, productive or economical practice. The recommendation that virtual schools should be funded at the same per-pupil amount as traditional public schools raises the question of profiteering, given Fordham’s claim that virtual schools operate more economically (a claim for which there is limited evidence). This report appears to be ideologically motivated and designed to open up the $600 billion market of K-12 education to for-profit corporations.




0 Comments

February 25th, 2014

2/25/2014

0 Comments

 
FIGHTING FOR AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION VS A MEDIEVAL CLASS-BASED ASSIGNMENT----CLASSICAL EDUCATION VS TRADES IS WHAT IS HAPPENING.  THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND FOUNDING FATHERS ALL INVOLVED THE CHOICE OF ENLIGHTENED DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION.

THERE IS NOTHING THE MATTER WITH TRADE EDUCATION.....WE DO NOT WANT IT PRE-K-COLLEGE WITH A COMMITTEE DECIDING HOW CHILDREN ARE TRACKED ACCORDING TO TESTING!


This is my last post for now on education.  I want to contrast the South Korean model I shared last with the Finnish (modeled from US public education before Reagan).


Regarding Maryland's education reform taking the Korean model and not the Finnish model:

I showed in my last few posts that Race to the Top is modeled from the Korean/China model of education and that US universities have already been taken by corporate interests. This is what education privatizers have been working towards this past decade or two. Clinton became the first pol running as a democrat to advance this-----because he was the first to take the democratic party neo-liberal by starting the privatized universities. Now Obama is placing privatization of K-12 on steroids with Race to the Top.

As I showed earlier, South Koreans have been trying to shake this education reform for decades and they are shouting just as US teachers are for the sake of educators, students, and parents for a strong democratic education as we see with the Finland model.

REMEMBER, THE FINNISH MODEL WAS MODELED AFTER THE AMERICAN EDUCATION SYSTEM BEFORE REAGAN/CLINTON DISMANTLING!

All of Baltimore's appointed School Supervisors are in place because they support this school privatization. Alonzo from NYC/Bloomberg's crew of privatizers and now Milwaukee's school privatizer under the likes of Scott Walker.

Let's look at what Americans see as a strong public education model that worked in the US for decades! The Finnish model values equality, equal access, places teaching as a prestigious profession that is well-paid and autonomous......AND IT HATES THE WORD COMPETITION, TESTING, and privatization.

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success


Anu Partanen Dec 29 2011, 3:00 PM ET

The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.

Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.

The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweek ranked it number one last year -- and Finland's national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.

And yet it wasn't clear that Sahlberg's message was actually getting through. As Sahlberg put it to me later, there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.

* * *

During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather's TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an "intriguing school-reform model."

Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."

This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it's true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

The irony of Sahlberg's making this comment during a talk at the Dwight School seemed obvious. Like many of America's best schools, Dwight is a private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a year to attend -- not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented on Sahlberg's statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.

Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to education, because he's become their go-to guy in Finland. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a Finnish school. He taught mathematics and physics in a junior high school in Helsinki, worked his way through a variety of positions in the Finnish Ministry of Education, and spent years as an education expert at the OECD, the World Bank, and other international organizations.

Now, in addition to his other duties, Sahlberg hosts about a hundred visits a year by foreign educators, including many Americans, who want to know the secret of Finland's success. Sahlberg's new book is partly an attempt to help answer the questions he always gets asked.

From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: "Real winners do not compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg's comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don't exist in Finland.

"Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same."

Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

* * *

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

In fact, since academic excellence wasn't a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland's students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland -- unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year -- or even just the price of a house in a good public school district -- and the other "99 percent" is painfully plain to see.

* * *

Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems of other countries. All countries are different, and as many Americans point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous population than the United States.

Yet Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.

Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Teachers College, has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation's education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country: Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the PISA survey. Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.

Indeed, Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American state -- after all, most American education is managed at the state level. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010 with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born residents than Finland.

What's more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.

With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.

Is that an impossible goal? Sahlberg says that while his book isn't meant to be a how-to manual, it is meant to be a "pamphlet of hope."

"When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's, many said it couldn't be done," Sahlberg said during his visit to New York. "But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland's dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it couldn't be done."

Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.
___________________________________

If the Supreme Court want to 'interpret' Constitutional Law then they need to go back to the time in which it was written and by whom. Jefferson and many of those former American Revolutionary leaders had strong public and democratic education in mind. Equality is the founding principal in America and education has always been seen as central. Brown vs Board of Education simply extended this Constitutional right to all people.

We know strong public education when we see it. Building all citizens ready to lead in business and government. Collecting taxes to fund that goal. This is the model in the mid-1900s that had the US ranked #1 in the world.

REMEMBER, NEO-LIBERALS WILL HAVE YOU BELIEVE WE NEED THE BEST OF THE BEST IN THE WORLD TO BE COMPETITIVE IN GLOBAL MARKETS....BUT WHAT WE NEED IS TO GIVE ALL CITIZENS WHAT THEY NEED TO MAKE THEIR OWN WAY THROUGH LIFE WITH A STRONG DOMESTIC ECONOMY!

The idea of parents being in charge of their community schools goes without saying in a democracy. We have our local school boards that are voted into place by voters until recently. We have vigorous discussion of education policy in all schools and extended to communities until recently.


JEFFERSON AND AMERICA'S FOUNDING FATHERS WOULD SEE FINLAND AS THE SUCCESS AND SOUTH KOREA AS AN OPPRESSOR FROM WHICH THEY ESCAPED TO AMERICA.

18th Century Advice: Thomas Jefferson on Education Reform

Elena Segarra

April 14, 2013 at 2:10 pm

The original “Man of the People,” Thomas Jefferson, was born on April 13 in 1743.

Jefferson is best known for drafting the Declaration of Independence, but he also wrote prolifically and prophetically on education. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be,” he wrote in a letter to a friend.

