From personal experience this issue is an important issue because I saw firsthand a school where students were struggling to meet academic standards. I was a part of a program called Little Terps here at the University of Maryland, where I was a weekly mentor to a third grade student name Alirio at Hyattsville Elementary School in Prince George’s County. Through observation and in talking with Alirio’s teacher, he and many of the students in his class were not proficient in reading or math. I would spend the afternoons teaching Alirio the multiplication table and guiding him through reading a book that was below his grade level. I wouldn’t say I could pinpoint why these students were not proficient in these subjects, but can only say that the students need a system which makes certain that they are on the right track in receiving a proper education.

I am a person who believes in limited government and that if the government, especially the federal government, does not need to be involved, it should stay out of our business. But in the case of education, the local governments were not doing their job. Students were nowhere near the proficient levels they needed to be in math and reading and so something had to be done. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was and still is a step in the right direction by the federal government into holding schools, teachers, and administrators accountable for the education of our children.

As we move forward with this economically vital effort, we can look to states that have shown the way. In Michigan and Massachusetts, for example, Governors Rick Snyder and Deval Patrick have made expanding access to preschool programs a priority.

We’re inspired and empowered by the work going on in Massachusetts and can’t wait to share our NGPM apps with the world!

Self-direction, or getting quiet to find guidance within, is a critical life skill that we need to teach in our schools, from Kindergarten through Ph.D. It is missing from the majority of our educational institutions and this hit home in a dream I had last night. In the dream I’m working at a school where all the students are doing a senior project. There are varying levels of success among them, yet, more of them than not are hardly doing anything at all, paralyzed by the process of  having to make their own decisions. 

Upon awakening from it I was reminded of my own childhood in the Talented And Gifted program, or T.A.G., where there was quite a lot of creative freedom. I, however, did not excel because my inner account of originality was all but bankrupt. As so many others like me, I went on to graduate not only from high school but also college with the highest honors – in conformity – and that became clear the day I stepped into the “real” world. Thrust disconcertingly into the sea of uncertainty and the need to make my own decisions, I went, “oh, crap.” I was never taught how to do THAT in school.

Our education system, lower and higher, is almost exclusively focused on the communication of outer knowledge. As a result, we continue to produce droves of half-hearted worker bees, many of whom go to their graves never experiencing the Genius that lives inside of them. It’s No Worker Bee Left Behind.

Yet, self-direction is the process of tapping into that Genius, the same goldmine of scientific insight from which Einstein plucked, the limitless reservoir of compassion from which Mother Teresa drew, and the volcano of inspiration that fueled Beethoven’s 5th symphony. These mortals were not “geniuses” themselves, no, but open channels of That which is behind every quantum leap of civilization. This is something we all have access to, the channel to which is opened by learning to listen quietly within, for that is where Its still, small voice is heard.

This practice should be a required part of every curriculum in every school, no matter how old or young the student body, for the evolution of our society at this critical juncture depends on it. In an age where the “system” is no longer working we cannot afford overwhelming conformity to it. We need novelty, creativity, and originality, and those can only come from the unconditioned, the untaught. When the Genius begins expressing through all the beacons – students – that occupy every corner of our society, then we might turn this shop around.

So, let’s reinvigorate our grade schools and colleges with a path of contemplative self-reflection, non-denominational and non-religious.

(For inspiration on The Genius checkout Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA)

Prologue

Martin Luther King, Jr. took society by storm because he knew the truth of life in his bones and he was not afraid to die for it. The same is true of other leaders like Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Dalai Lama, to name a few.

Leadership training is big in our schools. We all strive to “train the leaders of tomorrow.” That is great and I think it should continue, but how can anybody lead others if they can’t even lead themselves? To be a leader has nothing to do with others and everything to do with self-knowledge. So, perhaps, we should turn the lights of our students’ minds in a different direction. Perhaps we should turn them around and start transforming our society from the inside out.

====================================

Thanks for this, John.

I have very mixed reactions to EDHirsch — not all necessarily at the same time.

About a decade or so, I thought EDH was just plain wrong, but decided I should read what he had to say, so I did just that. It was a painful experience, but I had to admit he made a lot of very convincing points. I wrote an op-ed published in the Washington Post about that time, in an article that was mostly critical of what I saw a poorly-thought-out and clearly never-tried out math curriculum  that was being foisted on the students of DC by administrators who had no clue. I think I concluded by endorsing his effort over what was being tried in DCPS at the time – long before charter schools started spreading like fungus or mushrooms.

In any case, my opinion is that Hirsch is worth reading, but he’s a very powerful, logical, and persuasive writer, and if you immerse yourself in his work without having time to discuss it with friends or acquaintances or colleagues or students, you may find yourself being won over by Hirsch, simply because you were unable to argue back with actual data and facts (not just rhetoric). Some of what he argues is correct, but I disagree with him that it is really possible to come up with a single, standard curriculum for everyone, and I also think that a number of educational experiments that he condemns as utter, outright failures have actually been successful at times.

