The other day, I was riding with my husband, who is a pretty good driver. On this day, he maneuvered a busy intersection with his usual aplomb, and out from behind some trees appeared a pedestrian, a young woman, totally self-absorbed, looking down, her ear phones snugly attached. My husband, swerved in the right direction […]
K-12 Mega-Merger: What Strange World Is This? Teachers Want Lowered Class Sizes!
Teaching children can be a beautiful thing. But there are so many needs right now due to years of inadequate funding and mismanagement. One solution to many problems is lowering class sizes. But read this article about a K-12 Mega-Merger and it’s easy to see that lowering class size is only on the minds of […]
The School Safety Commission’s Troubling Ties to the Border Crisis
School safety is simmering in everyone’s minds during summer vacation. But looking at the individuals on the Federal Commission on School Safety should give us pause. How do they view children? There’s cognitive dissonance when they say they want safe schools, yet they thought it fine to separate babies and children from their parents in the […]
Without Professional Teachers, Special Education is a Joke!
How do school districts bypass special education services and get away with it? One way, is to make it look like special education services are being restored, but due to a teacher shortage, the district must rely on teachers without classroom experience. Special education, all teaching really, but special education, especially, demands teaching qualifications. To […]
The Ridiculous Ways Adults Ruin Recess
Recess for children is such a simple concept that some adults don’t know how to deal with it. Edutopia is talking about a “right way” to do recess in order to “optimize” it. This stems from a report that is supposed to “help” with recess. They want to manipulate how children play and how we […]
Gates’s Blunders Destroy Teachers and Public Schools!
In a democracy, all powerful institutions that affect our lives need vigilant oversight. ~David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age (p. 304) As grills get fired-up for the 4th of July, dark clouds hang over the country. Here’s one. We learned through a RAND report, that the Bill & […]
Betsy DeVos Conquers the World: The Global Education Reform Movement (GERM)
Education in almost every country in the world is subject to the grip of education ‘reform’ which is diminishing public schooling, promoting privatisation and destroying teacher professionalism. It aims to produce a narrowly educated workforce, which can read instructions and advertisements but is discouraged from thinking critically about the world. ~UK’s National Education Union Betsy […]
Schools, and a Country’s Children: Remembering a Gentler (Not Perfect) Past
This is our land. These are our children. We’re all in it together. ~Brochure for the Van Buren Intermediate School District, Project NOMAD (Needs and Objectives for Migrant Advancement and Development), 1972 and 1973. In the early seventies, as a young college student, I became an aide for two summers, in the Michigan Migrant Education […]
Why Merging DOE with DOL is Wrong! Education is for Children, NOT Corporations
Moms and Dads, when you looked into your newborn’s eyes for the first time, did you think, I wonder what job our government will steer our baby into? A merger of the Department of Education (DOE) with the Department of Labor (DOL) is about just that. Here’s a quote from this administration’s manual called “Delivering […]
For Dads Who Care and Protect Children
There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children. ~Nelson Mandela, Former President of South Africa Fathers who are protectors of children. Today is your day. Today, I am thinking about fathers who help their sons and daughters in school, and fathers who flee a […]