My Beauty Best Teacher

The Africa Monitor reports:

After being privatized to a share company, the National Cement Factory(of Ethiopia) has doubled production and works are underway to open another plant, according to the company's representative.Found inefficient and bankrupt, the 70 year old company was put under the management of the Mugher Cement Factory, before its 80 percent share was finally sold out to the East Africa Group in February 2006, as per the country's privatization policy.The Governmental maintains ownership of the remaining 20 per-cent.

The President of the United States fills a lot of important roles in our political system- Commander-in-Chief, Chief Executive, Chief Legislator, Chief Jurist, Chief of State, Chief Diplomat, Head of Political Party, Popular Leader, etc- and to the list of these roles we now apparently must add 'Investor-in-Chief.'

Head of executive branches, whether at the state level as Governors or at the national level with our President, increasingly believe that it is part of their job description to take the money that taxpayers send to them to perform important government functions and instead gamble that money away on risky investments- the more risky and uncertain the investment, the more it seems that these executives are likely to dump precious taxpayer money into them.

Here in Michigan, we had a Governor that won a second term of office believing that she was a good Governor because she dumped taxpayer money into 'green energy' and 'cool cities' and the movie industry; upon further review and looked at with a true eye for costs and investment gains, these investments all turned out to range from bad to poor to horrible. Taxpayer money was distributed in a corrupt manner based more on political favors and little to no lasting gains came from these investments, certainly not enough to justify calling these schemes 'investment' in the private marketplace.

At the national level, Barack Obama believes that one of his major roles as President is to direct investments for the future, in spite of his lack of experience, training, or record of success in investing. No one would ever hire him to direct their personal investments, and yet as President he is doing just this with our public money at a time when public money is in short supply and needed ever more vitally. And the process that these investments are awarded are corrupt, filled with political considerations and backroom deals that would put any private businessman in prison for their actions.

The Washington Post writes about this role of the President in its article Barack Obama, investor-in-chief. From the article:

Would you buy a used car from Barack Obama? Or would you want him managing your 401(k) investment retirement plan at work? The president, of course, isn’t in that business specifically, but in a larger sense he’s been investing our money, picking the businesses he thinks will fuel economic expansion, new jobs and the technology of the future, and rebuild the nation’s fraying infrastructure.

All it takes is money - ours - he says, and he’s been spending it as fast as he can in a failed attempt to get the economy growing again. The economic policy term for this is “central planning,” wherein the government tries to pick the winners and losers and dumps hundreds of billions of dollars into various business sectors in the belief that it will pay off in the long run.

The government isn’t very good at this business, as we’ve seen in the disastrously ineffective $825 billion spending stimulus plan that President Obama and the Democrats shoved through Congress in 2009. Much of that money went into the budgets of countless federal departments, agencies and other programs that spent it. Still more went to states, counties, cities and towns for infrastructure programs or to keep public workers employed. A lot of the money was given to businesses that Mr. Obama thinks will be good for the environment, though his investment decisions didn’t always work out the way he hoped.

Consider the White House-backed solar energy firm Solyndra Inc., which declared bankruptcy this week after pocketing a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. Critics called the deal a “stimulus black hole.”

When Mr. Obama visited the Solyndra factory in May 2010, he called the company a success story that was “leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.”

He was quite proud of his investment, boasting at the time, “Less than a year ago, we were standing on what was an empty lot,” but now here was this shiny, new factory that “is the result of those loans” backed by his administration.
It was later learned that the White House fast-tracked Solyndra’s loan application, rushing Mr. Obama’s pet project through without a lot of serious checking. Federal investigators said that the administration had bypassed procedures to safeguard the taxpayers’ investment.

Mr. Obama is big on the solar-panel industry and under his policies, the government has dumped a lot of our money into it in the past three years. But it turns out that the U.S. industry has not turned out to be the bonanza that he sold to the country. Prices for solar panels have fallen because of strong competition from China, making the fledgling industry precarious at best without heavy federal subsidies.

Evergreen Solar Inc. filed for bankruptcy last month after being forced to close its plant in Massachusetts that was built with state and local government subsidies.

Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, New Mexico Democrat, says the loan guarantee program “has not worked as well as we had hoped.” Sounds like a Wall Street investment banker defending a fat bundle of subprime real estate securities that went bad.

