Acclaimed blogger Digby, whose site Hullabaloo is a bastion of political depth and completeness, guest posted on The Hill website last week. Her piece, Share the Sacrifice, assails political elites for their detachment from Main Street Americans who they purport to represent.
Yet out here in the real world, poll after poll shows that, in fact, Americans are far more concerned with
I’m going to say 100,000. I see reports of “over 85,000″ but as I saw no helicopters flying overhead, meaning we had no professional estimates, the evaluation by someone who’s been to every single historic Saturday labor rally in Madison, Wisconsin is good as any. I spent the day at Madison, Wisconsin’s largest rally yesterday. I wanted to do this piece when I got home, but the combination of walking on concrete, the exhileration of it all, and standing in the wind for nearly 7 hours did me in. As happens on every day I go to a rally, I fell asleep on the couch in the middle of trying to write or post photos. Now I have to get ready to play music for church. This will be what it will be. Assume more to come in the afternoon.
The Tractorcade
That wind!
Fifty tractors embarked from the Alliant Energy Center to the Isthmus, driving down John Nolen Drive and ultimately climbing the Hamilton Street hill to the Capitol. The west wind rushing up Hamilton had an almost
Pete Seeger said: “The first time I heard Odetta sing she sang “Take This Hammer” and I went and told her how I wish Leadbelly was still alive so he could have heard her.”
Odetta died in December of 2008. Read more about her HERE.
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Matthew Schauenburg is conducting a hunger strike for democracy |
• Sun, Mar 13, 2011 |
The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.
-Socrates
When “collaboration” is really code for standardization, professional development becomes nothing more than control over actions.
Just like how mandated sentences strips judgement from judges, so too does standardization deny teachers the ability to teach. Maja Wilson puts it this way:
Mandating practices in the effort to improve teaching paradoxically creates the kind of environment that undermines good teaching. [Standardization] contributes to an environment that actually stunts teachers’ ability to make good decisions in the classroom and obscures bad teaching with its illusion of uniformity.
It’s not easy to object to standardization; I know a lot of good teachers who believe consistency is a good
Almost two months after the School District firstannounced its plans to convert Audenried High School into a charter, Universal CompaniesPresident and CEO Abdur-Rahim Islam finally got to share his vision Saturday for how Universal intends to overhaul the school.
“We have the capacity to not only improve the education scores, but change the neighborhood,” said Islam, who said Universal will bring a health clinic, day care center, and extensive internship opportunities for students to the school as part of its efforts to turn the entire community into a Promise Neighborhood modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone.
“We will embrace every child in this community,” he said.
But many of the roughly 100 people in the audience, frustrated that the Universal takeover was presented to them as a fait accompli, remained focused instead on the School District’s process for deciding Audenried’s future.
Since the subject’s been breached in Madison, we should begin the Man Hattin’ project and explore our options regarding a General Strike of public employees in the U.S. on or beginning May first. No modern state can function without reasonably honest apolitical public servants. They are the permanent government. These goofy politicians come, and go, riding their partisan, larg
Op-Ed from: www.northjersey.com
The recent Teacher Effectiveness Task Force report recommended basing teacher evaluation significantly on student test scores. A few weeks earlier, Education Commissioner Cerf recommended that teacher tenure and dismissal, as well as compensation decisions be based largely on student assessment data.
Implicit in these recommendations is that the state and local districts would design a system for linking student assessment data to teachers for purposes of estimating teacher effectiveness. The goal of statistical “teacher effectiveness” measurement systems, including the most common approach called value-added modeling (VAM), is to estimate the extent to which a specific teacher contributes to the learning gains of a group (or groups) of students assigned to that teacher in a given year.
Unfortunately, while this all sounds good, it just doesn’t work, at least not well enough to even begin consider
Governor Mitch Daniel is a new Presidential hopeful among Tea Partiers for 2012. Here he bares his rotten soul and love for evil empire. At the same time he gives important insight into Republican and Tea Party objectives.
Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana compares the budget issues faced federally and by many states to the “Red Menace’ of the Cold War, with innuendo similar to Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunt, directed at the left, progressives and liberals. With his Republican dominated legislature, having risen to office on the wave of right wing tea party fanaticism, the full program for “reclaiming America” emerges.
Here is a sample from his speech on the issue energy and the environment. Let’s strip mine from Appalachia to the Rockies. “…treat domestic energy production as the economic necessity it is and the job creator it can be. Drill, and frack, and lease, and license, unleash in every way the jobs potential in the enormous energy resources we have been denying ourselves.”
Governor Mitch Daniels (R-IN)
Friday, February 11, 2011 Washington, DC, CPAC
To listen to Daniel’s full speech got to:
If it is Saturday, it must be protest time at the Wisconsin State Capitol.
In spite of a brisk spring wind blowing across the Madison isthmus a massive and highly energized crowd that totaled over 85,000 demonstrated against Governor Scott Walker and his fellow Republicans.
Those rallying were sending two messages that were clear and specific.
First, a high degree of anger over the end to collective bargaining in the state along with the strong disapproval over the proposed drastic budget cuts. The second message was the
The trick to speaking at the IEA RA turns out not to be about orange shirts or sweaters.
The trick is offering an amendment or submitting a New Business Item. Then they have to call on you. And they have to call on you first!
The morning session started out badly as some colleagues from higher ed offered a legislative platform
Don’t give up the fight, teachers. It’s not just in Wisconsin that they’re coming for public workers like you. Are you going to lie there and take it?
Many of you have lost your jobs at Montbello because of this hostile takeover. Here are the numbers:
