#lubienski

[margalotta]

Franciszek Łubieński, Strój sieradzki,  ca.1912

[czarnika]

[mia-decorative]

Fork, from a dessert service, Meissen Porcelain Factory, c. 1775, Minneapolis Institute of Art: Decorative Arts, Textiles and Sculpture

Flatware dessert service, porcelain & vermeil in a leather box; hand painted Vermeille Set, comprising 12 forks, 12 knives, and 12 large spoons in original traveling leatrher box, with two trays. Porcelain was still a luxury object in the 18th century, and these pieces of porcelain-handled flatware show the ostentatious, if impractical, use of the material (also seen on the handle of a small sword on view in Gallery 340). Like the cup and saucer shown here, they were meant to show the high development of porcelain as a German industry. Part of a dessert service for twelve, they were, according to the donor, given as a diplomatic gift from the Queen of Saxony to Prince Wladislav Lubienski of Poland. After the Second World War, as the formation of the U.S.S.R. was in progress, the owners transferred the service to American Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane, whose widow gave the service, in its original leather traveling cases, to the MIA. Medium: Hard paste porcelain, gilt metal

https://collections.artsmia.org/art/18594/

[pufal]

"Książka o śmieciach" Stanisław Łubieńskihttps://przemyslawpufal.pl/ksiazka-o-smieciach-stanislaw-lubienski/  

[marcjampole]

Government privatization of services doesn’t only fail in the United States as experience of Great Britain is demonstrating

The New York Times is giving us new evidence that privatization of government services is a failed concept. The Times reports that Great Britain’s decades-old experiment with privatizing government services is failing. Privatized facilities for the elderly and the disabled have run into a slew of abuse charges in the recent past. Moreover, a report by the British government found that over the next 25 years schools could cost 40 percent more, and hospitals 70 percent more, if run by private firms instead of through the government. Sounds like a typical privatized American prison, which costs more to operate than the government facility it replaced.

Why anyone ever thought that privatization of government services would lower costs and improve quality is beyond comprehension. When the government does something, its chief concerns are quality of service and cost to taxpayers. But once a private company gets involved, another factor enters the decision-making process: profit, which in the private sector is primarily split between owners and senior management. That profit has to come from somewhere, and it does: from the total pool available for providing the service—from salaries, equipment, supplies, transportation and facilities. Whatever the money set aside to provide the services, the cut given to profit will diminish it.

But wait, privatizers say. The private sector will run things more efficiently.

But how? Through economies of scale, which assumes that many companies will have the purchasing power of the federal government or most states. For the most part, that’s just not true. And in those rare cases in which a large private sector business might have an edge in purchasing supplies or maximizing the productivity of equipment over a local government, that government can always band together with other municipalities to buy supplies or share technology and staff.

As it turns out, it’s not economies of scale on which privatizers depend, it’s cutting the costs of labor. Typically, virtually all employees of privatized government services receive lower compensation than their government paid government. Why? Because privatized employees generally aren’t in unions, while government employees are often unionized. So what, you might ask? Who cares how an organization splits the pie, as long as the service is provided at a high level of quality and costs taxpayers as little as it has to. There are unfortunately two flies in this ointment: 1) Paying lower salaries will attract less qualified employees; 2) Cutting the salaries of large numbers of people—unionized or not—drives down the entire wage scale of an economy, which leads to all the problems that inequality of wealth brings, including an increase in asset bubbles and recessions, a decrease in the possibility of individuals moving up the income ladder and anti-democratic distortions to the political system.

(The exception to the rule that a privatized worker will make less than a government worker is the military, for which privatization brings on other problems such as a lack of loyalty of the mercenary to the values of the U.S. armed forces and pressure by privatizing lobbies to instigate or continue wars so that the profit train keeps running.)