The solar-panel industry is not the only “investment” Mr. Obama has sunk a lot of our money into. While the plants build with his loans make for great campaign photo ops, the costly reality is that government is trying to pick the winners and losers in our economy instead of the private sector.

But Mr. Obama thinks he’s good at this investment business and now he is trying to convince us to buy into to a new federal “infrastructure bank” that will make off-budget grants and loans to rebuild “roads, bridges and ports and broadband lines and smart grids” with $30 billion of our money.

The bank would put “all those [unemployed] construction workers” back to work, he said. And it would provide Mr. Obama with lots of photo ops at jobsites, saying “look what I’ve done for you.”

If this sounds familiar, it was sold to us in the guise of the 2009 job stimulus bill that was supposed to put the construction industry back to work. Some short-term jobs were created but when the building projects were completed, the jobs ended. The construction industry today is in a recession.

Making Mr. Obama the investor-in-chief, deciding how and where the nation’s capital resources should be spent, hasn’t worked and isn’t going to work. Ask Japan, which has gone on a public-works spending binge though its economy has been in a slump for two decades.

Better to shift federal public-works spending decisions to the states, along with the gas tax money for highways, and let them - not remote federal bureaucrats - set their own priorities. Broaden the tax base by eliminating dozens of loopholes, then cut business and individual tax rates, and slash the capital gains tax to unlock needed, job-creating investment capital.

Let the marketplace make the investment decisions that have made America the largest and most successful economy in the world. Mr. Obama has got better things to do with his time, like trying to figure out why his job approval polls have fallen to 39 percent.

Roald Dahl's hilarious and outrageous novels have made him one of the most popular children's authors of all time. Here, the author himself brings five of his wickedly funny stories to life:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:
Willy Wonka's famous chocolate factory is opening at last!

James and the Giant Peach:
A little magic can take you a long way.

Fantastic Mr. Fox:
Nobody outfoxes Fantastic Mr. Fox!

The Enormous Crocodile:
Watch out, kids!

The Magic Finger:
What happens when the hunter becomes the hunted?

Click here to buy from Amazon

The Roald Dahl Audio CD Collection

Occasionally in my job I proctor standardized tests that are given to every student in the state. This job is usually pretty uneventful- as a proctor, you simply read the directions to the students and then keep an eye on them. Our students test in a big empty cold gym that is filled with row after row of students, busily filling in bubbles to prove that they have learned something after years of public education.

I've written before about how I have personally observed bias on standardized tests- read my entries Liberal Teachers To Students- Play God, Bloomfield Hills Schools Sticking with Leftist Curriculum, Students Accept Majority Tyranny, The Liberal Bias of Government Mandated Tests, I have been Black-Listed, Thoughts after Grading AP Government Exams, Black Listed, and Working on the Standards.

The real tragedy with biased standardized tests is that students who are conservative or right or even moderate will have trouble with the tests not because they lack knowledge or smarts but because they will reject the premise of the question or the agenda of the reading.

During the last test I had a kid wave me over when I was wandering up and down the rows, and I knew him to be a smart kid, so I came over to him and asked him what he needed, figuring he needed a new pencil or something.

"How do I answer this question," the smart young adult asked me, "when I don't buy into the premise behind it?" I read the question that he was pointing to, and saw the problem. The test was a reading test where the students would read from a document and then answer a series of questions. The reading that had this student troubled was a selection about the early industrial revolution, in which factory owners are portrayed as evil and government officials are portrayed as good, and the questions asked students to glorify the government officials and demonize the factory owners.

It was a tad biased of a selection, so I just leaned over to the student and told him- "I see what you mean, it is a tad slanted, but just write down the answer that the grader is looking for- I'm sure the next one will be more moderate or maybe even slanted right for balance."

"The next question is even worse," he said, and had me read the next selection. The second reading that students across the state had to read and then respond to was a story about the gold rush, in which prospectors are characterized as mad and irrational and wrong for seeking to make a lot of money in mining. The selection made it seem as if anyone who was an entrepreneur or anyone who had a dream was wrong, and not someone to be encouraged or supported, and the attached question that students were to respond to asked them to justify those assumptions.