(I should go back and look at my copy and see if I write any comments in the margin. )

In any case, if I had it to do today, I would probably withdraw the endorsement I made at the time, unless I had a chance to visit one of the Core Knowledge schools myself and see how they do it. CK schools may not be perfect, and probably wouldn’t suit me or my wife or my kids, but it might be a pretty good.way of teaching that doesn’t do too much harm, and produces some good results. It seems from your piece, John, that the CK model seems to be working at the schools you visited, and seems well-organized and providing a reasonable education.

Which is about the best one can hope for!

We are not all going to agree  on one and only one perfect way of raising or educating children. Disagreements on what should be emphasized and what should be discouraged are part of what make us human.

That’s fine.

However, what’s not fine is to cheat and abuse kids, and, unfortunately, that’s happening a lot. It should not be the case that the children of the rich and near-rich get an excellent education, with small classes, teachers who aren’t being micro-managed, and lots of ‘extras’ like art, music, sports, drama, and project, but the children of the poor and near-poor, particularly but not exclusively minorities, get a lousy one. Irony of ironies, those ‘extras’ are being removed from the education of those poor students — in the name of improving it! Influential “reformers” like Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg say it’s a wonderful idea to have 50 to 100 students in a room with a single, inexperienced and untrained teacher who has no plans to stick around in the teaching profession. What planet do these nuts come from? Have they ever taught a class themselves?

Oh. They never have. That explains a lot. Neither did Arne Duncan.

Unfortunately, it appears from the objective facts that a good number of organizations that claim to be all for the children seem to be mostly focused on increasing profits for a tiny handful of corporate billionaires, following some arbitrary educational philosophy that has exactly ZERO experimental support and which has FAILED to achieve any of the miraculous results they boasted they would achieve, not even raising test scores. In other words, kind of like latterday, educational snake-oil salesmen, and what they are proposing is quite demonstrably NOT WORKING. If you want examples, look at my blog as well of those by Valerie Strauss, Diane Ravitch, EduShyster, and anybody else we point to on our blogs.

And one of their biggest pitch-ladies, Michelle Rhee, who actually did teach for a while in Baltimore, has been proven to be a serial fabricator of facts. Or, in plain English, a big fat liar, as I and you, John, and many other people have repeatedly shown. Every claim Rhee made about her supposed successes in Baltimore are demonstrably false. (Whether she ate a bee or not, I don’t know and I don’t care.)

I don’t put E.D.Hirsch into that category of Rhee-ly big liars, because I have no evidence of any phoniness or fraudulence on his part. (Then again, I haven’t looked. Has anyone?)

But I have one big question, the answer to which I have no clue, again because I’ve never looked:

What kind of attrition rates for cohorts are there at the schools modeled by EDH? 

(That’s an enormous indictment of even the highest-flying charter schools: they find that they have the exact same difficulty that the regular, urban public schools (RUPS) have been increasingly unable to solve: RUPS are forbidden from expelling, suspending, or otherwise sanctioning in any way the most difficult-to-handle, violent, mentally disturbed students. Teachers have in fact been disarmed of the weapons they need in the classroom: the promise that if a student is seriously disruptive, the student will be removed by another adult and will face very unpleasant consequences that the kid and his/her family actually care about, up to and including removal to another institution that’s much less free. There is absolutely no disciplinary support behind teachers in most non-magnet public schools. And, sorry, NRA, a teacher carrying a gun is the absolutely worst solution I can think of for this problem. I mean, a teacher is ALWAYS considered to be in the wrong if he/she happens to come into any physical contact whatsoever with a student – whether to straighten a collar, remove a “kick me” sign from the back of an unsuspecting patsy, congratulating a student with a pat on the back or head, god-forbid! actually hugging a student for ANY reason, or trying to stop a fight. I know of a number of cases just like this, and could give you lots of details if you cared to listen for a few hours. What the charter schools DO have, and here in DC they use it liberallty, is the right to get rid of students. They have many subtle and not-so-subtle ways of doing it; if public schools could do it, they would be a lot more orderly than they are today. It’s quite difficult to manage a class with just one or two out-of-control students when you have neither administrative nor family support. I honestly assure you that this happens in many public schools and also in some charter schools I have visited.)

So, if a charter or alternative school claims that they are achieving superior results in test scores and attendance and graduation and college acceptance rates, in comparison with the exact same population that’s in the regular public schools, they are simply lying. For one thing, you have to look at the attrition rates. I know a little bit about my few  strengths and many weaknesses as a teacher over my 30 years teaching in public schools in DC. You may find it hard to believe that a lot of my students actually went on to college, even Ivy League in a number of cases I know about — and some went on to jail. Some went on to productive lives doing all sorts of things. Most, of course, I have no idea, but I do run across some of them from time to time.

