E Wayne Ross – Page 40 – Critical Theories in Education

The year in music—My favorite albums of 2010

I used to post much more often about music here at WTBHNN, but I thought I would at least continue the tradition of my yearly favorites list. See my annual reviews dating back to 1998 here.

Before I get to the list, some observations about purchasing, streaming, and sharing music.

For many years I purchased around 100 albums years, give or take 10 or so. With the “digital revolution” my album purchases have trended upward, for example: 110 (2007); 158 (2008); 149 (2009); and 188 (2010). (Unlike my teenage son, I rarely buy single tracks. Although I did buy two 7″ vinyl releases from Robert Pollard this year).

Only 73 of my 188 album purchases were actual cds, so I’m downloading over 70% of the music I buy (and the majority of that is from eMusic).

I’m streaming music more than ever. I have a subscription to Napster and stream their 2.5 million tune catalog and internet radio throughout my home. I’ve also recently subscribed to Sirius radio. I continue to share music among friends, but even taking all that into account, I’m spending more than ever on recorded music. Hmmm…

View my 2010 cd collection here. You’ll see I did a little back catalog purchasing of Rolling Stones releases (particularly the 1994 Virgin cds, since the 2010 remasters don’t sound nearly as good.)

E. Wayne’s Favorite Albums of 2010
(I don’t claim these are the best albums of the year, but they’re the ones kept going back to. And I know there are many albums I picked up this year that just haven’t gotten the attention they deserve, so I reserve the right to change my mind in the future.)

The Top Ten
1. Bettye LaVette – Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook
2. Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse – Dark Night of the Soul
3. Robert Plant – Band of Joy
4. JJ Grey & Mofro – Georgia Warhorse
5. Solomon Burke – Nothing’s Impossible
6. Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings – I Learned the Hard Way
7. Broken Bells – Broken Bells
8. Boston Spaceships – Our Cubehouse Still Rocks
9. The Black Keys – Brothers
10. Shelby Lynne – Tears, Lies, and Alibis

Honorable Mentions
Los Lobos – Tin Can Trust
Massive Attack – Heligoland
Galactic – Ya-Ka-May
Charlie Musselwhite – The Well
Porcupine Tree – The Incident (released in 2009, but PT was my most listened to band of the year)

The 2010 Mixtapes

Wayne’s 2010 Faves – Rock/Post-Rock

Silk Rotor – Robert Pollard
Breakdown Into The Resolve – Ryan Adams & The Cardinals
We Used to Wait – Arcade Fire
Tender Heart – Alejandro Escovedo
Angel Dance – Robert Plant
Vaporize – Broken Bells
Revenge (feat. The Flaming Lips) – Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse
Paradise Circus – Massive Attack
The Blind House – Porcupine Tree
Written In Reverse – Spoon
27 Spanishes – Los Lobos
I Believe In You – Black Dub
Kong – Bonobo
Hunted By A Freak – Mogwai
John the Dwarf Wants to Become an Angel – Boston Spaceships
The Money Shuffle – Richard Thompson
Stereo (Remastered) – Pavement
Feeling In the Dark – Dwight Twilley Band
Valleys of Neptune – Jimi Hendrix

Wayne’s 2010 Faves – Rhythm

The Word – Bettye LaVette
The Game Gets Old – Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
I’m Leavin’ It Up To You – Jimmie Vaughan (w Lou Ann Barton)
Heart Of Steel – Galactic, Feat. Irma Thomas
Nothing’s Impossible – Solomon Burke
Harlem River Blues – Justin Townes Earle
Testify (Parts 1 & 2) – The Isley Brothers (that’s Jimi on guitar)
Only In Amerika – Dr. John & The Lower 911
Everybody Thinks You’re an Angel – Mose Allison
Have Blues, Will Travel – Smokin’ Joe Kubek & Bnois King
Everlasting Light – The Black Keys
The Sweetest Thing – JJ Grey And Mofro
Sad and Beautiful World – Charlie Musselwhite
Tramp – Steve Miller Band
Too Hard To Love You – Guitar Shorty
Season Man – Tony Joe White
Tragedy – Peter Wolf (w Shelby Lynne)
Rains Came- Shelby Lynne
Mixtape – Tift Merritt
Porter Wagoner’s Grave – Marty Stuart
Me And The Devil – Gil Scott-Heron

Critical Education: How Well Does the Standards Movement Measure Up?

Critical Education has just published its latest issue—the first of a two part examination of No Child Left Behind policies and the standards movement by Lawrence C. Stedman.