But wait, privatizers say. The private sector is more likely to innovate and those innovations will lead to higher quality and lower costs. That’s not the way it has worked out in real life. In fact, when researchers Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski ran the numbers, they found that one of the major reasons public schools outperform private schools (when adjusted for poverty and disabilities) is that public schools are more innovative, introducing new teaching techniques and technology than private schools. (The other reason, FYI, is because public school teachers are more experienced and participate in more continuing education classes than private school teachers. Makes sense, since paying more attracts better employees—that’s the American way!—and if private schools can cut teacher professional development, they can produce more profit.) No one has found any innovations at private prisons, except perhaps in the area of information technology which would occur at the governmental level, too. The privatized section of the armed forces has access to all the advanced technology they want—all developed by the U.S. military!

But wait, privatizers say. Privatization ends the special interest group politics surrounding government programs. That assertion is also belied by the facts. What happens in the real world is that the industry offering the privatized services becomes another special interest that finances and influences politicians. Teachers’ unions lobby for higher salaries and smaller classes, both of which lead to better outcomes for students especially in the elementary school years, at least according to the research. The prison industry lobbies for longer prison sentences, high bails and round-ups of undocumented immigrants, all to fill their jails. The defense industries lobby for higher military budgets and more military excursions. For those dear readers who don’t see the painfully obvious difference, let me explain: what the teachers want helps society; what private prisons and military contractors want does not.

But wait, privatizers say. The private sector always does it better than government by definition. Now that’s just a lie, as a landfill’s worth of evidence demonstrates. All we have to do is compare the cost and outcomes from the American system of healthcare insurance and delivery to those of every other western democracy, all of which have one form or another of single-payer healthcare. We rate first in costs and close to last in infant mortality and life expectancy. BTW, some nationalized healthcare systems like Germany’s do find a place for private, highly regulated health insurance companies. Not surprisingly, the most nationalized part of the American system—Medicare, Medicaid, the Veteran’s Administration before Bush II and Republicans gutted its budget—do the best job on costs and quality.

Is it possible that government control or ownership works best for the delivery of all goods and services? Based on the evidence of the Soviet Union and its satellites, it would be hard to make that assertion.

On the other hand, it seems that many types of industries seem suited to government control—certainly education, prisons, the military and probably healthcare. One key similarity of these enterprises is that they require large numbers of people who interact intimately with those served. While a telecommunications company or a solar panel manufacturer may require thousands of employees, technology, facilities and equipment are at least as important to the business as people. A phone company sells phone service using phones over landlines or on wireless frequencies. A school may use computers and science labs, but it sells teachers and teaching. A military sells armed forces (although modern warfare has increased the military’s dependence on capital goods more).

Another similarity of the industries that have seen disastrous results in privatization (or in the case of education, merely mediocre results) is that they all involve the entire public and the public good. No society since about 1850 can survive without universal education and literacy. Everyone needs healthcare. We build prisons and maintain armies to protect everyone. One can make a case that everyone needs electrical, telephone, water and natural gas service, too. Evidence is mixed as to whether government or the public sector most efficiently delivers these capital-intensive utilities, but we do know that when privatized they always require a lot of regulation to make sure that everyone has cheap, ubiquitous and reliable access to them.

A final similarity I see in the industries for which past experience demonstrates that government control beats privatization is that they are either mature industries, meaning that the market will not increase for their services except through population growth; or industries that it is the public interest not to grow. We are certainly better off when we have less need for prisons and the military.

I suspect that a whole lot of industries would be better off if they were nationalized. Of course I do, I’m a democratic socialist. But the experience in the United States and elsewhere else suggests that even the most extreme free-market conservative should see the benefit of centralized public education, prisons, healthcare, military, mass transit, roads and other services that governments routinely provide in most western nations. Except, of course, those right-wingers who hope to profit from privatization; or do not believe that rich folk should be taxed so that everyone can enjoy the service in question, e.g., affordable and high quality education and health care, and hope to use privatization as a Trojan horse to achieve that end.

