Just what Detroit needs.
For fuck’s sake.
by John Cole| 69 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor
by Kay| 61 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Education, Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Grifters Gonna Grift, Assholes, Democratic Stupidity, Even the "Liberal" New Republic, Meth Laboratories of Democracy, Nobody could have predicted
We talked about how Louisiana is a school reform success story, earning a high grade from both reform industry insider Michelle Rhee and the voter suppression law lobby-shop, ALEC.
We also talked about this innovative reform industry plan for Excellence in Profiteering. It’s called Course Choice in Louisiana (but was recently revealed as Value Vouchers in Michigan). Innovation is like lightening. It can strike in two places at exactly the same time, as it obviously did in the case of Course Choice/Value Vouchers/Whatever They Will Call It In Your State.
We talked about the exciting 21st century career opportunities Course Choice is already creating in Louisiana in the vital door-to-door-sales sector of the economy:
“Help change the landscape of public education in Louisiana!
On your own time! With the potential to make $75k+ in 6 months or less!
Company Description: SmartStart Virtual Academy (“SVA”) (a division of SmartStart Education) is a state-approved Course Choice provider. This means that SVA has been authorized to offer FREE courses to high-school students in the state of Louisiana for graduation credit. SVA is offering 22 approved courses — both core-classes (such as reading, math and science) and career-ready courses (such as web-design and publishing).”
In the interest of accountability, let’s see how this reform industry experiment is going so far:
Southwood High School junior Randall Gunn is a straight-A student.
So when the school’s principal saw his name come up as registering to retake several courses online, it immediately raised a red flag. Gunn was called into a counselor’s office and told he was enrolled in three Course Choice classes — all of which he already had passed standardized tests with exceptional scores.
“I had no clue what was going on,” Gunn said. “I have no reason to take these classes and still don’t know who signed me up.”
More than 1,100 Caddo and Webster students have signed up to participate in what some say are questionable Course Choice programs. According to parents, students, and Webster and Caddo education officials, FastPath Learning is signing up some students it shouldn’t — in many cases without parent or student knowledge. A free tablet computer is offered to those who enroll, and some educators believe that’s all the potential enrollees hear. Money to pay for the courses comes from each school district’s state-provided Minimum Foundation Program funding.
Half of the money — courses range from $700 to $1,275 each — must be paid to FastPath and other providers up front. Neither students nor their parents are responsible for the tablet devices if they are lost or stolen. And they can keep them even if they don’t pass the course.
“This all goes back to all of the education reforms that were passed within eight days during last year’s session. This is what you get,” state Rep. Gene Reynolds, D-Dubberly, said of the apparent lack of oversight.
“I have graduating seniors signed up for math classes,” Roberts said. “I have even seen kids, sophomores, enrolled in second-grade math and reading classes. There’s no rhyme or reason to who these companies are signing up or for what classes.”
One example is freshman Shakelvin Calhoun. Calhoun was signed up for junior- and senior-level classes, and said he still is unsure how he was enrolled.“ It was a complete surprise to me,” he said. “We still can’t figure out how I was signed up or why I was put in those classes, but I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
At least 104 Webster Parish students, mostly elementary age, were signed up for 208 classes when the company’s representatives went door to door over a 10-day period last month in Minden’s housing projects and densely populated neighborhoods.
Here’s the best part:
If Course Choice moves forward and all of the 104 students participate, that would take more than $250,000 from the district’s MFP funding. Continuing to deduct from the district’s allocation ultimately will put a strain on the ability to keep teachers in the classrooms, Busby said.
by Kay| 74 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Glibertarianism, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Going Galt, I Smell a Pulitzer!
I think they could impart invaluable insights into strategies for success in today’s new world order and answer the question: “What World Are You Living In?”
Standing with other protesters on Chicago’s storied State Street, Charde Nabors, 21, said she’s fighting for better pay and more opportunities for workers like her.
Nabors said she earns $9 an hour at Sears and would like to work full time, rather than her current 20 hours a week. She relies on food stamps to help feed her two children, ages 2 and 5 months.
