Mike's Blog Roundup
By Mike Finnigan Thursday Dec 11, 2008 8:00amCounty Fair: Highlighting some of the absurd attempts by news media to tie Barack Obama to Rod Blagojevich's alleged corruption.
Happy Valley News Hour: Hitler vs. Teh Internets
Greg Palast: Trial balloons lofted in the Washington Post suggest President-elect Obama is about to select lawyer Joel Klein as Secretary of Education. If not Klein, then draft-choice number two is Arne Duncan, Obama's backyard basketball buddy in Chicago. Say it aint so, O.
Street Prophets: The Religious/Industrial Complex
Our Broken Government: It's gonna take time to clear away the wreckage
OFF THE BEATEN PATH: The Augusta Citizen-Investigator, The American Boy, The Brooklyn Ink, The Strange Death of Liberal America
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My eyes hurt..
C&L site is real messed up when viewed with Chrome. Looks fine with IE. Thought you'd like to know..
Could have prevented the assassination of President Kennedy by — well, that’s a good question, isn’t it, who killed Kennedy, because if you believe that load of self-contradictory whitewash handed down by the Warren Commission then you’re a bigger fool than I thought.
The US budget deficit swelled by more than 400 billion dollars in the first two months of fiscal 2009, almost the record gap of the prior year, Treasury data showed Wednesday.
The federal deficit ballooned by a combined 401.57 billion dollars in October and November, 2.5 times the size of the same period a year ago.
The two-month deficit represents 88 percent of the entire fiscal 2008 deficit of 454.79 billion dollars, the highest on record.
9/11 Victims' Families Challenge Legitimacy Of Guantánamo Military Commissions
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/detention/38038p...
Our Broken Government: It's gonna take time to clear away the wreckage
It's gonna take more time than there is, I think.
The damage done has been so pervasive, so thorough, so complete that I doubt a team of fucking SAINTS, working with the Holy Spirit and Jaysus Fuuking Christ hisself could undo it before the Greenland Ice melts...
Greg Palast: Trial balloons lofted in the Washington Post suggest President-elect Obama is about to select lawyer Joel Klein as Secretary of Education. If not Klein, then draft-choice number two is Arne Duncan, Obama's backyard basketball buddy in Chicago. Say it aint so, O.
Seriously...He's done more for education, teachers,and to make schools humane han anyone else I can think of...
and if not him, then Henry Giroux. Vid here.
Or bell hooks. Here's a vid.
there's no comments block for the next thread...again
heckuva way to run a railroad...
every once in a whilst.
I'm thinking of writing a new classic holiday tale about Christmas depression and despair, and it'll be called The Bi-Polar Express.
"Put a lawyer in charge. Or the guy who I played Basketball with."
Awesome leadership skills there.
Important Palast piece. It would be really nice if teachers or former teachers were allowed to run the Education Department, since, funny, they always do much better than administrators who hate teaching and teachers, or outsiders who haven't ever taught but are convinced they know the answers. Just collating the "Best Practices" studies and funding teacher training in those techniques would help immensely, but the biggest single problem is normally class size.
Tonnes of literature suggest that the most expedient student learning is closely correlated with the amount of attention teachers can devote to individual students.
The optimum number for 'average' elementary school kids is around 20 (for students not living in upper middle-class households), though it varies. Kids from privileged backgrounds often do not "need" to go to school at all to achieve all the 'bench-mark' achievements in 'literacy' and 'numeracy.'
I learned a statistic in my first education grad-school class which has stuck with me ever since (almost 25 years): Student achievement (scores) on standardized tests correlates directly with the Socio-Economic Status of the parents. 70% of ALL variation is accounted for by that one variable. The higher the family SES, the higher will be the test scores of the test takers. Further analysis revealed that the single factor most closely related to student performance was whether the mother had attended post-secondary school.
I whole-heartedly endorse you recommendation that a 'real' teacher be appointed to lead the Ed Dept. suggested above a couple of candidates I deemed suitable: Bill Ayers (yep, THAT one), Henry Giroux, or bell hooks.
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