Scholars Say "No" To Israel

Scholars’ Group Endorses an Academic Boycott of Israel - NYTimes.com:

An association of American professors with almost 5,000 members has voted to endorse an academic boycott of Israeli colleges and universities, the group announced Monday, making it the largest academic group in the United States to back a growing movement to isolate Israel over its treatment of Palestinians...

I think this is more significant than you think.

Warren Flogs Ed Department

Elizabeth Warren: Education Department Shouldn't Be A 'Lapdog':

...Warren, a member of the Senate banking and education committees, also said it was “shocking” that the department had not yet recovered some $22 million in allegedly improper payments made to Sallie Mae despite a 2009 recommendation from the department’s inspector general that it recover the debt.

“The Department of Education needs to be aggressive in watching out for students, not for profit-making loan servicers,” Warren said. “They’re there for our students, not to help loan servicers make a profit...”

Starr Vile

“He Took the Time to Chat”: Ken Starr’s Plea for a Child Molester:

What’s Ken Starr up to these days? According to Virginia court documents, the famously pious former Clinton prosecutor recently pleaded with a Fairfax County judge to let a confessed child molester go free. Because he’s a family friend. Here’s the letter...

One of the commenters over at Gawker wondered why this story wasn't front-paged on the New York Times. Good question.

Ph.Ds In Public Schools

Why Aren’t More Ph.D.s Teaching in Public Schools? - Laura McKenna - The Atlantic:

...American universities award more than 60,000 doctoral degrees every year. However, there are not enough academic jobs for all those graduates. One study asserts that only 41 percent of Ph.D.s will find tenure-track positions. Some studies are slightly more optimistic. In a report for the academic journal PS, Jennifer Seagal Diascro reported that 49 percent of the 816 Ph.D.s who graduated from political science programs between 2009 and 2010 found permanent academic positions.

I'll offer a reason not mentioned in the article: lack of respect. People who earn terminal degrees typically are highly motivated and very intelligent, thus they are less likely to develop the patience and philosophical inclination that teachers need to thrive in K-12 and far less likely to suffer fools kindly-- they expect people to listen to them.

The Management Underbelly

Some people will make much of this as a failing in education, but these two nabods were not in education, though that's what their paycheck says. They were in management. I have observed that when you hire a teacher you are going to get one of two kinds of people: those who will have their markers pried from their cold, dead fingers, and those who discover that teaching is work and immediately start scheming to escape the classroom by getting into management. Don't by surprised when these frustrated 1%ers turnout to be bullies, liars, and hypocrites

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A school official’s unbelievably racist texts - Salon.com:

...There is so much that’s contemptible about the exchanges between Como and Donato – the simmering, near constant anger they display, the grotesque, dehumanizing way they view pretty much anybody who isn’t a white man (to their credit, though, I didn’t notice any gay slurs in the lot) and the jaw-dropping amount of arrogance and privilege it takes to speak that hatefully, that freely. But what stinks most is the betrayal it represents, the lie that their jobs were. The disgust they had for their own kids. “They were friendly to our faces,” Zhaqweyza Armstrong, a 16 year-old Coatesville High junior, told the Inquirer Monday, “and then they talked about us behind our backs.”

Right on cue to back me up, Salon posts another essay on teaching:

Here We Go Again

13 Wounded in Barrage of Gunfire at Chicago Park - NYTimes.com:

A gunman who shot and wounded 13 people at a South Side park on Thursday night was armed with an assault-style rifle equipped with a high-capacity magazine, the police said on Friday...

Home School Horrors

The Sinister Side of Homeschooling - The Daily Beast:

...Indeed, when kids are homeschooled, it’s easy for the world to forget that they exist. In August, Erica Lynn Parsons, a 15-year-old girl ostensibly being homeschooled in North Carolina by her adoptive parents, was reported missing by her stepbrother; it soon emerged that she hadn’t been seen since 2011. Her birth mother is now calling for an “Erica’s law” that would provide greater oversight of homeschooling...

No Insurance For KS Schools

Kansas law thrusts Iowa insurer into gun debate:

A new Kansas law allowing gun owners to carry weapons in public buildings, including schools, has thrust a major Des Moines-based insurer into the national gun control debate.

The EMC Insurance Cos. insures 85 percent to 90 percent of all Kansas school districts and has refused to renew coverage for schools that permit teachers and custodians to carry concealed firearms on their campuses under the new law, which took effect July 1. It's not a political decision, but a financial one based on the riskier climate it estimates would be created, the insurer said...

We Have The Scientists

...but not at minimum wage.

Business ruined science in this country | The Confluence:

...Anyone who thinks that all you need to make good science is cheap, well educated labor should really give it a whirl sometime. Let me know how you’re doing after a decade of lab work and half a dozen restructurings.

The idea that we need to import more foreign engineers when American engineers can’t get work here and have to go work in Canada and Japan is just beyond cruel and stupid.

As Colin McIlwain says, the idea that there is a shortage of well educated, technically proficient and experienced American scientists is something the business community conjured up in order to push wages down. Congress is either willfully ignorant or completely bamboozled if it seriously thinks that we need more foreign STEM graduates...