Jefferson understood that freedom depends on self-government: the cultivation of self-reliance, courage, responsibility, and moderation. Education contributes to both the knowledge and virtues that form a self-governing citizen. By proposing a bill in Virginia that would have established free schools every five to six square miles, Jefferson sought to teach “all children of the state reading, writing, and common arithmetic.” With these skills, a child would become a citizen able to “calculate for himself,” “express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts,” and “improve, by reading, his morals and faculties.”

Jefferson viewed this basic education as instrumental to securing “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” for Americans because it helps an individual “understand his duties” and “know his rights.”

Once taught reading and history, people can follow the news and judge the best way to vote. If the government infringes on their liberties, educated citizens can express themselves adequately to fight against it.

By providing equal access to primary schools, Jefferson hoped to teach children “to work out their own greatest happiness, by showing them that it does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed them, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.”

While Jefferson supported the idea of public education, he would not have placed schools under government supervision. Instead, he argued for the placement of “each school at once under the care of those most interested in its conduct.” He would put parents in charge.

But if it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by…[any] general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience.… No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to.

Taxpayers would provide the resources for public education; the community would arrange the schooling. Although we today face a very different set of challenges than Jefferson, his reasoning remains relevant: Those most concerned with the school’s performance, i.e., parents, will best manage education.

We spend more than enough on our struggling education system. Empowering parents with control over dollars, instead of increasing the amount spent on schools, will improve educational outcomes.


____________________________________________
Why Finland's Unorthodox Education System Is The Best In The World

Adam Taylor

Nov. 27, 2012, 8:45 AM



A new global league table, produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit for Pearson, has found Finland to be the best education system in the world.

The rankings combined international test results and data such as graduation rates between 2006 and 2010, the BBC reports.

For Finland, this is no fluke. Since it implemented huge education reforms 40 years ago, the country's school system has consistently come in at the top for the international rankings for education systems.

But how do they do it?

It's simple — by going against the evaluation-driven, centralized model that much of the Western world uses.

Finnish children don't start school until they are 7.

They rarely take exams or do homework until they are well into their teens.

The children are not measured at all for the first six years of their education.

There is only one mandatory standardized test in Finland, taken when children are 16.

All children, clever or not, are taught in the same classrooms.

Finland spends around 30 percent less per student than the United States.

30 percent of children receive extra help during their first nine years of school.

66 percent of students go to college.
The highest rate in Europe.

The difference between weakest and strongest students is the smallest in the World.

Science classes are capped at 16 students so that they may perform practical experiments in every class.

93 percent of Finns graduate from high school.
17.5 percent higher than the US.

.
43 percent of Finnish high-school students go to vocational schools.

Elementary school students get 75 minutes of recess a day in Finnish versus an average of 27 minutes in the US.

Teachers only spend 4 hours a day in the classroom, and take 2 hours a week for "professional development."

Finland has the same amount of teachers as New York City, but far fewer students.

600,000 students compared to 1.1 million in NYC.

The school system is 100% state funded.

All teachers in Finland must have a masters degree, which is fully subsidized.

The national curriculum is only broad guidelines.
Teachers are selected from the top 10% of graduates.

In 2010, 6,600 applicants vied for 660 primary school training slots

The average starting salary for a Finnish teacher was $29,000 in 2008

However, high school teachers with 15 years of experience make 102 percent of what other college graduates make.

In the US, this figure is 62%.

There is no merit pay for teachers

Teachers are given the same status as doctors and lawyers

In an international standardized measurement in 2001, Finnish children came in at the top, or very close to the top, for science, reading and mathematics.

It's consistently come in at the top or very near every time since.

And despite the differences between Finland and the US, it easily beats countries with a similar demographic

Neighbor Norway, of a similar size and featuring a similar homogeneous culture, follows the same strategies as the USA and achieves similar rankings in international studies.

____________________________
__________________

We want to be clear.....America's champions of industry throughout the late 1900s mostly attended public schools so we know they were not as dismal as corporations are making them to be. They taught citizens and corporations wanted students ready to work day one. This article does not include Clinton in on this Reagan turn towards privatization, but we know university privatization soared in Clinton's terms.

WE SIMPLY NEED TO GO BACK TO THE MODEL IN THE 1900s THAT MADE US #1 AND MAKE A FEW REFORMS TO ALLOW FOR THE COMPUTER AGE. NOT MAKE SCHOOLS COMPUTER-BOUND!


The Myth Behind Public School Failure


Monday, 24 February 2014 09:46 By Dean Paton, Yes! Magazine | News Analysis



Until about 1980, America’s public schoolteachers were iconic everyday heroes painted with a kind of Norman Rockwell patina—generally respected because they helped most kids learn to read, write and successfully join society. Such teachers made possible at least the idea of a vibrant democracy.

Since then, what a turnaround: We’re now told, relentlessly, that bad-apple schoolteachers have wrecked K-12 education; that their unions keep legions of incompetent educators in classrooms; that part of the solution is more private charter schools; and that teachers as well as entire schools lack accountability, which can best be remedied by more and more standardized “bubble” tests.

What led to such an ignoble fall for teachers and schools? Did public education really become so irreversibly terrible in three decades? Is there so little that’s redeemable in today’s schoolhouses?

The Beginning of “Reform”

To truly understand how we came to believe our educational system is broken, we need a history lesson. Rewind to 1980—when Milton Friedman, the high priest of laissez-faire economics, partnered with PBS to produce a ten-part television series called Free to Choose. He devoted one episode to the idea of school vouchers, a plan to allow families what amounted to publicly funded scholarships so their children could leave the public schools and attend private ones.

You could make a strong argument that the current campaign against public schools started with that single TV episode. To make the case for vouchers, free-market conservatives, corporate strategists, and opportunistic politicians looked for any way to build a myth that public schools were failing, that teachers (and of course their unions) were at fault, and that the cure was vouchers and privatization.

Jonathan Kozol, the author and tireless advocate for public schools, called vouchers the “single worst, most dangerous idea to have entered education discourse in my adult life.”