[audioverseawards]

The Audio Verse Awards Nominee Showcase Podcast - 2019 Showcase: Astral Queen

Hello! Sarah Golding here - Astral Queen dialogue editor and voice actor as Captain Kelly and the AI Computer in this one off script - a winner of the first ADPP Script writing competition by the amazing Paul Spencer. This was edited and sound designed by Eli McIlveen with original music by Tom Rory Parsons and guest appearances from Mark Lubienski Steel and Graham Rowat. Love a northern accent me. Find out what happens when a space cruise ship Captain finds out that its’ AI has mysteriously jettisoned all of its passengers, and the ship is heading bow first towards a crash land on a distant planet.... Enjoy. And do check out the other gazillion ADPP winners made by amazing audio drama royalty involving a myriad of recognisable AD names on the Audio Drama Network Spreaker site. And also if you wanna voice act pls listen to MADIVA podcast and look out in the audio drama hub fb page for more Audio Drama Hub Virtual Pub sessions to learn from those making it about the craft of Audiodrama! Thank you so much for listening ya Legends!

[gmmkindi]

On Goalpost Moving – by Patrick J. Wolf

On Goalpost Moving – by Patrick J. Wolf

The Friedmans, with friend, heading to Milton’s 90th birthday party.

The Miami Herald recently re-published an op-ed originally appearing in The Conversation. In the essay, education professors Christopher Lubienski and Joel Malin wonder why states keep adopting and expanding private school choice programs when such initiatives, in their view, have failed. Their answer essentially is that school…

[sallysklar]

Living in Dialogue: Race and Class Segregation Encouraged by Charter and Voucher Echo Chamber

Living in Dialogue: Race and Class Segregation Encouraged by Charter and Voucher Echo Chamber

Because I have been asked to comment on problems facing public schools in the United States, I would like to begin by saying that there are a great many things right with public education. Two friends, Ellen Allensworth, Director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, and Chris Lubienski, professor of education policy at Indiana University, tell me that public sector innovation in the classroom in Chicago and beyond surpasses much, if not most, of the innovation that we see in the charter and independent sectors in the United States. The problem is that willingness to innovate and implementation of innovation in public schools is largely unreported in corporate media.

With this in mind, I would say that the single largest factor facing public education today is inadequate funding in rural areas, inner cities and inner-ring suburbs. We still face a situation in this country with what Jonathan Kozol once called Savage Inequalities that are made worse by increasing income inequality, structural unemployment, and persistent segregation. Black, brown, and white families are facing what Thomas Shapiro calls “toxic Inequality” that makes it almost impossible for poor families to gain any measure of financial stability.

Richard Rothstein of the Institute for Policy Studies has recently written a book, The Color of Law, that argues that public policy created segregation and that segregation is most responsible for underfunded schools and the “hyper-poverty” that education reformers are attempting to target.

I part ways with many policy makers when they advocate for charters, vouchers, and an end to neighborhood schools. Like John Dewey, I believe that schools should serve as community centers and that public schools have an important in role in the construction of strong community institutions beyond buildings.

In my view, many of those who support public education reform have good intentions, but mixed motives. I tend to agree with the McArthur Award winning New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones who said that

White communities want neighborhood schools if their neighborhood school is white. If their neighborhood school is black, they want choice. We have a system where white people control the outcomes, and the outcome that most white Americans want is segregation.

Every statistical study done about test scores in the United States for the last fifty years points to one fact: the biggest gains in test scores in the United States were achieved in the mid 1970s when schools reached their zenith of integration. We have gone back toward racial and class segregation since, and the charter and voucher movements are merely accelerating the pace of segregation in the opinion of awide consensus of policy experts.

Our current problem is that these simple facts are rejected by the billionaires like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Ken Griffin, the Kochs, and the Waltons who push charters and vouchers to gain market share in a thirteen billion dollar a year industry. Philanthropy is a tool to open markets. The Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations are filled with market zealots who seek to disrupt public education to sell product, gentrify inner-city neighborhoods, and make their bosses look better.

These same billionaires contribute heavily to university education departments that rubber stamp their ideas. The Gates foundation heavily subsidizes education research at Harvard University and the Walton Foundation has deep pockets for education research at the University of Arkansas.

