Tag Archives: Oakland Public Schools

Rouge Forum Update: Special Holiday and Season Opener Edition! What Wars?

Remember Proposals are Due, April 15, for the Rouge Forum Conference

Send Your Articles, Photos, Cartoons, for the Rouge Forum News to Community Coordinator Adam Renner (arenner@bellarmine.edu).

On April 4th, 43 Years Ago, Martin Luther King gave his speech opposing the war in Vietnam. Here is a link to the speech:

“A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.”

Here’s an audio link to MLK Jr.’s speech: http://benfrank.net/nuke/mlk-vietnam_speech_audio.html

On the Little Rouge School Front:

April 24, Mass Meeting of March 4th Movement: Fresno!

Freep Investigation: $57 Million Fraud Rises from One DPS Office: “A former department chief at Detroit Public Schools and his assistant used secret offices and their own computer system to improperly divert more than $57 million in school funds to vendors who provided little, if anything, in return”

Where Were the DPS Accountants? “The other significant point to draw from the Hill scandal has to do with the dates for his employment. He worked in DPS from 2001-05, during which time the district was under state, not local, control. The elected school board had been disbanded, and an appointed reform board was in place, ostensibly to help clean up the district’s financial and academic messes.”

Oakland Teachers Voted to Strike On April 22. Will They?

History of Oakland Teachers’ Strike

Florida Teachers Fight Back vs Proposed Ed Law: “Among provisions in the Senate and House bills is testing for students in every course.”

History Wars Part X: While even some conservative intellectuals say that some of the revisionist history is simply wrong, at the core, the effort reflects the ever-changing view of history, which is always subject to revision thanks to new information or new ways of looking at things, and often is viewed through a political lens. “History in the popular world is always a political football,” said Alan Brinkley, a historian at Columbia University. “The right is unusually mobilized at the moment.”

Delaware and Tennessee: Top Ratt Scabs: The Obama administration delivered a jolt to U.S. public education Monday by selecting just two states, Delaware and Tennessee, to receive $600 million in hard-fought grants designed to help districts overhaul their programs.

And Even Though They Didn’t Win, Many States Changed Education Laws: The Suckers List: “The initiative prompted regulatory changes in California, Illinois, Washington, and Tennessee, where until recently there had been “impenetrable legal barriers to education reform.”

Teacher Contracts Explained: San Diego EA vs Green Dot Contracts: “lays out two teacher contracts side by side so that readers can both familiarize themselves and compare key dimensions such as teacher pay, evaluation, the rights of the teachers union, and teacher transfers. The contracts are between the San Diego Unified School District and the San Diego Education Association, which was ratified in 2006 and is still in use, and an early contract used by Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles. San Diego is a K-12 school district serving almost 131,000 students through 205 schools, and the 18th largest school district in the United States. Green Dot, founded in 2000, is a network of public charter schools serving more than 10,000 students across 18 campuses.

“Always be sure you are right, then go ahead”

Read more here.