humans do not produce resources, humans extract finite resources from the ground...,

mises |  The world is overpopulated. The street are clogged, traffic is in a snarl, and people are living – both figuratively and literally – right on top of each other. There’s hardly enough room to swing a cat these days, right? Wrong.

The world is not overcrowded at all. There are vast swaths of unpopulated land all over the place. Siberia, Canada, Africa, Australia, even the rural USA all contain more than enough wide open spaces. So why do people labor so resolutely under this delusion? The reason is simple: most people, especially those with the time and inclination to carp about overpopulation, live in areas of high population density, a non-representative sample of the world as a whole. We call these places cities, and the reason why people live in cities, despite their complaining, is that there are benefits for large populations congregating close together.

It is convenient to live in a place with lots of other people, because each of those people can potentially do something for you, from repairing your shoes, to cooking your meals, to running entertainment venues, to, perhaps most importantly, providing you with gainful employment. Try living out in the middle of nowhere and see how easy it is to feed yourself, much less make a living and survive medical problems. The division of labor means that the more people there are nearby, the more able we are to fulfill our wants and needs. Hence, crowded cities.

This misconception of the world’s population problems has led some to celebrate the declining birth rates we now see in most of the developed world. But the anticipation of a little expanded breathing room causes them take the wrong view on the economic impacts of a declining population. This has to do with an incomplete understanding of human action.

Those who worry about overpopulation tend to view people as nothing more than consumers.

Resources are finite; humans consume resources. Therefore, fewer humans will mean more resources to go around. This is the core idea behind the opposition to expanded immigration. Namely, the fear that more people will mean less work and less wealth for the rest of us. But while the two premises of this syllogism are true, they are also woefully incomplete, making the conclusion incorrect as well.

The reason is that humans are not merely consumers. Every consumer is also a producer as well, and production is how we have improved our standards of living from the dawn of man till today. Every luxury, every great invention, every work of art, every modern convenience that we enjoy was the product of a mind – in some cases, of more than one. It then stands to reason that the more minds there are, the more innovations we will have as well. A reductio ad absudum reveals the obvious truth that a cure for cancer is more likely to emerge from a society of a billion people than from one of only a handful of individuals.

More importantly, these innovations result in a multiplication of resources, so our syllogism changes to the following: Resources are finite; humans consume resources; humans produce resources; therefore, if humans produce more resources than they consume, a greater population will be beneficial to the species.

nonlinearities of the sabotage-redistribution process

york |  A recent exchange on capitalaspower.com, titled ‘Capitalizing Time’, suggests a possible confusion regarding our claims, so a clarification is in order. Over the years, we have argued that the relationship between sabotage and distribution tends to be nonlinear. Up to a point, sabotage redistributes income in favour of those who impose it; but after that point, sabotage becomes ‘excessive’ and the effect inverts. One illustration of this nonlinearity is given by the relationship between unemployment and the capital share of income.

In ‘Capitalizing Time’, Blair Fix plots this relationship, with the income share of capitalists on the vertical axis and the rate of unemployment on the horizontal axis. However, the low-pixel graphics of the chart are too crude to reveal the nonlinearity. Figure 1 corrects this shortcoming. It shows the same relationship, but with finer graphics that make the nonlinearity visible (the definitions and sources for all figures are given in the Appendix). Note that, unlike Blair, we use the capital share of domestic income rather than of national income. The reason is that the latter measure includes foreign profit and interest, which are unaffected by domestic unemployment. In practice, though, the two sets of data yield similar results. 

house considering record spending on nuclear weapons

accuracy |  The House of Representatives meets this week to consider the Pentagon’s budget proposal.

GREG MELLO, gmello at lasg.org, @TrishABQ Mello is executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group. The group’s recent backgrounders include “President Requests Unprecedented Spending on Nuclear Weapons Maintenance, Design, Production” and “U.S. Claims of Nuclear Weapons Retirement, Dismantlement ‘May be Misleading’ — GAO.” [PDF]

Mello said today: “As in previous years, the House Armed Services Committee version of the annual Defense Authorization Act tries to force the administration to design and build new nuclear weapons, components, and high-dollar factories sooner rather than later, and without further ado.

“The Committee wants to start design of a new cruise missile warhead three years sooner than the administration believes is desirable.

“To take another example, the bill mandates ramping up production of plutonium warhead cores (‘pits’) to 30 pits per year by 2023 independent of any actual need. The new idea is production for production’s sake. Without this there would be no need for production, or new factories, since pits will last several decades more. The U.S. also has at least 15,000 surplus pits, thousands of which are reusable.

“Fortunately the bill also requires a detailed study of ways to produce more pits (and dispose of surplus plutonium) that don’t require new factories. The National Nuclear Security Administration operates several plutonium facilities at great cost and extra capacity of various kinds. Even the supremely-hawkish House Armed Services Committee wants to know if it is really prudent to build new plutonium facilities.

“Overall, the policy shifts in this bill go towards maintaining jobs in the warhead complex, and especially at the big three nuclear labs, still sized for a Cold War. This bill aims to keep the labs fat and happy.

“Warheads last a long time. To the warhead caucus, that’s a big problem. The Committee therefore proposes billions of dollars in make-work. It’s up to responsible Republicans and Democrats — both — to rein in this waste, which does nothing for anybody’s conception of national security.

“Meanwhile, the Administration could and should immediately cut the deployed nuclear arsenal back to the somewhat lower levels already approved by the military and Pentagon.”

treat peasant violence like an infectious disease

slate | Gary Slutkin is a professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the founder and executive director of CURE Violence. Two shocking street killings by children inspired him apply the tools of epidemiology to violence—and discover how to immunize against it.