"Or read this one," the young student said. The third and last selection that students had to read and respond to was a history article about the War with Mexico, in which the US is portrayed as the enemy and the bad guy, including language about how the US had no justification at all for invading Mexico, and about how the Mexican army were the hero's for simply defending their homes from the big bad US, and several individual Mexican’s are specifically named as hero’s while all the US soldiers are just characterized as faceless bad guys. The response question was designed to have students write about how things can be viewed from another perspective- a worthy goal, but since most students lack any knowledge of the other side of this issue and are fed one angle in the prompt, the question is set up to have students simply justify the question's agenda that the US is bad and Mexico is good.

Shaking my head, I repeated my earlier advice, "Just write what the grader wants you to say." The student was disgusted, and did so, but I can't imagine he gave it his best effort or put 110% into the writing of those essays.

Seth Godin, author, change maker

Seth Godin is not God. I don't think he pretends to be but sometimes I think those that read his work don't realize who he is. He is a natural born gift writer / rebel who has made his own rules and had is own career. He is one of a kind. That is great. We need more Seth Godins.

In a recent post, Seth makes a great point that we are going Back to (the wrong) school and that we are educating kids for 1925.

Agreed. Totally.

I agree with this statement.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

But there is also some sort of insinuation I read into the post that the problem is having teachers/ educators in authority.

Let's make a line here that needs to be very clear:


We need to be promoting higher order thinking.

Memorizing is at the bottom. We aren't teaching problem solving. We're not teaching anything of lasting substance when we continue to see if kids can memorize. We just aren't.

Seth is on the money when he says that the testing environment has put us on the race to the bottom. I'm glad he's saying it.

Kids need to be problem solvers. They don't need to be told what to do at every moment. They need to know how to figure things out. This is exactly why I don't teach point and click software and handle it more holistically. We've already used more than 30 software programs to solve problems in my Computer Applications class as we customize the experience to the individual and the things we are trying to create.

We also need to have a respect for authority in place so we can have safe places to learn.

The one insinuation that I see in this discussion all over the place is the idea we should disregard authority. There is a big difference between questioning what a person in authority says and the fact that a person in authority has authority.

The lack of discipline in schools is one reason that many of my teacher friends are quitting. I know of one local school that talked to teachers about putting bullet proof glass in every classroom to protect the teachers. How about protecting the students? If teachers are afraid, how about the poor scrawny kid who won't go to the bathroom all day because he's afraid of bullying?

As a society, we don't trust people in authority. We don't trust organizations in authority. We've had a complete erosion of the belief in authority.

Never mistake a teacher in authority for a dictatorship.

Right now many of those in authority in education have led us down the wrong path as a country. So, it is understandable. But let's turn our eyes to the kids for a moment.

The danger of Selective Authority
Many parents have advocated a principle of "selective authority." Selective authority looks like this

"I'm going to learn from you because you can give me something" or
"I'm not going to learn from you because I don't like you." 

What results is punk football players who are very coachable but have no integrity and keep getting in trouble with the law. This problem is everywhere.

This type of philosophy means if a kid can convince Mom and Dad that "my Lit teacher doesn't like me" and the kid knows that suddenly anything I do to that lit teacher is excused and encouraged.

WRONG.

The "rights" of a few who don't deserve it

Rafe Esquith in his book,Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56,  talks about an incident where a group of fifth graders were interrupting their fifth grade graduation with profanity and trash talk. Rafe removed them from the proceedings and was promptly told by the principal that everyone "has a right to graduate" and that the could do nothing about it.

No! Those kids should get a diploma but they should not have the right to completely ruin the graduation for the other students.

Schools and principals who tolerate such misbehavior look impotent, incompetent, and totally backwards!

Do we encourage disrespect?
PROBLEM. The problem in many schools is that it is impossible to even teach lower order industrial age thinking because our society has so worshipped the young that we are encouraging a total disrespect for authority.

We all have bosses. We all have laws to follow. Lots of times we don't like the boss or the laws but we have to follow them anyway. We need to follow people we don't like sometimes so we can be successful in life. We can respect their authority even if we don't care for them as a person.

We can also be a renegade with cool ideas in the classroom and beyond if we have empowering teachers to bring that out of us. I can be empowering and still have my classroom management act together.


Show up and Keep your Promises
A young man at Walgreen's yesterday was talking to me. He was missing the first half of his family reunion because the manager could not get anyone to work for him. He was at work anyway. I was very impressed and told him so. He said,

'My Momma raised me right. I need to show up where they are counting on me and keep my promises."

Respect for authority does not mean subservience, slavery, or even the worst case, abuse. It means that we have guidelines. It means we treat each other with respect and have character.