Guess what, no surprises: a strong correlation between family income & education on the one hand and student achievement on the other. (Academic achievement and actual smarts for life are two different things: many of my kids were way smarter than I was at many things — some that I know of even ended up doing much more mathematics or sciences than I ever did, at much deeper levels, so that I can’t follow what they are doing at all. Others were soooo good at emotionally manipulating a situation in ways I seldom could anticipate.

Teaching in south Anacostia (DC) is quite different from teaching in Chevy Chase (DC) – and that was as true 35 years ago when I started as it is today. You don’t think I tried to overcome that? I did, I tried as hard as I possibly could, and I failed.

We’ve all failed. Nobody has won.

Yet.

Any “reformer” who claims that the gap has been overcome that gap is probably referring to a charter or private school where the truly emotionally disturbed kids, the ones most affected by what it means to be poor and black or Hispanic in America, the violent and disruptive crazies, have been either made to shape up or ship out. Or never entered in the first place.

We in the public schools have lost the “ship out” solution.

Why? Is it the intention of the today’s ruling class — as publicly advocated by wingnuts like Jerry Fallwell — that the public schools must fail?

——————–

Guy Brandenburg, Washington, DC 
http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/
http://home.earthlink.net/~gfbranden/GFB_Home_Page.html
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County Superintendent Dallas Dance announced Duncan’s planned visit on Tuesday. Duncan will speak at Loch Raven High School in Towson on April 10.

It would be his second visit to a county school. Last August, Duncan addressed 800 English teachers at Perry Hall High School.

Less than a week later, Perry Hall was the scene of a shooting in which an intellectually disabled student was shot in the back by another student carrying an antique shotgun. The shooter, 15-year-old Robert Gladden Jr., pleaded guilty to an adult charge of attempted murder and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

(Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Some college students show that they have mastered course content by portfolios, test scores and clinical observations and in 2001 Regents College, renamed Excelsior, began issuing associate degrees based on competency as a way for veterans, homemakers and others to get credit for prior learning.

Now there are 20 public and private institutions developing or delivering such programs. Policy makers see them as key to improving college graduation rates. Employers laud Excelsior’s 15,000 student associate-level nursing program believing it’s as good as a traditional one.

In 2011, federal education secretary Arne Duncan praised Western Governors University programs for “real leadership in the moving from seat time to competency,” believing others would follow.

The Lumina Foundation is convening a meeting shortly to try to develop language and guidelines in hopes of pleasing accreditors and moving the Feds toward financial aid for competency-based programs.

Read more in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

So we come to the most high-profile speech that Bush has made since the election. As a potential GOP nominee in 2016, he covered numerous topics in his CPAC appearance this week. Curiously using, Watson, the name of a super computer as a virtual strawman child, he conveyed this vision for America’s system of education:

…..we need to equip every child with the best tools to rise. Each child in America deserves the best education on the planet. Why not? We’re already paying for it. We spend more per pupil than any other country in the world. And yet, our kids frequently rank in the bottom quartile on math and science scores. I could stand here all night and tell you about the details of a system that will get us there –don’t worry, I remember I’ve got only 25 minutes—but we need to have the leaders and the authority to put that system in place.

Somewhere in America a child is being born who will design and build the next and better version of Watson. His or her creation may save your life or the lives of your children and grandchildren. It may save the lives of millions. The tragedy is that for every child who reaches their full abilities, who builds that Watson, there are a hundred who could have done the same thing but are stuck in failing and indifferent schools. We are squandering America’s greatest resource, and I believe only reform-minded conservatives have the resolve to confront and end the single greatest waste of human potential in the history of the world.

We need a transformation of education based on standards benchmarked to the best of the world; A system of no-excuses accountability that refuses to accept failure and that rewards improvement and excellence; a culture based on empowering parents with an abundance of choices for their children’s education and a deep understanding of the transformative power of digital learning.

Opponents of Bush’s education ministry could have written this for him, but probably wouldn’t have gone as far to create some sort of person-computer to use as a  prop that reminds of Clint Eastwood’s empty chair.

Opponents also would have known to use test score data to bash the nation’s “failing and indifferent schools,” knowing full well he’ll use the same data in his next speech to brag about his Florida model.

Opponents would also have known that Bush would want to pitch the “transformative power of digital learning,” even though such programs are still in their infancy and have already proven to have flaws.

Opponents know that Bush wouldn’t have offered specifics and would have focused on themes, mantras and platitudes. Details of implementing these  have already proved messy, controversial and divisive.

No republican dares challenge Bush’s education vision lest they suffer permanent  ostracism. One only need to see what happened to Charlie Crist when he vetoed Bush’s teacher evaluation bill in 2010. Is such a fear-devotion dynamic a good thing for an entire political party? No republican can hazard to utter an unspeakable, “what if Jeb has been wrong?”