Madhumita Venkataramanan: You began your career working on infectious diseases. What was your focus?

Gary Slutkin: I began to understand how diseases spread—and how to control them—with tuberculosis. From 1981 to 1984, I was an infectious-disease fellow at San Francisco General Hospital and was then made responsible for controlling TB in the whole city. I had to learn all the characteristics of spread and how to find active cases and "contacts"—people who can transmit it invisibly. Later, I worked on cholera and TB in Somalia. And from 1987, I worked at the World Health Organization for seven years on HIV and AIDS epidemics in Africa.

What strategies were most successful for stopping the spread of disease?
Controlling HIV was almost entirely about changing behavior. I ended up hiring a lot of psychologists and others who understood how to change community norms. In Uganda we ran an education campaign to destigmatize HIV-positive patients, explain how HIV is transmitted, and promote prevention, including using condoms. The dominant message was "stick to one partner."

What prompted your shift from disease to street violence?
After 10 years working in Africa, I moved back to the United States in 1994 and was looking for how I could be useful at home. Two incidents from that time had a big impact on me. One was a 12-year-old boy who performed an "execution style" killing under a bridge. The other was another 12-year-old who threw someone, making them fall seven to 10 flights from a housing project, for not giving him some candy.

When I looked into it, I thought the strategies being used against violence had no chance of working. They had little scientific basis and grossly misunderstood and overvalued punishment. I knew violence was a behavior – just like exercise, smoking, overeating, or having sex. It looked to me like a field with a giant gap.

can capitalists afford recovery: nitzen next tuesday at the london school of economics

york |  Theorists and policymakers from all directions and of all persuasions remain obsessed with the prospect of recovery. For mainstream economists, the key question is how to bring about such a recovery. For heterodox political economists, the main issue is whether sustained growth is possible to start with. But there is a prior question that nobody seems to ask: can capitalists afford recovery in the first place? If we think of capital not as means of production but as a mode of power, we find that accumulation thrives not on growth and investment, but on unemployment and stagnation. And if accumulation depends on crisis, why should capitalists want to see a recovery? 

Jonathan Nitzan is a professor of political economy at York University in Toronto and co-author, with Professor Shimshon Bichler, of Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder.

This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis. For any queries contact Sandy Hager, email S.B.Hager@lse.ac.uk or call 020 7955 7379.

how come you charged me $34,000 for four hours of anaesthesia?

kunstler | Funny how, in the current national rapture of techno-narcissism, it is harder than ever to do something that for generations used to be as simple as pie: to get somebody on the telephone. It’s especially funny in a time when phones have become a prosthetic extension of every human hand and pretty much the be-all and end-all of human culture. I hold a phone, therefore I am!

It’s not so funny that the places where it is most difficult to connect to a live human being are among the most critical activities, most particularly every branch of health care. Hospitals now operate under the entirely false and obviously dishonest premise that a robotic phone routing system is the best way to handle communications. Notice that, in the logic of this system, no distinction is made between mundane business and medical emergencies. Everybody who calls get’s the same perky robot —always a woman, by the way, in a dishonest attempt to provide false reassurance that a “caring” presence (Big Sister) is at the other end of the line. Whether you call about a billing error or having just shredded your foot in a rototiller, the message at the other end will always be democratically the same: “Your call is important to us.” (Not.)

I dwell on these matters because I spent an inordinate amount of time last week calling around to several hospitals and doctors offices to get some of my medical records for a lawsuit I am prosecuting against the manufacturer of a defective hip implant that gave me cobalt / chromium poisoning. Note also that we have contrived to make it nearly impossible to obtain our own medical records.

Now I am, going to reveal to you why it is so difficult to get a live human being on the telephone at these important places: because the more of a racketeering matrix medicine becomes, the more it seeks to evade responsibility for the consequences. That is, the more medicine becomes a criminal enterprise, the less it wants to hear from its client/victims. The same ethos is at work in just about every other realm of corporate enterprise in the USA. Our problem in the USA is not “capitalism,” it’s racketeering. Why we fail to comprehend it is one of the abiding mysteries of contemporary life.

The biggest offender after medicine, of course, is banking. They don’t want to hear from you either.

this is what broad does to tender young black children in order to make a market for agilix software...,

dianeravitch | Eclectablog has run a series of articles about the Education Achievement Authority, the special district created by Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder to contain the state’s lowest performing schools.

The district is run by Broad-trained superintendent John Covington, who left Kansas City right before the district lost its accreditation.

The communications director for EAA complained about the Eclectablog series, for obvious reasons.

Here, another teacher speaks out. This teacher is a veteran, with 43 students in his or her class.

This is part of the interview:

Can you give me some specific examples.?

Yes, I can. For example, the BUZZ program. The BUZZ program does not work. I had 43 students in my classroom the first year…

All by yourself?

By myself. And, with the 43 students, I didn’t have enough computers. Just like other teachers have stated. There were not enough computers. And half the time the computers would freeze up or the internet would crash.

I really feel sorry for the Teach for America teachers because they had been put into an environment that they really were not prepared for. It was like throwing an inexperienced lion trainer into a cage full of lions. But, at the same time, if the EAA really wanted to help students, these so-called disadvantaged students or at-risk students, if they really cared about them, they would have brought in professional veterans like me; teachers who had been proven and in their career for quite a while, who knew what they were doing. That would have made sense.

