Do I? No.
Have I? Yes.
hctiB G: Bow Down and Bend Over: 1
originally posted October 15, 2006 @ 15:29
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We have been told for years to bow down before “the market.” We have placed our faith in the laws of supply and demand. What has been forgotten, or ignored, is that the market rewards only efficiency. Every other human value gets in its way. The market will drive wages down like water, until they reach the lowest possible level. Today that level is not being set in Washington or New York or Sacramento but in the fields of Baja California and the mountain villages of Oaxaca. That level is about five dollars a day. No deity that men [sic?] have ever worshiped is more ruthless and more hollow than the free market unchecked; there is no reason why shantytowns should not appear on the outskirts of every American city. All those who now consider themselves devotees of the market should take a good look at what is happening in California [illegal immigrant labor, wages, conditions, etc.]. Left to its own devices, the free market always seeks a work force that is hungry, desperate, and cheap—a work force that is anything but free.
Schlosser, Eric. Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
hctiB G: Naked Emperors
originally posted October 14, 2006 @ 15:09
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I wrote on Father’s Day about my unresolved, opaque feelings about my father and, ultimately, male authority:
But I grew up without the absolutist authority of the male in the household. As far as I am concerned, all the emperors have no clothes. They come and go, they are needed and not, they are good and bad, they fortify and decimate.
I like that my daughter has a father. Even when I feel left out of their moon-and-Earth orbit, I am happy that she has an Earth around which to revolve, at least for a while longer. But I wonder what her inner sense of male authority will be.
I grew up with men but not ruled by any domestically. My father left and made himself mostly scarce. My maternal grandfather was mellowed by age and a first grandchild, me, a girl—a man who’d said educating a girl was a waste (because she’d get married and just benefit somebody else’s family) pestered my mother about my education from the time I was 5 until he died, right after my high school graduation. He was relief from the household and not an emperor, at least not with me or not by the time I came along. All my uncles were younger than my parents, one only 7 years older than I. Male cousins were my first and best playmates. And until college—fuck, still—men are some of the friends I most value and most deeply enjoy, think most fondly of and pursue the most, whose loss I most intensely mourn. (Marriage has been a salve for and contributor to those losses. Men are bewilderingly-to-me reluctant to be friends with a married woman.) But I didn’t LIVE with any of them. I wasn’t girlfriend or wife or fiancée or cohabiter. I wasn’t the take-care-of-a-man type.
Then I did live with one of them. And culture kicked in and girl-training I didn’t even know I had oozed from all pores. I cleaned counters and did laundry and balanced accounts and cleaned litter boxes and bought food and cooked and washed dishes and found keys, socks, wallets, birth certificates and watered plants and and and. All that work was inherently different than what I had done or would do for myself. And that difference churned in my ribs, cracked in my knuckles and turned to metal on my tongue. I was the base on which others stood. No matter how grateful they were, I was still looking up at the soles of their shoes.
Even covered in girl-training ooze, I never completely submitted. I never bought all the way into anything, that gratitude was enough or any payment at all, that I could get to myself later or that this service was my Self.
I never believed that men or boys in general were superior. The emperor was always naked to me. Without an emperor in my childhood home and memory, I could flick off (at least most of) the girl-training ooze. Born in another time, if I hadn’t been killed by my clansmen for some intellectual, social and/or sexual transgression, I would have had to pass as a man or be a gender separatist—nun, Amazon, outlaw or isolate in the desert squinting into the horizon, sharpening her scythe.
tags: gender roles, patriarchy, second shift
Diane Ravitch Comes to the Experiment
Diane Ravitch: The Sad State of Education Reform Today
Dillard University, 2601 Gentilly Blvd., Professional Science Building Amphitheater
Oct. 27, 2010, 7 PM
Sponsors:
Deep South Environmental Justice Institute
Louisiana Association of Educators
Co-sponsors:
New Orleans Educational Equity Roundtable
BESE Meeting THURSDAY!
Got your question ready? Read Pastorek’s recommendation letter [PDF]?
From the press release:
BESE ANNOUNCES DATE FOR PUBLIC HEARING REGARDING FUTURE GOVERNANCE OF RECOVERY SCHOOL DISTRICT SCHOOLS
BATON ROUGE, LA – State law authorizes the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) to transfer chronically low-performing schools to the jurisdiction of the Recovery School District (RSD) for an initial five year period. That initial period will expire at the end of the 2010-2011 school year for Orleans Parish public schools transferred to the RSD in 2004 and 2005. On Tuesday, BESE will receive a recommendation from State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek on the future governance of 68 of these schools, currently operating as RSD direct-run schools or independently-managed charter schools. However, BESE will not act on Superintendent Pastorek’s decision until its December Board Meeting. And today the state’s education policy making board announced the details of an October public hearing on the matter.
BESE Member Chas Roemer, who chairs BESE’s RSD Committee, said the meeting, which will be held October 14 in the auditorium of McDonogh #35 High School in New Orleans, is required by legislation. He emphasized the Board’s commitment to a format that will allow ample input and feedback from the communities impacted by this decision.
“While the focus of Tuesday’s BESE Committee meeting is to hear a report on the progress of RSD schools and to receive Superintendent Pastorek’s recommendation, it is of critical importance to us that we hear from students, parents, educators, groups and the citizens of New Orleans prior to making a decision. While we’re anticipating that individuals and groups will attend the committee meeting on Tuesday to voice their opinions, we want to devote adequate time – and set a convenient time and place — to ensure that everybody who wants to be heard is heard. We want to assure the community that the BESE meeting tomorrow is not the only time we will hear comment, and we encourage citizens to attend the October meeting,” Roemer said.