As the 45 states that have adopted Common Core Standards begin implementation serious concerns are being raised about the impact on the privacy of students and their families. The federal Family Educational Rights Privacy Act, or FERPA, was enacted in 1974 to protect the privacy of education records and directory information, which includes name, address, phone number, date of birth, and e-mail address, among other personally identifiable information.

Schools are a rich source of personal information about children that can be legally and illegally accessed by third parties. With incidences of identity theft, database hacking, and sale of personal information rampant, there is an urgent need to protect students’ rights under FERPA and raise awareness of aspects of the law that may compromise the privacy of students and their families.

In 2008 and 2011, amendments to FERPA gave third parties, including private companies, increased access to student data. It is significant that in 2008, the amendments to FERPA expanded the definitions of “school officials” who have access to student data to include “contractors, consultants, volunteers, and other parties to whom an educational agency or institution has outsourced institutional services or functions it would otherwise use employees to perform.” This change has the effect of increasing the market for student data.

For example, the amendments give companies like Google and Parchment access to education records and other private student information. Students are paying the cost to use Google’s “free” servers by providing access to their sensitive data and communications.

The 2011 amendments allow the release of student records for non-academic purposes and undermine parental consent provisions. The changes also promote the public use of student IDs that enable access to private educational records.

Predictably, any education legislation advanced by a republican in Florida is, well, doesn’t advertise the whole story. Here’s SB 878′s abstract:

Education Accountability; Requiring the State Board of Education to notify the Legislature of any major changes in federal law which may affect the state’s K-20 education performance accountability system; requiring the Board of Governors to make available to the Department of Education all data within the State University Database System which is to be integrated into the K-20 data warehouse; revising provisions relating to schools that are assigned school grades, including colocated schools, and students whose assessment data is used in determining school grades, etc

That “federal law” is FERPA and “K-20 data” are whatever private information the education for profit industry can mine from test data of Florida’s children. Small wonder that even some conservative firebrands like Michelle Malkin are raising the alarm about the federal power grab that Common Core Standards promises.

I’ve always wondered if Florida’s republican legislators really have full understanding of what it is they’re signing on to. Do they just do as they are told by leadership, Jeb Bush and the Florida Chamber of Commerce?  Are they willing accomplices to the effort to privatize the entire nation’s education apparatus?

Or is it a scandalous combination of each?

Dire predictions about the fate of certain government programs hardly have been in short supply as sequestration-related budget cuts loomed. It was hardly a surprise, then, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan got in on the act.

“It just means a lot more children will not get the kinds of services and opportunities they need, and as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs,” he said in an interview with CBS‘ “Face the Nation.” “There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall.”

It turns out, though, that it isn’t true. Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post confirmed this in a fact-check column that awarded Mr. Duncan no fewer than four “Pinocchios” for this whopper.

“Oddly, however, the Education Department for days was unable to cough up the name of a single school district where these notices had been delivered,” he wrote. “Then, on Wednesday, Duncan appeared before the White House press corps and produced a name — Kanawha County in West Virginia — with a major-league caveat. ‘Whether it’s all sequester-related, I don’t know,’ he said.”

Facts matter. They may ruin your PR spin or fly in the face of your talking points, but they can’t be ignored. The fact is this: We’ve been hiring new teachers over the past four decades at a clip that far outpaces the increase in students.

From 1970 to 2010, student enrollment in the nation’s public schools increased by only 7.8 percent. The number of teachers, however, increased by 60 percent.

Even that number is dwarfed by the increase in nonteaching staff positions that occurred during that time: 138 percent. That’s right — it more than doubled, despite the fact that the percentage of students was going up by a very small amount.

“Twenty-one ‘Top-Heavy States’ employ fewer teachers than other nonteaching personnel,” according to a new report by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice that focuses on the worst offenders. “Thus, those 21 states have more administrators and other nonteaching staff on the public payroll than teachers. Virginia ‘leads the way’ with 60,737 more administrators and other nonteaching staff than teachers in its public schools.”

Certainly puts a new light on those predictions about a parade of pink slips.

The fact is, real federal spending per pupil has nearly tripled since the 1970s. And as education specialist Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation points out, there are plenty of places for the budget ax to fall without hampering education in the slightest.

Consider Head Start, the nation’s flagship preschool federal program. Taxpayers have spent more than $180 billion on this program since it began in 1965; it currently costs $8 billion a year. Yet a recent evaluation by the Department of Health and Human Services — which shows “little to no effect on cognitive, social-emotional, health, or parenting outcomes” on the participating children — suggests very little return on that investment. It’s also rife with fraud and abuse, with staff misreporting income to enroll more students.

There are plenty of duplicative or ineffective education programs that could be cut as well, such as:

Native Hawaiian Education Program ($34 million annually).

Alaska Native Education Equity Program ($33 million annually).

Foreign Language Assistance Program ($26.9 million annually).

High School Graduation Initiative (Dropout Prevention) Program ($50 million annually).

The list goes on and on. There are 150 federal education programs, in fact. That’s on top of state and local spending, which comprises the bulk of all education funds.