In one recent case Citadel Capital Management founder Ken Griffin succeeded in getting his ideas about education into print in the form of a book published by the chairman of the University of Chicago Economics Department. After the book was published, the University’s Booth School of Business received a gift of $125 million. The book, coauthored by John List, simply regurgitates much of what Milton Friedman and Gary Becker have to say about education and a free market. In two chapters (“How Can Poor Kids Catch Rich Kids in Just Months?” and “What Seven Words Can End Discrimination?”) of The Why Axis, dismiss an ocean historical and sociological literature on segregation to embrace a bonus pay plan that may or may not have succeeded in Chicago Heights, Illinois.

Peer reviewed history and sociology mean absolutely nothing in the creation of education propaganda from the free market school of education. The de jure history of segregation that requires legal remedy is replace by a simple graph or two and the expert word of a billionaire who has made a great deal of money. Rather than deal with deep rooted historical problems, billionaires seek band-aid fixes that they can profit from in the near term through investment in education privatization. It is as easy as “win-win.”

This is precisely how the free market education reform movement operates: forget an ocean of peer-viewed research, funnel large sums of money into big name universities, and billionaires can give voice to their own half-baked ideas with the stamp of approval from major academic brands.

Multiply this by control of major editorial boards, the noise created by Foundation created PR firms, and the AstroTurf funding of such groups and Democrats for Education Reform, and the echo chamber drowns out most of the peer reviewed research.

It does not hurt that these same billionaires can hate on our Education Secretary in public, but cheer her every move in private.

Billionaires are practicing a bait and switch. Their narrative about the decline of public education is repeated in most major newspaper and network outlets on cue. But public schools are out innovating them in the trenches and this innovation is seldom reported.

Many public-school teachers live in neighborhoods that are historically segregated and they understand that “free market” band aide approaches that make money for investors and gentrifiers work to deepen segregation: their solutions simply move segregation to other inner-city areas, inner ring suburbs, and “selective enrollment” schools that segregate on test scores and therefore on class.

Only policies that decrease segregation will create a more equitable school system; public policies must target de jure segregation and more resources need to be committed to all public schools.

The billionaires can easily buy academic credibility and the broader public has difficulty determining who more accurately represents the reality of schools and schooling. Billionaires seek to create a dual school system, but charters and vouchers resegregate students in violation of their civil rights and drain underserved public schools of resources needed to operate libraries, and special education, art and physical education programs.

Only a unified grassroots effort of parents, students, teachers, responsible public servants, and credible academics can push the truth into broader public discourse.

elaine January 26, 2018

Source

Living in Dialogue

Living in Dialogue: Race and Class Segregation Encouraged by Charter and Voucher Echo Chamber published first on https://buyessayscheapservice.tumblr.com/

[gazetawyborcza]

Maks Łubieński i Michał Walczak z Pożaru w Burdelu: Podobnie jak prezes idziemy po media - planujemy nakręcenie serialu o współczesnej konspiracji. Trzy, cztery lata temu nasi bohaterowie mieli problem z kredytem frankowym i rowerami Veturilo. Dziś zajmują się trójpodziałem władzy. Z Michałem Walczakiem i Maksem Łubieńskim, twórcami i autorami kabaretu Pożar w Burdelu rozmawia Agnieszka Kublik. W teatrze dziedziczenie traum dobrze się opowiada romantyczną groteską. Nagłym przerwaniem realistycznej ciągłości, pojawieniem się ducha, sobowtóra, wampira. Uwielbiamy skrajności, napady lęku lub euforii, odmienne stany świadomości, gwałtowne zwycięstwa i straszliwe katastrofy. Nudzą nas pozytywistyczne mity o tworzeniu zespołów, kompromisach, okrągłych stołach, ekonomii i „orlikach”. Nie dziwmy się, że młodzi chodzą w koszulkach z „wyklętymi”, skoro nie ma serialu o tworzeniu KOR-u, filmu fabularnego o Adamie Michniku czy musicalu o Lechu Wałęsie. Polak najpiękniejszy oklejony bandażami, krwawiący. Rozmowę czytaj w Magazynie Świątecznym: wybr.cz/pozar Fot. Adam Stępień #AgencjaGazeta #magazynswiateczny #pozarwburdelu #teatr #smiech #zart #komedia #walczak #lubienski

