michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Oct 2, 2005 23:14:18 GMT 4
What Do Kids Need?By Deborah Meier Deborah Meier is the principal of The Mission Hill School, a new K-8 public school in Boston. She is also is Vice-Chair of the Coalition of Essential Schools, a national reform network. Previously, she founded and directed the Central Park East Schools, a network of small public schools in East Harlem. This article is an excerpt from her book, "Will Standards Save Public Education?" To educate today's children for tomorrow's democracy, we need locally grown standards that celebrate differences and reflect their communities. Virtually every discussion of education reform in the United States today takes for granted the notion that kids need "higher standards" in school. It is a simple and an enormously popular idea: let's decide what everyone ought to know, and then let's test every kid to make sure they all know it. The ones who don't won't be promoted or get a diploma. But is this really what our kids need? I believe that the current push for national and state-mandated standards is fundamentally misguided. It leads inevitably to standardization, which is the antithesis of real education. It will not help to develop young minds, contribute to a robust democratic life, or aid the most vulnerable of our fellow citizens. By shifting the locus of authority to outside bodies, it undermines the capacity of schools to instruct by example in the qualities of mind that schools in a democracy should be fostering in kids— responsibility for one's own ideas, tolerance for the ideas of others, and a capacity to negotiate differences. Standardization instead turns teachers and parents into the local instruments of externally imposed expert judgment. It thus decreases the chances that young people will grow up in the midst of adults who are making hard decisions and exercising mature judgment in the face of disagreements. And it squeezes out those schools and educators with innovative ideas. Read the entire article: www.eyeoneducation.tv/reform/meier.html Note to members and guests: Please feel free to add and comment here about articles or your own gripes about the educational system. I will be adding more to read on The No Child Left Behind Act, Standardized testing, ways to help your child, etc.. Michelle
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 4, 2005 15:55:34 GMT 4
No Child Left Behind [NCLB] legislation has failed to live up to its promise. Not only has the law been underfunded, but the Bush administration has equated standardized testing with accountability. Worse, school districts worried about being "restructured" if their students test poorly are directing teachers to drill students specifically to pass the tests —rather than teaching a rich, well-rounded curriculum. The Campaign for America's Future asked the experts at FairTest to evaluate how NCLB handles accountability—and offer a progressive alternative. To Keep its Promise, NCLB Needs Overhaul By Monty Neill and Lisa Guisbond, FairTest for the Campaign for America's Future Rather than fulfill the promise of its title, the controversial "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law has damaged education quality and equity because of its flawed assumptions and arbitrary requirements. NCLB must be thoroughly overhauled if the federal government is to make a useful contribution to strengthening education in U.S. schools, particularly for low-income and minority group students Based on evidence collected from several years of school experience around the nation, FairTest has documented a series of basic flaws in NCLB, including: The law falsely assumes that boosting test scores should be the primary goal of schools, an approach that has not improved education when implemented by individual states; Education is being damaged as students are coached to pass tests rather than taught a rich curriculum that will help prepare them for life in the 21st Century; Widespread school "failure" is an inevitable outcome of NCLB's one-size-fits-all design because of rigid "adequate yearly progress" provisions, which set unrealistic goals for academic gains, punish diversity, and ignore the fact that test results are frequently inaccurate; NCLB's school transfer policy undermines ongoing reform programs because it often unfairly stigmatizes the sending schools, is costly in time and other resources, and disruptive to teachers and students in both sending and receiving schools. The kinds of heavy-handed sanctions ("restructuring") required for schools that do not boost test scores have previously been shown to be counter-productive; The requirement that limited English proficient students score "proficient" on English exams is self-contradictory, as is the provision that most children with special needs demonstrate competency in the same manner as other students; and The federal government has failed to adequately fund the law. NCLB is based on testing, blaming and punishing. A more helpful accountability system would focus first on building the capacity of teachers, schools and districts to ensure that all children receive a high-quality education that meets their individual needs. Core elements of the accountability systems FairTest proposes to better promote school improvement include: Use of multiple forms of evidence of student learning, not just test scores; Extensive professional development that enables teachers to better assess and assist their students; Public reporting on school progress in academic and non-academic areas, using a variety of information sources and including improvement plans; and The sparing use of external interventions, such as school reorganization, while giving reform efforts sufficient time to succeed. Assessment systems must make public schools accountable to parents, students and the local community rather than to distant government bureaucracies. Some states, such as Nebraska, are having success with models based on these principles. Those who seek to fundamentally change NCLB face enormous obstacles on Capitol Hill—from both President Bush and key Republicans as well as many Democrats. However, the inevitable crisis in the law will propel a variety of calls for change. FairTest will continue working with educators, civil rights organizations, and parent and community groups to build the power to win positive changes to the law. www.ourfuture.org/issues_and_campaigns/education/pas_nclboverhaul.cfm
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Oct 5, 2005 9:08:14 GMT 4
ARE OUR "SCHOOLS" CONCENTRATION CAMPUSES FOR MIND DESTRUCTION?Much attention has recently been focused on child abuse. In my opinion, by far the worst and most damaging form of child abuse is called "compulsory education." Personally, I would rather not have children than subject them to incarceration in a concentration campus for mind destruction. In Report #03: How to Improve Your Information, the Semmelweis-reflex is described. In summary, the Semmelweis-reflex is the automatic rejection of the obvious, without thought, inspection, or experiment. You may think that in the supposedly enlightened age of the 1990's, humans no longer suffer from the Semmelweis-reflex. This view is mistaken. During the past twenty-five years numerous authors have written several dozen books - published by "mainstream" publishers - on why "compulsory education" should be abolished. The results of this cruel form of mind destruction are disastrous. Yet most people, when confronted with the suggestion that "compulsory education" be abolished, will summarily reject the suggestion without examination. The Semmelweis-reflex in action. The desired end result of an education system might be described as people who: competently read, write, speak, count and calculate; think independently, rationally, and creatively; have developed, and can increase, their consciousness, intelligence, thinking-skills, will-power, etc.; can speak in public; can do research; can be inventive; apply common sense to solve problems; have developed, and can enhance, practical skills in their areas of interest; conduct successful relationships; competently manage their own finances (money); apply appropriate values, principles, and reason to make decisions; continuously strive to improve every aspect of their life - happiness, health, success, confidence, competence, personal power, wealth, abilities, etc.; have a positive outlook on life; etc. People generally believe that children have to go to school to be educated. However, many authors demonstrate that the state-"education" system is worse than useless - children would be better off if state-"education" were abolished altogether. Parents should be free to educate their children as necessary. If schools are necessary, parents or businesses will pay entrepreneurs to create such schools. "Compulsory education" is a hoax because - rather than focusing on teaching reading, writing, and the ability to think creatively, critically, and independently - the emphasis in state-"schools" is on producing obedient conformists who can't think. In reality "compulsory education" is a form of mind destruction. THE CONSEQUENCES OF "EDUCATIONAL" MIND DESTRUCTION A report in The Arizona Republic of September 16, 1992 reflects the extent of the mind destruction wreaked by our "educators." A study found that 64 percent of elementary-school teachers say that the health of pupils is declining, while only 5 percent see it as improving. And "92 percent of the teachers listed psychological and emotional difficulties as the most common health problem. Researchers said those resulted mainly from divorce, neglect, low self-esteem and separation of family." The report didn't say anything about the fact that most of the parents of the pupils had themselves been incarcerated in concentration campuses for mind destruction - most of the teachers had of course suffered the same fate. The extent of the mind destruction of our youth is also reflected in increased rates of mental illness, suicide, violent crime, and further child abuse. In their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner report as follows: "...