Armed with Friedman’s ideas, President Reagan began calling for vouchers. In 1983, his National Commission on Excellence in Education issued “A Nation At Risk,” a report that declared, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

It also said, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

For a document that’s had such lasting impact, “A Nation At Risk” is remarkably free of facts and solid data. Not so the Sandia Report, a little-known follow-up study commissioned by Admiral James Watkins, Reagan’s secretary of energy; it discovered that the falling test scores which caused such an uproar were really a matter of an expansion in the number of students taking the tests. In truth, standardized-test scores were going up for every economic and ethnic segment of students—it’s just that, as more and more students began taking these tests over the 20-year period of the study, this more representative sample of America’s youth better reflected the true national average. It wasn’t a teacher problem. It was a statistical misread.

The government never officially released the Sandia Report. It languished in peer-review purgatory until the Journal of Educational Research published it in 1993. Despite its hyperbole (or perhaps because of it), “A Nation At Risk” became a timely cudgel for the larger privatization movement. With Reagan and Friedman, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist, preaching that salvation would come once most government services were turned over to private entrepreneurs, the privatizers began proselytizing to get government out of everything from the post office to the public schools.

Corporations recognized privatization as a euphemism for profits. “Our schools are failing” became the slogan for those who wanted public-treasury vouchers to move money into private schools. These cries continue today.

The Era of Accountability

In 2001, less than a year into the presidency of George W. Bush, the federal government enacted sweeping legislation called “No Child Left Behind.” Supporters described it as a new era of accountability—based on standardized testing. The act tied federal funding for public schools to student scores on standardized tests. It also guaranteed millions in profits to corporations such as Pearson PLC, the curriculum and testing juggernaut, which made more than $1 billion in 2012 selling textbooks and bubble tests.

In 2008, the economy collapsed. State budgets were eviscerated. Schools were desperate for funding. In 2009, President Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, created a program they called “Race to the Top.”

It didn’t replace No Child Left Behind; it did step in with grants to individual states for their public schools. Obama and Duncan put desperate states in competition with each other. Who got the money was determined by several factors, including which states did the best job of improving the performance of failing schools—which, in practice, frequently means replacing public schools with for-profit charter schools—and by a measure of school success based on students’ standardized-test scores that allegedly measured “progress.”

Since 2001 and No Child Left Behind, the focus of education policy makers and corporate-funded reformers has been to insist on more testing—more ways to quantify and measure the kind of education our children are getting, as well as more ways to purportedly quantify and measure the effectiveness of teachers and schools.
For a dozen or so years, this “accountability movement” was pretty much the only game in town. It used questionable, even draconian, interpretations of standardized-test results to brand schools as failures, close them, and replace them with for-profit charter schools.

Resistance

Finally, in early 2012, then-Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott kindled a revolt of sorts, saying publicly that high-stakes exams are a “perversion.” His sentiments quickly spread to Texas school boards, whose resolution stating that tests were “strangling education” gained support from more than 875 school districts representing more than 4.4 million Texas public-school students. Similar, if smaller, resistance to testing percolated in other communities nationally.

Then, in January 2013, teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School announced they would refuse to give their students the Measures of Academic Progress Test—the MAP test. Despite threats of retaliation by their district, they held steadfast. By May, the district caved, telling its high schools the test was no longer mandatory.

Garfield’s boycott triggered a nationwide backlash to the “reform” that began with Friedman and the privatizers in 1980. At last, Americans from coast to coast have begun redefining the problem for what it really is: not an education crisis but a manufactured catastrophe, a facet of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.”

Look closely—you’ll recognize the formula: Underfund schools. Overcrowd classrooms. Mandate standardized tests sold by private-sector firms that “prove” these schools are failures. Blame teachers and their unions for awful test scores. In the bargain, weaken those unions, the largest labor organizations remaining in the United States. Push nonunion, profit-oriented charter schools as a solution.

If a Hurricane Katrina or a Great Recession comes along, all the better. Opportunities for plunder increase as schools go deeper into crisis, whether genuine or ginned up.

The Reason for Privatization

Chris Hedges, the former New York Times correspondent, appeared on Democracy Now! in 2012 and told host Amy Goodman the federal government spends some $600 billion a year on education—“and the corporations want it. That’s what’s happening.

And that comes through charter schools. It comes through standardized testing. And it comes through breaking teachers’ unions and essentially hiring temp workers, people who have very little skills.”

If you doubt Hedges, at least trust Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul and capitalist extraordinaire whose Amplify corporation already is growing at a 20 percent rate, thanks to its education contracts. “When it comes to K through 12 education,” Murdoch said in a November 2010 press release, “we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.”

Corporate-speak for, “Privatize the public schools. Now, please.”

In a land where the free market has near-religious status, that’s been the answer for a long time. And it’s always been the wrong answer. The problem with education is not bad teachers making little Johnny into a dolt. It’s about Johnny making big corporations a bundle—at the expense of the well-educated citizenry essential to democracy.

And, of course, it’s about the people and ideas now reclaiming and rejuvenating our public schools and how we all can join the uprising against the faux reformers.

____________________________________

For those not minding academic research and history, this article shows from where our American leaders came at the time of writing the US Constitution. The Age of Enlightenment was in full swing and it saw education and access for all people central to society. It is from these philosophies that US education thought derived. Indeed, it is why the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Brown vs Board of Education and why Jefferson and founders writing the US Constitution created the public structures to provide for this.

What neo-liberals are trying to create in America is an education system that existed before this Age of Enlightenment when classical education was only for the rich and most people only learned what was needed for a trade.

Education in the Age of Enlightenment

The educational system played an important role in the transmission of ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment. The educational system in Europe was continuously being developed and this process continued throughout the period of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. During the period of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the development of the educational system began to really take off. The improvement in the educational system produced a larger reading public combined with the explosion of print culture which supplied the increase in demand from readers in a broader span of social classes.

Before the Enlightenment, the educational system was not yet greatly influenced by the scientific revolution. The scientific revolution broke the traditional views at that time, religion and superstition was replaced by reasoning and scientific facts. During the scientific revolution, it promoted the advancement of science and technology. People do not just accept opinions and views that the majority agrees on but they can do their own critical thinking and reasoning in order to determine the difference between what is right and wrong. This is mainly because everything has a reason behind its existence, the promotion of education helps the people to develop the ability to think on their own so that they are capable of judging things on their own instead of being bounded by religion and superstition. Philosophers such as John Locke proposed the idea that knowledge is obtained through sensation and reflection.

