Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is heading the administration’s effort to force schools to reopen in the fall for in-person instruction. What’s her plan to reopen safely? She doesn’t have one. Continue reading
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Florida teachers sue state to stop unsafe school reopening plan
MIAMI—Saying Florida’s mandate to reopen brick-and-mortar schools despite the coronavirus pandemic endangers students, teachers, and everybody else, the state’s teachers’ union is suing the GOP-run government to stop Florida’s unsafe school reopening plan. Continue reading
As COVID-19 takes toll, DeVos denounced for new ‘craven’ public school privatization scheme
‘With our country dealing with a pandemic, an economic recession, and structural racism, she's spied an opening to exploit this crisis to resuscitate her failed agenda.’
With the Trump administration planning to demand that Congress devote a large chunk of the state and local education funding in the next COVID-19 relief package to a new grant program for private and religious schools, the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers on Thursday accused Education Secretary Betsy DeVos of attempting to exploit the pandemic to advance her privatization agenda. Continue reading
‘Attacking the very foundations’ of church-state separation, SCOTUS delivers ‘seismic shock’ ruling on religious schools
‘Today's ruling is perverse,’ Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday delivered a ruling civil liberties advocates warned could make taxpayers “underwrite religious education”—opening a massive crack in the bedrock principle of church and state separation. Continue reading
Betsy DeVos wants to rob poor school districts
Times of great adversity not only bring out the best and worst in society, but they also flush out some of the stinkiest and slimiest creatures. Think of war profiteers, hucksters who prey on poor hurricane victims, or Betsy DeVos. Continue reading
Cuomo announces partnership with Bill Gates to ‘revolutionize’ NY schools in wake of coronavirus
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he will use the COVID-19 virus as an opportunity to ‘revolutionize’ the state’s school system, inviting Bill Gates to implement his controversial ideas about education.
Taking time off from mismanaging a pandemic and turning lifesaving masks sent from all over the country into an art installation, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared yesterday that he would use the deadly COVID-19 virus as an opportunity to “revolutionize” the state’s school system, inviting Microsoft founder Bill Gates to implement his controversial ideas about education statewide. Cuomo did not divulge many details of what his imagined education revolution would look like but did mention virtual education and remote learning. However, Gates is best known for one thing in education: charter schools. Continue reading
COVID-19 “CARES Act” bankrolls AI post-human education
DeVos, Thiel, Phase 2 of Project BEST
In 1982, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement for the US Department of Education, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, blew the whistle on the Reagan Administration’s Project BEST (Better Education Skills through Technology): a techno-fascist plan to privatize the American school system by selling it out to Big Tech corporations that deliver B. F. Skinner’s operant-conditioning method of “programmed instruction” through computerized “teaching machines.” Almost thirty years later, the “Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act” is primed to pump a flood of federal education funds into online charter school corporations, such as K12 Inc., KIPP, and Connections Academy, which deploy “adaptive learning” software that replace human teachers with artificial-intelligence courseware programmed with “Skinner-box” cognitive-behavioral algorithms geared to condition students for workforce training. Continue reading
Community schools are not the antidote to charter schools
How community schools and charter schools are both public-private partnerships that medicalize workforce training through socioemotional learning
Democratic presidential candidates, such as Elizabeth Warren, have pledged to fix the American education system by replacing privatized charter schools with “community schools” that incorporate “socioemotional-learning (SEL)” programs. These “Democratic” community schools, which teach “social skills” and “emotional competencies,” might sound like “liberal” or “leftwing” education reforms. But don’t be fooled by the pathos of such leftist “social justice” rhetoric. The Democrats’ socioemotional community-learning centers are no more “progressive” than corporate-fascist charter schools. Continue reading
America’s education system: Teaching the price of everything and the value of nothing
I am a substitute teacher (grades K-12) in a public school system located in Virginia, a state on the eastern seaboard of the United States. For many years prior to becoming a substitute teacher, I also taught at a private school in Virginia. Tuition and fees at the private school are approximately $42,000 (USD), the public schools are, of course, tuition free. Continue reading
After Education Secretary Betsy DeVos flouts 2018 ruling, judge reminds her of consequences—including jail time
‘I'm not sending anyone to jail yet, but it's good to know I have that ability.’