[T]he number one health problem in the United States is mental illness: there are more Americans suffering from mental illness than from all other forms of illness combined. Of almost equal magnitude is the crime problem. It is advancing rapidly on many fronts, from delinquency among affluent adolescents to frauds perpetrated by some of our richest corporations. Another is the suicide problem. Are you aware that suicide is the second most common cause of death among adolescents? Or how about the problem of 'damaged' children? The most common cause of infant mortality in the United States is parental beating." THE NATURE OF MIND DESTRUCTION"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year... It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty." - Albert Einstein "Some day, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well-considered, and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right, is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness." - Erik Erikson Jonathan Kozol is a teacher. In 1967 he wrote Death At An Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools, for which he won the National Book Award. Kozol taught for a year in a Boston school. Two weeks before the end of the year he was fired for reading a poem by a widely-recognized black poet whose work was not part of the compulsory curriculum. Kozol recounts how some teachers spoke of their black students as "animals" and referred to the school as a "zoo." He tells of the many beatings using bamboo whips. He provides extensive details of "pedagogic brainwashing" - for example, children are taught that "true obedience is true liberty." He quotes 15 such slogans. "Well, that was 25 years ago," you might say, "Things have changed dramatically since." In a recent article (The Arizona Republic, September 3, 1992), columnist Walter Williams wrote, "The education that most kids receive is nothing to write home about; however, that received by black youngsters is criminal... 46 percent of white - and 54 percent of black - Chicago public school teachers have their own children in private schools." Williams also cites statistics that indicate that the more money is spent on education, the worse are the results. Kozol is also the author of Illiterate America, which claims that one-third of adult Americans are illiterate. Among blacks, 44 percent of adults are illterate. That was in 1985. The situation today is probably even worse. Read the entire article: mind-trek.com/reports/misc/minddest.htm
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james
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Post by james on Oct 5, 2005 9:59:13 GMT 4
April 9, 2005 "Illiterate America" – 20 Years Later Tom Sticht International Consultant in Adult Education "Twenty-five million American adults cannot read the poison warnings on a can of pesticide, a letter form their child’s teacher, or the front page of a daily paper. An additional 35 million read only at a level which is less than equal to the full survival needs of our society. Together, these 60 million people represent more than one third of the entire adult population." (p. 4) The year 2005 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Jonathan Kozol’s passionate account of "Illiterate America" (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985) from which the quote above is taken. In his recounting of the lives of young children from poverty backgrounds with whom he had struggled to teach in the inner city schools of Boston in the 1960’s, Kozol painted a bleak, depressing word picture of the lives of masses of children who grew up to become adult illiterates. The stories, the numbers, the passion of Kozol’s book startled a nation that perceived itself as among the most literate nations on earth. But the book did not stop with simply pointing out the mind-numbing numbers of illiterate adults in America, it also pointed to the grossly inadequate response to the situation made by federal, state, and local governments, noting that "The federal government spends $100 million yearly to address the needs of 60 million people. The President has asked that this sum be reduced to $50 million. Even at the present level, direct federal allocations represent about $1.65 per year for each illiterate." (p. 5) Now, 20 years after Kozol’s alarming call to action, how have things progressed? On September 8, 1993, the U. S. Department of Education put out a Press Release announcing the results of a National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). The Press Release led with the bold headline, "LITERACY LEVELS DEFICIENT FOR 90 MILLION U. S. ADULTS". The release stated that about 47percent of the U. S. adult population demonstrated low levels of literacy. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley went on to say, "This report is a wake-up call to the sheer magnitude of illiteracy in this country and underscores literacy’s connection to economic status." So just eight years after Kozol pointed to 60 million adults with deficient literacy skills, the U. S. government increased this number by 30 million to 90 million adults with defective literacy. But just as when Kozol was writing, the federal government again responded to this appalling news in a startling manner – it reduced the budget for adult literacy education for each of the next three years! Today, in 2005, the U. S. Department of Education’s internet web site for Adult Education and Literacy still reports data from the NALS, and suggests that almost half the adult population is below the level of literacy needed for successfully meeting the demands of contemporary life at work, in the home, and in the community. And once again this dire situation has been met in the most egregious manner. Just as when the President called for a 50 percent cut in federal adult literacy education funding in the mid-1980s, the current President has responded to his own Department of Education’s concerns for the literacy needs of 90 million adults by proposing a more than two-thirds cut in the federal budget for adult literacy education, from some $575 million to around $200 million. Following Kozol’s approach of 1985, this comes to about $2.22 for each of the 90 million adults the federal government has declared to be in need of improved literacy. In constant 2005 dollars, this amounts to a 25 percent decrease from 1985 to 2005. The federal government is set to release another expensive survey of adult literacy in the U. S. in the fall of 2005. No doubt it, too, will call attention to tens of millions of adults whose literacy abilities are below the standards that the federal government deems necessary for the Nation to compete in the global economy and for citizens to maintain themselves and their families in a healthy state of being. But so what. Who cares? Jonathan Kozol wrote another book that stirred emotions long before he wrote "Illiterate America." That book he titled "Death at an Early Age." Over the last 20 years it seems as though the evidence points to the need for a third book. Because when needy, poorly educated children who are left to die in the schools grow up and become adults, their government is even more disdainful of them and their needs than when they were children. As far as the federal government is concerned, this third book might be called, "Death at Any Age." lists.literacytent.org/pipermail/aaace-nla/2005/002629.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Oct 10, 2005 8:10:28 GMT 4
Want to Know the REAL reason for the No Child Left Behind Act, and the insane push for high stakes testing. How about corporations making tons of money on the backs of our children?