We invite you visit our web site to review this and other articles and items of interest.

Critical Education
Vol 1, No 10 (2010)
Table of Contents
http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/21

Articles
——–
How Well Does the Standards Movement Measure Up? An Analysis of
Achievement Trends, Academic Course-taking, Student Learning, NCLB, and
Changes in School Culture and Graduation Rates
Lawrence C. Stedman

Abstract

This is the first of two papers examining the standards movement. In it, I review data from NAEP, the SAT, the international assessments, transcript studies, and NCLB assessments, as well as surveys and case studies of changes in curriculum and pedagogy. The picture is a bleak one. Over the past quarter century, achievement has stagnated, dropouts and aliteracy have grown, and large minority achievement gaps have persisted. The quality of student learning remains poor. School changes, stratified by class and race, have constricted instruction and harmed students and teachers. NCLB has made things worse, not better. Even in the two areas where the movement has achieved some success—lower grade math achievement and high school academic enrollments—the gains were largely superficial, other forces such as teaching-to-the-test and social promotion contributed, and serious deficiencies remain.

In the second paper, “Why the Standards Movement Failed,” I examine the educational and political reasons for the failure—including its misconstruction of pedagogy and links to the neoliberal reform project—and propose a progressive alternative.

Rouge Forum Update:

Our heartfelt good wishes to Rouge Forum Community Coordinator, Adam Renner, now hospitalized, and his wife, Gina. Get well, Adam!

The Rouge Forum update is linked here.

There you will find the latest news, in its social context, as well as classic Rouge Forum posters, flyers, and more. Plus fun!

We will start next year with announcements from, especially, India, China, and Canada, as well as updates on the resistance, in schools and out.

Update to issue 17 of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

The current issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor has been updated with two new field reports.

Issue No. 17 of Workplace “Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions” is guest edited by Howard Stevenson of Lincoln University (UK).

The new field reports include:

The NEA Representative Assembly of 2010: A Longer View of Crisis and Consciousness
Rich Gibson

Abstract
Following the 2009 National Education Association (NEA) Representative Assembly (RA) in San Diego, new NEA president Dennis Van Roekel was hugging Arne Duncan, fawning over new President Obama, and hustling the slogan, “Hope Starts Here!” At the very close of the 2009 RA, delegates were treated to a video of themselves chanting, “Hope starts Here!” and “Hope Starts with Obama and Duncan!” The NEA poured untold millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours, into the Obama campaign. In 2009, Van Roekel promised to tighten NEA-Obama ties, despite the President’s educational policies and investment in war. What happened in the year’s interim? What was the social context of the 2010 RA?

Resisting the Common-nonsense of Neoliberalism: A Report from British Columbia
E. Wayne Ross

Abstract
Faced with a $16 million budget shortfall, the Vancouver school trustees, who have a mandate to meet the needs of their students, have lobbied for more provincial funding to avoid draconian service cuts. The government has refused the request, and its special advisor to the Vancouver School Board criticizes trustees for engaging in “advocacy” rather than making “cost containment” first priority. The clash between Vancouver trustees and the ministry of education is not “just politics.” Rather, education policy in BC reflects the key features of neoliberal globalization, not the least of which is the principle that more and more of our collective wealth is devoted to maximizing private profits rather than serving public needs. British Columbia is home to one of the most politically successful neoliberal governments in the world, but fortunately it is also a place to look for models of mass resistance to the neoliberal agenda. One of the most important examples of resistance to the common-nonsense of neoliberalism in the past decade is the British Columbia teachers’ 2005 strike, which united student, parent, and educator interests in resisting the neoliberal onslaught on education in the public interest.

Historians Against the War and Veterans for Peace respond to attacks on Wikileaks

From Historians Against the War (HAW) Steering Committee (SC):

Over the last few weeks Wikileaks has released numerous classified U.S. government cables that have revealed what U.S. diplomats are saying to each other on a range of topics, from the war in Iraq to heads of state. The documents unveil disturbing facts about these wars, including secret CIA paramilitaries, unaccountable military task forces, and the widespread killing of civilians. The release represents a contribution to the right of the public to know, both in the United States and around the world, what the U.S. government really thinks and does, as opposed to the fictions that often pass for official statements.