This leads into Locke’s idea that everyone has the same capacity of sensation and that education should not be restricted to a certain class or gender. Prior to the 17th and 18th century, literacy was generally restricted to males whom belong in the categories of nobles, mercantile, and professional classes.
[edit]
Growth of the education system

Universal education was once considered a privilege for only the upper class. However, during the 17th and the 18th century, education was provided to all classes. The literacy rate in Europe from the 17th century to the 18th century grew significantly. The definition of the term literacy used to describe the 17th and 18th century is different from our definition of literacy now. Historians measure the literacy rate during 17th and 18th century by people’s ability to sign their names. However, this method did not reflect people’s ability to read and this affected the women’s literacy rate most of all because most women during this period could not write but could read to a certain extent. In general, the literacy rate in Europe during 18th century has almost doubled compare to the 17th century. The rate of literacy increased more significantly in more populated areas and areas where there was mixture of religious schools. The literacy rate in England in 1640s was around 30 percent for males and rose to 60 percent in mid-18th century. In France, the rate of literacy in 1686-90 was around 29 percent for men and 14 percent for women and it increased to 48 percent for men and 27 percent for women. The increase in literacy rate was likely due to religious influence since most of the schools and colleges were organized by clergy, missionaries, or other religious organizations. The reason which motivated religions to help to increase the literacy rate among the general public was because literacy was the key to understanding the word of God. In the 18th century, the state was also paying more attention to the educational system because the state recognized that their subjects are more useful to the state if they are well educated. The conflict between the crown and the church helped the expansion of the educational system. In the eyes of the church and the state, universities and colleges were institutions that are there to maintain the dominance over the other. The downside of this conflict was the freedom on the subjects taught in these institutions was restricted. An educational institution was either a supporter of the monarchy or the religion, never both. Also, due to the changes in criteria for high income careers, it helped increases the number of students attending universities and colleges. The job criteria during this period of time became stricter, professions such as lawyers and physicians were required to have license and doctorate to prove that they had significant knowledge in the field.
[edit]
Print Culture

The explosion of the print culture in the 18th century was both the result and cause of the increase in literacy. The number of books being published in the period of Enlightenment increased dramatically due to the increase in literacy rate and the increase in demand for books. There was a shift in interest in the categories of books, in the 17th century, religious books had comprised around half of all books published in Paris. However, throughout the century, the percentage of traditional genres such as religion has dropped to one-tenth by 1790 and there was an increase in popularity for the almanacs. The scientific literature in French might have increase slightly but mostly it remained fairly constant throughout the 18th century. However, contemporary literature seems to have increased as the century progressed. Also, there was a change in the language that books were printed in. Before 18th century, a large percentage of the books were published in Latin but as time progressed, there had been a decline in the percentage of books published in Latin. Similarly, with the spread of the French language, demands for books published in French increased throughout Europe.
[edit]
Public Libraries

In the Enlightenment period, there were changes in the public cultural institution such as libraries and museums. The system of public libraries was the product of the Enlightenment. The public libraries were funded by the state and were accessible to everyone and were free. Prior to the Enlightenment, libraries in Europe were restricted mostly to academies, aristocratic, and private owners. With the beginning of public libraries, it became a place where the general public could study topics of interest and self-educate themselves. During the 18th century, the prices of books were not affordable for everyone especially the most popular works such as encyclopedias. Therefore, the public libraries offers commoners a chance of reading literates that could only are affordable by the wealthier classes.
[edit]
Coffeehouses and Sites of intellectual Exchange

During the 18th century, the increase in coffeehouses, clubs, academies, and Masonic Lodges became alternative places where people could become educated. In England, coffeehouses became a new public space where political, philosophical and scientific discourses were being discussed. The first coffeehouse in Britain was established in Oxford in 1650 and the number of coffeehouses expanded around Oxford. The coffeehouse was a place for people to congregate, to read, and learn and debate with each other. Another name for the coffeehouse is the Penny University because the coffeehouse has a reputation as a center for informal learning. Even though the coffeehouses were generally accessible to everyone, most of the coffeehouses did not allow women to participate. Clubs, academies, and Lodges, although not entirely open to the public, established venues of intellectual exchange that functioned as de facto institutions of education.
[edit]
Rise of Feminism in Education

The overall literacy for the general public had increase for both men and women during the 18th century. However, there was a difference in the type of education that each gender received. During the 17th century, there were number of schools dedicated to girls but the cultural norm during this period for women was mainly based on informal education at home. During the 18th century, there was an increase in the number of girls being sent to schools to be educated, especially the daughters of middle class families whom wanted to provide their daughters with aristocratic education. In France, one of the most famous schools for girls was the Saint-Cyr which was founded by Madame de Maintenon. Although, the school Saint-Cyr was meant to educate women, it did not dare to challenge the traditional views at that point of time such as sexual inequality and destined roles of women. Therefore, the fact that there were schools for women did not bring about a social change where there was sexual equality because the schools itself did not challenge the social ideals. Moreover, the education that women received in schools was much more restricted than that of males. Women were excluded from learning categories such as science and politics. In d’Epinay’s recollection of her childhood education, she pointed out that girls were not taught much of anything and that proper education were consider to be inappropriate for the female sex. The main issue about female education is mainly because the traditional view women’s weakness as being due to nature and there are those like John Locke and d’Epinay who argue that women’s weakness was due to faulty education.