It’s true that everything is based on the performance series testing, but at the same time how can you give students higher learning, critical thinking skills — they want them to do that — but not teach them the basics? But they wanted us to keep pushing and keep testing them. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.

I got very frustrated because they kept asking me to use this Student Centered Learning (SCL) model and I knew it wasn’t working. I knew it wasn’t helping the children. So, I did what one of the other teachers in your articles did. I just ignored what the EAA administrators said and started doing the traditional things that I knew from years of experience work for children.

It’s true that they didn’t have any curriculum. No textbooks. A lot of times we didn’t have just basic supplies. So, I would go out of my own pocket and do what knew what I had to do. I had a lot of materials of my own from over the years and I would bring them in and supplement when the EAA was not giving me the materials that I needed. What they wanted me to do was put the kids on the computer and let them teach themselves. And half the time the computer program didn’t even work!

That’s the thing that blows my mind the most, that they designed the whole thing around computers and then didn’t give you guys enough to teach the kids with!

I’m speaking out because I feel for the children. And, you can quote me on this: This reminds me of the Tuskegee Experiment.

In other words, this is what states do to Other People’s Children, especially children of color.

You can be sure that you won’t find these methods in the upscale, well-funded schools of Grosse Pointe.

the difference between who puts in work and who puts themselves in front of a camera...

electablog | From an interview on Eclectablog with an EAA Teacher of the Year on why she quit.

“I was compromising my moral integrity and I couldn’t live with myself.”

    Did you teach in the EAA from the beginning?

    Yeah, I worked there from when school opened in the fall of 2012.

    Did you work at Nolan the entire time?

    Yes but last summer I was offered a job as a coach at another school and I was eager to take it.

    To get out of the classroom?

    No, not to get out of the classroom. To get out of Nolan.

    That’s one of the interesting parts of the situation. The principal at Nolan, Angela Underwood, she came from Kansas City with Dr. Covington and she was kind of their “star child”. She seemed to be given unfair advantage in my eyes in terms of the resources that she had. She had all of these people that had come over from Kansas City who had already done things the way Covington wanted them to.

    I learned a lot by talking to people at the other schools. The principals at other schools, they didn’t even know what they were supposed to be doing. The higher level, Dr. Covington’s team, wasn’t even helping the principals learn what was supposed to be going on in their schools.

    How can you lead and help teachers to do things the right way if you’re never shown yourself?

    But, at Nolan, there was no respect of the teachers from the administration. It was very much a dictatorship. Never in my life have I worked for someone who I couldn’t respect. Probably in the first month and a half I lost all respect for, first, my principal and then everyone in the hierarchy of the EAA organization — Covington, Esselman — I couldn’t respect them because they didn’t know what they were doing.

    I couldn’t work for Angela Underwood for another year because I was afraid I’d be fired. I was having a harder and harder time as time went on keeping quiet and not challenging her every time she did something that just didn’t make sense.

    The style of my principal was… well, we were cursed at, we were yelled at, we were belittled. And that seems to be the same way that Covington spoke to his principals and his administrative staff at his meetings. It was very much “my way or the highway” type of leadership. Even if principals had good intentions, they were being forced or coerced into doing things a certain way even if they didn’t think it was the best way.

    So this — I’ve been referring to it as a culture of fear and intimidation as it relates to the teachers — but is sounds like that might have extended to some of these administrators, as well, and they were just sort of emulating what was happening to them when they dealt with their own staff.

    Yes. That’s what I heard. For some people, if this job is your financial security and you’re using it to pay for your children, because a lot of the administrators are parents, as well, so they can’t just lose their jobs. So, they’re kind of forced into situations that, unfortunately, you personally don’t always agree with.

    You know, I talked to another teacher at Nolan and she said that the teachers there loved you and that they encouraged you to — she explained to me that you had to nominate YOURSELF for Teacher of the Year which seems kind of weird — but, she said that they had encouraged YOU to do that and then they really came out for you big time and you won by a landslide. And I thought that was neat. It wasn’t like the administrators picked one of their pet teachers. It was actually voted on by the other teachers. Am I right about that?

    Yeah. You were supposed to nominate yourself but they asked people to encourage other people to submit themselves and I had like five people that emailed me or came up to me and said, “You should submit yourself.” When I found out that not that many people were doing it, I thought, “What the hell?” and I decided to go ahead and throw my name in the hat and see what happened.

    I found out later that two first year Teach for America teachers were told by the principal that they should submit themselves. I was never told that by her, despite the fact that I was obviously doing well. I mean every time they had visitors, they were coming into my classroom. I was being asked to help with curriculum writing by the district. But I wasn’t asked by the principal to consider doing Teacher of the Year because I don’t think she thought I’d be a good representation for the EAA because I was honest. I was going to do right by the kids but I wasn’t going to lie and stretch the truth. I wasn’t going to put on a dog and pony show and I think the two people she asked would. This was their first year out of college and they were trying to impress her.

    I taught for five years before I came to Nolan and I also worked in the corporate world training educators. So, I’ve had lots of different bosses in my life and I’ve had lots of different jobs in my life. I have a pretty solid background in terms of going and getting another job. I didn’t need the EAA on my resumé.

how do you get away with telling the state education superintendent to go stuff it?

markmaynard |  On Thursday, February 20, at 10:00 AM, members of the Eastern Michigan University (EMU) community opposed to the ongoing association between their university and the Snyder administration’s troubled Educational Achievement Authority (EAA), will be gathering in Welch Hall to “demand” that all connections be immediately severed. Following is my discussion with EMU College of Education Associate Professor Steven Camron, one of the event’s organizers… Those who cannot attend, by the way, are encouraged to sign the online petition.