Scott Filmer's Photography Journal

We need yellow lines.
We have guidelines like the yellow line in the middle of the road.

Thank goodness for the yellow line in the middle of the road. It is that guideline that keeps us all safe. We need them in school too!

No Discipline Problems
I've had a few discipline problems in my career but not many. Typically, I have to fill out a discipline form once or twice a year. That is because my principal is exceptional at handling discipline. He is consistent (writing up his own son for not having a hair cut) and treats everyone fairly.

I am free to teach. There were times, I admit, under another principal that it wasn't so pleasant. When  discipline is maintained we have freedom to learn.

Appealing versus Arguing
Authority does not mean that a person is always right. The first day of class I always say something completely, totally WRONG. Something everyone knows is wrong. The kids now know my reputation and so they get it more often than not, but I always say.

"This is my classroom and we will work together to learn, but that does not mean that I know everything. I'm wrong quite a bit. You've just let me say something you know is wrong. Why did no one stand up to me? What is the right way to disagree when a person in authority says something is wrong?" (We discuss.) Then I end with, "This is OUR classroom. We learn from each other. If you disagree with me, I respect you if you disagree respectfully in a way that helps me and the others learn and I will treat you the same way. It is ok to make mistakes and sometimes I will say things to make you think that I may or may not agree with. I want your brains and your thoughts not just your blind acceptance of what I say. But you can know that if I do say something wrong like I just did that I will always correct myself in that same class period - you can trust what I say, but I needed to prove a point to you today. Say what you think not what you think I want you to say."

Note that I don't make this a habit to do this very much because I want students to trust what I say. If I say something wrong, I always admit it pretty quickly so they know that I knew it was wrong. I don't think it is a good practice to just "lie" all the time to confuse kids. But to do it once to make a point and to say I intentionally did it is OK.

There is a difference. In this case, I've preserved my authority. My "yellow line in the middle of the road" type authority while also making my classroom a safe place for open dialog, discussion, and learning by everyone.

Our Current Students aren't ready for 1925 work in some cases
A close family member employs some of those "1925 labor workers" as he works in a factory. The problem is that many of the workers he gets aren't even fit for that. They don't know how to show up on time and only 20% of them know fractions. (They ask where the bubbles are for the answers and are told that in the real world you don't have 4 answers for every question.)

Right now, the current public education system, at least down here in South Georgia doesn't really even produce good factory workers. Yes, it is broken, yes we need to fix it.

We need people who can keep their promises. Who can be productive. Who aren't just robots who test well.  We also need students who know basic math and fractions in the real world where there are no bubbles.

We need to improve and change how we are teaching but we also need to restore the guidelines and accountability that keep us safe. According to Maslow's heirarchy of needs - if a student is hungry and feels unsafe they aren't going to learn. Yes, we need to improve our teaching but to have good teaching we also need good discipline.

The danger of the rebellion against "industrial age do what you are told" education is that some people ARE not going to realize that the scripted, step by step teaching, worksheet mentality, and memorization mantras are the problem and in fact will think it is having discipline, order, and guidelines that are the problem.

Seth Godin on Education
So, as smart as Seth Godin is, take his posts on education for what they are. Very well written big-picture critiques of the big-picture problems in education and not a prescription for how to fix education. Honestly, I'm not even sure that some of our current education "leaders" are prepared to fix those problems as they have a self-interest in preserving the current systems that have gotten us where we are.

Whatever the solution - restoring order and discipline and SAFETY is an important part of improving any school. It is called "learning environment" and it is a top indicator of a successful school.

In Conclusion
Let's promote higher order thinking but to get there we do need consistent discipline and respect for authority back in our schools.

Remember your noble calling, teacher. Remember that those who critique a system are critiquing a system.

There are many amazing teachers out there and most likely you are one of them. No one can take away your nobility but when you act beneath yourself, you alone can give away that nobility. Let's teach anyway as best we can until people realize that the Freedom to Teach is one of the best things they could give teachers.

____
Unless noted otherwise, photos are from iStock Photo.

Here is what Richard A. Epstein, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Professor of Law at New York University Law School, and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, had to say regarding the major speech that President Barack Obama (one-term Democrat) gave at Osawatomie, Kansas:

The painful ignorance that is revealed in these remarks augurs ill for the long-term recovery of America. With the president firmly determined to set himself against the tides of progress, innovation will be harder to come by. The levels of unemployment will continue to be high as the president works overtime to impose additional restrictions on the labor markets and more taxes at the top of the income distribution—both backhanded ways to reward innovation and growth.