Years ago, I was very involved with presenting information to parents, teachers, and at school board meetings in which I attempted to show the flaws and danger in this type of legislation. I failed in my mission. The general consensus was that increased testing would be a good thing and a way to hold our teachers more accountable. Very few listened and those who did seemed satisfied to wait and see how it all panned out.
Now, a few years later, after you know what has hit the fan, parents and educators are concerned about school districts inability to fund over zealous testing of students, children who do not graduate when they fail standardized tests [even if they are A students otherwise], and the moral implications of teaching to the test.
The following are snips from an article from FairTest, The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which was originally published in the Nation magazine [01/28/02] As seen below it highlights Bush's ardent supporters in the testing and textbook publishing industries. I encourage you read the entire article, the link is provided below......MichelleReading Between the Linesby Stephen Metcalf [snips]: The new Bush testing regime emphasizes minimal competence along a narrow range of skills, with an eye toward satisfying the low end of the labor market. All this sits well with a business community whose first preoccupation is "global competitiveness": a community most comfortable thinking in terms of inputs (dollars spent on public schools) in relation to outputs (test scores). No one disputes that schools must inculcate the skills necessary for economic survival. But does it follow that the theory behind public schooling should be overwhelmingly economic? One of the reform movement's founding documents is Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America's Public Schools, by Lou Gerstner, chairman of IBM. Gerstner describes schoolchildren as human capital, teachers as sellers in a marketplace and the public school system as a monopoly. Predictably, CEOs bring to education reform CEO rhetoric: stringent, intolerant of failure, even punitive--hence the word "sanction," as if some schools had been turning away weapons inspectors. All of which has led to a feeding frenzy. Educational Testing Service, maker of the SAT, has always been nonprofit; but it recently created a for-profit, K-12 subsidiary, ETS K-12 Works, to provide "testing and measurement services to the nation's elementary and secondary schools." To help market it, the company replaced CEO Nancy Cole, an educator with a background in psychometrics, with an executive from the marketing wing of the pharmaceutical industry. As new CEO Kurt Landgraf recently declared, ETS has a "moral responsibility" to participate in the debate on the "viability of high-stakes outcome testing," for "the betterment of our society and the people in it." The big educational testing companies have thus dispatched lobbyists to Capitol Hill. Bruce Hunter, who represents the American Association of School Administrators, says, "I've been lobbying on education issues since 1982, but the test publishers have been active at a level I've never seen before. At every hearing, every discussion, the big test publishers are always present with at least one lobbyist, sometimes more." Both standardized testing and textbook publishing are dominated by the so-called Big Three--McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin and Harcourt General--all identified as "Bush stocks" by Wall Street analysts in the wake of the 2000 election.
While critics of the Bush Administration's energy policies have pointed repeatedly to its intimacy with the oil and gas industry--specifically the now-imploding Enron--few education critics have noted the Administration's cozy relationship with McGraw-Hill. At its heart lies the three-generation social mingling between the McGraw and Bush families. The McGraws are old Bush friends, dating back to the 1930s, when Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed began to establish Jupiter Island, a barrier island off the coast of Florida, as a haven for the Northeast wealthy. The island's original roster of socialite vacationers reads like a who's who of American industry, finance and government: the Meads, the Mellons, the Paysons, the Whitneys, the Lovetts, the Harrimans--and Prescott Bush and James McGraw Jr. The generations of the two families parallel each other closely in age: the patriarchs Prescott and James Jr., son George and nephew Harold Jr., and grandson George W. and grandnephew Harold III, who now runs the family publishing empire. The amount of cross-pollination and mutual admiration between the Administration and that empire is striking: Harold McGraw Jr. sits on the national grant advisory and founding board of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. McGraw in turn received the highest literacy award from President Bush in the early 1990s, for his contributions to the cause of literacy. The McGraw Foundation awarded current Bush Education Secretary Rod Paige its highest educator's award while Paige was Houston's school chief; Paige, in turn, was the keynote speaker at McGraw-Hill's "government initiatives" conference last spring. Harold McGraw III was selected as a member of President George W. Bush's transition advisory team, along with McGraw-Hill board member Edward Rust Jr., the CEO of State Farm and an active member of the Business Roundtable on educational issues. An ex-chief of staff for Barbara Bush is returning to work for Laura Bush in the White House--after a stint with McGraw-Hill as a media relations executive. John Negroponte left his position as McGraw-Hill's executive vice president for global markets to become Bush's ambassador to the United Nations. www.fairtest.org/nattest/Nation%20piece%20bush%20links.html
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DT1
Moderator
You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Oct 10, 2005 8:31:06 GMT 4
Such unabashed"good old boy network" cronyism is absolutely repulsive. It seems the concept of conflict of interest got the bum-rush on January 20th,2000. Thank you,Michelle,for helping to inform people of this,one more under-reported scandal among so many.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Nov 12, 2005 17:11:08 GMT 4
If you think that you are well educated, I have a challenge for you. We feel that with our technological society that we are quite advanced with knowledge. I have an 8th Grade Graduation Test you may take to see just how much you know.....
This is the eighth-grade Final Exam for 1895 from Salina, Kansas, USA.
It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS and reprinted by the Salina Journal.
8th Grade Final Exam Salina, Kansas - 1895
Grammar (Time: one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters. 2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications. 3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph. 4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run. 5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case. 6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation. 7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time: 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic. 2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold? 3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu., deducting 1050 lbs. for tare? 4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals? 5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton. 6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent. 7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per m? 8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent. 9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods? 10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.