[danielshar]

First Feature Film - Update #10

It’s been approximately 3 months since I’ve posted an update (all previous entries HERE), and exactly 1 year to the day (January 9th) since we technically started production (I still believe the 9th barely counted, as explained in Update #2). Three parenthetical asides with two semi-redundant links in the first sentence alone? What other special treats are in this post? Stick around and find out, my friends!

Since my last update, I’ve received a few chunks of the original score from renaissance man Mike Malarkey, and he is crushing it so far, as usual. Sound editing and color correction are also under way, which is exciting.

A few months ago, I started working with another awesome multi-talent named Eden Ames, who has been a huge help in figuring out our promotion plan for whenever we know when and how we’re releasing this movie. We’ve both spent a significant amount of time going through all of the videos and photos that were taken behind the scenes, and I think we’ve got a pretty good grasp on how best to utilize it all (more on that in a moment).

Our machine of an editor, Matt Kitchen, also cut together 5 bonus scenes from the hour of guided improvisation we ended the shoot with (which I detailed a bit in Update #5). I’m so pumped to eventually roll those extra clips out so that you all can see how much fun this cast had when I wasn’t making them do sad scenes.

We’re still tweaking the trailer to try to find the perfect balance of providing context without giving away too much. I have a whole new level of respect for people who excel at making trailers. It is absolutely an art-form in and of itself.

SPECIAL TREAT ALERT! If you want to be among the first to see the trailer (and perhaps some of those aforementioned bonus materials), please email us at scrapsmovieofficial@gmail.com and you’ll be added to our mailing list. We promise to only contact you when we have something we’re pretty sure you’ll like, so, hopefully, you won’t regret signing up.

EVEN MORE SPECIAL TREAT ALERT! For now, for all of you, in honor of the fact that we began production one year ago today, here are 10 never-before-posted behind the scenes photos from the set of SCRAPS (with plenty more to come in the future, so be sure to get on that mailing list)!

photo by Thomas Kelly

photo by Thomas Kelly

photo by Ella Lubienski

photo by Thomas Kelly

photo by Bill Stern

photo by Thomas Kelly

photo by Sarah Ashley

photo by Thomas Kelly

photo by Thomas Kelly

photo by Thomas Kelly

[addictinginfo]

NYC Charter Schools Getting Scary Wake Up Call From New Mayor (VIDEO)

Charter schools in New York are getting ready to wage war with the mayor over their lack of rent…

View Post

[pufal]

Stanisław Łubieński tym razem o śmieciach:"Książka o śmieciach"➡ https://taniaksiazka.info.pl/ksiazka-o-smieciach-stanislaw-lubienski/  

[marcjampole]

Want to improve your children’s chance of academic success? Research says send them to public schools

I’m not sure whether it was the author or the headline writer, but someone in the New York Times produced a headline that certainly constitutes false news: “Dismal Results from Vouchers Surprise Researchers.” The problem with it is that those researchers who have been paying attention already know that public policy driving families to put their children into private schools will achieve dismal results. Objective researchers in the pursuit of knowledge aren’t, or shouldn’t be surprised that kids using vouchers to attend private schools experience declines in academic performance. Perhaps Kevin Carey, who wrote the article, or the unknown specialist who composed the headline, meant to say that it surprised right-wing policy wonks and political pundits, who for the better part of a quarter of a century have been pushing vouchers, charter and private schools as a means to destroy teachers’ unions and produce new income streams for businesses.