The unfortunate thing is not that budget cuts are occurring. As the deficit continues to soar, it’s clear that they’re badly needed. No, the problem is that they’re not being targeted more effectively.

The nation’s teachers have proliferated a great deal in the past several decades. So have many programs that should have been expelled long ago.

-Ed Feulner is president of the Heritage Foundation.

First appeared in The Washington Times.

Who is this three-headed monster, this Cerberus of back-of-the-car political expression? I don’t know, but it makes me think there oughta be an annual awards show for bumper stickers. The creation of an “award-winning bumper sticker” would be a great addition to any resume.
If such an awards existed, “Keep Working: Millions on Welfare Depend on You” would win a special honor for lifetime achievement. The sentiment warms the cold heart of winter and sends us reeling back to the halcyon days when welfare queens drove Cadillacs and cashed fraudulent Social Security checks and Reagan only wanted to be president.
The lesson remains the same: It doesn’t matter if Wall Street rogues steal safes full of gold bullion if one unemployed black woman in Harlem drives an Escalade and gets her teeth capped in gold.
And it makes me appreciate anew Reagan’s peerless gift for spinning arrant bullshit and shameless exaggeration into electoral gold. Here’s his 1976 description of the archetypal welfare queen, as quoted in the New York Times:

She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.

Eighty names! Twelve Social Security cards! Four fictitious dead husbands! Enough to make a Goldman Sachs toxic-asset-selling huckster envious.
Why can’t we all just coexist?
Funny as it may seem, some folks see evil in the hopelessly inoffensive pablum of coexist. The mere sight of the bumper sticker launched Tea Party darling Allen West into a fit of patriotic apoplexy:

” … it has all the little religious symbols on it. And the reason why I get upset, and every time I see one of those bumper stickers, I look at the person inside that is driving. Because that person represents something that would give away our country. Would give away who we are, our rights and freedoms and liberties because they are afraid to stand up and confront that which is the antithesis, anathema of who we are. The liberties that we want to enjoy.”

Ah, sweet, sensual LIBERTY! I am an American, and you are my opiate of choice.  Lusty LIBERTY!, we love thee more than we love ourselves. Give me LIBERTY! or give me a lobotomy.
To the left of coexist, we hear a word in support of good, old-fashioned Main Line superiority. The horsey set! Next to that sits the granola-crunchy “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” and finally, out on the far left, we get a small nod to the ASPCA. Every decent human being loves defenseless animals and hates Michael Vick, after all.
The more I think about it, the more that bumper seems like art. Look at it long enough, it begins to change shape and morph into something altogether different. Maybe I did swallow acid. Because what first struck me as laughably incongruous now hangs together beautifully. Yes, I’ve been thinking about this too much.
Maybe (And I’m afraid I’m about to go off the deep end here) “coexist” is the perfect metaphor for 21st century corporate rule.
The face is pleasant. It is soothing. It smiles, and it winks.
It doesn’t goose-step or fulminate. It doesn’t threaten, it pacifies.
Coexist is nothing less than the Barack Obama of bumper stickers.
How about Obama? He’s for all the right things (if you’re a liberal), right? He wants us all to coexist peacefully, doesn’t he? If you’re not predisposed to foaming at the mouth and seeing the president as a socialist, a Muslim or a foreign-born usurper, he comes across an even-handed, reasonable bloke.
Hell, being president’s a tough job. No president can’t deliver everything you want. He’s trying hard to make the best of a bad situation (I’ll give him this much: That zoo over in the House the definition of a bad situation). Give the man a break. Right?
Well, to paraphrase Philip Marlowe, the real Obama is a double-dealer, a privatization broker, a killer by remote control. He has assumed the right to kill anyone at anytime without checks, balances or inconveniences. In wielding an awesome brand of executive power that would make George W. Bush blush, he accomplished the considerable feat of making a wingnut like Rand Paul seem scrappy and practically adorable. I’m sorry, did someone say FREEDOM?
Coexist!
Despite winning a decisive victory in November, Obama’s poised to knuckle under and slash entitlements popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. Hey, we all have to sacrifice, right? Can’t make those honest, hard-working CEOs who rake in 380 times more than the average schlub shoulder the entire load, right?
Obama does not need to make a so-called Grand Bargain to placate his fire-breathing tormentors and sometime dinner companions on the right. He needs a deal to placate our corporate mullahs. His corporate mullahs. Problem is he just can’t get any one of the ideological zealots on his right to agree to his sweetheart deal. Yet.
Sorry. I shouldn’t go down this path. All I wanted to do was travel the country and write about people we meet along the way. I don’t fancy myself a polemicist. This was about a stupid bumper sticker.
But the more I think of that goddamn bumper sticker, the more I see in it an apt symbol – at least as apt as Obama – for 21st century America.