MARK: My knowledge of the Educational Achievement Authority (EAA) is somewhat limited. Perhaps a good way for us to start would be for me to tell you what little I know, and you can jump in and correct me where necessary… As I understand it, the EAA was conceived of as a statewide school district, into which Michigan’s least well performing schools could be placed. This, we were told by the Governor, when he announced the existence of the EAA in 2011, would make it easier for the State to ensure that “more and better resources” could be delivered to the students in these schools. The long term goal, we were told, was to put the bottom 5% of all Michigan schools into the EAA, but they started with a subset of 15 Detroit schools. And the results at these schools, from what I’ve been able to ascertain, have been mixed at best. Since the roll-out of the EAA, during the 2012-2013 school year, we’ve seen enrollment in these schools drop by 24%, insufficient funding, and evidence of unsafe conditions, among other things. In other words, it doesn’t look as though “more and better resources” actually materialized… Am I close?

STEVEN: Yes, you’re spot-on! Former teachers I’ve talked to (three to be precise) have confirmed the anonymous reports we’ve been hearing out of EAA schools, about the poor teaching and learning environments. For instance, even experienced teachers are finding the exclusive teaching methodology – the computer-centric BUZZ system – wildly insufficient and under-resourced. And that’s even more true for the untrained Teach for America recruits who have been drafted to work in these schools.

MARK: Snyder, when announcing the launch of this initiative, in addition to promising “more and better resources” for kids in EAA schools, also said that there would be “more autonomy in these schools.” Given your reference to an “exclusive teaching methodology,” would I be right to assume that he also never made good on the promise of autonomy?

STEVEN: When the corporate reformers talk about “more autonomy for the schools” they don’t mean autonomy for teachers in the classroom. They mean principals getting to make hiring and firing decisions. They mean autonomy from “central office” on curriculum decisions, working conditions, staffing, etc.

MARK: What can you tell me about the BUZZ system?

STEVEN: I do not have first-hand knowledge of BUZZ. I’d suggest that you talk to former teachers, Delbery Glaze or Brooke Harris, who have very strong feelings and experience with it, and have described it as a joke.

MARK: Based on what we’re seeing unfold, it’s difficult not to get the impression that our legislators want to see a system in which those with resources purchase private education, while those without are warehoused in situations where inexperienced facilitators essentially read scripts… Which leads me to my next question. Are any of these initiatives being put forward by the EAA scientifically vetted? Are they employing best practices sanctioned by the educational community?

STEVEN: I think EAA officials have described their instructional approaches as “Student-Centered-Learning,” “cutting-edge” and the wave of the future. If that were true then why did the Kansas City Public Schools dump that experimental approach immediately after Covington left them to come to the EAA. Former teachers, and some anonymous current EAA teachers have unanimously described the instructional regimen at the EAA as anything but student-centered. My colleagues in the College of Education at Eastern, and Dr. Tom Pedroni from Wayne State, know better than I about evidence-based, research-supported pedagogy, and they describe this approach as defective from the beginning.

don't be in the bottom 5% if you don't want your tender young children ruthlessly cannibalized...,

democracy-tree |  Well, they did it.

The Michigan Senate passed the Education Achievement Authority bill tonight. As is typical of these cowardly GOP lawmakers, they blasted HB-4369 out of the Senate Education Committee after it sat languishing there with virtually no discussion for eight solid months.

This form of anal-retentive Republican lawmaking in Michigan seems to come in painful episodic waves of explosive legislative diarrhea that occur mostly in mid-December, coincidently mere hours before they race for the exits, butt cheeks tightly clenched, to go home and schmooze it up at fundraisers with lobbyists and cronies.

Gov. Snyder is eagerly poised to sign this legislation into law from the cozy den of his comfortable home in his gated community. He has been a proponent of the EAA since its inception. The legislation returns to the House on Thursday, then on to the governor.

GOP lawmakers were in such a hurry today, they recommended the bill out of committee without so much as updating the legislature.mi.gov committee reports page before ramming it through on the floor for a vote. This is hallmark of the slap-dash legislation Michigan has experienced under the Snyder administration.

Lawmakers are scheduled to wrap things up by this time tomorrow, and we can expect more legislative bowel movements before then. Their calendar allows for tentative sessions next week — not a likely occurrence though, because they’ll want to get the f#*k-outta Dodge as soon as they finish their annual shit-storm assault on democracy and civil rights.

democracy-tree |   The Michigan House adjourned without signing-off on the Senate version of the Education Achievement Authority. The lack of action came as a surprise to many who expected speedy approval in the wake of State Superintendent Mike Flanagan’s statement last week that the EAA will be expanding from 15 schools to approximately 25 as early as January.

The Senate version of HB-4369, approved this week, differed slightly from what the House passed back in March of 2013. Senators stipulated that no expansion could occur until the 2015-16 school year — effectively putting the brakes on the state’s rush to seize low-performing districts from local control.

Rep. Lisa Posthumus-Lyons (R-86), the original sponsor of the House version told the Associated Press:

“The members haven’t had much of a chance to look at it. That’s OK. The beautiful part about this December is it’s not lame duck. It’s the end of a quarter, not the end of the game.”

The Senate version also removed the cap on how many schools may be in the Authority — a condition which didn’t seem to worry Lyons:

“Don’t be in the bottom 5 percent of schools if you don’t want to be in the EAA.”