U.S. History (Time: 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided. 2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus. 3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War. 4. Show the territorial growth of the United States. 5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas. 6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion. 7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe? 8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865
Orthography (Time: one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication? 2. What are elementary sounds? How classified? 3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals? 4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'. 5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule. 6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each. 7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super. 8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last. 9. Use the following correctly in sentences: Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays. 10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Geography (Time: one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend? 2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas? 3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean? 4. Describe the mountains of North America. 5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fermandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco. 6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. 7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each. 8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude? 9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers. 10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Feb 6, 2006 18:03:06 GMT 4
February 4 / 5, 2006 Rumsfeld's Scheme to Spy on Your Kids Pentagon Database Leaves No Child AloneBy MIKE FERNER All over the country, organized citizens are fighting to restrict the military's presence in schools. But having recruiters troll high schools cafeterias is just one way the Pentagon inundates our youngsters with messages to "Go Army!" Since 2002, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has spent a half-million dollars a year creating a database it claims is "arguably the largest repository of 16-25 year-old youth data in the country, containing roughly 30 million records." In Pentagonese the database is part of the Joint Advertising, Marketing Research and Studies (JAMRS) project. Its purpose, along with additional millions spent on polling and marketing research, is to give the Pentagon's $4 billion annual recruiting budget maximum impact. And it has lit a fire under civil libertarians, privacy advocates and counter-recruiting activists across the nation. Over 100 organizations recently sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and to the DoD oversight committees of Congress, demanding the Pentagon dump the JAMRS database. Gary Daniels, litigation coordinator for the Ohio ACLU, declared, "The ACLU's work revolves around personal privacy, but in 2005, it's almost like the ship has sailed. It's clear the Pentagon's database does not bode well for privacy rights." "JAMRS is a much larger issue than recruiters' presence in the schools," Daniels added. "Students who 'opt out' of having their information turned over to recruiters by their school are just shifted into another column in the JAMRS database, called the 'suppression list.'" With students' personal information now in the hands of the Pentagon, Daniels estimated that keeping recruiters from contacting youths directly is just about impossible. Air Force Lt. Colonel, Ellen Krenke, a DoD spokesperson, downplayed the significance of the JAMRS database. It was initiated in 2002 and even then, she said, it was not a new project, simply a way to centralize information. "The individual services (Army, Navy, etc.) have been collecting this data since being authorized by Congress to do so in 1982." As for concerns about the sources of the information on these 30 million young people and how it will be used, Krenke said, "Most of the information in the database is collected through commercial vendors and is given by students voluntarily. If requested by law enforcement, tax authorities or Congress, JAMRS is required by law to provide the information. However JAMRS has never distributed these records outside DoD. Nor is it DoD's intent to share the data to outside agencies." Lillie Coney, Associate Director of EPIC (Electronic Privacy and Information Center), said that Krenke's reassurances are less than meet the eye. Coney contends that by waiting until May of this year to give public notice it was assembling the JAMRS database, DoD was in violation of the federal Privacy Act for over two years and has kept the public in the dark as to exactly how the information will be used.She characterized the 14 "Blanket Routine Uses" the Pentagon claims as exemptions to the Privacy Act as "a catch-all loophole that allows an agency to disclose personal information to others without the individual's consent," and objects that, to date, the Pentagon refuses to put in writing why they are not requesting information directly from the data subjects, how to correct false information in a record, or how the military intends to notify someone that local, state, or federal agencies have requested their information. Two of the 14 exemptions claimed by the Pentagon will allow it to give any federal law enforcement agency the records of anyone it believes has broken any federal statute, as well as disclose a person's records for the purpose of "counterintelligence, or for the purpose of enforcing laws which protect the national security of the United States." Coney warned that this will allow the military to begin creating criminal records on individuals for nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights. "Compare this to credit reports," Coney explained. "If you didn't know they existed and that they could affect your ability to get a job or a loan, how in the world would you know you need to check them for incorrect information? Imagine what you could do with access to a student's name, phone, social security number, e-mail address, race, employer, grade point average, gender, extracurricular activities, driving record, degree interest, and attained skills if it is shared with any federal government agency, foreign government, as well as state and local governments. If any information in this database is wrong, who will authorities tend to believe? You or the Department of Defense?" Others object to JAMRS because of the extensive involvement of private marketing companies, including maintenance of the database itself. Toledoan Peggy Daly-Masternak has two teenage sons. She started the Student and Family Rights and Privacy Committee, aimed at reducing the military's presence in the city's public schools. She says "there are few things these days on which people across the spectrum of viewpoints can unify. Privacy is one. If people knew the extent of the Pentagon's data collection they would give it a resounding 'No' and they would shout 'DEFINITELY NOT' to compiling these databanks together under contract to private companies. Yet, this is exactly what JAMRS does."The Pentagon has contracted JAMRS work to:Mullen Advertising Corp., one of over 100 subsidiaries of the Interpublic Group, a global advertising conglomerate with $6.4 billion in annual revenues and operations in 130 countries. Benow Corp., Mullen's subcontractor to manage the database. Benow was recently purchased by Equifax, Inc. which describes itself as "a global leader in turning information into intelligence." Equifax generates $1.2 billion annually by selling marketing services to businesses and credit reports to individuals. American Student List Corp. (ASL), and Student Marketing Group Corp. (SMG), two companies that specialize in gathering information from students, sell JAMRS some of the data it uses. According to EPIC, both these companies have faced legal action for using deceptive practices in collecting information from students. Teenage Research Unlimited: (TRU) is one of the companies from which JAMRS purchases "information on attitudes of youthon a wide variety of topics" TRU's web site claims it is "the first marketing-research firm to specialize exclusively in teenagers," with a vision "to develop an unparalleled expertise in the teenage market, and to offer our clients virtually unlimited methods for researching teens." At the bottom of the company's "about us" page, TRU states it "regularly applies its expertise to the 'unmarketing' of high-risk