Mister Journalism: "Reading, Sharing, Discussing, Learning"
"Dedicated to the premise that no matter what 'experts' say, trends in Education really are fleeting; and that the ONLY goal of all school employees should be to work with parents to help their students become better people in June than they were in September."
| by Nancy Bailey |
No one can deny the importance of early learning. We have years of research by developmental psychologists and early childhood education researchers built on findings to help us understand how preschoolers learn. We need to fund adequate preschools so students get a good introduction to the joy of formal learning. Researchers have known for some […]
A Spring Update4/16/2019 
I had so many pictures, it made sense to just put them into a slide show – check it out at the bottom of this post!
I was thinking it would be fun to write a post about how busy the springtime is – that was two weeks ago! As I thought about what I wanted to write, it was important to me that a post about busy-ness didn’t sound like a post that was complaining. Being busy with farm chores is a different kind of busy than the rest of my life. Sure the work never ends, but there is rarely a rush to complete things. The goal is to complete as much as you can squeeze in until you lose daylight, then go to bed, and start again the next day. So often my work life is the other kind of busy. It’s the kind of busy that’s rushed. As a teacher I am constantly gauging what needs to be covered and by when. I am frequently eyeing the clock, do I have enough time to get through everything today? There are emails to respond to and forms to fill out and these need to be done, usually, within a day or two. There are meetings to attend as well. And grading – there’s always grading. The busy I feel at work is similar to the farm – more to do than I can accomplish in one day – but the urgency is different. It’s more emotionally draining. Farm work is a steady busy. Additionally, farm work can be prioritized, while at work, it often seems that everything must be done now. As long as everyone gets fed and watered, I can consider farm work “done” for one day. Work life, as you all know, can rarely be boiled down to just the basics. And farm work is therapeutic. I can see the results of my labor and I fall into bed with a feeling of clear accomplishment. Anyway, here are the tasks at hand this spring… READ-SHARE-DISCUSS-LEARN more here –
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Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. (Martha Stewart)
In late March 2019, The Associated Press announced it was offering new guidance on writing about race and racism. It now directs journalists to avoid using “racially charged, racially divisive, racially tinged or similar terms as euphemisms for racist or racism when the latter terms are truly applicable.” The AP also stresses that as newsrooms assess whether a statement or act meets the definition of racism, their assessment “need not involve examining the motivation of the person who spoke or acted, which is a separate issue that may not be related to how the statement or action itself can be characterized.”
The AP stopped short, however, of offering specific suggestions for how to characterize certain types of comments, policies and actions.
To offer additional insights, Journalist’s Resource sought help from one of the nation’s leading scholars on race and history, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
READ SHARE DISCUSS LEARN MORE HERE – https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/race-society/covering-racism-khalil-gibran-muhammad
Pick a huge company out of a hat and it wouldn’t be surprising to find that the pay gap between the CEO and the average worker has been widening for decades.
But it’s actually average employee earnings across firms — not within them — that accounts for most of the rise in earnings inequality in the U.S. from 1981 to 2013, according to research in The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
READ SHARE DISCUSS LEARN more here – https://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/firming-up-inequality/
Celebration of abolition in Washington, D.C. in April 19, 1866. Source: Library of Congress
On April 16, 1862, the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act became law.
Pause for a minute to consider how much compensation would have been offered to the people who suffered torture and other human rights abuses and whose labor and families were stolen for generations. The answer is zero.
The federal government compensated the “owners” of enslaved people for their “loss of property.” The people who were freed were not compensated, nor given any assistance for the transition to their new found freedom.
Emancipation Day is a city holiday in Washington, D.C.
#TeachReconstruction #Reparations
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/compensated-emancipation-act/
The Network for Public Education published its scathing report on the federal Charter Schools Program three weeks ago, but as time passes, I continue to reflect on its conclusions. The report, Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride, is packed with details about failed or closed or never-opened charter schools. The Network for Public Education depicts a program driven by neoliberal politicians hoping to spark innovation in a marketplace of unregulated startups underwritten by the federal government. The record of this 25 year federal program is dismal.
Here is what the Network for Public Education’s report shows us. The federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) has awarded $4 billion federal tax dollars to start or expand charter schools across 44 states and the District of Columbia, and has provided some of the funding for 40 percent of all the…
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Editor’s Note: The original essay below, by New Atlantis contributing editor Matthew B. Crawford, was published in 2006. Mr. Crawford has expanded the essay into a bestselling book — Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work — published in 2009 by Penguin. To read excerpts from and reviews of the book, and to see interviews with Mr. Crawford, click here.
Anyone in the market for a good used machine tool should talk to Noel Dempsey, a dealer in Richmond, Virginia. Noel’s bustling warehouse is full of metal lathes, milling machines, and table saws, and it turns out that most of it is from schools. EBay is awash in such equipment, also from schools. It appears shop class is becoming a thing of the past, as educators prepare students to become “knowledge workers.”
At the same time, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards. By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods. It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.
A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.
So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor:
READ-SHARE-DISCUSS-LEARN MORE HERE – https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft
Stuff That Needs To Be Said
My thoughts on public education and other things
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Elected school boards are the bedrock of American democracy.
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an indie author writing to stay sane
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Attacks on our public education system hurt America
Independent Thought for an Independent World
"That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children.... is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination.... It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose... tied to one another by a common bond." —Senator Paul Wellstone --- March 31, 2000
Speaking My MInd
Mister Journalism: "Reading, Sharing, Discussing, Learning" 