******
This just in: They’re closing 23 schools in Philadelphia. How about the eye-popping opening offer the Philadelphia School District extended its teachers?
Since then, I’ve squandered a lot of time trying to understand the disturbing fundamentals of a distressing story: the destruction of public education in America. I’ve got so many tabs up on the subject of the demise of public education that they form their own expression of accidental art. To wit:

Look at ‘em all!
Anyway, Obama’s neck-deep in this thing. He’s got his Race to the Top, which is more or less a doubling-down on Dubya’s No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind. Race to the Top. Our leaders, you’ve gotta hand it to them. They’ve mastered the fine art of doublespeak. Ladies and gentlemen, how about a hand for Mr. George Orwell!
In Philadelphia, where the state took control over the district in 2001, the schools are run by the School Reform Commission. Three of the commission’s five members are appointed by the governor. The incumbent is Tom Corbett, who is something of a kept man, even by the subterranean standards we’ve set for politicians.
For instance, Corbett received more than $334,000 in campaign contributions from a charter school mogul named Vahan Gureghian. Mr. Gureghian is a story in himself. He’s an ostentatious old-school capitalist and one of Pennsylvania’s most influential political donors. He built himself a 10-bedroom, 11-bathroom, 1-bowling alley, French-style mansion in the high-toned Philadelphia suburb of Gladwyne. He recently paid $29 million for an oceanfront home property in Palm Beach, Fla.  He plans to erect another Robber Baron-style mansion there, complete with outdoor kitchen and a series of ornate fountains.
His Charter Schools Management, Inc. runs the state’s largest charter school in the urban wasteland of Chester, where the public school system is on its knees. CSMI runs 150 charter schools in nine states, which helps explain how Gureghian can afford to live like Gatsby in Philadelphia and Floria. And he does it all on the taxpayers’ dime.
Following the nationwide privatization blueprint, Corbett & Co. systematically starved the state’s public school system, cutting an estimated $1 billion over the course of his administration. When schools in impoverished areas see their property-tax revenues crater and their state funding dry up, they become ripe for the reaper. And whenever you hear the word “reform” in education circles, you can be sure the vultures of privatization are circling nearby.
The Philadelphia reform commission called in the Boston Consulting Group and paid it a nominal fee (at least $1.4 million) to turn in a report with boilerplate recommendations: close public schools, open more publicly funded by privately run charter schools (in Pennsylvania at least, charter school companies don’t even have to disclose how they spend their money). Next thing you know, those lazy, no-good teachers are met with outrageous contract demands.
Unions bad! Businessmen good! Government bad! Businessmen good!
This push for privatization is not just cultivated in the usual right-wing precincts. The liberals, the Democrats, the so-called progressives are in on the deal in a big way. Obama’s education secretary and basketball buddy Arne Duncan is deep in the pockets of the privatization posse. He’s a graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy. Show me an urban school superintendent, and I’ll show you a Broad academy graduate.
So you see, coexist! A good liberal like Barack Obama, a man with a humane conscience and a cultivated mind, is really is not so different from Ronald Reagan. Like Clinton before him, he’s a conservative Democrat with a thinly veiled hostility for New Deal programs which remain popular with a broad base of the American electorate.
Obama is, as one critic labeled him, the President of Privatization. Race to the Top promotes charter schools and the privatization of public education and institutionalizes the anti-teacher agenda of linking teacher performance with student test results. He is friend to the Broads, the Gateses, the Waltons and all the hedge fund managers and putative liberals like Al Sharpton and Michelle Rhee and Oprah Winfrey who are selling out urban America and lining the pockets of new age Robber Barons like Vahan Gureghian.
And despite all the propaganda, charter schools perform no better than public schools, though they get to cherry pick students. They conveniently ignore the fundamental reason why urban schools are so terrible: the Dickensian blightscapes from which most urban students emerge.
But freed from government shackles, they do sometimes produce horrifying hilarity.
Why did I go down this road? It’s obvious by now I’m about a thousand fathoms out of my depth.
Here’s a man who was never out of his depth. In a little more than 3 minutes, he explains what I’ve squandered a thousand words (so far) on to little result:

Because they still enjoy the protection of unions, however weak, public school teachers are the new welfare queens. The privatization posse brilliantly pits them against workers in the corporate world who already have seen their wages slashed and their retirements gutted. If we have to suffer, why should teachers get decent wages, humane retirement packages and union protection? They shouldn’t. To hell with them!
From Seattle to Philadelphia, the privatization posse is bent on destroying public education and teachers unions so already-rich business interests can gobble up a windfall of public money and become even richer
But really, what does it matter? Why do I waste so many words so pointlessly? With the way temperatures are rising across the globe, I probably worry needlessly. A corporate takeover of public education is small beer when placed alongside worldwide catastrophe.