The problem, therefore, with the president’s speech is not that it is demagogic in tone. The problem is that it is intellectually incoherent. As a matter of high principle, the president announces his fealty to markets. As a matter of practical politics, he denigrates and undermines them at every step. It is a frightening prospect to have a president who lives in a time warp that lets him believe that the failed policies of 1935 can lead this nation back from the brink. His chosen constituency, the middle class, should tremble at the prospect that his agenda might well set the course for the United States for the next four years.

In Professor Epstein's analysis of President Obama's speech, he echo's some of the comments that I have been making on liberal blogs like Balloon Juice and others- that in spite of his rhetoric and because of his economic incoherence and illiteracy, workers, school teachers, union employees, blue collar employees, the middle class, supporters of Occupy Wall Street, and related groups are going to suffer the most from President Obama's policies.

As Epstein wrote in his article Populist-in-Chief:

It is a good thing when plants can achieve the same output with less labor. Do we really want an America in which thousands of people work in dangerous occupations to turn molten lava into steel bars? Far better it is that fewer workers are doing those jobs. The jobs lost in that industry will be in part replaced by newer jobs created in the firms that build the equipment that make it possible to run steel mills at a lower cost and far lower risk of personal injury. The former workers can seek jobs in newer industries that will only expand by competing for labor.

And what about those ATM machines? Does the president really want people to have to queue up in banks to make deposits or withdraw cash in order to make a boom market for human tellers? Perhaps we should return to the days before automation, when phone calls were all connected by human operators. And why blast the Internet, which has created far more useful jobs than it has ever destroyed?

You see, if President Obama had his way, we would return to the Great Depression, when people were dependent on government for goods and services because government was in the business of destroying productive business around the world. If President Obama had his way, he would increase taxes and regulations on businesses while giving out subsidies and tax breaks to favored businesses, favoring those who hire lobbyists and special interest groups who redirect wealth over those who create wealth and make products or sell goods and services. If President Barack Obama had his way- a Congress of Democrats that went along with his ideas and ideals- America would be dragged back to the early 1900's, when we had a low standards of living and shorter life spans, and Obama would happily fill up dangerous and inefficient steal mills with 'workers', he would sign praises to the joy of labor while factory workers worked for low wages (compared to today) in dangerous industries, and the working class would have few goods (like cheap cars coming in from the Far East, cheap electronics built in backward nations around the world, and labor-saving devices everywhere built everywhere) just so that he could burnish his protectionist credentials.

When government gets in the business of redirecting wealth and picking and choosing the winners and losers in society, the only people who win and get wealthy are government officials- this lesson has been demonstrated over and over around the world many times over. And yet, that is exactly what Barack Obama and his Democratic Party are proposing to do- increase the power of the government to control wealth, liberty, and property in our society, and that somehow through this 'workers' and the '99%' will get more wealthy and happier. The logic is not explained, the mechanisms by which wealth is created are not explained- rather, the logic is the same logic that is found in every despotic tyranny throughout history- people have earned things that others want, and the government will get those things by playing one side off the other. Obama's magic act of wealth creation is the same sort of tyranny that the world has seen many times over- and has fallen for many times over as well.

Our nation has not only learned nothing from the Great Depression, we have learned the wrong lessons as well (see my post Lessons from Economic Recessions- Introduction and Great Depression), and are going about repeating the same mistakes that turned a recession in 1930 into a Great Depression that lasted to the 1950's (and included in it the collapse of the world into a deadly World War!). We must not allow this guy to enact those same policies- I don't care who does what with the GOP, and it doesn't matter who they are, anyone is an upgrade over this incoherent ideologue whose mind is so filled with mush and mindless platitudes and liberal bumper slogans that he is now unable to effectively design any policies that have a slightly positive effect on anyone.

President Obama, any Democrat who supports him, and any Republican who agrees with his policies needs to join Herbert Hoover on the unemployment line (or better yet, get a job somewhere in the private economy building or making or doing something useful!).

Luca Bussotti writing over at Pambazuka:

CC Afronie

Firing up the local production of knowledge is crucial to escaping the ‘industry of development’

He goes on to say:

...it appears rather obvious that few people have an interest in promoting local knowledge and knowledge in general as a key to exiting structural dependence. Rather, as Mozambican sociologist Elísio Macamo wrote, the ‘industry of development’ continues to work, and it doesn't seem to be in the interest of the leading classes to get rid of it.

