coryvmccray on May 27, 2011
5 Reasons Why I don't support privatization of government services.
Less Accountability, misclassification of employees, loss of good jobs,
promotion of class war, and kills the middle class and economy.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
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On Wednesday, the Thiel Foundation named the first winners of its controversial "20 Under 20" fellowship program, a sort of anti-college scholarship in which young people are handed $100,000 to pursue entrepreneurial ideas rather than a university education.
It's a limited program designed to showcase a bigger - and troubling - idea: that higher education is highly overvalued.
The Thiel Foundation, the libertarian group formed by PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, has been spreading the message for months, telling any outlet that will listen that college is a waste of a lot of people's time and money. It's a "higher education bubble" - and we all know how dangerous those are.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
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Back in her old bedroom, recent college grad Kari Fox plays with Rollo as she sits with her mother, Maureen Murray-Fox.
Cole Armstrong, 24, graduated with degrees in political science and economics from Swarthmore, going on to win a prestigious internship at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association.
Just one hitch: It is part time and unpaid.
So he moved home to live rent-free at his parents' in the Castro district.
California Polytechnic San Luis Obispo graduate Sara Hamling, 23, is just settling into her old room in San Mateo after begrudgingly unpacking college boxes.
Kari Fox, 23, a Georgetown graduate with a theater degree, can't complain as her mother fixes them both Manhattans at home in the Inner Richmond.
Whether it's the economy, lack of planning or friendlier relationships between
This is a really fantastic TED talk with Sal Khan of the Khan Academy, a non-profit company that develops educational videos and software to help kids learn at their own pace. This is exactly the sort of thing I hope we see more of at the intersection of technology and education.
You’ll notice at the end Bill Gates comes out and asks Khan a few questions. He ends the segment by telling the audience that they’re getting a taste of the future of education. I hope he’s right. For one thing, the software that Khan has developed allows teachers and parents and students to track their progress in extraordinary detail and without the threat of punishment looming over their heads.
And the entire concept is just brilliant. By allowing kids to do the lecture portion of class outside of class, teachers are able to spend much more time with children one-on-one in the class actually teaching.
This is the sort of effort I hope the Gates Foundation focuses on in coming years, though I do wonder if the
Parents Across America invites local or statewide education groups who share our overall goals of progressive, positive education reform and more parent input in education policy to affiliate with us. The more of us there are, the stronger our voice will be at every level.
We are also looking for parents who are interested in forming new chapters of PAA in their states and/or local communities. Check out what we believe, and if you agree, join with us!
We’ll coordinate our national activities with our chapters and affiliates, help you promote your events and recruit members, send you alerts about key legislative issues, share policy and research resources, and work together to save our public schools. We will also invite you to contribute to our website and blog.
If you are interested in having your existing group become a PAA affiliate, or you would like to form a new chapter of PAA, please write us at: info@parentsacrossamerica.org
SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2011 AT MIDNIGHT
The dramatic drop in crime rates in San Diego County – with the exception of hate crimes and bank robberies – mirrored to varying extents around the country, cries out for explanation. It defies the premise that economic crisis usually leads to increased crime.
Here, though, citizens must be cautious. Consider an election debate last year between the top contenders for California attorney general. Los Angeles County District Attorney Tom Cooley, who was to lose to his counterpart from San Francisco, Kamala Harris, asserted that historically low crime rates in California were due primarily to increased mass incarceration.
Cooley’s assertion may not be correct.
California’s prisons are certainly operating at nearly double their designed capacity, leading to federal court orders to cut the population by 33,000 prisoners, orders affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court last week. The forced reduction is a controversial move, since California has the highest recidivism rate in the United States, with two-thirds of prisoners returning within three years of release. To comply with the orders, money is being diverted from prisoner rehabilitation, social services and education, all associated with successful prisoner reintegration.
California’s mass incarceration boom, the nation’s largest, saw prisoners increase from 25,000 in 1980 to some 143,000 today. It was supported by the prison guards union, the most powerful lobby in the state, and set the pace for prison expansion in the nation as a whole. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States now has 25 percent of the world’s
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POTTSTOWN — "The shock," was something schools Superintendent Reed Lindley could understand.
As he wrote in an April 1 email, he had at the school board meeting the night before read a letter indicating that the operator of the largest charter school in Pennsylvania is interested in taking over all elementary education in Pottstown.
Although it was the first time either the public or the school board had been made aware of this possibility, Lindley was, of all the people in the room, anything but shocked.
By the time Lindley delivered the March 31 letter to the school board, he and the administration had for more than two months been in quiet but frequent communication with charter school operator Vahan Gureghian, CEO of Charter Schools Management Inc.
Since Jan. 22, Lindley and the district's top administrative staff had emailed and held meetings with Gureghian, visited the school the company operates in Chester, arranged to lobby state legislators together and even provided the company with statistical information about the district's elementary schools that is marked
About 90% of students attending charter schools in New York City are minorities. This has provoked some to accuse charter schools of creating "racial isolation" and rolling back the integration efforts that started with the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling of 1954.
At the national level, UCLA's Civil Rights Project issued a report lamenting that "charter schools enroll a disproportionate share of black students and expose them to the highest level of
New York City private school cut off dates are much earlier; and it is very common when a child is applying to a private school, especially boys, that they suggest that they reapply the next year for Kindergarten again.
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