Sensible Student Loan Bill

Warren’s proposal: Offer college students the same interest rates as banks | The Raw Story:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced a bill on Wednesday that would give college students the same interest rates on their federal student loans as banks do when borrowing from the Federal Reserve...

Killing Through Breakfast

It's amazing. Unbelievable. No long quotes. I don't want my computer to explode. No More Free Breakfasts | National Review Online: "...These are the ways in which the Left has damaged children and families through free school breakfasts..."

Rich Educationally Richer

No Rich Child Left Behind - NYTimes.com:

...What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.

One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago...

Teachers, Again

Teachers - Will We Ever Learn? - NYTimes.com:

...In America, both major teachers’ unions and the organization representing state education officials have, in the past year, called for raising the bar for entering teachers; one of the unions, the American Federation of Teachers, advocates a “bar exam.” Ideally the exam should not be a one-time paper-and-pencil test, like legal bar exams, but a phased set of milestones to be attained over the first few years of teaching. Akin to medical boards, they would require prospective teachers to demonstrate subject and pedagogical knowledge — as well as actual teaching skill...

Kids Go Hungry

No noon meal for kids in debt at middle school - CNN.com

Sorry, kid. No money, no lunch.

Students at an Attleboro, Massachusetts, middle school went hungry this week, if they had a negative balance on their pre-paid lunch cards...

More NC Craziness

The NC GOP jumps the shark | NC Policy Watch

...The same week the resolution dominated the headlines, Senate Education Committee Chair Jerry Tillman convinced a committee not to require criminal background checks for charter school teachers. The obsession with charters and vouchers to undermine public education is so strong that even children’s safety is apparently not a concern.

A House committee voted to repeal renewable energy standards that more than 80 percent of people in the state support.

Bills were filed to use the state tax code to penalize parents if their children in college have the gall to register and vote in the town where they attend school. The Senate voted to repeal the Racial Justice Act, sending a message that racial bias in the death penalty is not their concern.

Lawmakers approved Governor Pat McCrory’s appointment of a man to the State Board of Education who not only favors voucher schemes but doesn’t seem to think that gay and lesbian students deserve protection from bullying.

McCrory himself held a press conference to announce he was turning over the state Medicaid program that takes care of the most vulnerable people in the state to the profiteers on Wall Street...

Corruption In The Classroom

Atlanta School Reform Scam - Yet Another Education Reform Scam - Esquire

...The primary corrupting agent in the actual education process is the standardized test. It is the collateralized debt obligation of the education "reform" scam. Using standardized testing to measure anything, let alone using it as a basis for whether or not people can keep their jobs or not, is an open invitation to chicanery of all kinds, but especially that which involved massaging the numbers. Standardized testing is a Procrustean bed fitted with a Magic Fingers device. Once you've introduced the corrupting agent, then the corrupting agent forces on you a system of punishment and rewards that eventually guarantees that you and your whole system will look like jackasses...

Standardized tests and the people who push them are evil.

He's Not From The South: Part Infinity

Former Tea Party Candidate's Sewage Rant Gets Him Booted From School Board Meeting | Video Cafe

...Buffalo Teachers Federation President Phil Rumore on Friday said that Paladino was "demented" and didn't deserve to be on the school board because he had been caught forwarding emails that included bestiality, pornography and racism.

"Women having sex with each other, women completely unclad, African-Americans being apparently run over by an airplane," Rumore told WFBO. "It is really sick that anybody would give any kind of credibility to somebody like this being on a board of education..."

Voucher Ed

14 Wacky "Facts" Kids Will Learn in Louisiana's Voucher Schools | Mother Jones

...Many of these schools, Kopplin notes, rely on Pensacola-based A Beka Book curriculum or Bob Jones University Press textbooks to teach their pupils Bible-based "facts," such as the existence of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster and all sorts of pseudoscience that researcher Rachel Tabachnick and writer Thomas Vinciguerra have thankfully pored over so the rest of world doesn't have to...

Abortion Facts

How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement | RH Reality Check

Military Sense

General McChrysal Tells CBS He's Not Worried About A Nuclear Iran | Crooks and Liars

You can't have a discussion on Villager TV with any politician or beltway pundit about Israel or Iran unless there's sufficient fearmongering over the impending doom if the Ayatollah gets his hands on some nukes. I've had this post in the back of my mind for weeks, but I almost forgot about it since Schieffer didn't even do a follow up to these remarkable words. And I never imagined that I'd hear Gen. McChrystal, the man who was tasked to lead our forces in Afghanistan, say this on my teevee.

It's quite remarkable.

SCHIEFFER: What do you think is the greatest threat to our national security at this point?

MCCHRYSTAL: In the near term, it's clearly our economic challenges. Our inability to make tough decisions to move our economy forward, that worries me in the near term. In the long term it's our education because that is the future.

SCHIEFFER: Not terrorism, education.

MCCHRYSTAL: We can handle terrorism. We can handle a nuclear-armed Iran. We can't handle a future where young Americans are not educated enough to take our country forward.

SCHIEFFER: General, I want to be one of many to thank you for your service. Thanks for being with us today. We'll be back in one minute with the mayor of Los Angeles...