More here

Eddie Cross of Zimbabwe Pundit speculates that Africa may well be experiencing an equivalent of the European Dark Ages. However within ""...any "Dark Age" you have your islands of enlightenment and hope. And so it is in Africa and in places like Zimbabwe. You can find such places by visiting our private schools where dedicated teachers and administrators are maintaining a small but effective system of education that continues to produce outstanding athletes, sportsmen and women and fine academics. Above all they produce achievers - men and women who go out into the world and succeed wherever they go. You can find them by visiting certain business organisations - I have a friend here who runs a globally competitive clothing factory - he exports the great majority of his output to the most sophisticated markets in the world. Another friend manufacturers fruit drinks and chemicals - walk through the doors of his business and you are in a clean, modern environment, which is comparable to any in the world. Staff are motivated and work hard and their product is expensive, but always good quality..."

PSD Blog reports on the trailblazing work of Beatrice Ayuru:

A few years ago, with no business training and no money, Beatrice decided that she would build her own school. "No girl should endure what I had to go through myself," says Beatrice. "Education is the best way to help reduce poverty in my region […] and giving girl children education empowers them. In my village, women are over-dependent on men."

Today Her:

Lira Integrated School, today has 1500 students, a school bus and an income-generating brass band. With the savings from the school, Beatrice has built a small-scale yoghurt factory and employs in total 104 people. Beatrice is far from being done. She is planning to open a university.

On the lighter side of things, apparently you and I are working hard right now to help re-elect President Barack Obama, donating millions through taxes to his campaign to help transport security vehicles, armored limousines, and communications gear into cities ahead of his various campaign appearances. President Obama has decided to fly around the nation giving speech after speech instead of working hard to rebuild our economy, right-size government, lower the deficit, bring efficiency to operations, root out waste and fraud, and working to strike the compromises and deals needed to reform our bankrupt entitlement programs- and you're gonna pay for it.

Via The Daily Caller, Obama campaign gets more Air Force aircraft:

The U.S. Air Force is pulling nine cargo aircraft from military operations to support President Barack Obama’s stepped-up visits to campaign events.

The five medium-capacity C-130s and four heavyweight C-17s will be used to ferry security vehicles, armored limousines and communications gear into cities ahead of Obama’s campaign appearances.

In the months before November, the president is expected to fly into multiple cities per week, and speak at multiple sites per day. On Mar. 8, for example, the president will fly to Richmond, and then drive over to a Rolls-Royce aircraft-parts factory. That evening, he’ll fly down to Houston, Texas.

His wife, Vice President Joe Biden and many of his cabinet secretaries are using the Air Force’s fleet of VIP aircraft to visit more states as the election season speeds up.

The nine cargo aircraft will begin operations in April, said Maj. Michelle Lai, communications officer for the Air Force’s 89th Airlift Wing. “They’ll stand down in November 2012,” she said...

...The cargo aircraft have been used to fly troops, weapons and supplies into U.S. bases in Afghanistan, Iraq and other sites in the Middle East during the decade-long operations in Afghanistan and Iraq...

...The squadrons will supplement the existing fleet of VIP passenger aircraft at Andrews. Those aircraft include two giant Boeing 747s — which are tagged Air Force One while they’re carrying the president — as well as five Boeing 757 wide-body passenger jets, and 11 Gulfstream executive jets.

Those passenger aircraft are already helping shuttling cabinet secretaries to their election-related events, many of which are in critical swing-states...

So, to sum up, rather than protecting our nation, or carrying food to poor starving children, or just sitting and not wasting expensive jet fuel, the President has ordered that military assets be used to supplement his already extensive fleet in ferrying people and supplies around the nation, costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands.

It's kind of hard for liberals and progressives to argue that President Obama's actions as demonstrated here are anything other than wrong. On the other hand, I kind of feel like this borders on criminal- it's the utter misuse of government resources to support a person's political ambitions and fly friends and family around the nation in taxpayer paid luxury.

