Tag Archives: San Diego

No Chase Scenes! Mostly Print! Remember March 4th!

hand of Fate 3
Hand of Fate

Rouge Forum Update: No Chase Scenes! Mostly Print! Remember March 4th!

Read the full update here.

On the Little Rouge School Front This Week:

If I Boost Your Grade, Will You Please CARE About the Tests? “They’re bribing them with grades,” said Linman, an educator who helps professors improve their instruction at San Diego State University. “If we can’t make the ethical decision about what’s best for students, we have no choice but to say we’re not going to be involved….”reputations are at stake. Valhalla High Assistant Principal Sam Lund said that education has become a competitive marketplace where schools need good facilities and booming scores to draw families. Like it or not, Lund said, test scores matter. But critics argue they matter for the wrong reasons. “Raising our grades is much too drastic,” said Mitchell Winkie, a junior at Valhalla. “It seems like the point of all this is to make the school look better.”

Detroit Federation of Teachers Reacts to Recall Petition vs DFT President: “In interpreting its governing documents the Executive Board was doing exactly what AFT locals around the country and virtually all other unions regularly do. The membership does not have the authority to reject or overrule the decision of the Executive Board on constitutional questions. If the membership could overrule the Executive Board then the Constitution would have no fixed meaning. Rather it would mean nothing more than what a majority at any membership meeting, however large or small, would decide. The membership has the authority to amend the Constitution in accordance with the terms of that document. It does not have the authority to reject the Executive Board’s interpretation and application of that document.”

Reading Corps on the March in Detroit (Beware of Benevolent Missionaries and Their Books)

Inequality Booms In California Schools: * High-poverty schools were more than four times as likely (65.6% to 15%) as low-poverty schools to experience teacher layoffs.* 70% of principals reported that summer school had been cut back severely or eliminated. High-poverty schools were almost three times as likely (48.7% to 16.7%) as low-poverty schools to eliminate summer school.

San Diego Teachers Asked to Take 8% Pay Cut (can we smell the Detroit Rat?)

NYTimes on the End of Higher Ed (Class Struggle) in California: “In 1960, he added, the state created “the gold standard in high-quality, low-cost public higher education. This year, the California legislature abandoned the gold standard.”

Paul Moore on the Corptocracy of Education and Social Life

Read more here.

Rouge Forum Update: Class War Comix and more!

Dear Friends,

Less than two weeks until the Rouge Forum Conference, May 15-17, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Join us!

Come meet others whose interest in education goes to society as well. The core issue of our time is rising color-coded inequality met by the possibility of mass, class-conscious, resistance. No education organization in North America has the limited good sense and courage to say that.

The National Education Association will meet in San Diego in July, making sure no NEA member grasps this is not a tea-party but class war. Here we see how NEA pours $2million more into a campaign for a regressive California tax.

United Teachers of LA plan a one day walkout on May 15, but they don’t want to interrupt testing. Huh?
Well, at least this is 1/2 good news. “Union leaders said they chose May 15 “to have the least conflict with monthlong testing,” including the state’s STAR tests, which are the most prominent yardsticks for a school’s academic standing. But there are Advanced Placement tests, which are important for college applicants, scheduled for that day. ”

In a week, Chrysler went under, the Sunnis rose again, the Taliban swept 60 miles from the capital–some week! Primer on Chrysler Bankruptcy.

The UAW’s retiree VEBA benefits to disappear?

Who can argue that the government, the capitalist democracy in which the latter always loses, is anything more than executive committee and armed weapon of the rich? How the Banksters “own the place,” in Congress.

We note with sadness the death of WIlliam Pomeroy whose writings on the Huks in the Philippines was terrific. See his book, The Forrest, among others.

Marx on School:

“The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes to the self-valorization of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a schoolmaster is a productive worker when, in addition to belaboring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation. The concept of a productive worker therefore implies, not merely a relation between the activity of work and its useful effect, between the worker and the product of the work, but also a specific social relation of production, a relation with a means of valorization. To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.” Marx 1977, Capital, Vol 1, translator, B. Fowkes, New York, Vintage, p 644

Thanks to Wayne, Joe B, Adam and Gina, Phillip, Tammy, Donna, Sue H, Sherry, Connie and Doug, Eric C and S, Ginger H, Don A, Virginia P, Carol, Susan and Susan, Paul and Mary, Sandy and Van.

Good luck to us, every one!

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