*****
That said, let’s move over to the Devon Horse Show, that hoary equestrian to-do out on the western fringes of the Main Line. My mom loves the Devon Horse Show, bless her heart. And I love my mom. She loves Clydesdales. They are beautiful animals. Aren’t they?
Still, it’ll be nice to get off the whole teacher merry-go-round and say a few nasty things about Wells Fargo, the Devon Horse show’s main sponsor for 2013. Wells Fargo is a viper’s nest of medieval greed and 21st century business malpractice.
Wells Fargo, which received billions and billions in bailout money, is being sued by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for more than a decade of fraudulent activity in the mortgage market.
Wells Fargo, the banking leviathan that had its ears slapped back by a federal judge for gouging customers with deceptive overdraft fees.
Wells Fargo, which markets itself as the bank for Latinos but was fined millions for lending practices which systematically discriminated against blacks and Hispanics.
Wells Fargo, which has invested heavily in the private prison industry which depends upon the detention of undocumented immigrants for much of their profits. Wells Fargo has deep ties with the Geo Group, the purveyor of private gulags which recently gave a generous gift of $6 million to Florida Atlantic University in order to get its name on the Owls’ football stadium. See Owlcatraz.
And just one more sweet anecdote from Wells Fargo, something to remember the next time someone laughs at you and reminds you that the efficiency of the private sector is always preferable to the dead hand of government.
OK, sorry for all that. After all spewing nearly 3,000 words for no purpose whatsoever, I am no longer in the mood to laugh at the driver of that Honda Accord.
I do, however, wonder why he or she doesn’t give a damn about Tibet.

It was his idea in the first place and he’s the one who signed it into law to give him leverage over Republicans in the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations, which worked.

After campaigning for reelection on wanting $800B in taxes (which, unlike Team Obama, is what I call them, instead of using the euphemism “revenues”), the Republicans gave Obama that increase in taxes right after he won reelection. But then, in typical Obama fashion, he moved the goal posts again and wanted almost double that, or about $1.3T in taxes, and offered no substantive cuts in federal spending in return.

Obama tried to use the threat of the sequester a second time to extract even more taxes from Republicans, while still offering no cuts in return, and went on another campaign tour (because campaigning is his strong suit, not governing), acting like Chicken Little and predicting gloom and doom, in addition to having his minions (Lying Ray LaHood from Transportation, Janet “Big Sis” Napolitano from Homeland Security and Arne Duncan-the-Dunce from Education) all come out with dire predictions of the Armageddon that sequester would bring, all of whom since have had to either recant or severely modify their initial comments after some fact checkers did their work and revealed teachers and first responders weren’t going to be laid off, school children would not be running naked in the streets with nothing to eat, our borders would be no more porous than they already are, Y2K never happened, the Mayans were wrong, and the sky was not really falling.

And, of course, the most egregious thing which happened, allegedly in response to or in anticipation of the sequester, was the release of hundreds, if not thousands (hard to get straight info from the DHS), of already locked up illegal aliens back onto the streets of America — and this was even before the sequester went into effect.

It’s alleged by Team Obama that some career, unknown and faceless, mid-level manager at ICE ordered this and then almost immediately either resigned or retired. As Dana Carvey’s Church Lady would say, “How con-veeeen-ient.” Besides, if that’s the case, instead of the White House ordering it as another scare tactic about sequester, then take your pick between (a) the Obama Administration really being behind it to scare people over the sequester and lying to the American people about how it happened (a la Fast & Furious and Benghazi), or (b) the Obama Admin not knowing what one of its major agencies was doing, and possibly illegally, until after it happened. So, lying to us or just incompetent? Choose one…..or, in the case of the Obama Amateur Hour Administration, possibly both.

But it’s also odd, don’t you think, that DHS’s Janet Incompetano (I just changed her last name to reflect her incompetence) claimed she had insufficient funds, or would have had insufficient funds if ICE hadn’t jumped the gun, for enough beds for illegal aliens at the same time she ensured a $50M contract for 50,000 new TSA uniforms made it under the wire before the sequester took effect? That’s $1,000 per person for uniforms for our airport shakedown artists, while when I served in our military, I had to buy my own uniforms. Just sayin’.

Obama, recently doing what’s called “walking it back” (read: politi-speak for telling something closer to the truth only when you must), has since admitted that the sequester was not the fearsome fiscal cliff and scary scenario he and his handmaidens and henchmen had tried to frighten the American people with but was more like a “tumble.” I would suggest, Mr. President, that sequestration is not a “tumble” but instead your “stumble.” You used it first as a cudgel to get your way on the 2011 debt ceiling, you never thought it would really happen, yet you tried to use it again to get your way on more taxes — and the first time it worked but the second time it didn’t.

And, for once, and to their credit, Republicans didn’t blink and so here we are. I guess, dealing with a president who would rather play political poker and bluff to get his way on taxing the 1% while millions of Americans are out of work and our economy is still suffering, instead of leading and meeting with congressional leaders to mange the sequester of his own making, the Republicans realized Obama was overplaying his hand and called his bluff, deciding to at least take what they could get, which is merely an $85B (a near rounding error compared to overall federal spending) slow down in government spending and not even a real cut at all — and it’s spread out over months and years, to boot.

