Latest News and Comment from Education

Thursday, March 7, 2013

UPDATE: Daily Kos: What about the most vulnerable?

Daily Kos: What about the most vulnerable?:


The Network for Public Education

was announced today.   If you care about saving public education from privatization, from the so-called "reformers" like Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee, the corporatizers like Joel Klein, this is an organization you should join and support.
Allow me to quote in full their Mission:
The Network for Public Education is an advocacy group whose goal is to fight to protect, preserve and strengthen our public school system, an essential institution in a democratic society. Our mission is to protect, preserve, promote, and strengthen public schools and the education of current and future generations of students. We will accomplish this by networking groups and organizations focused on similar goals in states and districts throughout the nation, share information about what works and what doesn’t work in public education, and endorse and rate candidates for office based on our principles and goals. More specifically, we will support candidates who oppose high-stakes testing, mass school closures, the privatization of our public schools and the outsourcing of its core functions to for-profit corporations, and we will support candidates who work for evidence-based reforms that will improve our schools and the education of our nation’s children.
Please keep reading.


What about the most vulnerable?

The pain of the sequester is that kind that lurks: a slow, creeping disaster mainly affecting those Americans on the fringes who are barely inching their way back into a still-bleak job market — or hopelessly locked out of it — and poor Americans too old or too young to participate in it.That is how the effects should always have been framed: not as a danger to air travelers and contractors, but as a prowling danger to the most vulnerable in our flock.
Not framing it this way harkens back to a larger problem in our culture: a failure, or outright unwillingness, to acknowledge America’s poor — both working and not — and to appreciate their struggle.
The words are by Charles M. Blow, from a New York TImes op ed titled Cry About the Real Wolf.In it Blow uses the fable of the little boy who cried wolf to call the Obama administration to task for how it handled the politics of the sequester.
He then pivots to write about his hometown in Louisiana, with a median family income of under $30,000,