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Monday was told in no uncertain terms that her refusal to abide by a 2018 order stopping her department from collecting on student loans made to predatory for-profit Corinthian College had the potential to land her in jail, though Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim made clear that was, for now, an unlikely outcome. Continue reading
Why Trump can’t learn: An educated guess by a veteran teacher
Dyslexia may explain a lot about the twisted behavior of the president.
While dyslexia has been mentioned now and then as one of the reasons Donald Trump is so ignorant of what it takes to govern in a free society, I want to explore it as foundational to his inability to learn and grow while in office—and also as a way to link disparate troubling elements in his makeup. Continue reading
School daze: Use that bribe scandal to fight for debt-free college
This will come as no surprise to most sentient human beings but we have an education crisis in this country that begins with the Cheeto Benito in the White House and trickles down all the way to households in which a child has never had a storybook read to them. Continue reading
Starving kids won’t help them study
Instead of looking at the real reasons students struggle, one Arkansas lawmaker wants to deny them school lunch funding.
An Arkansas lawmaker wants to cut school lunch funding for schools that fail to improve their students’ reading levels. Continue reading
The deep-pocket push to deep-six public schools
The backstory to the showdown in Los Angeles between teachers and billionaires
Back during the 1960s and 1970s, in cities, suburbs, and small towns across the United States, teacher strikes made headlines on a fairly regular basis. Teachers in those years had a variety of reasons for walking out. They struck for the right to bargain. They struck for decent pay and benefits. They struck for professional dignity. Continue reading
Betsy DeVos needs an education on ethics
The student loan sharks who prey on veterans and single moms have a friend in Trump's education secretary.
Question: What do you get when you combine ignorance, imperiousness, and incompetence? Continue reading
Student debt slavery II: Time to level the playing field
The lending business is heavily stacked against student borrowers. Bigger players can borrow for almost nothing, and if their investments don’t work out, they can put their corporate shells through bankruptcy and walk away. Not so with students. Their loan rates are high and if they cannot pay, their debts are not normally dischargeable in bankruptcy. Rather, the debts compound and can dog them for life, compromising not only their own futures but the economy itself. Continue reading
Student debt slavery: Bankrolling financiers on the backs of the young
Higher education has been financialized, transformed from a public service into a lucrative cash cow for private investors. Continue reading
Secretary DeVos, Neurocore, and competency-based workforce training
A continuation of outcomes-based behaviorism through medicalized education
Vice President Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote to confirm US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos marks the first time in history that a VP has issued the deciding vote to officiate a presidential cabinet appointment. The contentious opposition votes have expressed that among their concerns are conflicts of interest between Secretary DeVos’s federal powers and her multimillion-dollar investments in a biofeedback corporation known as Neurocore, which provides neuroscience treatments for retraining cognitive habits through stimulus-response conditioning. Continue reading
Don’t trust business with education
Greasy politicians use education funds to enrich corporations—and themselves.
Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick are lucky: They inherited a big chunk of the multi-billion-dollar fortune that Dick’s dad Richard amassed through his shady Amway corporation. But what they’ve done with their Amway money is certainly not the American Way. Continue reading
Billionaire Betsy DeVos, big data, and the public-private planned economy
If cutting-edge educational technologies can scientifically maximize student learning, then why do so many Silicon Valley bigwigs at Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Yahoo! send their children to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, a school which bans computer technology from its classrooms? If high-tech computerization were such a fundamental enhancement to cognitive development, then why did Steve Jobs withhold iPads and other “screen-time” technologies from his children? Why would these tech gurus not practice for their own sons and daughters what they preach (and bankroll) for the public education system? These incongruences signal red flags that the real objective behind the accelerating push for personalized computer learning is not to boost academic outcomes, but to data-mine students for the purposes of corporate-fascist political-economic planning. Continue reading
Betsy DeVos confirmed as education secretary
Long ago, inner city kids like myself had wonderful public schools with dedicated teachers, preparing us for higher education when even top colleges and universities were affordable. Continue reading
National charter school fascism: Corporate P-20 council governance and the public-private merger of education, criminal justice, health and human services
When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, the eminent “free market” economist, Milton Friedman, referred to the tragedy as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” into a privatized system of “school choice” competition. Heeding Friedman’s call, education reformers have converted approximately 90% of the New Orleans school system into a network of for-profit and nonprofit charter school corporations that are integrated through Louisiana’s two P(K)-16/20 workforce development councils: the College and Career Readiness Commission and the Blue Ribbon Commission for Educational Excellence. Now, nearly ten years later, this 90% privatization overhaul is being touted as a model for a total charter privatization takeover of the United States national education system through P(K)-16/20 workforce development councils. Continue reading
Boots on the ground for public schools
In the midst of a presidential campaign circus, parents and teachers try to put the focus on state lawmakers—and kids.