Image by bcbuddy2072 via FlickrFrom the Economist a lesson for Sub-Saharan Africa:

These days Vietnam also has plenty of other things to be proud of. In the 1980s Ho Chi Minh's successors as party leaders damaged the war-ravaged economy even more by attempting to introduce real communism, collectivising land ownership and repressing private business. This caused the country to slide to the brink of famine. The collapse soon afterwards of its cold-war sponsor, the Soviet Union, added to the country's deep isolation and cut off the flow of roubles that had kept its economy going. Neighbouring countries were inundated with desperate Vietnamese “boat people”.

Since then the country has been transformed by almost two decades of rapid but equitable growth, in which Vietnam has flung open its doors to the outside world and liberalised its economy. Over the past decade annual growth has averaged 7.5%. Young, prosperous and confident Vietnamese throng downtown Ho Chi Minh City's smart Dong Khoi street with its designer shops. The quality of life is high for a country that until recently was so poor, and its larger cities have retained some of their colonial charm, though choking traffic and constant construction work are beginning to take their toll.

An agricultural miracle has turned a country of 85m once barely able to feed itself into one of the world's main providers of farm produce. Vietnam has also become a big exporter of clothes, shoes and furniture, soon to be joined by microchips when Intel opens its $1 billion factory outside Ho Chi Minh City. Imports of machinery are soaring. Exports plus imports equal 160% of GDP, making the economy one of the world's most open.

As told by Guy Brandenburg, retired DCPS teacher. I couldn't have said it any better. Check out Guy's blog when you get a chance @ http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/

More slander, lies, and spin from Michelle Rhee

Larry Elliot writes about Africa's manufacturing challenges:

Textiles and clothing account for one fifth of Africa's manufactured exports (and in a country such as Lesotho, well over 90%), but competition has intensified since the scrapping of the multi-fibre agreement (MFA) in 2005 removing the quotas that had limited China's exports..."Development studies experts state that"...scales [of production] are low in sub-Saharan African plants, and many producers suffer from poor bureaucratic and physical infrastructure. But there is pervasive evidence that many SSA plants suffer from low levels of productivity arising out of organisational procedures, low levels of skill and inadequate management within plants."
All these factors are evident in Mali, one of Africa's biggest producers of cotton, which - in theory - could turn the raw material into finished garments. Yet Mali is one of the poorest 10 countries in the world. At a ginning factory an hour's drive south of the capital, Bamako, 97% of the cotton is exported to be turned into clothes. Marks & Spencer arrives next week to look at the potential for sourcing organic cotton from Mali, but will almost certainly take the raw material out of the country for processing.

via YaleGlobal

My earlier post was about Michelle Rhee the person- what she did and what the results were of her actions. But this post will focus more on her actions with regards to educational reform and my thoughts on these issues.

Via Newsweek I saw this article- "Why Michelle Rhee Isn't Done With School Reform." Here are some selected passages from it:

...When I started as chancellor in 2007, I never had any illusions about how tough it would be to turn around a failing system like D.C.’s; the city had gone through seven chancellors in the 10 years before me. While I had to make many structural changes—overhauling the system for evaluating teachers and principals, adopting new reading and math programs, making sure textbooks got delivered on time—I believed the hardest thing would be changing the culture. We had to raise the expectations that people had about what was possible for our kids.

I quickly announced a plan to close almost two dozen schools, which provoked community outrage. We cut the central office administration in half. And I also proposed a new contract for teachers that would increase their salaries dramatically if they abandoned the tenure system and agreed to be paid based on their effectiveness....

Rhee offers up several structural changes to the system, increased efficiency in both facilities and in human resources, and changed the culture of the biggest aspect of education, the teachers. All of these proposals are fascinating, but it is the teacher's pay one that I am the most interested in.

According to wikipedia, Rhee had two proposals:

In 2008, she also sought to renegotiate how the school system compensates teachers. Rhee offered teachers the choice of: being paid up to $140,000 based on what she termed "student achievement" -- but losing tenure; or, retaining tenure -- but earning much smaller pay raises. This controversial move to end teacher tenure and promote "merit" pay was strongly contested by the teachers unions.

In 2010, Rhee and the unions agreed on a new contract that offered 20% pay raises and bonuses of $20,000 to $30,000 for "strong student achievement," in exchange for weakened teachers' seniority protections and the end of teacher tenure for one year. Teachers were observed by administrators and outside professionals for five 30-minute sessions during the year, and the teachers' performance was rated during those sessions. Teachers who received fewer than 175 out of 400 points were deemed ineffective and were dismissed. Teachers who received between 175 and 249 points were deemed minimally effective and given a one-year warning to improve their performance. Under this new agreement, Rhee fired 241 teachers, the vast majority of whom received poor evaluations, and put 737 additional school employees on notice.