In response, members of the U.S. government and public, from both parties, have unleashed a firestorm of verbal abuse, physical threats, legal maneuvers, and economic pressure to try and silence Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, and to prevent the publication of any more U.S. government documents.*

We call on all HAW members to oppose these attacks and to stand up for freedom of the press and the free distribution of information. Several petitions are circulating on the web — for example, at https://sites.google.com/site/wilibeaks (Voters for Peace) and http://www.credoaction.com/campaign/wikileaks/index2.html?rc=homepage (Credo). We ask you to sign them and to ask your friends and colleagues to do so as well.

* For recent background articles on these attacks, see, e.g.:

Glenn Greenwald, “Joe Lieberman Emulates Chinese Dictators”

Tom Hayden, “The Lynch Mob Moment”

Robert Scheer, “From Jefferson to Assange”

Editors of The Nation, “First They Came for Wikileaks Then . . .

++++++++++++++

Veterans For Peace in Support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks and to Boycott Ebay, Paypal and Amazon Corporations

Yesterday, the Executive Committee of Veterans For Peace voted to break all commercial ties with the Amazon Corporation and call for our members to boycott eBay Corp. and PayPal Corp. This includes, but is not limited to,

Removing the Amazon link from the VFP website. Previously we had encouraged our members to use this link when making purchases from Amazon Corp., as a fundraising method for our organization.

Urging our members, supporters and the public to boycott Amazon, eBay and PayPal corporations.

Urging Julian Assange and the Wikileaks team to continue their fight in the most important area of free speech: government secrets.

The U.S. Justice Department is reportedly considering charging Assange under the Espionage Act. This much-discredited and little-used law was last invoked against journalists, unsuccessfully, in the failed Pentagon Papers case in 1971. However, prosecution and conviction under this act, passed in 1917 to stifle dissent during WWI, may have little to do with espionage and everything to do with government repression.

For example, the federal government used the Espionage Act to prosecute Gene Debs, the great union organizer and socialist presidential candidate, for a 1918 Canton Ohio speech against U.S. involvement in the “Great War.”

Another citizen prosecuted in the same period under the same law, according to Kevin Zeese, director of Voters for Peace, was Rose Pastor Stokes, sentenced to ten years in prison for a letter to the Kansas City Star, saying “no government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people while the government is for the profiteers.”

The government-war-private corporation axis is exposed fully in this case. Credit card companies Mastercard and Visa, along with giant online retailer Ebay Corp., owner of PayPal Corp., have voluntarily joined Amazon Corp. in answering the government’s request to block WikiLeaks’ funding in an effort to keep additional information from a citizenry increasingly fed up with war, secrecy and corporate power.

VFP gave imprisoned Army PFC, Bradley Manning, its Courage of Conscience award earlier this year for releasing documents detailing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Resistance to the attack on WikiLeaks and Assange is also growing and VFP considers it important to do what we can to join that resistance.

-end-

Rouge Forum Update: Resistance and on to the next decade

The Rouge Forum Update, complete with the news from the school-based uprisings in Europe (see the video under Fightback) is linked here.

See also the answer to the burning question, “What would the Ramones do on high-stakes standardized test week?”

Congratulations to Ed Yu on the publication of his book, The Art of Slowing Down, a Sense-able Approach from Pananthea books.

We are looking for critical reviews of the film, Inside Job.

Remember the Rouge Forum Conference, Chicago, May 20-22, in Chicago.

Public education’s No. 1 enemy—capitalism

In a Z-Net commentary published yesterday, Boris Kagarlitsky describes what he sees as some of the problems with current education policy in Russia, including:

forcing university-bound students to take unified state exams against the strong objections of educators, students and parents;
removing class size limits in public schools (currently set at about 25 students/class);
mass school closures.

What’s interesting here are the parallels among Russian, US, and Canadian educational “deforms”.

Kagarlitsky’s analysis of the Russian education reform scene is, unfortunately, short-sighted. For Kagarlitsky, these policies can be explained by pointing to incompetent government officials (particularly Andrei Fursenko) and others, who are fearful of an educated public, when, in fact, these policies result from application of the principle that public education serves corporate/capital interests, rather than public interests.

Kagarlitsky points out that Fursenko’s policies reflect “a systematic campaign aimed at downsizing public education as if it were a noncore, unprofitable business sector within a large company” seemingly missing the point that this is exactly how public education is being managed by the executive committees of the rich (governments) world-wide.

See two recent examples of how the corporate interest principle works in the USA and Canada (there are many, many more):

the newly appointed school chancellor in New York City, Cathie Black, whose qualifications to lead the largest public school system in the USA are that she was chairman of Hearst Magazines and set the standard for dumbed-down journalism at USA Today.
criticisms levelled at the Vancouver School Board by the British Columbia Ministry of Education (via a Comptroller General’s report) that trustees spend too much time and energy working to improve teaching and learning conditions in Vancouver schools. The Comptroller General and Minister of Education want the trustees to make “cost containment” their number one priority.