youth behaviors. As an advocate for teens, TRU has worked on a number of important social-marketing issues, including: anti-tobacco and drug use, sexual assault, life safety, education, crisis management, and skin cancer." What it calls its social-marketing clients include the American Cancer Society, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, various state health departments, and Kidspeace, a group with a mission to "give hope, help and healing to children facing crisis," including a web page advising how to help children cope with war. The much longer list of TRU corporate clients include Abercrombie and Fitch, Calvin Klein, Target, Hill and Knowlton, Channel 1, CosmoGirl, Cartoon Network, MTV, Time-Warner, WB Network, AT&T, Microsoft, Verizon Wireless; VISA, Avon, Proctor and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Heinz, Kraft, General Mills, Taco Bell; and lastly, an "Other" category ranging from the Master Lock Co., to the National Association of Chain Drug Stores. Literally at the bottom of the list is the Department of Defense. As the ACLU's Daniels said, "In a way, the Pentagon is not doing anything private industry hasn't done for years. "The military is trying to turn kids into soldiers and private industry is trying to make them bigger consumers." Daly-Masternak voiced an additional concern. "The sources of data in the JAMRS database include the High School Master File and the College Students File. Both are collected and manipulated by the American Student List and Student Marketing Groupand where do the ASL and SMG get the data they trade for cash? If it's what the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) recommends schools collect from students, every student from kindergarten through college is in big trouble regarding their privacy. Linking JAMRS to NCES and other such data has the potential for the DoD to create lifetime profiles of everyone," she warned. The U.S. Dept. of Education's National Center for Educational Statistics publishes the NCES handbook listing over 700 coded bits of information on students, such as:Category 0674: Honors Information--18 coded options including whether the student made the Honor Roll, Honor Society, or Honorable Mention. 0679: Extra curricular activities--97 coded options 0689: Non-school activity--13 coded options from full time employment to patents and inventions. 0710: Education planned--14 coded options from GED to Ph.D. 0714: Voting status 0715: Other post-school accomplishments "other than employment, education and military service such as elective offices held and books published." 0737: Whether or not the student has gingivitis. Options 2091 to 2094 describe normal gums to "severe gum deviation." 0741: Mother's first pre-natal visit 0743: Mother's total weight gained during pregnancy 1070: Meal service transaction date: "The month, day and year on which the student received a particular meal or food service." 1106: Meal service components. Coded options include bread, fruit, meat, milk and vegetable. 9 categories on Early Childhood Program Participation, defined as "Information about a child's care, education, and/or services from birth to enrollment in kindergarten." 16 categories on student employment: In-School/Post-School Employment Status to Number of Hours Worked per Weekend and Employment Recognition. Coney said people should also note that so much information is "floating around in cyberspace" from sites like www.myspace.com where young people can chat on thousands of topics in exchange for registering their name, email address, date of birth, gender, zip code, and country. "The free time kids have to themselves these days to role play, act out, and just be kids is often spent in the new online 'backyard,' but we know that anything placed on the internet can be accessed if there's a data leak." The Pentagon's JAMRS web site lists the following as sources for the information in its database:* High School Master File: (HSMF) contains contact information on nearly four million students for every class year, covering about 90% of the high school population. * Selective Service System: contains a listing of all registrants with the Selective Service System, about 2.5 million names per year. * College File: contains basic information on over 3.4 million college students enrolled in a range of two- and four-year academic institutions across the country. * Joint Lead Management System: over 70,000 yearly "influencer (parents, coaches etc.) and prospect leads" are processed on a daily basis from the individual branches of the military. * Permanent Suppression File: this file is update and available the first of every month. Some of the research projects JAMRS commissions include:Ad Tracking Study: conducted quarterly to monitor "advertising awareness and imagery" for all military branches. Adult/Youth Influencer Polls: track "attitudes, impressions, and behavioral intentions as they relate to and affect military enlistment." The Youth Poll "measures youth's favorability of the military, perceived knowledge of the military, perceptions of current economic conditions, and reactions to current events." The Parent Poll is targeted at parents of children who've completed the Youth Poll, to see what has an effect on "a parent's likelihood to recommend as well as indirectly influence youth propensity (to enlist)." College Drop Outs Study: conducted to understand "how the Services can capitalize on this group of individuals (ages 18-24)." It was performed by University of Texas MBA students who volunteered their time as part of a market research course. Educator Study: 90 high school teachers and guidance counselors were polled to "uncover their attitudes toward military service" and to "develop better understandings of the relationship between educators--a key youth influencer group--and military representatives engaged in recruiting efforts on high school campuses" Knowledge Study: "Knowledge about the military and attitudes toward it have a strong impact on youth's propensity to join and adults' likelihood to recommend the military(T)he JAMRS program began a study in August of 2004 on the types of knowledge that may affect these attitudes: subjective knowledge (how much one believes he/she knows about the military), declarative knowledge (knowledge of military facts) and structural knowledge (how one associates military concepts) are three types of knowledge thought to affect attitudes toward the military. This study will be especially beneficial to military recruiters and advertisers in determining what youth and influencers need to know about the military, what they need to believe they know about the military, and how they relate military concepts, in order to be propensed for military service or recommend it." Media Allocation Project: using services such as Nielson and Arbitron, "JAMRS can project how many young people (15-24 & 18-24) saw a branded message and forecast costs by state and by month. These data have been, and will be, used by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through research and analysis, to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing communications and to assess advertising mix tests (given a certain budget, what is the most efficient mix of TV, radio, print, etc.). Clemson University has also used these data to link advertising effectiveness with military applications and enlistments." Mothers' Attitude Survey: gauges attitudes towards the military of 270 mothers of 10th- and 11th-graders. The purpose is to validate JAMRS' "influencer communications" strategies that allow recruiters to a) refine approaches towards friends of mothers who may be strong supporters of the military, b) help motivate friends of mothers who are undecided about advocating the military, and c) help avoid alienating mothers who are strongly opposed to the military. National Quorum Poll: conducted by Wirthlin Worldwide/Harris Interactive Co., is a twice-monthly omnibus survey that serves as a trend analysis tool. "The National Quorumprovides JAMRS the means to get a 'pulse' on public opinion immediately after a significant event" and to capture the attitudes and opinions of American adults on various aspects of the military, including the impact of the war in Iraq. Studies conducted by the National Academy of Sciences: The JAMRS site describes an extensive involvement between the Department of Defense and the NAS, dating from 1999, through the Academy's National Research Council. The Council's Committee on Youth Population and Military Recruitment has completed two phases of work. 1) "In the first phase, the committee examined long-term trends