“Food stamps help but they don’t pay the rent,” Nabors said, acknowledging the difficulty of searching for work and taking public assistance. She and other fast-food and retail workers flocked to downtown Chicago on Wednesday to make a public pitch for higher wages. Their “Fight for $15 campaign” seeks $15 an hour for employees. It is supported by a coalition of local community, labor and faith-based organizations — including the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago, a group of downtown fast-food and retail workers that launched in November.
The group has been working with others to stage protests and push for a boost in Illinois’ minimum wage, which has remained at $8.25 since 2009.
Wednesday’s action came just weeks after hundreds of fast-food workers walked off their jobs in New York City, also in a push for higher wages. Late last year, Wal-Mart workers in select cities staged protests, seeking higher wages and benefits as well as pushing back against the retailer’s decision to open on Thanksgiving.
The protests have been gaining steam in the fast-food and retail sectors — which have generated the most jobs since the recession, labor experts said, but are among the lowest paid.
The rolling protests began at 5:30 a.m. as workers walked off the job at some McDonald’s restaurants and Dunkin’ Donuts, organizers said. The protesters, who were scattered around several Loop locations, continued the day with a rally at St. James Cathedral.
“I’m fighting for 15,” Robert Wilson Jr., 25, who makes $8.60 an hour at McDonald’s at Navy Pier, told the crowd. “I don’t see the point of people having full-time jobs that don’t pay enough to cover their basic needs.”
Katelyn Johnson, executive director of Action Now, one of the rally’s organizers, said the idea for the event was borne out of protests last year over CTA fare hikes. Johnson said conversations with protesters there revealed the bigger priority of low wages.
Conversations with protestors revealed the bigger priority.
by Kay| 88 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Even the "Liberal" New Republic, Nobody could have predicted, Very Serious People
Millions of kids all over the country are taking high stakes tests this week:
At Public School 10 on the edge of Park Slope, Brooklyn, parents begged the principal to postpone the lower school science fair, insisting it was going to add too much pressure while they were preparing their children for the coming state tests.
On Staten Island, a community meeting devolved into a series of student stress stories, with one parent recounting how his son had woken up from a bad dream, mumbling that he had forgotten to fill in a bubble answer.
And at Public School 24 in the Riverdale neighborhood in the Bronx, a fifth-grade teacher, Walter Rendon, has found himself soothing tense 10- and 11-year-olds as they pore over test prep exercises. “Sometimes, I say: ‘Just breathe.’ ”this year’s tests, which begin Tuesday, are unlike any exams the students have seen. They have been redesigned and are tougher.
But the standards are so new that many New York schools have yet to fully adopt new curriculums — including reading material, lesson plans and exercises — to match. “It really makes me nervous,” said Patrick Timoney, a seventh grader at Intermediate School 2, on Staten Island. “It’s a big deal and if you don’t get a good grade, it’s not the best.”
Larry Larson, a Web developer with a fourth grader at Public School 58 in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, said he had started teaching his son concepts like long division. He said the new tests felt like someone “changing the rules of the road overnight.”
I’m sure when the scores come back we’ll be treated to a media barrage of stories about our failed and failing public schools, which will certainly make privatization proceed more smoothly. The kids are anxious because they’re not absolute morons, despite being failures who attend our failed and failing public schools. They’re surrounded by anxious adults and they know they didn’t cover the material. Would Arne Duncan sit for a high stakes test he hadn’t prepared for? Of course not. That’s not “education.” It’s a very common bad dream, is what it is.
Meanwhile, here’s how the adults are holding themselves accountable:
The chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee said Sunday that he has no plans to launch a full-scale investigation into allegations of widespread cheating on standardized tests in 2008, during the tenure of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee.
Council member David Catania (I-At Large) said that he intends to find out why the scope of a prior cheating investigation was limited to one school, but much of his focus will be on improving the integrity of future tests, which are used to evaluate schools and teachers.