During the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, there was a rise in number of publications made by women writers. The number of women who published their works in French during the 18th century remained constant around 55- 78 published works. Also, during the years after the French revolution from 1789–1800, the numbers increased to 329 published works. The reason for this increase in publication is most likely because the restrictions in publication were looser during this period. However, the increase in number of publication suggests that there was an increase in women’s education which allows more women to become writers.
0 Comments

February 20th, 2014

2/20/2014

0 Comments

 
I am going to stay with education a day or so more as I listen to corporate WYPR tell us that this education reform...Race to the Top WILL CONTINUE even as most citizens in Maryland do not want it.  Again, we had to listen to Maryland State Education Association say that its union supports these policies and yet, every county I know of is shouting they do not want this kind of reform.  MSEA is like NEA......they are made up of appointed education officials who then hire like minded people.  They are bureaucrats for the Maryland State Department of Education.  So, if you have a neo-liberal President like Obama who appoints a raging corporate education-privatizer like Arne Duncan as US Education Secretary, Duncan then fills his department heads with education privatizers and all of them are Federal union employees.  The same happens at the state level.  Neo-liberal O'Malley, Maryland's governor, appoints all of the heads of Maryland State Education and he appoints education-privatizers too.  Those department heads hire people who want to implement privatization policy.  These people are state union employees and indeed, there may be 17,000 of them.  They are bureaucrats.......

Meanwhile, rank and file teachers all across the state are saying that this education union does not speak for them....and it doesn't.  It works for O'Malley and Bill Gates/Wall Street.  So, from Montgomery County to republican counties to Baltimore City and County......teachers and parents are shouting and it is growing as fear of retaliation is overcome by the shear ignorance of these Race to the Top policies.  WHEN WYPR SAYS THAT THESE POLICES WILL BE IMPLEMENTED, WHAT THEY ARE SAYING IS THAT WITH THE CURRENT CANDIDATES FOR GOVERNOR.....ALL OF THEM WILL CONTINUE THESE REFORMS BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL NEO-LIBERALS------BROWN, GANSLER, AND MIZEUR.  It is the Executive office of governor and mayor/county executive that decides if these reforms continue----NOT WYPR OR THE 1%.

The answer is running and voting for labor and justice to boot neo-liberals out of the democratic party-----they are not democrats.  Then, that labor and justice governor will appoint leaders to state education that are democratic education policy-makers and the MSEA will then shout out for strong public schools and not privatized schools that kill teachers.
I will email the MSEA to take a look at my website to know what is happening in education since many of them are probably simply business people.

I showed a good piece on corporatization of education so let's look some more at research that says none of this is worth the money, time, and effort and again, what the end-goal looks like.

There are two world leaders today in educating their citizens....Finland and South Korea.  WE THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA WANT THE FINLAND MODEL AND neo-liberals/Brookings Institution want the South Korean model.


IN FACT......NEO-LIBERALS CREATED THIS SOUTH KOREAN MODEL AFTER THE WAR EVEN AS THEY DISMANTLED THE #1 RANKED PUBLIC EDUCATION MODEL IN THE US TAKING AMERICA FROM THE RIGOR AND RESOURCES THAT MADE IT #1.  THEY DID THAT BECAUSE THE US MODEL IN THE MID-1950s WAS THE SAME AS THE FINLAND MODEL TODAY.  FINLAND IS #1 TODAY BECAUSE IT USES THE MODEL AMERICA USED TO HAVE.

Confusing yeah?  Not really.  Finland's model is a social democratic model full of public revenue supported public schools and lots of resources for these schools and well-paid and well-protected teachers as employees.....just as the US had before Reagan/Clinton dismantled it.


FINLAND'S MODEL CAME FROM THE US EDUCATION SYSTEM WHEN WE HAD A SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.  REAGAN AND CLINTON KILLED THIS BECAUSE THEY WANTED PRIVATIZED SCHOOLS WITH NO PUBLIC FUNDING SINCE CORPORATIONS AND THE RICH DO NOT PAY TAXES AND WHAT IS LEFT IS SENT FOR CORPORATE SUBSIDY.

So, the US has this model for success in public education that existed before neo-liberals got hold of our government.


Today I wanted to look at South Korea to show where neo-liberals are wanting to take the US......and tomorrow I will show Finland and how its school system mirrors what America had when it was a social democracy!  Note below the article that shows Korean citizens want to move towards the Finland model and Korean teachers are shouting against the same policies of Race to the Top as US teachers are!

KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS KOREAN MODEL WAS POLICY FROM THE SAME NEO-LIBERAL THINK TANKS FORCING THESE POLICIES ON AMERICA RIGHT NOW!

S. Korean teacher earns $4M a year, but isn't proud of success

Posted: Wed 8:38 PM, Feb 19, 2014 Local 8 NOW TV

SEOUL -- He commutes in a chauffeured Mercedes, makes more than $4 million a year -- and he's an English teacher.

Forty-four-year-old Kim Ki-Hoon is a private tutor who is thriving in South Korea's test-score-obsessed, academic-crazed culture. Kim teaches in a "hagwon," or "cram school," part of the $17 billion after-school learning industry.

CBS News was with Kim at the school on a Saturday afternoon; he says studying on weekends is typical.

Kim appears on TV shows featuring "star teachers." His students say his teaching is more engaging -- and practical -- than most. And to show his human -- almost geeky -- side, he'll bust out the guitar.

"I was inspired about his lectures," says 22-year-old Seung Jun-Yang. Seung says a typical school day starts at 7 a.m. and kept him studying past 1 a.m.

Students cheer on classmates before big exams, in this country where more than 70 percent of kids go to college. Competition is so fierce that parents can be seen praying for their kids' success.

But when asked what the long hours of schooling mean for students, Seung says, "Personally, I think, depression time."

Kim agreed.

"I'm not actually proud of my success," he says. "The other side of the coin is the inefficiency of Korean education."

While an international educational poll ranks Korean students at the top for academics, they're at the bottom for happiness. Kim is trying to change that.

"This is my favorite place to be, and I am happiest when I'm teaching," he says.

If we had to guess, going to the bank isn’t too bad, either.


________________________________________

If you listen to Obama he is using the same hype that Koreans use to support their education.  COMPETITION---BEST OF THE BEST---LIMITED SPACES IN TOP SCHOOLS.

Sadly, Obama is one big corporate hawker.


