DC City Council Budget Hearing on Human Services

DC City Council Budget Hearing on Human Services – Child Care Testimony – March 1, 2012

Message to Mayor Gray and City Council

Youth Speak Out About Budget Cuts & Youth Incarceration

Video shot and edited by Grace Ebiasah of the DC-based nonprofit Different Avenues. Grace asks youth how they feel about Congress’ decision to spend more money to lock up youth while drastically cutting programs that actually help youth.

Obama’s, Congress’s, and City Council’s war on DC’s poor

Class size

How can Atrios be so blind. He taught at the university level, which is completely different from K-12.

Yglesias to spouting the latest nonsense from the education deform gang, that hiring good teachers is more important than class size.

How are you going to attract quality teachers if you expect them to deal with a class of 40 seventh graders?

You know how to recognize a public policy scam? When the person is advocating a policy that they don’t plan to live with. Yglesias did not go to public schools, does not teach in them, does not plan to send his children to them, he is advocating policies that other people’s children will have to live with.

What I don’t understand is why doesn’t Candi Patterson and/or Nathan Saunders make an appointment and to give him a briefing? That is part of what a union should do for its members.

Question for Archbishop Dolan

Are you going to publicly repudiate Bill Donohue? Because on something like this silence equals conscent.

I am asking Archbishop Dolan because the New York Times is his hometown newspaper and when a man publicly identified as a Catholic publishes such a morally abhorrent advertisement, it behooves the Archdiocese of New York to repudiate it.

I could ask the same of Cardinal Wuerl.

Really, it is impossible to dismiss the thought that the Roman Catholic church is run by truly horrible people who are a eminent danger to children, gays and lesbians, women, and gynecologists.

Putting Union Busting First

It appears that Kaya Henderson is continuing Rhee’s trainwreck policies.

So, is Vincent Gray OK with this, or is he going to defend the school system?

Massive resistance 2.0

Torturing Detroit’s Kids for Racist Fun and Profit

I cannot believe what is happening to our country.

Vincent Gray leadership FAIL

DC’s New Mayor to Cut Services to Most Vulnerable Residents

The plan will cut and over time eliminate benefits to city residents who receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits for over five years.

So what are those families supposed to do? There are NO jobs east of Rock Creek Park. We have thousands of DC residents who spend all day every day in a futile job search. What are they supposed to do?

Michelle Rhee’s declining expectations

Fast Company January 12, 2011: Michelle Rhee Wants to Spend $1 Billion Fixing Education

Politico January 27, 2011:

Now Rhee is in the process of shifting from political naif to full-fledged power broker. She has created an emphatically political new organization, StudentsFirst, and she told POLITICO she hopes to raise and spend an astonishing $200 million annually — a large sum, even in the deep-pocketed world of education philanthropists

Maybe making yourself politically radioactive wasn’t such a bright idea. And maybe the billionaire union busting movement wants a new face for their work.

Education deform

Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

Every day, dozens of reporters and bloggers cover the Big Three’s reform campaign, but critical in-depth investigations have been scarce (for reasons I’ll explain further on). Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that the reforms are not working. Stanford University’s 2009 study of charter schools—the most comprehensive ever done—concluded that 83 percent of them perform either worse or no better than traditional public schools; a 2010 Vanderbilt University study showed definitively that merit pay for teachers does not produce higher test scores for students; a National Research Council report confirmed multiple studies that show standardized test scores do not measure student learning adequately. Gates and Broad helped to shape and fund two of the nation’s most extensive and aggressive school reform programs—in Chicago and New York City—but neither has produced credible improvement in student performance after years of experimentation.