Oh, but, again unlike Team Obama, in all fairness, I misspoke. Obama did meet with congressional leaders over the sequester — but it was not until after he finished his latest campaign tour and on the day on which it was to go into effect. Much too little, much too late, Mr. President. Leading from behind obviously makes one trip over one’s own feet sometimes.

Anyone who doesn’t see what’s really going on is simply not paying sufficient attention, or they’re just drinking too much liberal Kool-Aid. Now, five years into a presidency for which he campaigned in 20o8 that he knew how to fix the economy and, after being elected, said he would do so by the middle of his first term or be a one-termer, and after blaming Bush for everything under the sun, especially the economy, time and time again, it is now not only Obama’s sequester but also Obama’s economy. There is a point of diminishing returns, when it cannot plausibly still be all Bush’s fault any more. Obama has to finally, and for once, take some responsibility for his own bad choices — and there have been many, from the stimulus which didn’t stimulate, to Solyndra, et al., to the sequester.

And, make no mistake, some of the really scary stuff is that what you have going on now is a president more willing to continue to play politics rather than join in the hard work of fixing a broken immigration system, reforming a burdensome and loop hole-ridden tax code, helping create jobs for a flagging economy, or cutting federal spending or its ever-epanding size and who, seeing some splits among the House Republicans, is more hellbent on being a demagogue and destroying the Republicans’ chances in the 2014 mid-term elections than he is on fixing the economy, or anything else, for the benefit of the American people.

Obama is a lousy president, has never been a president for all the people and is as worse about cronyism as any in modern times, but he is sometimes a masterful politician. And if he can split the Republicans enough to retain the Senate majority and regain the House majority, he will have what he had during his first two years in office — him in the White House and Democrats in charge of both chambers of Congress. Liberals will once again “own” the federal government and the most liberal (and unaccountable) president in our history will be even more unleashed and unfettered than ever, not having to worry about reelection again, having that “flexibility” he whispered to Medvedev to tell Putin about, and if ObamaCare is the hallmark of him and Democrats being totally in charge for his first two years, one can only wonder — and worry — what else might be forthcoming after 2014 in his last two years.

And THAT, my friends, not the sequester, is the seriously scary stuff you should really be worried about.

Well, that and whatever Janet “Big Sis” Incompetano’s DHS is up to — but that’s for another article. Stay tuned.

Duncan told reporters at the White House last Wednesday that the Kanawha County school system was already handing out pink slips in anticipation of the automatic cuts that, among other things, will impact the amount of federal money states get through September.

“Yes, there’s a district where it’s happened. But, again, it’s just because they have an earlier union notification than most – Kanawha County, West Virginia,” Duncan said at a briefing where Cabinet officers detailed the impact of cuts under the so-called congressional sequester to their agency programs.

But an official with the school district cautioned Duncan’s explanation wasn’t totally accurate. Diane Young, the coordinator of the Head Start program for Kanawha County Public Schools, explained that Head Start, the federal program for needy children, has yet to notify the school system whether it will provide federal money in the fall.

Teachers: worried about spending cuts? Share your story on CNN iReport.

Without any kind of funding notification from Head Start, Young told CNN the school system must plan to do without the program in the fall, and as a result was planning to lay off 16 teachers and 12 teaching assistants – but had yet to send the official notices. That means no dismissal announcements — pink or otherwise — were sent.

On Monday, Duncan said at a meeting with school district leaders he was sorry he misspoke.

“Language is really, really important, and I want to apologize for not being as clear as I should’ve been last week. Because I wasn’t as clear, the spotlight was put on me and that’s never ever my goal,” Duncan said. “My goal here is to have the spotlight be on children and families, so when I said ‘pink slips’ that was probably the wrong word. I should’ve used ‘job eliminations,’ ‘positions eliminated.’”

CNN’s Jim Acosta and Lindy Royce contributed to this report.

Make it so … You are not getting angry enough:

The White House’s media management team will be in the public spotlight this week following a series of days in which it leveraged the media to distribute what turned out to be misleading or false information.

President Barack Obama told reporters that Capitol Hill workers were facing pay cuts as a result of the looming budget sequester. Education Secretary Arne Duncan cited the same cause when he incorrectly claimed that a school district was already laying off teachers. And White House spokesman Jay Carney understated by a factor of 10 the number of illegal immigrants administration officials released in a bid to lower the cost of housing inmates in immigration detention facilities.

Those statements came as the White House sought to create public anger about Republicans’ refusal to vote for additional new tax revenues as part of a last-minute budget deal to forestall the sequester, which will force mandatory across-the-board cuts across much of the federal budget.

You’re being played, got that!!

Get out there you media slouches, find those people who are hurt by the sequester and put them on TV. NOW!!! Make the public angry media.

And you ask why I no longer watch any network or cable anything …