Obama Praises Korean Education System?

by Robert Koehler on March 12, 2009 in Korean Society

As you all already know, US President Barack Obama praised the Korean education system yesterday:

“Our children _ listen to this _ our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea every year,” Obama told a gathering at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce here. “That’s no way to prepare them for a 21st-century economy.”

As the KT points out, this comes as a shock to many in Korea, land of the “goose father,” international school controversies, constant bitching about private tutoring and never-ending talk of public education reform.


____________________________________

While neo-liberals in the US try to force this Race to the Top privatization model they used in South Korea on Americans......Koreans are saying they do not like or want it as it takes all the quality of life and choice from life.....not very democratic!

Please keep in mind.....it is a neo-liberal policy that America must compete in global markets to be #1 and all of this is to make the rich richer.  It has nothing to do with what is good for the country or you and I.

OECD education report: Korea’s school system a pressure cooker for children South Korea's education system is so controversial hundreds of thousands of pupils seek education overseas South Korea's education system is highly focused on examination results

 Photo: Alamy By Andrew Salmon, Seoul

1:36PM GMT 03 Dec 2013


It has been praised by President Barack Obama and delivered top-five results for South Korea in global literacy and numeracy tests, but among Koreans themselves, the education system is so controversial that hundreds of thousands become educational emigrants.

he regimented by-the-book teaching system leaves nothing to chance.

“I have a friend in the US who is a swimming instructor and she guides her students to learn the best personalized swimming techniques for themselves, but this takes a long time to develop,” said Kim Won-sook, headmistress of central Seoul’s Jangwon Middle School. “In Korea, educators teach everything: The methods, the techniques - even how to practice.”

Teaching is egalitarian, but by favoring the average student, she added, does not cater well to slow or advanced learners.

“Korean education cannot produce geniuses,” added Sue Kim, an educational reporter at Korea’s leading daily, The Chosun Ilbo. “We don’t have any Nobel laureates, but we can produce a lot of Samsung mid-level managers.”


The system is highly focused on examination results.

The modern equivalent of the old state-run Confucian exams is the Korean Scholastic Aptitude Test, or KSAT, which streams students for universities. In a society burdened with nepotism, cronyism and corruption, it is one of the few areas of Korean society that is scrupulously fair.

But intense focus on exam scores creates an irony: knowledge is often eschewed in favor of test preparation. “I have a nephew who is very literate but his mother says, “I don’t want him to read, as he won’t pass his tests,’” said Emanuel Pastreich, a Harvard professor of Asian Studies teaching at Seoul’s Kyunghee University. “In Korea you have to know the right answer to every question, but in the US or Europe, the process of getting to the answer is much more important,” added education journalist Kim.

Likewise, Koreans often consider skill less important than qualification. A Japanese chef working in Seoul noted that after graduating from a cooking institute in Italy, he decided to gain real experience working in Italian kitchens. Meanwhile, his Korean counterparts at the institute, having gained their certificates, flew home and opened restaurants.

Egalitarian school teaching, combined with pressure to ace exams and enter prestige universities, has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry of cram schools that offer children a chance to get ahead; Kim the reporter noted that when her daughter entered elementary school, every single new student could already read.

“Parents prepare their children before school, so what is happening is that everyone in the classroom is equally prepared,” she said. “They are equally far advanced of the curriculum - and that is happening at every level.”   THIS IS THE TIGER MOM APPROACH THAT IS COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY.....

Hakwon are as notable in Korean towns as pubs are in British, but British children might quail at the hours their Korean counterparts spend in them: Teens commonly leave school and attend hakwon until midnight.

“Kids sleep in school and stay up for the hakwons,” said Pastreich.

Scholastic pressures are so great that suicide is the number-one killer of South Koreans under 40 (compared to traffic accidents in other developed nations), while educational cost burdens are so colossal, they are cited as a factor in the declining national birth rate.

As a result, many Koreans are opting out and studying abroad. In 2012, 154,100 Koreans were enrolled in foreign universities and 85,000 were doing overseas language courses, according to ICEF Monitor, an educational data provider. And in November, Seoul’s Kyungyang Shinmun newspaper estimated that 5 percent of Korean families live apart, with the husband working in Korea, while the wife accompanies children studying overseas:


_____________________________________________

Obama and neo-liberals follow Brookings Institution/neo-liberal policy and as such......choose a South Korean/Chinese model for education. Both are very autocratic and have intense competition with children frazzled with constant testing, study, and winners and losers. China has the model of tracking children into vocational schools according to how the state makes the assessment. THIS IS THE MODEL BEING USED BY NEO-LIBERALS IN STATES ACROSS THE COUNTRY....PHILLY AND BALTIMORE FIRST AND FOREMOST.

Below you see South Korean teachers shouting out 'enough is enough' as they reject the very model being forced on Americans right now.


DID YOU KNOW THE SAME NEO-LIBERAL INSTITUTIONS BEHIND RACE TO THE TOP INSTALLED THIS EDUCATION SYSTEM IN SOUTH KOREA AFTER THE WAR?

South Korea: Education union challenges standardised testing
(20 June 2012)The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU) has challenged the South Korean Government to eliminate Korean Standardised Testing. The KTU, an EI affiliate, argues that the measurement of a teacher’s worth should not rely on standardised testing.

Members of KTU and education civic organizations protest in front of the building of the Ministry of Education in Seoul on 12 June The KTU held a press conference to raise this demand together with education related civic organizations in front of the Ministry of Education in Seoul on 12 June.

Schools in South Korea’s 16 provincial education offices have their budgets allocated according to the Standardised Testing Results (so-called Ilje-gosa), which are made available to the public.

Schools with the highest scores receive more money than those with lower scores. This, explained KTU President Jang Seok-woong, “puts a strong pressure on the schools to get a high grade on the testing by fair means or foul”.

Teaching to the test

“Implementing standardised testing since 2008, the Government has driven teachers and students into cutthroat competition and spread the philosophy of teaching only to the test, narrowing the school curriculum,” he added.