As Larry Stedman concludes, in a forthcoming two-article series examining standards-based education reform for the journal Critical Education,

…the changes we have seen in schooling and school culture were not only unavoidable, but were also the desired ones. What many of us perceive as a failure is, in fact, a success in managerial terms. A proficiency-driven, command-and-control, authoritarian type of schooling was, in fact, the goal of the reforms and serves capital’s interests well.

Rouge Forum Update: Fightback! Don’t Shop! Raise Hell!

The most recent issue of the Rouge Forum News is here. Thanks to Adam Renner for great work on pulling together the issue.

The Rouge Forum Update, complete with
*news of world-wide resistance to the international war of the rich on the poor,
*fightbacks against the assault on knowledge and schools,
*an essay contest,
*plus great graphics, and more (!)
*is linked here

Don’t forget to make plans for the Chicago Rouge Forum conference, May 20-22, 2011.

Rouge Forum Update: Beats Hell Out of Time or Newsweek (or Education Week)

Rouge Forum Update: Beats Hell Out of Time or Newsweek (or EdWeek)

The Little Red Schoolhouse
Linda Lovelace Sucks Money Out of San Francisco Schools: Ms. Lovelace was in charge of administering contracts between the school district and Bay Area Community Resources. According to her termination letter, she signed contracts on behalf of officials who had not given her authorization and submitted false claims that she had worked 12-hour days during the school year.

“Your conduct in intentionally requesting and receiving an additional four hours of compensation every single day is tantamount to stealing,” stated the dismissal notice, which was written by Roger Buschmann, the chief administrative officer. “Particularly at a time when the district faces a multimillion-dollar deficit and forced layoffs of many skilled and diligent professionals, such conduct is appalling.”

Detroit School Union Boss: “We’re Shortchanged so Let’s Attack….Students”: The president of the Detroit Public Schools teachers union wants substitute teachers to stop developing lesson plans, grading assignments and participating in parent-teacher conferences. The move is meant to send a message to Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, who hasn’t restored pay and benefits of substitute teachers serving as a daily classroom teachers due to teacher shortages this year, said Keith Johnson, president of Detroit Federation of Teachers.

Next Target, after merit pay, abolition of tenure, mass racist layoffs, etc.—Teacher Pension Funds: Today there is an almost $500 billion shortfall for funding teacher pensions, and that gap is growing. Why should you care? Because ultimately taxpayers are on the hook for that money. But the problem doesn’t just end there. The way teacher pensions operate is badly suited to today’s teacher workforce, where 30-year careers are no longer the norm. The current setup penalizes teachers who move between states, switch to private or public-charter schools that do not participate in the pension system or leave teaching altogether. Meanwhile, it becomes financial suicide for teachers to change careers after a certain point, even if they no longer want to teach or are not good at it.

There Goes the Economy

Weaker Dollar Won’t Help Workers: Another reason increased sales abroad might not translate into American jobs is that American companies have moved steadily overseas in recent decades. The number of workers employed by American companies abroad more than doubled from 1989 to 2008, to 10.5 million, according to the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis. Companies mostly wanted to open up foreign markets, and in some cases take advantage of cheaper labor, studies show, but less vulnerability to currency movements was an important fringe benefit.

Hot Damn! Cheap American Workers For Sale! GREER, S.C. —When German automaker BMW put out the call recently to hire a thousand factory workers here, the people who responded reflected the upheaval occurring in the U.S. economy. Among the applicants: a former manager of a major distribution center for Target, a consultant who oversaw construction projects in four Western states and a supervisor at a plastics-recycling firm. Some held college degrees and résumés in other fields where they made more money. But they’re all in the factory now making $15 an hour — about half of what the typical German autoworker makes.

The trade debate in the United States usually focuses on the jobs lost to factories in the developing world. But the recession has forced countless skilled workers in this country to consider jobs they would have rejected in the past. They now offer foreign manufacturers a resource that was far less common just a few years ago: cheaper wages for better talent…At GM and Chrysler, new hires make $14 an hour, or half the amount that existing workers take home. Likewise, at the BMW plant, which is not unionized, new workers earn a little more than half of what those hired earlier make. Some still seemed stunned by their change of circumstances. But they are almost uniformly grateful for the opportunity.

Read the full Rouge Forum Update here.