As a teacher whose students achieve superior results on AP tests (I've taught 3 different AP courses in recent years and steadily raised test scores and enrollment in these courses) and on common assessments (I've taught 4 other classes in recent years and had my students (including mainstreamed students) outperform other teachers on our common exams), I'm quite comfortable with being judged on student achievement. And my worth isn't just measured in the classroom- I run the most popular club in the school, volunteer on our teacher leadership team, run several charities, mentor students during my prep hour, and coach part-time. It would be nice if I was rewarded for this sort of effort rather than watching teachers who perform at a much lower level make the same amount as me.

To think that I could be being paid like the professional that I am- with several advanced degrees and extensive background experience- rather than as a factory drone that simply moves students through the system! It is an exciting thought, but I don't want to dwell on how it would benefit me personally- imagine how exciting it would be to my fellow teachers who also perform exceptionally in the classroom. Because I'm going to let you in on a little secret right now- there are a lot of exceptional teachers in education, who haven't been drained and wearied and discouraged by the system and who make my efforts pale in comparison. I'm driven by these other teachers, who I am in competition with for test scores and achievement, and we are driven in spite of the system and not by it. It makes me excited to think that these other teachers could be rewarded for their tremendous efforts in education!

And the downside? Bad teachers lose their jobs. Teachers who are unqualified, teachers who do a poor job of teaching their students, teachers who do not achieve measurable results, and teachers who everyone in the building knows are bad will lose their jobs. Oh, it's no big secret who these people are- ask anyone in my building who would be fired first, and they'd look knowingly at you, since they know who these people are. There are not a lot of them, but they are there, sucking up resources and sucking down students, bad apples ruining the bunch, souring students on learning, while giving teachers a bad name. They'd lose their jobs.The union shouldn't be protecting them.

So what's the next step? Continuing from the Newsweek article...

....When you think about how things happen in our country—how laws get passed or policies are made—they happen through the exertion of influence. From the National Rifle Association to the pharmaceutical industry to the tobacco lobby, powerful interests put pressure on our elected officials and government institutions to sway or stop change.

Education is no different. We have textbook manufacturers, teachers’ unions, and even food vendors that work hard to dictate and determine policy. The public-employee unions in D.C., including the teachers’ union, spent huge sums of money to defeat Fenty. In fact, the new chapter president has said his No. 1 priority is job security for teachers, but there is no big organized interest group that defends and promotes the interests of children.

You can see the impact of this dynamic playing out every day. Policymakers, school-district administrators, and school boards who are beholden to special interests have created a bureaucracy that is focused on the adults instead of the students. Go to any public-school-board meeting in the country and you’ll rarely hear the words “children,” “students,” or “kids” uttered. Instead, the focus remains on what jobs, contracts, and departments are getting which cuts, additions, or changes. The rationale for the decisions mostly rests on which grown-ups will be affected, instead of what will benefit or harm children.

The teachers’ unions get the blame for much of this. Elected officials, parents, and administrators implore them to “embrace change” and “accept reform.” But I don’t think the unions can or should change. The purpose of the teachers’ union is to protect the privileges, priorities, and pay of their members. And they’re doing a great job of that.

What that means is that the reform community has to exert influence as well....

We have to exert our influence. That is why I blog- to change the system so that students and good teachers both can win, and by winning will make our nation greater.

For more on Michelle Rhee, check out THE BEE EATER: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation's Worst School District.

• Keys to Flattening your Classroom | elementaryflatclassroom

  I love this quote from our elementary Flat Classroom teachers Erica Barclay and Kevin Crouch:
  
  "What does it mean to flatten your classroom? How does this impact the learning experience for you and your students? The most profound impact is the ability to take learning outside the walls of your classroom. Though this has always been possible with the occasional field trip, in theory, now kids have the ability to take a field trip every day with access to the right technology. Furthermore, all kids don’t have to go to the same place on these virtual trips; they can learn from different people in different fields related to their interests. Flattening these walls means letting kids out of the factory model of education and into a world of differentiated instruction. The world is our classroom now, not just the physical room they may meet their teacher in."

  tags: education flatclassroom globalcollaboration

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