The House is expected to revisit the legislation as early as January. Lawmakers will probably take the deal the Senate has offered considering it took them nine months to get a vote on the amended legislation in 2013 — House proponents of EAA expansion may not wish to take their chances on sending it back to the Senate.

did covington lie on a $35.4 million grant application?

democracy-tree |  Michigan’s Superintendent of Public Education Michael Flanagan announced today that he plans to move more schools into the Education Achievement Authority starting in January. Approximately ten academically struggling schools are to join the current 15 that were vacuumed-up last year from Detroit Public Schools. The announcement comes amidst growing criticism over the state-run district’s efficacy and fiscal health.

Senate Democrats took issue with the EAA last week pointing to its inability to prove their worth. Sen. Bert Johnson (D-2) put it this way:

“The shortcomings of the EAA are well documented. From flawed accounting practices to a lack of results in the classroom, the EAA has made many promises of getting better, but has failed to deliver.”

Pressure from educators across the state and faculty members at Eastern Michigan University spurred the resignation of EAA board member Jann Joseph last week. Joseph is the dean of the college of education at EMU. Faculty cited concerns about the affiliation with the EAA:

“These negative impacts on our reputation, our local relationships, our students and programs, the clear effect on enrollments and thus revenue to the university are a repudiation of EMU’s legacy as a champion of public education and a leader in the preparation of educational professionals. We implore you to remedy this situation as quickly as possible by unanimously voting to withdraw from the contract creating the EAA.”

The EAA has yet to demonstrate its value, and has a history of shady revenue deals. Last year they borrowed $12 million from DPS in a hush-hush contract, and through a freedom of information request it was discovered that EAA Chancellor, John Covington, lied on an application for a $35.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

hood disease...,

cbslocal |  In the inner city, a health problem is making it harder for young people to learn. The Centers for Disease Control said 30 percent of inner city kids suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The CDC said these children often live in virtual war zones. Doctors at Harvard said they actually suffer from a more complex form of PTSD that some call “hood disease.”

Unlike soldiers, children in the inner city never leave the combat zone. They often experience trauma, repeatedly.

“You could take anyone who is experiencing the symptoms of PTSD, and the things we are currently emphasizing in school will fall off their radar. Because frankly it does not matter in our biology if we don’t survive the walk home,” said Jeff Duncan-Andrade, Ph.D. of San Francisco State University.

In Oakland, about two thirds of the murders last year were actually clustered in East Oakland, 59 people killed.

Teachers and administrators who graduated from Fremont High School in East Oakland and have gone back to work there spoke with KPIX 5.

“These cards that (students) are suddenly wearing around their neck that say ‘Rest in peace.’ You have some kids that are walking around with six of them. Laminated cards that are tributes to their slain friends,” said teacher Jasmene Miranda.

Jaliza Collins, also a teacher at Fremont, said, “It’s depression, it’s stress, it’s withdrawal, it’s denial. It’s so many things that is encompassed and embodied in them. And when somebody pushes that one button where it can be like, ‘please go have a seat,’ and that can be the one thing that just sets them off.”

In 2013, there were 47 recorded lockdowns in Oakland public schools – again, almost all in East and West Oakland.

Students at Fremont High showed where one classmate was shot.

“If someone got shot that they knew or that they cared about…they’re going to be numb,” one student said. “If someone else in their family got shot and killed they will be sad, they will be isolated because I have been through that.”

Gun violence is only one of the traumas or stressors in concentrated areas of deep poverty.

“Its kids are unsafe, they’re not well fed,” Duncan-Andrade said. “And when you start stacking those kids of stressors on top of each other, that’s when you get these kinds of negative health outcomes that seriously disrupt school performance.”

maybe it's fava beans and chianti that puts rolls on your neck....,

wsws | The revelations regarding Covington, far from being an aberration, provide an insight into the outlook of those, like Covington, who seek to exploit the miserable condition of the public education system to further their own mercenary aspirations. The actual purpose of the EAA is to privatize primary and secondary education. Covington was initially offered $225,000 to take the job of EAA Chancellor, with a $175,000 signing bonus to boot, but even this lavish salary was increased to $425,000 in short order. He was appointed to this position despite the fact that the Kansas City school district, his former employer, saw half of its schools shut down and its test scores drop precipitously under his watch.

While some Democrats are using the scandal to make political hay, the EAA is itself an outcrop of legislation initiated under Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm. In 2009, Granholm, with the assistance of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), created the State School Reform/Redesign District (SSRRD) to represent the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools in Detroit. In the same year, Granholm named Robert Bobb the first statewide emergency manager to run the Detroit public schools. Under Bobb, over 100 Detroit Public Schools (DPS) have been closed—further facilitating the process of school charterization.

In 2011, under Snyder, the contract to oversee the schools in the SSRRD was awarded to the EAA. Then, in 2012, the EAA was named the only Michigan finalist in Obama’s Race to the Top competition.

Additionally, the Obama administration has thrown its full backing behind the privatization of public schools and the attacks on teachers. Last May, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went on a public campaign with Governor Snyder to promote “education reform,” specifically choosing to “shine the spotlight of success” on the EAA. Duncan referred to Detroit as “ground zero” for Obama’s education agenda, stating that in a few years Detroit could surpass New Orleans, which currently leads the nation in percentage of children—79 percent—in charter schools. Detroit is currently second in the nation, with 51 percent of children attending charter schools.

