Why Are Things As They Are?

It is 70 Years Since Battle of Dunkirk

Brit Video-– www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ_gDFmCcaE

Churchill: We Will Fight Them on the Beaches…

The Little Red Schoolhouse Front:

Company Town: by Carl Sandburg

You live in a company house
You go to a company school
You work for this company
According to the company’s rules
You all drink company water
And all use company lights
The company preacher teaches us
What the company thinks is right….

Half of Detroit Kids Poisoned by Lead–Not Good For High-Stakes Tests: “the higher the lead level, the worse a student’s scores on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program exam, or MEAP. Overall, 58% of roughly 39,000 DPS students tested — 22,755 children — had a history of lead poisoning, according to the study.Perhaps more startling: Of the 39,199 students tested as young children, only 23 had no lead in their bodies.”
www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100516/NEWS01/5160413/1319/High-lead-levels-hurt-learning-for-DPS-kids&template=fullarticle

Students as Money–Michigan Districts Pay Bribe for Best School Status: “he districts did not make the cut because of test scores or graduation rates but instead because they paid a marketing firm $25,000.” From The Detroit News: www.detnews.com/article/20100517/METRO/5170337/Metro-Detroit-school-districts-buy–best–status#ixzz0oAH0ylsv

Too Many Teachers; Not Enough Wars, Too Many Kiddies: “Michigan State University has pushed its 500 graduating teachers to look out of state. As local jobs have dried up, it started an internship program in Chicago, which is a four-hour drive from the East Lansing, Mich., campus. Professors now go with students to the annual campus job fair to make sure they do not hover around the Michigan tables, but walk over to, say, North Carolina, Virginia or Texas.”
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/nyregion/20teachers.html?hp

The Ongoing Failure of Racist Capitalist Schooling in Detroit: “Detroit Public Schools fourth- and eighth-graders performed worst in the nation on a national reading test whose results were released this morning. Like math scores unveiled in December from the National Assessment of Education Progress, Detroit children’s reading scores are the worst in the 40-year history of the test.From The Detroit News: www.detnews.com/article/20100520/SCHOOLS/5200459/DPS-students-at-bottom-of-national-reading-test-scores#ixzz0oVO3Lo8p

Detroit Mayor Can’t Halt Barbarism: “Detroit Mayor Dave Bing acknowledged that police and city officials don’t know how to stop the crime wave.”
From The Detroit News: detnews.com/article/20100520/METRO/5200490#ixzz0oXS41oWI

Who is Lying in this PBS Newshour Broadcast On Detroit Schools? Everybody. As Usual.
www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june10/detroit_05-20.html

Bribe? What Bribe? Payoffs to Bobb Ok in Michigan Court: “Wayne Circuit Court Judge Susan Borman indicated today Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb is entitled to receive part of his pay from private foundations. The issue — challenged by the district’s school board, a civil rights group and a coalition of teachers who oppose charter schools — was whether Bobb was in conflict of interest for accepting $89,000 of his salary from a foundation that supports private and charter schools. Bobb receives $280,000 in salary and $145,000 in supplemental income from foundations for fixing the school district’s finances.”  www.detnews.com/article/20100521/METRO01/5210404/Judge-indicates-private-supplement-to-Robert-Bobb-s-salary-is-OK#ixzz0obHqk6po

Duncan Lies About Texas Textbook Standards Adopted May 21: “”Whatever Texas decides, I do not think there will be large ripple effects around the country,” Duncan said to CNN. “Textbook companies today have a real ability to customize textbooks.”

We Say Fightback! Front:

Puerto Rico Universities Occupied, Struck, and Shut for A Month+: “The students here have hunkered down, bringing the academic calendar to a halt. They are a month into a strike that has crippled an 11-campus system with more than 62,000 students, intent on persuading the administration to revoke austerity measures that they believe will unfairly hamper low-income students. Only one campus, for medical sciences, is operational.”
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/us/21students.html?hp

BBC on the Brit Teachers’ Test Boycott (watch the short video): “Tens of thousands of children in England are missing their Sats tests as head teachers in hundreds of schools stage a boycott. About 600,000 10 and 11-year-olds were due to take the national schools tests from Monday. But heads and deputies from two big teaching unions voted for a boycott…”
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/education/10103165.stm

Bangkok is Burning–Tweetphotos: tweetphoto.com/23018649 (Rick Parkany photo)

IVAW Confronts Recruiters–War is not a Game!

Solidarity Forever Front:

Clockwise from top left, NEA boss Dennis Weaver Makes about $425 thousand a year. AFT’s Randi Weingarten who abandoned tenure and bargained merit pay, has not revealed her latest AFT salary. McElroy, former AFT top, is now at the Education International, joined by Reg Weaver, former NEA president who reported $686,949 in 2008!