Certainly Carey, who directs the education policy program for the ostensibly non-partisan think tank New America, must have read The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, a 2013 study by Sarah Theule Lubienski and Christopher A. Lubienski that demonstrates without a doubt that public schools outperform private schools when we correct raw data to account for wealth, per student spending, disabilities and other factors. I wouldn’t expect the Times headline writer to know of this important book, as a Google search at the time it came but revealed just one review in the mainstream media. The media doesn’t like to review books that disprove the current political nonsense, whatever it is.  

Using two recently generated large-scale national databases, the Lubienskis show that demographic factors such as wealth and disabilities explain any advantage seen in private school performance in the 21st century. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better at educating children but because their students come mostly from wealthy backgrounds. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis demonstrate conclusively that gains in student achievement at public schools are great and greater than those made at private ones. The Lubienskis take on the critics of real educational reform, the politicians and other factotums of the rich who don’t want to do anything that requires greater spending on students, such as teacher certification programs and curriculum and instruction advances. The Lubienskis show that these reforms do work. 

The latest research reported by Carey in his Times article concerns the results on standardized tests of students who have used voucher programs to enroll in private schools. Vouchers, which right-wingers and Republicans have been pushing for years, give money earmarked for public education to families, which they pay to private schools to educate their children. The never-proved principle underlying vouchers, first proposed by right-wing economic mountebank Milton Friedman, is that giving parents choice will improve public education by forcing it to compete with other schools. 

Over the past few years, Republican legislatures have implemented widespread voucher programs in a number of states such as Indiana, Louisiana and Ohio. As Carey reports, vouchers have largely failed to improve school performance, and in fact, have harmed the performance of many children:

·         Indiana children who transferred to private schools using vouchers “experienced significant losses in achievement” in math and saw no improvement in reading.

·         Children, primarily poor and black, who used vouchers to switch to private schools in Louisiana, achieved negative results in both reading and math; elementary school children who started at the 50th percentile in math and then transferred via voucher to a private school dropped to 26th percentile in one year.

·         A study financed by the right-wing, anti-union Walton family and conducted by a conservative think tank found that Ohio students using vouchers to attend private schools fared much worse when compared to their peers in public school, especially in math.

·         It turns out that the best charter schools, another variation on school choice liked by the right wing, are those that are nonprofit public schools open to everyone and accountable to public authorities. The more “private” a charter school, the worse its student perform.

 There could be many explanations for the lousy performance voucher students in private schools achieved compared to public schools, but I think it comes down to the simple fact that the teachers tend to be more experienced, more educated and more professional in public schools. Why is that? Because they are better paid. 

 In the real world, the best get paid the most. The best lawyers tend to make the most money. The best accountants tend to make the most money. The best writers—business and entertainment—tend to make the most money. The best musicians tend to make the most money. Forget the obscene fact that Beyoncé makes about 200 times what the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic and the masterful jazz pianist Orrin Evans do. They both do quite well when compared to the average piano teacher who gives lessons at the Jewish Community Center or YMCA. 

 Public school teachers make more money than private school teachers. Doesn’t it make sense that they would therefore do a better job and that public schools would therefore do better in quantitative comparisons?  I know that there are some very competent and dedicated private school teachers, but in general, how could the aggregate of private school teachers keep up with public school teachers, who make so much more money?

 The reason that public school teachers make more money is one of the primary reasons right-wingers want to dismantle public schools: unions. Right-wingers hate unions because they force employers to pay better wages to employees, leaving less profit for the company’s owners and operators. In unionized workplaces, employees make a far larger share of the pie than in nonunionized ones. Thus by leaving public schools and going into private ones, children leave an environment in which their teachers are highly paid but administrators make less than they would in the private sector for an environment in which teachers are paid less and administrators more, and if the school is for-profit, money is siphoned off as profit for investors. By definition, less money is spent on education in private schools.  That is, unless the tuition is so high that the voucher covers only a small part of it, in which case the voucher is merely a subsidy to the wealthy, who likely would have sent their children to the chichi expensive private school no matter what.