The unions, operating as an appendage of the Democratic party, have not raised a finger to oppose the privatization of public schools or the attacks on teachers. The primary concern of the union bureaucracy is to secure a place for itself in order to maintain its privileges. In line with this, the unions have participated in the process of privatization. During Granholm’s term the AFT proudly noted its role in creating the “failing district”—the SSRRD—saying the union had worked “fast and furiously” to enact legislation “allowing more high performing charter schools.”

monsters get fat cannibalizing tender young black children - and afrodemia is silent...,

Monster leans in to bite hapless children

michigancitizen |  A “waste and abuse of power,” is what Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lon Johnson called spending done by officials at the Educational Achievement Authority

Following a May 12, Detroit News report on Gov. Snyder’s state-created experimental district exposing excess spending by the cash-strapped district, Johnson said, “Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on things like personal chauffeurs and new IKEA furniture, while kids go to schools without heat or air conditioning, shows Republican Gov. Rick Snyder’s risky school takeover district is continuing to fail our kids.”

The report revealed the EAA staff spent nearly $240,000 on travel, gas for Chancellor John Covington’s personal chauffeur and IKEA furniture, since 2010.

“This waste and abuse of power is exactly why the EAA is opposed by members of the state Board of Education, current and former teachers in the district, and professional educators all over our state and country,” Johnson said in a recently released statement. “Michigan schools need more leaders in Lansing who will once again invest in our public schools, not force a school takeover meant to enrich Gov. Snyder’s friends and allies.”

Among the findings: $178,000 was spent on hotel and airfare traveling to 36 cities from April 2012 to February, while another $10,000 was spent on gas for Covington’s chauffeured car, $25,000 for IKEA furniture for Covington’s office and $8,000 combined at Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Meijer, Home Depot and Lowe’s, according to the report.

The EAA came under criticism last week when a video went viral showing a teacher using a broom to beat back one student fighting with another at Pershing High. The EAA promptly fired the teacher, although, as reported here exclusively, (“EAA teacher is collateral damage.”)   the student initiating the fight had been improperly readmitted to school by the principal, who came from Seattle after being dismissed there. The teacher has since been reinstated.

Detroit parents and community have battled against the EAA since it was created with 15 DPS buildings and contents by former Emergency Manager Roy Roberts.

EAA enrollment fell this year as parents took children out of the failing district. In February, it was revealed through MEAP scores students in the EAA were performing at lower levels than when they entered the district.

When EAA Chancellor John Covington was superintendent of Kansas City Schools, the district lost its accreditation.

why do scientifically repudiated classifications continue to have force in the media, politics, and even science?

The garbage man pseudo-science propagandist Nicholas Wade was subsidized, promoted, and given a huge platform for 30 years as the "science" editor at the NYTimes. This is so strange when we consider just how awful and anti-scientific his core beliefs really are. A book length exposition of this nonsense should get him laughed off the mainstream stage. 

shara dev has done a wonderful job of succinctly dismantling race - yet his take down doesn't receive consideration beyond an infinitesimal scale...,

why does the establishment continue to promote pseudo-scientific classifications?

aaanet |  Dr. Agustín Fuentes takes establishment garbageman Nicholas Wade apart. Wade asserts that humans are divided into 5 genetically identified continentally divided races and that there are significant differences in the genetically-based social behavior of these races. Wade gets both the data and his interpretations very wrong. 

If you're making a scientific argument about genetic variation, you have to focus on population and be very clear about your definitions. Wade uses the invented and reified classifications that are the antithesis of clarity and precision.

What does human genetic variation actually look like. Humans share 100% of all their genes, and about 99.9% of variations. The .1% of all variation we're interested in is not in the genes themselves, and is not shaped by natural selection as Wade asserts. 

What we know about human variation does not support dividing populations into the races that Wade is working to substantiate.  Fist tap Bro. Makheru.

internet bully stopped and frisked in tahnussy's comment section

So, feeling "in the know" about this particular subject, I opted to stick my toe into the supremely shallow and very heavily policed waters over at what passes for black public intellectual output over at the atlantic. It didn't take long for me to piss off the extremely partisan toddlers and get put in check. My question, did I "argue" in bad faith - as I was accused of doing by the hyperactive moderator Sandy - who also happens to profess to be a "master teacher" in various and sundry of the humanities and whose primary instrumentality is chalk?

In my estimation, the severe and excessive levels of thought policing that take place in the cathedral's "safe places" has nothing whatsoever to do with trolling, but are instead hallmarks of the profound discursive and political weakness of feminized progressive politics. Emotions prevail in these contexts, and if your position is unpopular - no matter how it's presented - you will be ostracized because they are incapable of a fact-based or reasoned counter-argument.  You're either with us, or you're against us - is.all.they've.got.  This is why I believe nobody will step up and overcome the malicious narrative mischief being worked by Nicholas Wade and amplified by the Establishment.

trickydonut KlugerRD • 2 days ago

I actually don't think tenure is the biggest issue, I think supervision is. In most schools, the principal or other administrator might only stop by a classroom 4 or 5 times a year, with maybe only two of those being actual evaluations. What rarely happens: observation, identification of issues teachers need help with (#1: classroom management), and then sustained support until the issue is resolved. Yes, there are bad teachers out there, but usually problems just fester because no one knows about them or takes the time to fix them.

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  AptiDude trickydonut • 2 days ago

  
  

  Yes, and how many inner-city high administrators actually could advise a French teacher, music teacher, art teacher, special education teacher or an AP physics teacher effectively about how best to instruct their students? All they can do is make sure the teacher is in the room and the students are mostly paying attention and order is being maintained.

