Once again, the LA Times fails the publicby not providing the big picture context of Bush's rah rah talk in front of ALEC this month, by playing down the very very right-wing agenda of the organization Dubya spoke to this month, and by using language developed by the right-wing for propaganda.    

Earlier this week, I caught the very conservative Investor's Business Daily (November 13, 2006)  offering a strategy comment from Grover Norquist in their front page story titled: Conservatives Spar Over Iraq, Values After Stinging Loss. Sorry, no link.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said social issues can be local concerns for Republicans, but don't have to go national.

"It's not reasonable to suggest that the pro-life issue in toto hurts Republicans. That's not true. It actually helps them," Norquist said. "you have to look at it district by district. You don't run an anti-stem cell candidate in downtown New York, but you want to have a right-to-life in a Catholic neighborhood or the South".

This is nothing new.

Via the ever subversive Susan Ohanian, I just found out about this (rare) piece of NCLB activism.

Author Debra Craig wants all of you who thinks NCLB is a huge mistake which needs to be erased to please send your erasers to Gov. Tommy Thompson, the head of the NCLB Commission, who just got quoted saying:

"Very few people say let's scrap the law altogether. That's a good sign."

She wants 1 million erasers sent to the dude before the commission meets again in 2007. That would be very good sign, indeed.

Woke up this morning to find how nicely AP's'loophole' piece played into the hands of Spellings.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is pledging to scrutinize a loophole that allows states to exclude nearly 2 million student test scores under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Oh boy. More heroic Spellings here.

"Do we need to move forward to include more and more children all the time? Yes, we do. I think you'll see we're going to continue to look at that issue," she said.

I have a question. Does anyone remember Armstrong Williams?

AP does a better job in this pieceon NCLB.

Another unintended solution, experts say, is for schools to become less diverse.

"The really rich and ritzy suburbs that don't participate in any form of integration, that turn their backs on all efforts to admit minority kids or low-income kids into their first-rate public schools, those districts aren't going to suffer at all," said Jonathan Kozol, an educator and author of several acclaimed books on race and education.

"They're going to be rewarded for their selfishness. They're going to be rewarded for their racial insularity because they're not admitting any kids who are at any academic risk. They're not admitting any kids who had been previously studying, for perhaps the first six years of school, in a rotten, overcrowded school."

My opinion, as I've written before: NCLB is revolutionary piece of structural legislation, designed to (very) quietly install a form of corporate 'school choice', which will, yes, quite likely result in increased segregation.

Getting back to this Guardian piece on the relationship between social class and how kids do in school (blogged here), I was struck by this warning regarding the connection between school choice and segregation.

Webber and Butler warn that introducing further freedoms for schools, as the government is, may allow middle-class parents and schools to choose each other, leaving those from poorer backgrounds stranded in an increasingly segregated system.

Here lies still another reason why I haven't been a fan of charter schools nor of the whole school choice concept, a standard wishlist mantra of the corporate tribal clan now in power.  

Here I'm echoing Cyndy at mousemusings who points out this gem of an article penned by Howard Zinn titled "America's Blinders".

I always find asking "why" a horribly difficult question with no easy answers especially when it comes to explaining human behavior.

So I love that Zinn is able to pinpoint these two dynamics inherent to our current collective American psyche:

1. our lack of historical perspective and

2. a stark moral superiority.

This is required reading, my opinion.

The solution?

Today I'm happy to see this good response  by Barbara Ehrenreich,  of the Nickle and Dimed fame, now under attack by Dobson et al who has labelled her as a "homewrecker".

Barbara doesn't miss a beat. She niftily pinpoints what was projected onto her and blasts back, countering that the real homewreckers are corporations whose policies don't provide adequate wages, requiring workers to work long hours and/or work two jobs or more.

What she does works well. My hope: let there be tons more responses like Barbara's out there.

A second point: this attack on her is a good illustration of a key attack strategy the corporate-Republican tribe uses, namely projection.

But first, to clarify, I'm referring to projection as the psychological defense mechanism, as defined below.