The RSD was created by legislation in 2003 for the purpose of transforming the state’s chronically low-performing schools. Five New Orleans schools were transferred to the RSD in 2004 and 2005, prior to Hurricane Katrina. In November 2005, legislation extended the designation of a failed school to include schools scoring below the state average, if the school operates within a district in academic crisis. The New Orleans School System fell within this definition. Thus 107 schools were transferred to the RSD in 2005, although not all these schools remained open.
Currently, the RSD oversees 68 schools in New Orleans and 16 schools outside of New Orleans – either directly or indirectly in the case of charter schools. The RSD has also entered into Memorandums of Understanding or Management Contracts with another 25 schools.
Meeting Details:
Date: Thursday, October 14
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: McDonogh #35 High School Auditorium
1331 Kerlerec Street, New Orleans, LA 70116
hctiB G: It Begins Again
originally posted October 8, 2006 @ 8:05
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An actual student spelling error: “As the saying goes, a group is only as strong as its weakass link.”
Go Read
The Problem With New Orleans’s Charter Schools
And do not skip that last Caroline Roemer Shirley quote. Have we found the Sarah Palin of education?
Paraphrase: No, Thanks, Don’t Need It
G Bitch to Sixth District NOPD: I live on the street where the shooting was Sunday and there’s a bullet in my neighbor’s wall.
Sixth District to G Bitch: Well, the scene has already been processed so we don’t need it but if your neighbor needs something, like for insurance or something, she can call and have an officer come out to write a report. All right?
G Bitch: All right. Thank you.
also at bugs, bark, leaves, and lizards with pictures and related posts
“the ‘reform’ narrative”
cross-posted at bbll
Ravitch responds to the outcome of the DC mayoral race, one frequently called a referendum on Michelle Rhee, and the narratives generated about the outcome and the recent charter movement’s main narrative. [Which she neatly sums up at the end--read all the way through for the full effect]
In the closing days of the Fenty campaign, [Rhee] went to the districts where Fenty had his strongest support—the largely white districts in the city’s Northwest section—to rally voters.
When the results came in, Fenty was trounced in largely black districts. In Wards 7 and 8, his opponent, Vincent Gray, won 82 percent of the vote. In Northwest Washington, where white voters predominate, Fenty won 76 percent of the vote. Fenty decisively lost the black vote and decisively won the white vote. D.C. public schools are about 5 percent white, so it is a reasonable supposition that the anti-Fenty vote was fueled to a large degree by parents of children in the public schools. Gray won handily, 53 percent to 46 percent.
It’s a repeated motif—white voters supporting “tough” reforms of public schools though few of them have children in these public schools or the ones being reformed, and black voters with children in the schools being reformed who do not support the individuals and/or policies and/or effects of the reforms. The idea that these types of reforms must be imposed upon the teachers, parents and children is a telling aspect of the charter movement narrative.
Journalists attributed Fenty’s loss to the power of the teachers’ union, but such an explanation implies that black voters, even in the privacy of the voting booth, lack the capacity to make an informed choice. When the Tea Party wins a race, journalists don’t write about who controlled their vote, but about a voter revolt; they acknowledge that those who turned out to vote had made a conscious decision. Yet when black voters, by large margins, chose Vincent Gray over Adrian Fenty, journalists found it difficult to accept that the voters were acting on their own, not as puppets of the teachers’ union.
Anti-union sentiment is part of the charter school movement narrative. I’d like to add, following Ravitch, that these charter school reformers also assume that teachers can’t think for themselves and cannot possibly be objecting to anything except petty selfish interest in maintaining power over crumbling schools for reasons too weird to imagine or articulate. Why is such antagonizing, demonizing language and narrative spokes needed to make schools, make education, better?
Mayoral control of schools short-circuits democratic processes by concentrating all decision-making in the hands of one elected official, who need not consult with anyone else.
That could be said for any kind of single-person control, for appointed officials with little accountability to voters and parents, for insisting one way is The Way so just the hell out The Way, You People, and let us Reform you.
We now have an “education reform” movement which believes that democracy is too slow and too often wrong, and their reforms are so important, so self-evident that they cannot be delayed by discussion and debate. So self-assured are the so-called reformers that they can’t be bothered to review the research and evidence on merit pay or evaluating teachers by test scores or the effects of high-stakes testing. If they can find one study or even a report by a friendly think tank, that’s evidence enough for them.
Sound familiar, New Orleanians? Sound anti-democratic? Ravitch thinks so, too. A blanket disregard for discussion, debate, research, best practices is the wrong mindset to reform education that is meant to teach our children how to discuss, debate, research, weigh and analyze, and make sound decisions not based only on a petty personal interest when the issue is public policy, the public good, other people’s children. Why do students not “understand” the scientific method, logic, argument, etc.? Hm. Maybe because it is the last thing that is valued in so many of the most important arenas.
Ravitch says all, more, and much more far better than I can. So just go read.
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pic: http://www.flackrabbit.com/2009/michelle-rhee/
How Much Does Your Public Charter School Cost?
You heard me—how much does it cost? I don’t mean school supplies but “fees,” raffles, candy and giftwrap fundraisers, lab fees, field trip transportation and more fees, technology fees, materials fees, etc. I’m not asking for your moral judgment of these fees and “fees” one way or the other. I want to know how much it costs. How many dollars?
And alternatively, what does your charter school provide? Laptop, transportation, folders, gym uniforms, etc.?