In 2008, Reg Weaver, then President of NEA, had a total compensation of $686,949. This is about $200,000 more than any NEA president before or since. NEA–explain Weaver’s 2008 pay! We checked the web site below for accuracy, matching it against the LM2 forms that NEA must file, and the site is on point. More than 375 NEA employees made more than $100,000 in 2008.
neaexposed.com/leadership.htm
This is an accurate link to the LM2 report: neaexposed.com/documents/08LM2Staffcompensation.pdf
PhotoCopy of 2008 and 2009 NEA filings: richgibson.com/neaSALARY.html

Washington D.C. AFT Scams Election to Force Through Concessions: “”She’s got to get this knucklehead on the ballot because he didn’t file petitions,” he said. He added that there can be no contract ratification without an elections committee because that panel is responsible for administering not only regular but “special” elections. That would include a contract vote.”
voices.washingtonpost.com/dcschools/2010/05/wtu_two_votes_one_fine_mess.html

Michigan Education Association Salaries: Count the $100,000 plus Club Members:

And in a note from Jack Gerson, here is the very low-down on the California Teachers Association $100,000 Gang in Power because They Sell Labor Peace for Dues Income:
(1) CTA has 32 “Managers” — salary range between $172,857 and $221,612
(2) CTA has 9 “Staff Attorneys” — salary range between $78,419 and $150,620
(3) CTA has 152 “Professional Staff” — salary range between $78,419 and
$134,728
(4) CTA has 20 “Supervisors” — salary range between $72,158 and $110,100
Compensation and fringe benefits for CTA’s three executive officers’
(President David Sanchez; VP Dean Vogel; Secretary-Treasurer Gail Mendes). Combined compensation for the three is $660,000.
Travel expense budget for the three is a combined $410,000. Benefits and
“other administrative expenses” for the three is a combined $300,000.
Oakland teachers earn between $40,000 and $70,000 per year. The Oakland
Education Association is a CTA affiliate. Oakland teachers have trouble
making ends meet, and often ask why CTA dues are so high.

Steve Brill in the NYTimes Mag on Ed Reform and the Bogus Unions:

www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23Race-t.html?src=me&ref=general

“Why the sudden shift from long-simmering wonk debate to political front burner? Because there is now a president who, when it comes to school reform, really does seem to be a new kind of Democrat – and because of a clever idea Schnur had last year to package what might otherwise have been just another federal grant program into a media-alluring, if cheesy-sounding, contest called Race to the Top. It has turned a relatively modest federal program (the $4.3 billion budget represents less than 1 percent of all federal, state and local education spending) into high-yield leverage that could end up overshadowing health care reform in its impact and that is already upending traditional Democratic Party politics. The activity set off by the contest has enabled Schnur’s network to press as never before its frontal challenge to the teachers’ unions: they argue that a country that spends more per pupil than any other but whose student performance ranks in the bottom third among developed nations isn’t failing its children for lack of resources but for lack of trained, motivated, accountable talent at the front of the class.”

“If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions – the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association – together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers’ union members. In the last 30 years, the teachers’ unions have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal campaigns, an amount that is about 30 percent higher than any single corporation or other union. And they have typically contributed many times more to state and local candidates. About 95 percent of it has gone to Democrats.”

“In 2008, Rhee – a Klein protégée, who founded the New Teacher Project after teaching in Baltimore for Teach for America – proposed huge salary increases for those teachers who would give up lifetime tenure guarantees and lockstep compensation and agree to have their performance linked to student test-score improvements. Those who didn’t volunteer could keep their current pay scales and job security. For two years, the union refused to allow Rhee’s offer to be put up for a vote. Rhee persisted – “I’m not big on the collaborative, warm and fuzzy approach,” she says – and became a hero of the reformers.

Despite efforts by both sides to save face for the union by preserving the language of tenure, the deal that Weingarten and Rhee negotiated in April actually achieved more than Rhee sought in her original offer. The new contract unambiguously, if subtlely, strips tenure of its core job-security protections. “

““That President Obama did this is a total game changer,” says Pastorek, the Louisiana schools superintendent, who is a Republican working for a Republican governor, Bobby Jindal. “If he really sticks to this, education will never be the same.”

Spy Vs Spy:

Weatherman Bill Ayers, Once a Liberal With a Bomb, Now a Liberal Seeking Grants, Defines Terrorism for the New Yorker (a full professor turns to Webster’s): www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2010/05/17/100517mama_mail1#ixzz0o3AAnHw5

Iran Contra’s Dewey Clarridge Runs Private Spy Agency in Pakistan and Afghanistan for Pentagon: “ raised questions about whether the United States has outsourced some of its most secretive and important operations to a private army many fear is largely unaccountable. The C.I.A. has relied extensively on contractors in recent years to carry out missions in war zones.
The exposure of the spying network also reveals tensions between the Pentagon and the C.I.A., which itself is running a covert war across the border in Pakistan…(but wait, there’s less)…
The Times is withholding some information about the contractor network, including some of the names of agents working in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/world/16contractors.html?hp

FBI Recruits With a Happy Face in Dearborn:

The Perpetual War Front:

Sailor, Being Redeployed, Suicides: “the man was upset because he was set to deploy soon”
www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/may/20/swat-standoff-ends-in-suicide/

The Afghans are Coming! The Afghans Are Coming!“..assaulted Kandahar Air Base, the main military base in southern Afghanistan, on Saturday night, military officials said, in the second attack on a major base in a week” www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/world/asia/23kandahar.html?hp

Emerging Fascism Front:

Banned In Israel–81 Year Old Dangerous Chomsky: “There were two basic points,” Professor Chomsky told the interviewer. “One was that the government of Israel does not like the kinds of things I say — which puts them into the category of I suppose every other government in the world. The second was that they seemed upset about the fact that I was just taking an invitation from Birzeit and I had no plans to go on to speak in Israeli universities, as I have done many times in the past, but not this time.”
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/world/middleeast/18chomsky.html?scp=2&sq=chomsky&st=cse

Detroit Cop Murders Seven Year Old Girl: “”This is what it is like in this city now,” said Khristian Jackson, a 15-year-old Southeastern 10th-grader. “People don’t fight in school no more. They shoot.” From The Detroit News: www.detnews.com/article/20100518/METRO01/5180359/Aiyana-s-teacher-asks—When-is-enough-enough?-#ixzz0oKbggyvZ

May 13–Cleveland Cops Attack High School Students’ Walkout in Support of Teachers and Their Own Education. Students Charged with Violating Daytime Curfew, Assault, Resisting Arrest, and others Suspended from Collingwood High School for a Week.

The There Goes the Economy Front:

Hey Grad! Wanna Job? Go to SDSU and Be a Police Spy: “And on San Diego’s – and at San Diego State in particular, we’re seen a huge increase in the federal employers, everybody from the FBI to CIA, SPAWAR, they’re all coming to campus and saying we want to be more closely connected to your students so we can recruit the next generation of workers.”
www.kpbs.org/news/2010/may/17/job-market-recent-college-grads/

The Racism Gap: “studied the same 2,000 black and white families between 1983 and 2007, and found that the racial wealth gap “has more than quadrupled over the course of a generation.” At the bottom of the economic pyramid, at least 25 percent of black families in 2007 could draw on no assets whatsoever to see themselves through the economic storm.”


The Heavens Weep:

The Bush/Obamagogue/BP Disaster (Klare): “the Obama administration’s Interior Department followed in the infamous footsteps of the Bush administration.  In 2009, it “exempted BP’s calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis.”  (And, of course, mere weeks before the explosion, the president was urging yet more deep-water off-shore drilling and reassuring Americans that it wasn’t terribly dangerous, while less than two weeks before its oil rig blew, BP was vigorously lobbying to expand its exemptions.)
www.tomdispatch.com/post/175249/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_the_oil_rush_to_hell/

Jamaica and Carribean Worry About BP’s Illegal Oil Invasion:
www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/US-fears-oil-spill-could-reach-Cuba_7634116

On the Hey Look! It’s Magic! Front:

“Beat Me! Rape Me! Make Me Write Bad Checks!”:Tens of thousands of people filled St. Peter’s Square on Sunday in a massive show of solidarity with Pope Benedict XVI over the clerical sex abuse scandal.”
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-pope-20100517,0,2416907.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fmostviewed+%28L.A.+Times+-+Most+Viewed+Stories%29

Baptist Fanatic Rents a Boy: “The good minister expressed gratitude that his rent boy “did let me share the gospel of Jesus Christ with him with many Scriptures in three extended conversations.”
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opinion/16rich.html?src=me&ref=homepage

Child Kidnapper Praises God For Her Conviction in Haiti: “But it emerged that the children were not orphans…”
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8688496.stm

Hide the Kids. Here Come the Witch-hunters! ““if a child under the age of 2 screams in the night, cries and is always feverish with deteriorating health, he or she is a servant of Satan.”
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/us/22beliefs.html?hp
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lpNeSZNq70

Classic Hidden History (not in the Texas Standards):

May 19 1920 Battle of Matewan: “On May 19, 1920 ten people were killed at Matewan in the deadliest gunfight in American history.”
www.matewan.com/History/battle2.htm

John Sayles Fact-based film Matewan clip:

May 23 1934 – The Auto-Lite Strike culminates in the “Battle of Toledo”, a five-day melée between 1,300 troops of the Ohio National Guard and 6,000 picketers.

May 23 1945 – World War II: Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, commits suicide while in Allied custody.

Thanks to Bob, Rick, Adam, Gina, Eva, Candace, Sally, Sandy, Crystal, Shelly, Perry and Kathy, Dr KRG, Pete, Steve, Ricky, Hal, Sharon E, Patrick, Sharon, Elaine, Erin (twice), The Susans, Dana, Chase, Yvonne, George and Sharon and Danny (Substance is looking good), Billy P, Karl, Arturo, Val C, Daniel, Ruben, and Edgar.

Good luck to us, every one.

r