Unfortunately some really bad news for those of us who oppose the standardized testing educational-industrial-complex.  

Only from Wineripof the NYT:

Watchdog of Test Industry Faces Economic Extinction

For more than 20 years, FairTest, a small nonprofit group headquartered on the second floor of an old house here, has been the No. 1 critic of America's big testing companies and their standardized tests.

...snip...

A generation of education journalists, like Thomas Toch, who reported for Education Week and U.S. News & World Report, were schooled on the complexities and limitations of standardized testing by FairTest.

"They've helped me a lot," said Mr. Toch, who is now a director of Education Sector, a nonpartisan Washington policy research group.

On a slow day, like last Friday, Robert Schaeffer of FairTest handled calls from The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Lakeland Ledger, Associated Press and Hartford Courant and Bloomberg News.

So far, I think the best short summary of our horrible up-to-no-good corporate special election is by CA Assemblyperson Jackie Goldberg in this interviewin Citybeat, a local alternative weekly.  Goldberg, btw, before she was an LA City Councilperson, was a public school teacher in Compton.

If you want some strong clarity, see what she says below.

When I notice the Governor blaming Davis or the Democratic Legislature for the 'mess' or the 'broken system', I get really ticked off mostly because I think there's more to the dynamic than just the Dems. Just as bad is his 'reform' as the solution to the 'broken system'. Yeah right.  One example too late: now we know 'taking it to the people of Cah-li-for-nia' means putting on a special election for corporate interests at taxpayer expense.   Let's not fall for that one again.

We all should view Prop. 75, the antiunion initiative, as part of a 50 state strategy, a Norquist agenda item. If it's not in your state, it will appear soon.

In California, a past Norquist director pushing antiunion initiatives nationally is now a Schwarzenegger appointee, sitting on the Board of Forestry.  

Prop. 13 laid the groundwork for this special election in California on November 8th.  Passed in 1978, Prop. 13 has been known simply as the initiative which froze property taxes.

But it did another thing, something which we should have seared into our brains.

Finally.  

From John Myers' blog, Capitol Notes:

Now, the argument will head to court. O'Connell and the CTA say their new lawsuit follows the same path as the 1993-1994 legal battle over Prop 98 with then Governor Pete Wilson, a case that challenged the ability to tinker with the initiative's guarantees about the minimum levels of school funding. That case ended in a settlement that sent hundreds of millions of dollars more to the schools.

Peter Schrag wants me to believe that a new study, which will be funded entirely from corporate foundation money, will give us the answers to what makes CA schools 'efficient' among other things.  

Actually, I'm now convinced 'efficient' is code for 'one more reason to bash public schools'.

Scrutiny of the Governor's business affairs should be regular and normal policy, but I think too many were caught up in the shine of his movie star image to even question his financial dealings and income. We should question why it has taken so long for this vetting process to happen, two years into his term.

 SFChron finds Gov. Schwarzenegger taking advantage of another loophole.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, taking advantage of a technicality in campaign finance laws, has been collecting rent from political action committees that he controls.

During the past three years, campaign committees controlled by Schwarzenegger have paid $166,859 in rent to Main Street Plaza, a three-story building in Santa Monica that the governor owns.

Results of the study by Lubienski and Lubienski, published by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, are simply too stunning to ignore. And I haven't ignored it. I read about it first over at Joe Thomas' at Shut up and Teach, also noted at Bill's place (Endless Faculty Meeting), and more recently over at Education at the Brink (good discussion over at his place).

Medical News

Dallas News

PDK

Pdf

Short of repeating everyone else, I'd like to point this bit out: Lubienski and Lubienski set out to test 'market theory', the theory underlying the school choice trend sold to us as the superior way, the basic assumption being private schools are more effective than public schools at educating kids.  

Their question: does the evidence support market-style 'reform'?

Now that parents are waking up to the existence of the NCLB legislated database,  our good government has come up with creating a brand new military recruiting database,  separate from the NCLB database.

I know lots have been written about this already, but I want to highlight a few singular features .