Thousands of schools across the country are in tremendous need of repair, remodeling, or replacement. and learns firsthand how indoor air quality issues affect student success.
in providing a minimum environment for effective teaching and learning. It represents the types of problems America’s public school students face nationwide.
There is hope on the horizon, my dears.
For more than ten long, empty, intellectually dry and dishonest years, we’ve lived under . (Someone told me not to be so negative. Trust me. I’m holding back.) Children, especially poor children, have been subjected to a corporate “reform” mentality of pass/fail by making their quota of test score points on some standardized garbage never designed to gauge anything more delicately complex than a child’s understanding of where the comma goes.
(Ironically, the only ones lately who have been afforded “social promotion” have been the morally corrupt CEOs who were awarded their , but I digress.) (more…)
I’m sorry. I’m not normally a violent person. But how can you not want to slap the next clown that routinely and without an pinky fingernail-size of evidence continues to characterize the mega-wealthiest amongst us as “Job Creators”?
A bona-fide mega-wealthy rich guy is Nick Hanauer. He’s got millions and millions and says he wants politicians and pundits bent on protecting his millions and millions to cease and desist calling him a Job Creator. He’s had great ideas. He’s taken big risks. He’s made smart business bets. And God bless him for it. But he says,
He says if any jobs were created by his ideas and risks and bets, it’s because there were customers for what he was selling. Without customers, there’s no one to buy your product or service. And if customers don’t have jobs and decent pay to go along with those jobs, they can’t buy what you’re selling.
Customers with a paycheck create jobs. And when customers lose their jobs and their paychecks, giving all the tax breaks and tax credits and tax loopholes in the world to the mega-wealthy won’t create a consumer.
In fact, giving the mega-wealthy more may actually mean you’ve given them some loophole that pays them to create jobs… in China.
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. In honor of the week-long celebration, I was asked to focus my remarks this week on my “vision” for an amazing public school system. Oh my.
The last time I did that, I was accused of smoking something. Apparently there is a fine line between “vision” and “hallucination”. But I will repeat myself and tell you exactly what I want in my visionary, dreamy, hallucinogenic, utopian planet.
Aside from the obvious (that you would never have to go down to Staples and buy your own reams of paper because there wasn’t enough in the District budget for such exotic baubles), I would be in charge.
I’m pushy that way. In my system, classroom teachers would be in charge.
There would never be a Non-Teacher who would hand us a script to read to our students or give us a ridiculous goal (100% of your kids WILL be above average) or a ridiculous prize (and if they ARE then you get more pay) or a ridiculous punishment (and if you don’t achieve a statistical impossibility, which could only be accomplished by cheating, you get fired.)