 The reason companies bust unions is greed. Greed also plays a major role in the insistence against all facts and reasoning that school choice will solve every educational challenge. Choice is the preferred answer because it doesn’t involve spending more money and raising taxes.  In fact, over time, vouchers can be used to cut educational budgets if the stipulated voucher amounts do not keep up with inflation. 

 Despite the fact that taxes on the wealthy are still at an historic low for a western industrial democracy, rich folk and their political and policy factotums do not want to raise the taxes needed to create an educational system that works for everyone. Here are some of the things that we could do with added tax revenues earmarked to public education:

·        Smaller classroom sizes for elementary and middle school children.

·        Computers for every student in every class.

·        A return to the days of art, music and other enrichment programs.

·        New textbooks that reflect the latest findings in science and social science.

·        More special programs for both the disabled and the gifted and talented.

·         True school choice, which involves vocational programs in the technology, hospitality and healthcare industries for high school students.

 Keeping their taxes low and busting unions are not the only reasons well-heeled ultra conservatives advocate for vouchers. Some, like our current Secretary of Education, hope to profit by investing in for-profit schools. Others, and again Secretary DeVos is among them, want to use public funds to finance the teaching of religion in private religious schools. Perhaps not ironically, moral education of the masses and suppression of unions seem always to go hand-in-hand since the industrial revolution of the 19th century. In this sense, religion is a form of social control and a social solvent that dissolves the perception of class differences.

 Thus, when you hear Trumpty-Dumpty, DeVos and other supporters of voucher programs for education spout their pious homilies, remember that they have absolutely no interest in providing our children with a high-quality education that prepares for a meaningful life and rewarding career. Nor are they dedicated to a higher principle they call freedom that trumps all other concerns in a free society. Remember, there are all kinds of freedoms, such as freedom from hunger, from ignorance, from illness, from pain. Be it education or healthcare, when they cry freedom, they only mean freedom of choice or freedom to make money unencumbered by social concerns.

 No, it’s neither an interest in America’s children nor dedication to principle that motivates the rich folk behind the school choice movement. It’s simple greed.

[sallysklar]

Living in Dialogue: Race and Class Segregation Encouraged by Charter and Voucher Echo Chamber

Living in Dialogue: Race and Class Segregation Encouraged by Charter and Voucher Echo Chamber

Because I have been asked to comment on problems facing public schools in the United States, I would like to begin by saying that there are a great many things right with public education. Two friends, Ellen Allensworth, Director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, and Chris Lubienski, professor of education policy at Indiana University, tell me that public sector innovation in the classroom in Chicago and beyond surpasses much, if not most, of the innovation that we see in the charter and independent sectors in the United States. The problem is that willingness to innovate and implementation of innovation in public schools is largely unreported in corporate media.

With this in mind, I would say that the single largest factor facing public education today is inadequate funding in rural areas, inner cities and inner-ring suburbs. We still face a situation in this country with what Jonathan Kozol once called Savage Inequalities that are made worse by increasing income inequality, structural unemployment, and persistent segregation. Black, brown, and white families are facing what Thomas Shapiro calls “toxic Inequality” that makes it almost impossible for poor families to gain any measure of financial stability.

Richard Rothstein of the Institute for Policy Studies has recently written a book, The Color of Law, that argues that public policy created segregation and that segregation is most responsible for underfunded schools and the “hyper-poverty” that education reformers are attempting to target.

I part ways with many policy makers when they advocate for charters, vouchers, and an end to neighborhood schools. Like John Dewey, I believe that schools should serve as community centers and that public schools have an important in role in the construction of strong community institutions beyond buildings.

In my view, many of those who support public education reform have good intentions, but mixed motives. I tend to agree with the McArthur Award winning New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones who said that

White communities want neighborhood schools if their neighborhood school is white. If their neighborhood school is black, they want choice. We have a system where white people control the outcomes, and the outcome that most white Americans want is segregation.

