● Did Uber stiff New York drivers for hundreds of millions of dollars? The explanation is pretty technical but Noam Scheiber makes a really good case that the answer is yes.
● Massachusetts is considering legislation to pay adjunct professors fairly. Lobbyists for colleges are screaming about affordability, which is something you hear them talking about much less when the topic is how many hundreds of thousands of dollars the college president should be paid vs. whether the adjuncts who teach many of the classes should be paid so little they qualify for food stamps.
● Who is Wilbur Ross? (He’s the commerce secretary. But who was he before he took that job?)
● Reminder: Education is not a damn marketplace.
● Diane Ravitch on the absurdity of applying industrial lingo to schools:
One of the reasons that corporate reformers want to put kids on computers is that they think this is the way to standardize and replicate and scale up “success,” even though sitting in front of a computer for several hours a day is not what most parents or educators think of as good education.
What they don’t understand is that there are areas of life that are not susceptible to industrial processes.
Can we scale up good families? We know what a good family looks like. Why can’t we make every family look like that? Can we scale up churches? Churches may grow into mega churches, but every church is different, even if they use the same Scripture and liturgy.
We cannot scale up great orchestras. A string quartet will always require four musicians, and there is no way to implement cost savings, or get productivity gains (this is known as Baumol’s Effect). Reformers themselves want their children to have a human teacher with a small class, the smaller the better. But when they think of “scaling up,” they look for mechanical replacements for humans, to cut costs.
Wherever creativity is required, wherever human interactions matter, scaling up remains elusive because it is an industrial process, not a human one.
We have many examples of excellent schools in the public and private sector, and they are very different from each other.
● The next Operation Dixie: Sarah Jaffe talks to experienced organizers about how to move forward in the South.
● Jaffe also talked class war with Daniel Denvir.
● Four things Betsy DeVos doesn't want you to know about education tax credits.
● If Ben & Jerry's is progressive, why won't it protect its farmworkers?
● Workers Independent News:
Comments are closed on this story.