Catania’s statement came three days after the public airing of a 2009 memo indicating that as many as 191 teachers in 70 D.C. public schools may have committed testing infractions in 2008.
Catania said that in light of the 2009 memo, he is “bewildered by the narrow scope” of a investigation by the D.C. Inspector General, which lasted 17 months and focused only on one school. But he said a full-scale reinvestigation of the five-year-old allegations “would be impractical and would yield little in terms of accountability.”
“Among other things,” he said, “simply identifying and interviewing the hundreds of witnesses would overwhelm the Council’s limited staff and resources.”
It makes more sense to focus on tightening test security and strengthening efforts to identify cheating in the future, the council member said.
The hearing will also include discussion of a report released Friday by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which found that teachers in 11 schools cheated on 2012 standardized tests.
I have no idea how they’re going to “tighten security” when they’ve made a decision to ignore what happened when security was lax, but creating security standards without finding out how and why there was a breach makes about as much sense as testing kids on material they didn’t cover, so I’m not surprised. I suppose we’re getting ready to create a companion industry to the testing industry, one that focuses on test security. We’ll need lots and lots of consultants. I can save DC a lot of money and time on this hearing, because everyone in this country is familiar with how these go. The 2008 cheating was due to a few bad apples (ideally lazy, venal union members or their failed and failing students) and none of the people responsible are now or were then in positions of power. Wrap it up, release the findings and hire the security consultants.
The school reform industry spokespeople and the politicians they own yammer constantly about “accountability” and “no excuses.” The standards they impose seem to apply only to students and teachers, however, because let’s face it. It would be extremely embarrassing to the billionaires and the clueless media celebrities and the politicians from both parties who promoted Michelle Rhee and blindly climbed onto this bandwagon if they investigated what actually happened under Rhee’s watch, so they’ve simply decided not to. No excuses for fourth graders. Plenty of excuses available for the adults at the very top. That’s today’s lesson in accountability from the no excuses crowd.
by Zandar| 93 Comments
This post is in: Austerity Bombing, Fuck The Poor, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell
And speaking of the working poor, the Great European Austerity Bombing continues unabated, with precisely the results you would expect.
Unemployment in the euro zone rose to yet another record high in the first two months of the year, official data showed Tuesday, providing confirmation that the economy remains in a deep freeze.
The jobless rate reached 12 percent in both January and February, the highest since the creation of the euro in 1999, Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, reported from Luxembourg.
The January jobless rate for the 17-nation currency union was revised upward from the previously reported 11.9 percent.
For the overall European Union, the February jobless rate rose to 10.9 percent from 10.8 percent in January, Eurostat said, with more than 26 million people without work across the 27-nation bloc.
Perhaps more deficit reduction in the UK is necessary, as an example. Sadly, the only thing keeping us from the same situation was the stimulus the President got through. It was only about half as large as it needed to be, but that’s why we’re dealing with 8% unemployment rather than 12%. Republicans won’t make the mistake of allowing the economy to improve until they get the reins back, then deficits won’t matter again.
Now that we’re on the sequestration diet, I expect that 8% to start creeping back up towards 9%. After all, the only reason those overpaid government jobs we’re shedding aren’t being replaced by shiny new awesome higher-paying private sector jobs is shut up and you’re lazy and Obama can’t shoot hoops and Google doodles of Hugo Weaving and Benghazi and food stamps and Obama took Cole’s effing mustard.
Until then, we’ll stall out for the next four years because national debt is immoral (and soon impeachable) so we must eliminate even more government jobs and put people on government safety net programs, and then cut the programs because there’s too many people on them. Then and only then will millions of jobs suddenly poop out of The Invisible Asshole Of The Free Market. Sure, they don’t pay enough to not require government help, but that’s why God made sure you have more than 40 hours in a week that you could work through.