  
  
  
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  CNu trickydonut • 2 days ago

  
  

  Bingo!!! Education is not rocket science. Take attendance, perform instruction, issue grades. Supervise for consistency and quality in all of the above. Simple.
  Parental priorities in high-performing public school districts:
  1. Safety
  2. Children have fun in school
  3. Children served good food that they enjoy.
  4. Academics
  5. College/Vocational preparation
  In that order
  If you take care of the first three, four and five have a marvelous way of taking care of themselves. The first three are of course bellweathers of a competently managed school environment.
  The invisible 800lb gorilla that no one EVER explicitly articulates - is that the past three generations of urban public school graduates / attendees - a majority have had such an atrocious experience in school, such an abject failure and deviation from priorities one through three - that they not only have zero warm and fuzzy feelings about the enterprise, they actually have a deeply imprinted and visceral aversion to contact with the school of any kind.
  These are generations whose compulsory attendance at schools stripped of cultural enrichment and starved for resources at the business-end of education delivery - was miserable. Their experience was rendered miserable because bloated, overpaid, incompetent administrations were engaged in various and sundry modes of parasitic extraction and self-aggrandizement that had nothing whatsoever to do with the needs and wants of their core constituents.
  Until the 19th century education model is fully reformed (and it can't be due to deeply conflicting institutional interests) and urban public schools are remade predominantly safe, fun, and nourishing - then the problem of failed performance will persist.
  Off the top, somewhere between 50-70% of the existing teacher cadres have got to go. In addition, 10-12% of students who are irretrievably pre-jail and make life miserable for the other kids, teachers, and school leadership - they've also got to go. I believe they used to call it "reform" school.
  Finally, parents and grandparents have to be brought back into active communal engagement with the institution despite the ill-will they may bear toward it because of their own miserable experiences therein. Cultural enrichment activities are the path down which this bridge and community rebuilding can be achieved. Again, those programs require reallocation of resources away from the central office and out to the locations where education and community are delivered.
  The political will and audacity to effect these kinds of institutional changes is not present in sufficient quantity to make anything like this happen anywhere in the U.S.

  
  
  
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    Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

    
    

    Yes, firing 50-70% of people who do the work is clearly the place to start if we want to improve education outcomes. Why didn't I think of that?

    
    
    

    
    
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      CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

      
      

      Teachers get certified at the age of 21-22, and don't have to update that at regular intervals like most professionals. Consequently, we have 48 year old teachers who haven't updated their pedagogical methods since prior to the advent of the world wide web, facing kids with Googol in their pockets and the answer to nearly any question those kids want to pose. It's a grotesque understatement to call such an obsolete and out of touch skill set "doing the work". More like "occupying the position", "waiting on a pension" and "categorically failing to manage the classroom".
      There's a reason that kids don't want to listen to these out of date and irrelevant throwbacks.

      
      
      
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        monknomo CNu • 2 days ago

        
        

        It varies by state, but even in backwater Alaska teachers have to take a couple credits of continuing education courses every year to maintain their credentials. The courses general cover new pedagogical methods and is not dissimilar from what lawyers and other professionals with a certificate do.

        
        
        

        
        
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          CNu monknomo • 2 days ago

          
          

          They seem to have missed that in Missouri http://dese.mo.gov/governmenta...

          
          
          
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            Sandy Young (Corkingiron) Mod CNu • 2 days ago

            
            

            None of what you've posted contradicts the comment you are responding to - nor does it support your generalization that teachers aren't motivated and often required to update their credentials.
            You are simply not arguing in good faith. Don't post again.

            
            
            
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        Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

        
        

        I'm not at all sure you know what your are talking about. I doubt that anyone has taught a quarter of a century without "updating" their pedagogical methods - at least not in any major school district. Teachers have been forced to cope with and adapt to curriculum changes. And I don't believe that their resistance is always because they are incompetent, but might be because they have experience that outside consultants and "reformers" don't value.

        
        
        
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          CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

          
          

          I've watched it first hand for five years now and have been absolutely shocked and appalled at the lack of professional development, the lack of self-motivated continuing education, and the profound lack of basic operational technology skills. Technology is now a primary content and curriculum delivery modality in the classroom, part and parcel of what you do to boost both individual and collaborative student engagement - but an overwhelming percentage of teachers are technology illiterate.
          Concrete examples; in the large urban district it's been my privilege to observe, we rolled out a new student information system. Fewer than 15% of teachers participated in mandatory training for the SIS - with the consequent failures of basic data entry in the non rocket science aspects of school business, i.e., entering attendance and issuing grades.
          So also for training in the use of the short-throw projector systems and blue-tooth pens and controls for using these systems to interactively display their lessons.
          Finally, the actual computer classes for children have suffered from a 9 year old pathetic excuse for a curriculum focused on "digital citizenship" rather than actual functional skills.
          On their own, the children tend to be exponentially more technology literate and technology aware than the adults purported to function as their instructors.

          
          
          
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            Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

            
            

            I don't believe that your experience with issues like short throw projectors comes close to supporting the suggestion that 2/3 or so of teachers are incompetent and should be terminated. Sorry. You come off like a wack job full of extreme opinions based on a pocket full of anecdotes.

            
            
            
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              CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

              
              

              lol, the writing on the wall has you petrified. That's a very good thing indeed!

lectures aren't just boring they're ineffective...,

sciencemag |  Are your lectures droning on? Change it up every 10 minutes with more active teaching techniques and more students will succeed, researchers say. A new study finds that undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active learning methods.