in the youth population and evaluated policy options that could improve youth propensity for and enlistment in the military." Their research was published in a 2003 report, Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth 2) "In the second phase, the committee reviewed military research on advertising and recruiting and found it often lacked long-term objectives and coordination across relevant research topics and methodologies. The committee developed an evaluation framework to assist the DoD in making informed decisions on the effectiveness of various recruiting policies and mixes of recruiting resources." This research was published in a 2004 report, Evaluating Military Advertising and Recruiting, Theory and Methodology. The book is helping DoD to improve its research on advertising and recruiting policies and has been sent to each of the Services' Market Research Directors and Recruiting Commanders. Donald Rumsfeld's top adviser on recruitment, pay and benefits for some 3.4 million people on active duty, in the Guard and Reserve, and DoD civilian employees is David Chu. He recently told reporters, "If you don't want conscription, you have to give the Department of Defense an avenue to contact people." The Pentagon's JAMRS database is designed to do that in a bigger and better way than ever before. Mike Ferner is a freelance writer from Ohio. He can be reached at: mike.ferner@sbcglobal.net counterpunch.org/ferner02042006.htmlNOTE FROM MICHELLE: Recommended reading Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of America's Schoolsby Alex Molnar "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as..." (more) SIPs: private school voucher plans, parental choice law, private school vouchers, parental choice legislation, charter school reform (more) CAPs: Channel One, Chris Whittle, Whittle Communications, Lamar Alexander, Education Alternatives (more) www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0813391393?v=glance
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Feb 20, 2006 18:24:57 GMT 4
Harvard study blasts Bush education policyThursday, February 16, 2006; Posted: 9:56 a.m. EST (14:56 GMT) BOSTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- President Bush's No Child Left Behind education policy has in some cases benefited white middle-class children over blacks and other minorities in poorer regions, a Harvard University study showed Tuesday. www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/02/16/bush.education.reutCute little flash on standardized testing from the American Federation of Teachers: www.letsgetitright.org/cartoon/TAKE ACTION:www.unionvoice.org/campaign/NCLBletsgetitright/Full Petition Text: For all children to succeed, schools need high academic standards, rich curricula, quality professional development for staff, help for struggling students, adequate funding and a fair system of assessment and accountability.
The No Child Left Behind Act has failed to live up to its promise. Our children are paying the price. Congress and the administration need to listen to parents and teachers. It's time to make some constructive changes and get NCLB right.
Signed by: [Your name] [Your address] I'm posting this FYI. But I have one question: "During the elections, why did the teacher's union put their support behind Bush?" Did they think that they would benefit from the NCLB legislation? Did anyone seriously consider the after affects of NCLB? Or maybe some of the wealthier school districts saw it as a cakewalk to gain more federal funding.
After all, monies don't go to the struggling, poorer performing districts whose children need more help. Nope, those who can afford the increased testing costs and who shamelessly teach to the test for high test scores are the ones who reap the funding rewards. Why, some of the wealthier districts are able to create their own version of standardized testing which reflects the curriculum that they offer. All others are forced to buy off the shelf tests which in most cases test students on information that they have not been taught or not taught at the grade level they are in.
Seriously, these questions have bugged me for a long time. Where was the AFT when the studies behind NCLB legislation were put out? Studies which were not even completed by the academic professionals [none who were involved in the public school system] due to time limitations of the administration's push for legislation. In fact, the studies were handed over to and completed by a research company. [I'll post more on this later, when I have the time.]
So, now the the stuff has hit the fan, since standardized testing has been shown to be a poor way to judge students' progress [and most likely hinder progress], and school districts are going broke under NCLB, the AFT is screaming; I ask again: "Where was the AFT when they could have headed off this disastrous legislation?" In Japan, teachers refused to use standardized testing at the primary grade levels; they won. Too bad the AFT didn't follow their peers in Japan; they have, however, done an excellent job of increasing public school salaries....Michelle AFT About UsThe American Federation of Teachers was founded in 1916 to represent the economic, social and professional interests of classroom teachers. It is an affiliated international union of the AFL-CIO. The AFT has more than 3,000 local affiliates nationwide, 43 state affiliates, and more than 1.3 million members. Five divisions within the organization represent the broad spectrum of AFT's membership: teachers; paraprofessionals and school-related personnel (PSRP); local, state and federal employees; higher education faculty and staff; and nurses and other healthcare professionals. In addition, the union includes more than 170,000 retiree members. The AFT is governed by its elected officers and delegates to the union's biennial convention, which sets union policy and elects the union's officers. Elected leaders are Edward J. McElroy, president, Nat LaCour, secretary-treasurer, Antonia Cortese, executive vice president, and a 39-member executive council. McElroy and LaCour also serve as vice presidents of the AFL-CIO. In non-convention years, the AFT hosts the Quality Educational Standards in Teaching (QuEST) conference, a professional issues meeting that attracts nearly 3,000 educators from around the country. AFT's healthcare, higher education, public employee and PSRP divisions also host yearly divisional meetings. The AFT advocates sound, commonsense public education policies, including high academic and conduct standards for students and greater professionalism for teachers and school staff; excellence in public service through cooperative problem solving and workplace innovations; and high-quality healthcare provided by qualified professionals. Among the well-known Americans who have been AFT members are: John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Hubert Humphrey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frank McCourt, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, former Senate Majority Leader and Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield, former HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, and former United Nations Undersecretary and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche. www.letsgetitright.org/about.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Mar 6, 2006 21:51:01 GMT 4