Every statistical study done about test scores in the United States for the last fifty years points to one fact: the biggest gains in test scores in the United States were achieved in the mid 1970s when schools reached their zenith of integration. We have gone back toward racial and class segregation since, and the charter and voucher movements are merely accelerating the pace of segregation in the opinion of awide consensus of policy experts.

Our current problem is that these simple facts are rejected by the billionaires like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Ken Griffin, the Kochs, and the Waltons who push charters and vouchers to gain market share in a thirteen billion dollar a year industry. Philanthropy is a tool to open markets. The Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations are filled with market zealots who seek to disrupt public education to sell product, gentrify inner-city neighborhoods, and make their bosses look better.

These same billionaires contribute heavily to university education departments that rubber stamp their ideas. The Gates foundation heavily subsidizes education research at Harvard University and the Walton Foundation has deep pockets for education research at the University of Arkansas.

In one recent case Citadel Capital Management founder Ken Griffin succeeded in getting his ideas about education into print in the form of a book published by the chairman of the University of Chicago Economics Department. After the book was published, the University’s Booth School of Business received a gift of $125 million. The book, coauthored by John List, simply regurgitates much of what Milton Friedman and Gary Becker have to say about education and a free market. In two chapters (“How Can Poor Kids Catch Rich Kids in Just Months?” and “What Seven Words Can End Discrimination?”) of The Why Axis, dismiss an ocean historical and sociological literature on segregation to embrace a bonus pay plan that may or may not have succeeded in Chicago Heights, Illinois.

Peer reviewed history and sociology mean absolutely nothing in the creation of education propaganda from the free market school of education. The de jure history of segregation that requires legal remedy is replace by a simple graph or two and the expert word of a billionaire who has made a great deal of money. Rather than deal with deep rooted historical problems, billionaires seek band-aid fixes that they can profit from in the near term through investment in education privatization. It is as easy as “win-win.”

This is precisely how the free market education reform movement operates: forget an ocean of peer-viewed research, funnel large sums of money into big name universities, and billionaires can give voice to their own half-baked ideas with the stamp of approval from major academic brands.

Multiply this by control of major editorial boards, the noise created by Foundation created PR firms, and the AstroTurf funding of such groups and Democrats for Education Reform, and the echo chamber drowns out most of the peer reviewed research.

It does not hurt that these same billionaires can hate on our Education Secretary in public, but cheer her every move in private.

Billionaires are practicing a bait and switch. Their narrative about the decline of public education is repeated in most major newspaper and network outlets on cue. But public schools are out innovating them in the trenches and this innovation is seldom reported.

Many public-school teachers live in neighborhoods that are historically segregated and they understand that “free market” band aide approaches that make money for investors and gentrifiers work to deepen segregation: their solutions simply move segregation to other inner-city areas, inner ring suburbs, and “selective enrollment” schools that segregate on test scores and therefore on class.

Only policies that decrease segregation will create a more equitable school system; public policies must target de jure segregation and more resources need to be committed to all public schools.

The billionaires can easily buy academic credibility and the broader public has difficulty determining who more accurately represents the reality of schools and schooling. Billionaires seek to create a dual school system, but charters and vouchers resegregate students in violation of their civil rights and drain underserved public schools of resources needed to operate libraries, and special education, art and physical education programs.

Only a unified grassroots effort of parents, students, teachers, responsible public servants, and credible academics can push the truth into broader public discourse.

elaine January 26, 2018

Source

Living in Dialogue

Living in Dialogue: Race and Class Segregation Encouraged by Charter and Voucher Echo Chamber published first on https://buyessayscheapservice.tumblr.com/

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Nagroda Literacka NIKE 2017 dla Cezarego Łazarewicza za książkę " Żeby nie było śladów" http://taniaksiazka.info.pl/zeby-nie-bylo-sladow-cezary-lazarewicz/ a od czytelników dla książki: Dwanaście srok za ogon Stanisława Łubieńskiego http://taniaksiazka.info.pl/dwanascie-srok-ogon-stanislaw-lubienski/