“Universities were founded in Western Europe in 1050 and lecturing has been the predominant form of teaching ever since,” says biologist Scott Freeman of the University of Washington, Seattle. But many scholars have challenged the “sage on a stage” approach to teaching science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses, arguing that engaging students with questions or group activities is more effective.

To weigh the evidence, Freeman and a group of colleagues analyzed 225 studies of undergraduate STEM teaching methods. The meta-analysis, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that teaching approaches that turned students into active participants rather than passive listeners reduced failure rates and boosted scores on exams by almost one-half a standard deviation. “The change in the failure rates is whopping,” Freeman says. And the exam improvement—about 6%—could, for example, “bump [a student’s] grades from a B– to a B.”

“This is a really important article—the impression I get is that it’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have this data,” says Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University who has campaigned against stale lecturing techniques for 27 years and was not involved in the work. “It’s good to see such a cohesive picture emerge from their meta-analysis—an abundance of proof that lecturing is outmoded, outdated, and inefficient.”

Although there is no single definition of active learning approaches, they include asking students to answer questions by using handheld clickers, calling on individuals or groups randomly, or having students clarify concepts to each other and reach a consensus on an issue.

Freeman says he’s started using such techniques even in large classes. “My introductory biology course has gotten up to 700 students,” he says. “For the ultimate class session—I don’t say lecture—I’m showing PowerPoint slides, but everything is a question and I use clickers and random calling. Somebody droning on for 15 minutes at a time and then doing cookbook labs isn’t interesting.” Freeman estimates that scaling up such active learning approaches could enable success for tens of thousands of students who might otherwise drop or fail STEM courses. Fist tap Dale.

genetic passports

vice | Are you scared of getting nuked? If you asked me that now, I'd say, “Not hugely.” But if you had asked me that when I was around ten, I would have been sobbing before you even finished the question. 

I don't know what kids are afraid of these days—if it's just kidnappers and internet pedophiles or they still think Al-Qaeda is going to blow up a middle school in Evansville for some reason. When I was a tyke in the early-90s, though, the big three were killer bees (hand at knee), drive-by shootings (hand at collarbone), and nuclear annihilation (hand way the fuck up here). Didn't matter that the Cold War was effectively over and all those hydrogen bombs, which had been trained at my head since birth, were still out there and possibly in less reputable hands than even the Russians. Besides, I had an entire back catalog of prime nuclear-proliferation cinema to learn my fate from. As soon as the NORAD computer would freeze up during chess and mutually assure the destruction of Omaha, my friends and I would see a flash brighter than a thousand suns, and those of us who weren't turned into disintegrating skeletons would swell up like Akira monsters and slosh like chili across the windshield of the first car that hit us. That's how we were going to go out. Provided, of course, we hadn't already died from AIDS. 

It didn't help learning that the actual results of a for-real nuclear explosion are way worse than Hollywood has the special effects to depict. A lot of mainstream accounts of Japan's bombings, like those in John Hersey's Hiroshima, sort of soft-pedal the body horror that acute radiation poisoning causes, but they are nevertheless full of preteen nightmare fodder. Melty-faced Jason Robards doesn't hold a candle to trying to guess what it feels like turning into a shadow, a permanent shadow, tattooed on the side of a building. 

Once you dig a little deeper, you realize the human shadows were the lucky ones.

peasant, your mission is to be a gunner on the lookout for threats from below...,

medialens | There are always convenient news-hooks on which corporate journalists can hang their power-friendly prejudices about the West being 'the good guys' in world affairs. Channel 4 News is not immune from this chauvinism. For example, Matt Frei introduced a report about last month's elections in Iraq with this propaganda bullet:

'Now, America once invaded Iraq so that, in large part, Iraqis could do what they did today – go to the polls.' (Channel 4 News, April 30, 2014)

Frei was, in fact, diligently reading out the first line of a blog piece by his colleague Jonathan Rugman, C4 News foreign affairs correspondent. The actual overriding reason for the West's war of aggression – strategic geopolitical dominance, including control of valuable hydrocarbon resources in the Middle East – was simply brushed aside. As ever, 'we' must be seen to be acting out of benign intent and pure desire to bring democracy to people around the globe. The reality is that 'we' must stifle other countries' independent development and, if required, bomb them into submission to Western state-corporate hegemony.

Frei acting as a mouthpiece to Rugman's bizarrely skewed perspective on the Iraq War was yet another case of sticking to the editorial line from the C4 News 'team you know and trust'. When we asked C4 News correspondent Alex Thomson whether he agreed with this particular editorial monstrosity from his team he ducked out:

'whoah - I'm surfing right now and staying well out of this one!'

To be fair to Thomson, that was his jovial way of not defending his colleagues. He knows we know, and we know he knows we know, where his sympathies lie on that one.

Whereas Thomson has enough savvy to see behind much US-UK government rhetoric, he is aware that he must rein in any expressed scepticism to hang on to his job. As a general rule, journalists in the public eye are constrained to direct scepticism in one direction only: towards the propaganda output of officially declared enemies.

Thus, BBC Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg was free to make this observation via Twitter:

'Dominating the Russian airwaves, Moscow's lexicon for the Ukraine conflict: "junta", "fascists", "Banderovtsy", "genocide", "extremists"'

That's fine. But when has Rosenberg, or any of his colleagues, ever highlighted how 'our' airwaves are dominated by 'London's lexicon' and 'Washington's lexicon'? Why is it the job of a supposedly impartial BBC journalist to expose 'Moscow's lexicon', but not that emanating from London or Washington? Rosenberg ignored us when we asked him those questions on Twitter.