When the tests were initially imposed on public schools in 2008, the Ministry of Education dismissed 14 KTU teachers who exercised their right to opt out of the test, after conferring with students and parents regarding whether or not they wanted to participate in the standardised exam.

The Lee Myung-bak administration has undertaken a brutal attack against unionised teachers over the last five-year period. This has included the dismissal of 16 KTU executive members, the suspension of 67 union staff members, suppression of teachers' freedom of speech, and restriction of teachers' trade union rights and freedoms.

Educators at heart of debate

EI supports South Korean educators, parents and students in their struggle against test-driven education and the misuse of standardised testing to gauge teaching standards. EI firmly believes that educators and education unions should lead the debate about defining quality and excellence in teaching.


___________________________________________

Neo-liberals in the US are trying to install the same education model as they did in South Korea after the Korean War. As you can see below.....the citizens of Korea do not want it. As neo-liberals installed this model in Korea.....they dismantled the US model now shown with the Finland education system. This model was ranked #1 when America used it and it is now #1 with Finland and uses social democracy.....while Korea's is autocratic and cruel....neo-liberalism.



Neoliberal Ideology And The Restructuring Of Education In South Korea: The Continued Struggle For Democratic Social Reform, Workers’ Rights And Cham

Elizabeth Goggin, SIT Graduate InstituteFollow


Publication Date 2009

Degree Name MA in Social Justice in Intercultural Relations

First Advisor Janaki Natarajan

Abstract The history of South Korean education has been turbulent and contentious among its citizenry in the six decades since the country’s inception. Following Japanese colonial rule the political and governmental affairs of the country remained largely in the hands of the Japanese sympathizers making up South Korea’s ruling class at the time, which included the formation and administration of the education system. The United States, having had an integral role in the creation and development of the South Korean state, also influenced the trends and design models used to enact education reform, especially since military rule ended in 1993. This political transition in South Korea signaled the arrival of neoliberal economic policies and the evolution of the school reform movement from the previously promoted standard of equal education for students to a system valuing competition above all else. This paper examines the particular role of neoliberal political ideology in schools and how it has impacted education for students and professional freedom for teachers. In doing so, it attempts to answer the question: How have the legacy of a colonial education system and more recent neoliberal reforms in South Korea affected teachers and students? Through a series of interviews with members of the Korean Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union (KTU) and students in a private girls high school in Seoul, it deals with themes of hierarchy in schools, heightened competition, the loss of labor rights, political rifts and the increasing disparity in educational opportunity. It is argued that neoliberal reform policies, heightened under the Lee Myung-bak administration, have been detrimental to the formation of an independent and egalitarian South Korean education system and have damaged the teachers’ movement for democratic control of schools.

Disciplines Curriculum and Social Inquiry | International and Comparative Education

Recommended Citation Goggin, Elizabeth, "Neoliberal Ideology And The Restructuring Of Education In South Korea: The Continued Struggle For Democratic Social Reform, Workers’ Rights And Cham" (2009). Capstone Collection. Paper 1316.
http://digitalcollections.sit.edu/capstones/1316



____________________________________________
As you see this reform is being forced on all Western nations by neo-liberals who have temporary control of our government.  As this article shows, the goal is to make education about job training and less about educating for a democracy.....building citizens.  Remember, the only reason jobs are scarce and the economy is stagnant is that Wall Street made it that way with massive fraud and corruption and wants to keep it that way because a desperate labor force can be exploited.  Global markets allow these corporations to consolidate all business into one ownership and then to seek profits overseas even as they keep the domestic economy stagnant.  THIS WAS THE GOAL OF REAGAN, CLINTON, BUSH, AND NOW OBAMA AS NEO-LIBERALS/NEO-CONS.

So, students should not have to feel pressured by competition to get into schools.....to obtain and compete for jobs.....all of which this education reform pretends is necessary.

STOP ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL DNC CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES.  RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE AND TAKE BACK THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FROM THESE CORPORATE POLS.  WE SIMPLY NEED TO REVERSE TH


Neoliberalism and the commercialization of higher education

By Holly Brentnall

SUNDAY JULY 28, 2013  The International

  With neoliberalization university students are becoming increasingly career driven rather than critically engaging with their education. Cuts in spending and the replacement of academic staff by technology are not the only pressures faced by British academia. Increasingly, education is fashioning students into a productive labor force rather than teaching them more traditional academic ideals.

Last year’s plans to raise tuition fees in Britain to a maximum of £9000, $13,731 at today’s exchange rate, were coterminous with cuts of £2 billion in funding for education. Universities’ lack of funding caused them to compensate for lost income by hiking up tuition fees. This is perceived as disastrous for Britain’s progression up the global league tables, which, conducted by the Times educational supplement, rank universities by teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. With increasing competition from universities around the world, the UK’s University and College Union warns that Britain is at risk of being left behind.

The neoliberal turn to privatization and the commercialization of education is an area of concern for British universities. Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has been expressing itself in university syllabi. Abandoning previous values of critical-thinking and challenging basic assumptions, the focus leans towards teaching vaguely defined “skills” such as “teamwork,” “communication” and “leadership.”

Such effects are evident in the recently “enhanced” course guides at the London School of Economics (LSE). The LSE is a private university that specializes in the social sciences and ranks third in the university league tables for the UK. The university’s new course guides include ‘skills’-sets that lecturers have to tick off as they incorporate them into their lessons. Such an approach propounds an entrepreneurial attitude over the goals previously associated with the social sciences. As sociologist Stephen Ball claims, in such institutions students as commodities transforms education into a “big business” rather than education for education’s sake.

What is neoliberalism?

In the 1970s, responding to a period of stagflation (inflation with rising unemployment), former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former U.S. President Ronald Reagan were the first to advocate the creeds of neoliberalism. This involved political-economic practices of privatization and deregulation besides the promotion of free markets and free trade. Neoliberalism rapidly spread across all G7 countries (the seven wealthiest countries on earth, the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan) before being imposed via violent military coups onto many countries in the ‘developing’ world, including Iraq, Poland and most of South America.