Saturday, March 04, 2006 The Bashing of BennishBy Rosemarie Jackowski It looks like the press has found another scapegoat. Must be that the Ward Churchill bashing was no longer pulling in the high ratings so now begins the Bashing of Bennish. Jay Bennish is a high school geography teacher at Overland High School in Aurora, Colorado. Recently one of his students taped some of Bennish’s comments during a class. I am not offended that a student would take that action, either on his own or under the direction of someone with less than pure motives. All classrooms should be open to public scrutiny at all times. A while back in Vermont there was an incident. In the middle of the night the local police chief gained entrance into the high school classroom of a teacher who was an anti-war activist. The chief was on a mission to inspect the classroom bulletin board. He suspected that there might be some anti-war material posted there. “Can’t have none of that there Commie stuff infecting the minds of our youth.” Anti-war information, anti-capitalist information, anti-government information, anti-military information are now verboten. In other words, we have become an anti-information culture. Any discussion of the important issues is not allowed. No one is allowed to stray too far outside the Democrat/Republican box. Hannity and Colmes aired their views of the Bennish classroom controversy during their March 2 program. It is not surprising that both Sean and Alan bashed Bennish. “Fair and balanced” has never been a view that is held at Fox or MSNBC or CNN. More importantly, fair, balanced, and factual information is also missing from many textbooks currently in use in our government run schools. What is remarkable is the consistency of the media to engage in ad hominem attacks against anyone who holds an out-of-the-box global view. The folks at Fox really need to get out more. Out here in the real world there are many different global views. Some citizens in this country don’t support capitalism. Ain’t that a shocker. Some folks even refer to it as “predatory capitalism”. Some folks don’t support wars of aggression and many do not support the occupation of other countries by this government. Sometimes anti-war activists are tolerated, but anti-capitalist activists, now that is a whole other issue. It strikes at the heart of the Empire. It is the educational system that has enabled the global aggressions that have inflamed the rest of the world. The Harvard/napalm connection is just one old example of the military-university complex. The failure of our schools to give an accurate view of world history is an even bigger problem that educators often ignore. This is not a freedom of speech issue. It is an issue of the right of students to have access to accurate historical information. Do students have the legal right to accurate historical information? I applaud Bennish. He is one of the few with the moral fortitude to do the right thing. We should not allow him to be alone in bearing the burden that comes with exposing the truth. If the facts that Bennish presented to his class were wrong, then and only then, should he be criticized. I have yet to hear anyone attack the information he presented to his students. Instead of bashing Bennish, he should be a candidate for “The Teacher of the Year” award. The entire country should be examining the lessons that Bennish attempted to teach. A free and open discussion of the information would benefit this “Mis-informed R us Nation”. Unfortunately, this Bennish blip on the media’s radar screen will go down as just one more missed opportunity for the press to become informed. It is doubtful that the issues that Bennish bought to his students will ever be addressed in the media in this country. The recently released Bin Laden tape made a reference to a book by William Blum. Those in the media who interviewed Blum immediately after the tape was released never seemed to get the point. The serious issues in Blum’s books were never discussed and it is doubtful that the information that Bennish tried to give to his students will ever be discussed openly. Until those in the media are themselves educated enough to discuss the important issues, the ad hominem attacks will continue. Sean and Alan, you really should get out more. Rosemarie Jackowski is an advocacy journalist living in Vermont. She can be reached at dissent@sover.net. www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/jackowski03042006Should Teacher Jay Bennish Be Fired (Poll -- 72% Say No) For Comments He Made About Bush?cbs4denver.com/local/polls_poll_061105430Defend Teacher Jay BennishOverland High School teacher Jay Bennish has been suspended for making remarks critical of the Bush regime in his classroom. Demand that the suspension of Jay Bennish be immediately withdrawn and that he be allowed to return to teaching, unimpeded by harassment or threats from inside or outside the school. Contact Overland High School Administrators:Principal Jana Frieler jfrieler@cherrycreekschools.org School Phone: 720-747-3700 FAX 720-747-3895 Superintendent: Monte Moses 720-554-4213 Sign and Circulate this Statement:On January 31st, George W. Bush stood in front of the world to deliver his State of the Union speech that angrily defended his murderous war on Iraq, the Patriot Act and NSA spying, and his whole ugly program. The next day, Jay Bennish, a teacher at Overland High School in suburban Denver, stood in front of his geography class and spoke a simple truth: Bush’s program of spying, forced religion, unjust war and oppressive foreign policies is immoral and a grave danger to humanity. In his critique of the Bush Administration, Bennish commented, "I'm not saying Bush and Hitler are exactly the same, obviously they're not. OK. But there are some eerie similarities to the tones that they use." For this, Bennish has been suspended and could be fired from his teaching position at Overland High. A student who complained about Bennish’s progressive views hid a tape recorder in class and turned it over to the school’s principal. Right-wing bloggers and media pundits have gone on a rampage to put Bennish at the center of a witch-hunt atmosphere for the “crime” of exposing the very real crimes of the Bush regime. In an act of inspiring defiance and large-mindedness, 150 students walked out of class to protest Bennish’s suspension, demanding that Bennish continue teaching at Overland High and chanting for peace. The students’ demands cannot fall on deaf ears and the persecution of Jay Bennish must not go unchallenged! At a time when critical thought and dissent are under attack and a chilling atmosphere looms over academia, the suspension and possible firing of Jay Bennish demands nation-wide, public opposition. At a time when someone like University of Colorado Ethnic Studies Professor Ward Churchill can be systematically attacked - in the media and by people within the government - and nearly forced to resign for political statements he has made, a precedent allowing for the same or worse for a public high school teacher must not be allowed! The firing of Bennish would represent a step toward a future where electronic surveillance and fear are classroom norms, where adherence to public policy is mandatory and dissenters whisper behind closed doors in fear of a network of informants and spies. If people can remain silent as a public school teacher is spied on, and on that basis is suspended and could face firing for telling the truth to his students about the horrors being committed by their government, what will it take for people to step out? That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn — or be forced — to accept. Will Bennish’s name simply get lost in a long list of teachers and professors who have their careers come to an abrupt and humiliating end for publicly opposing the Bush Regime, or will thousands and thousands of people step out to oppose this unjust suspension and all it represents? The answer to that question is up to us. Bennish not only dared to ask the questions all too few are asking; he challenged his students to ask them, too. The question of whether Bennish spoke the truth must enter into this debate. His direct challenge to Bush’s "do as I say, not as I do" logic and his encouragement for students to look beyond the surface in the search for what is true, must be supported, not attacked! Please add your name to this statement and demand that the suspension of Jay Bennish be immediately withdrawn and that he be allowed to return to teaching, unimpeded by harassment or threats from inside or outside the school. Visit worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1163&Itemid=61 to sign this statement. If you would like to see the above statement printed in the Denver Post, please call our office at 866-973-4463 to donate specifically for this purpose.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Apr 19, 2006 18:28:37 GMT 4