Maybe if all those European Poors were working 90 hours a week at (less than) minimum wage while homeschooling their kids, volunteering for church and training for neighborhood firearms defense militias like us Puritan-streak rock-ribbed salt-of-the-earth ‘Muricans, they’d know le freedom.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 80 Comments
This post is in: Fuck The Poor
I have a neighbor, let’s call him “Fred”, who is a mid-level corporate manager who just switched back to managing part-timers on a night shift. It’s probably the worst job his (mostly unionized) company offers, and it attracts workers who aren’t that well-educated, most of whom are working poor.
Fred and I were having one of our every-so-often conversations about the world and its problems, and he was bringing up some of the problems his workers and their friends have. One of them is the loss of benefits after crossing an income threshold. If you’re one of Fred’s employees who is a high-school graduate with a couple of kids, and you’re on Medicaid, there’s a point where making a few dollars more means the loss of those programs, which is a huge hit. You’d have to make $1,000 a month more to afford private insurance, if you could get it, to replace Medicaid.
So, what tends to happen is some of these employees will reject extra hours, or they’ll have a second go-nowhere job that pays them cash under the table. Fred identifies this as a problem with “welfare”, and he’s roughly right. There are structural incentives to stay on Medicaid, because the distance from making enough money to be Medicaid-ineligible, to making enough to afford private insurance, is pretty big.
This is old ground and Fred has covered it before, but what was interesting about our conversation was that he said, out of the blue, “Maybe Obamacare will fix that”. And maybe it will–if the transition from Medicaid to premium support for a policy that has decent coverage doesn’t mean going off a $500-a-month cliff.
Fred is fairly conservative: people need to work harder, too many handouts, taxes are killing him, etc. He’s also a bit of a bigot, and a self-described asshole, but he’s not blind. He knows, from experience, what it means to be working poor. He sees the hard life and disincentives to making the jump to the middle class. He’s certainly not the poster child for empathy, since most of the pain he feels is when he has to scramble to fill a spot because an employees can’t work extra hours. But he’s not buying the welfare-mothers-in-Cadillacs fantasy about poverty that people with his political attitudes might otherwise spout. And because of that, he knows that Obamacare, if implemented correctly, will actually get people “off welfare”, meaning into the middle class.
If, instead of a trip to the salad bar at Applebees, David Brooks worked on a loading dock at 3 AM in the middle of the winter, let’s say for a week, he might have a bit of the insight that Fred has, even though Fred has never read Hayek or Burke, or attended the Aspen Institute.
by Zandar| 124 Comments
This post is in: Austerity Bombing, Fuck The Poor, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You
America, where pulling yourself up by the bootstraps is a bit difficult due to all the sharp bootstrap-cutting objects lying in your path.
A Tupelo woman hired earlier this month by a KFC was fired Monday after the franchise owner discovered she’s homeless.
Eunice Jasica has been staying at the Salvation Army lodge since early December after losing her job, her car and her home.
The nonprofit organization requires its residents to seek employment daily and, upon finding it, to pay for lodging and start saving for a place of their own. Jasica said she had been job hunting for months and was relieved to find work on March 11 at the KFC on North Gloster Street.
A document signed by that location’s general manager on March 12 confirms Jasica had been hired to perform “prep work” and would receive a paycheck every two weeks.
But when Jasica reported for duty Monday, franchise owner Chesley Ruff withdrew the job offer upon learning she lived at the Salvation Army.
“He told me to come back when I had an address and transportation,” Jasica recalled. “But how am I supposed to get all that without a job?”
Firing someone you hired because they don’t have a place to live when the entire reason they took the job was to be able to afford a place to live, and you don’t pay enough to afford a place to live? I’m betting Chesley Ruff is a lifelong Republican.
Luckily, this story now has a better ending.
A woman fired from a KFC in Tupelo for being homeless has found a new job and an outpouring of support.
Eunice Jasica was tentatively hired Tuesday by On Time Transportation to shuttle Medicaid and Medicare patients to and from doctors’ appointments. She still must complete the final stages of her application process but should be on the job by early April, said the company’s office manager, Yolanda Baskin.
The much larger problem is America is largely designed to keep poor people poor, and ridiculously rich people ridiculously rich.