The shoulder on Highway 9D between Garrison and Cold Spring, New York, is nearly nonexistent in places, and if you attempt to walk side-by-side your pant leg will get covered in burrs. Continue reading
Free speech not present at some universities
Like most Jews, Benjamin Aaron Shapiro, a respected journalist, is an advocate for social justice, following the Jewish concept of Tikun Olam, literally translated as “repair of the world.” Unlike most American Jews, Shapiro is a conservative whose views of the nation are closer to those of Ted Cruz than of Bernie Sanders. Continue reading
Corporate-fascist workforce training for the Hegelian state: The real meaning of Bruce Rauner’s cradle-to-career education
Last year, the union-busting governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, took his corporatist agenda to a new level as he pushed to rewrite the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin system by erasing the phrases “search for truth” and “improve the human condition” and overwriting them with a new objective for the college: to “meet the state’s workforce needs.” Just south of the Wisconsin border, Governor Bruce Rauner is touting a similar “cradle-to-career” overhaul of education policy in Illinois, which will deemphasize traditional academic studies while prioritizing corporate workforce training through privatized charter school curriculums. Continue reading
The corporatization of education: The Gates Foundation, Arnie Duncan, and Bruce Rauner
For over twenty years, the former senior policy advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement for the US Department of Education, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, has been warning us about the coming corporatization of education through fascistic charter school privatization that will be subsidized by public finances. Continue reading
Pennsylvania school is flushed by a problem
Ten-year-old Kaitlyn Montgomery, a fourth grade student at Park Elementary School in Munhall, Pa., now has access to that school’s restrooms. Continue reading
’Rithmatic doesn’t add up in one school district
The Danville Education Association (Pa.) has been operating without a contract for three years. Continue reading
The exorbitant cost of pseudo-educating America
The next two-trillion dollar bubble
At $1.2 trillion in student debt, we may only be 60 percent along the way, but rest assured that it won’t take but 3 to 5 years before this spectacular bubble bursts . . . and it will do so on the economic backs of the poor, and the ghostly—ghastly might be more apropos—remnants of a fast disappearing middle class. Continue reading
Freedom Rider: Newark rejects $100 million school scam
In 2010, Facebook’s billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg joined Newark, New Jersey mayor Cory Booker on the Oprah Winfrey show with great fanfare. The purpose of their appearance was to announce that Zuckerberg was contributing $100 million to the Newark, New Jersey school system. Continue reading
The fracking prostitutes of American colleges
Part 3 of 3 parts
Among the mission statements of the University of North Dakota Department of Geology and Geological Engineering is that it “strives to develop in its engineering graduates keen insight and abilities to design an environmentally sound and sustainable future for humanity.” Continue reading
To think or to work? that is the question
Posted on October 21, 2019 by John Klyczek
On both sides of the political aisle, workforce-training reforms are being touted as the be-all, end-all of America’s public education system. Right-wing “school choice” proponents, such as President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, push corporate charter school programs with workforce-training curriculums. Left-wing “community schooling” advocates, such as Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden and Julián Castro, push “lifelong-learning” programs with school-to-work curriculums. Both “conservatives” and “liberals” concur: the purpose of public education is workforce development. Continue reading →