According to geographer and anthropologist, David Harvey, proponents of neoliberalism hold positions of incredible power in university think-tanks as well as in financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The main intent of neoliberalism is to generate wealth by opening up countries to free trade, trade between countries that is not regulated by the government, allowing for deviance from ethical practices. However, studies such as those by economists Duménil and Lévy indicate that the primary effect of neoliberal strategies across the world has been for wealth to become increasingly concentrated within the richest strata of society. According to these studies, neoliberalism does not even improve economic growth, with global growth falling by almost 3% last year. In contrast, countries such as India and South Korea, spared from certain aspects of neoliberalism, saw rapid growth thanks to investment in industry.

Other implications of neoliberalism include the reduced power of organized labor, increased productivity paralleled by declining wages in order to extract more value, and most poignantly, as analysts such as David Harvey have found, the pumping of wealth from the poorest to the richest members of society via transfer pricing and cheap migrant labour.

Neoliberalism and higher education

Many academics are against the reforms in education taking place, whilst others argue that it is a necessity in a time of economic crisis. Doctor Jason Hickel, lecturer in Economic Anthropology at the LSE explains, “This seems like a relatively innocuous change, but to me it’s a sign that the way we think about higher education is changing for the worse.” Some might reject this, claiming that teaching career-orientated skills are crucial in order to bolster students against the current economic climate. “Of course, students need to get jobs upon graduating. I am sensitive to that.

The proponents of the New Enhanced Course Guides argue that students will be able to use the language from the skills section to fill out their CVs and to convince employers to hire them.” Nevertheless, as Hickel argues, “The kinds of skills that the New Enhanced Course Guides [at the LSE] include, reflect the language of the corporate world and the ethic of entrepreneurial self-management. Even if they didn’t, they would still send students the wrong message, namely, that education is designed to equip individuals with marketable skills, and that the ultimate end goal is productivity.”

Furthermore, the way people are taught will have transformative effects on the world as a whole, as generations of students progress into the jobs market and foreign students return to their countries of origin, carrying with them the neoliberal articles of faith. After coming home with neoliberal values, many American-educated students led military coups in which the pursuit of commercial ideals implicated the death of hundreds of thousands. This was the case for Chile in 1973, where the insurgent government was led by US-educated graduates. More recently, in 2009, a coup in Honduras was led by graduates taught at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a US training ground based in Georgia, which has been linked to to torture cases, dictatorships and military coups. Countries that experienced such coups, according to data gathered by the CIA, are among the most economically unequal in the world. With an intake of students from 145 different countries, spanning from South America to the South East Asia, the global impact of education at universities such as the LSE will be equally significant.

Besides the circulation of powerful neoliberal ideologies throughout academia, tuition hikes also become subject to marketization, the treatment of education as a business and students as a future labour force. Evidencing this, one year into its term in office, the British Conservative Party held meetings to discuss how universities could help contribute to growth in the economy.

In this process of marketization, austerity measures have led to increased tuition fees, which students find increasingly difficult to pay and applications to universities are declining. In 2011, there was a decrease of 20,000 applications. This implicates the bursting of the tuition bubble which has led to a further neoliberal assault on education through managerial-imposed readjustments of academic faculties as well as closures of poorly achieving departments. This in turn has led to declining moral and increased strategic competition between academic staff.

Education has also become increasingly quantified via standardized testing, as universities and departments are ranked by performance in a way that brushes over divergences in opinion, steering the control of curriculum and organization of departments. With layoffs as well as cessations of entire disciplines in certain universities, underachievement is blamed upon the teachers rather than the effects of reduced funding.

For example, the closure of Exeter University’s chemistry department in 2006, determined principally by financial motives, was met by vociferous resentment on the part of the chemists as well as students, academic unions and the Royal Society of Chemistry. The department was shut down due to its low position in the university ranking, the high cost of running its laboratories and in order to attract further grants. Students and teachers alike responded with letters and emails of complaint. Nevertheless, the university’s director, Steven Smith, persisted in this profit-making tactic.

What are the viable alternatives?

Neoliberal techniques involve the commercialization of education, focusing principally on preparing students for the world of work. As Hickel argues, “Those of us who teach in the liberal arts and social sciences generally reject this approach. We encourage our students to value learning for its own sake, and we try to sow in them a passion for asking difficult questions about the world and equip them to think critically about taken-for-granted assumptions.”

From the start of the 21st century, academics and institutions have started calling for a revival of the cosmopolitan ethic (‘an injury to one is an injury to all’), which provides tangible alternatives to neoliberalism. Others advocate Democratic Learning, which, in drawing on the views of the educator, John Dewey, provides a framework for teachers, involving methods influenced by the students themselves and, takes a humanist approach to teaching, concerned with human welfare. So doing, lecturers will supply students with the tools necessary to become fully active democratic citizens. As Hickel claims, “We need to be empowering students to resist this kind of commodification of everything rather than encouraging it, especially given that all indicators seem to suggest that it’s leading our society down a dead-end road. For us, higher education is more about learning how to challenge the status quo rather than simply learning how to climb the ladder.”

On the other hand, some take a less optimistic view of British education. As Tarak Barkawi, lecturer in Politics at the New School for Social Research explains, “For many years now in the UK, faculty have been forced to put things on their syllabi (like learning aims and outcomes) so that battle was lost some time ago.” Barkawi also introduces yet another side of the debate: “For what it is worth, the neoliberal modernizers are bad, but so too are those who cite traditional academic values to protect cosy jobs, or to not do their jobs, or to carry on doing what they always have done. So you have to be a little careful at taking everything at face value.”

As broached by Barkawi, the commercialization of British education is not a black and white issue but a more nuanced matter of much contention. There are those who advocate a profit-orientated education, others such as Hickel who plead for a return to critical engagement and a humanist outlook, and finally, those such as Barkawi who have a more tentative view. However, as the league tables demonstrate, for British universities not to lag behind the rest of the world there must be a reassessment of the purpose of education.

Holly Brentnall is a freelancer for The International.

0 Comments
<<Previous

    Author

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

    Archives

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

    Categories

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

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.