Omitting Minorities' Test Scores By NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON, BEN FELLER and FRANK BASS, Associated Press Writers Tue Apr 18, 12:21 PM ET Laquanya Agnew and Victoria Duncan share a desk, a love of reading and a passion for learning. But because of a loophole in the No Child Left Behind Act, one second-grader's score in Tennessee counts more than the other's. That is because Laquanya is black, and Victoria is white. An Associated Press computer analysis has found Laquanya is among nearly 2 million children whose scores aren't counted when it comes to meeting the law's requirement that schools track how students of different races perform on standardized tests. The AP found that states are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting that requirement. And minorities — who historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing — make up the vast majority of students whose scores are excluded. The Education Department said that while it is pleased that nearly 25 million students nationwide are now being tested regularly under the law, it is concerned that the AP found so many students aren't being counted by schools in the required racial categories. "Is it too many? You bet," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in an interview. "Are there things we need to do to look at that, batten down the hatches, make sure those kids are part of the system? You bet." The plight of the two second-graders shows how a loophole in the law is allowing schools to count fewer minorities in required racial categories. There are about 220 students at West View Elementary School in Knoxville, Tenn., where President Bush marked the second anniversary of the law's enactment in 2004. Tennessee schools have federal permission to exclude students' scores in required racial categories if there are fewer than 45 students in a group. There are more than 45 white students. Victoria counts. There are fewer than 45 black students. Laquanya does not. One of the consequences is that educators are creating a false picture of academic progress."We're forcing districts and states to play games because the system is so broken, and that's not going to help at all," said Kathy Escamilla, a University of Colorado education professor. "Those are little games to prevent showing what's going on."Under the law signed by Bush in 2002, all public school students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014, although only children above second grade are required to be tested. Schools receiving federal poverty aid also must demonstrate annually that students in all racial categories are progressing or risk penalties that include extending the school year, changing curriculum or firing administrators and teachers. The law requires public schools to test more than 25 million students periodically in reading and math. No scores can be excluded from a school's overall measure. But the schools also must report scores by categories, such as race, poverty, migrant status, English proficiency and special education. Failure in any category means the whole school fails. States are helping schools get around that second requirement by using a loophole in the law that allows them to ignore scores of racial groups that are too small to be statistically significant. Suppose, for example, that a school has 2,000 white students and nine Hispanics. In nearly every state, the Hispanic scores wouldn't be counted because there aren't enough to provide meaningful information and because officials want to protect students' privacy. State educators decide when a group is too small to count. And they've been asking the government for exemptions to exclude larger numbers of students in racial categories. Nearly two dozen states have successfully petitioned the government for such changes in the past two years. As a result, schools can now ignore racial breakdowns even when they have 30, 40 or even 50 students of a given race in the testing population. Students must be tested annually in grades 3 through 8 and at least once in high school, usually in 10th grade. This is the first school year that students in all those grades must be tested, though schools have been reporting scores by race for the tests they have been administering since the law was approved. To calculate a nationwide estimate, the AP analyzed the 2003-04 enrollment figures the government collected — the latest on record — and applied the current racial category exemptions the states use. Overall, the AP found that about 1.9 million students — or about 1 in every 14 test scores — aren't being counted under the law's racial categories. Minorities are seven times as likely to have their scores excluded as whites, the analysis showed. Less than 2 percent of white children's scores aren't being counted as a separate category. In contrast, Hispanics and blacks have roughly 10 percent of their scores excluded. More than one-third of Asian scores and nearly half of American Indian scores aren't broken out, AP found. Bush's home state of Texas — once cited as a model for the federal law — excludes scores for two entire groups. No test scores from Texas' 65,000 Asian students or from several thousand American Indian students are broken out by race. The same is true in Arkansas. Students whose tests aren't being counted in required categories also include Hispanics in California who don't speak English well, blacks in the Chicago suburbs, American Indians in the Northwest and special education students in Virginia. State educators defend the exemptions, saying minority students' performance is still being included in their schools' overall statistics even when they aren't being counted in racial categories. Excluded minority students' scores may be counted at the district or state level. Spellings said she believes educators are making a good-faith effort. "Are there people out there who will find ways to game the system?" she asked. "Of course. But on the whole ... I fully believe in my heart, mind and soul that educators are people of good will who care about kids and want them to find opportunity in schools." Bush has hailed the separate accounting of minority students as a vital feature of the law. "It's really essential we do that. It's really important," Bush said in a May 2004 speech. "If you don't do that, you're likely to leave people behind. And that's not right." Nonetheless, Bush's Education Department continues to give widely varying exemptions to states: _Oklahoma lets schools exclude the test scores from any racial category with 52 or fewer members in the testing population, one of the largest across-the-board exemptions. That means 1 in 5 children in the state don't have scores broken out by race. _Maryland, which tests about 150,000 students more than Oklahoma, has an exempt group size of just five. That means fewer than 1 in 100 don't have scores counted. _Washington state has made 18 changes to its testing plan, according to a February report by the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Vermont has made none. On average, states have made eight changes at either the state or federal level to their plans in the past five years, usually changing the size or accountability of subgroups whose scores were supposed to be counted. Toia Jones, a black teacher whose daughters attend school in a mostly white Chicago suburb, said the loophole is enabling states and schools to avoid taking concrete measures to eliminate an "achievement gap" between white and minority students. "With this loophole, it's almost like giving someone a trick bag to get out of a hole," she said. "Now people, instead of figuring out how do we really solve it, some districts, in order to save face or in order to not be faced with the sanctions, they're doing what they can to manipulate the data." Some students feel left behind, too. "It's terrible," said Michael Oshinaya, a senior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City who was among a group of black students whose scores weren't broken out as a racial category. "We're part of America. We make up America, too. We should be counted as part of America." Spellings' department is caught between two forces. Schools and states are eager to avoid the stigma of failure under the law, especially as the 2014 deadline draws closer. But Congress has shown little political will to modify the law to address their concerns. That leaves the racial category exemptions as a stopgap solution. "She's inherited a disaster," said David Shreve, an education policy analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures. "The 'Let's Make a Deal' policy is to save the law from fundamental changes, with Margaret Spellings as Monty Hall." The solution may be to set a single federal standard for when minority students' scores don't have to be counted separately, said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Washington-based Education Trust. While the exemptions were created for good reasons, there's little doubt now that group sizes have become political, said Wiener, whose group supports the law. "They're asking the question, not how do we generate statistically reliable results, but how do we generate politically palatable results," he said. ___ Associated Press Writers Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami, Nahal Toosi in New York, Duncan Mansfield in Knoxville and Garance Burke in Kansas City contributed to this report. Source: tinyurl.com/fzl66 On the Net: Education Department: www.ed.gov/
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on May 15, 2006 14:58:21 GMT 4
HOW TO EDUCATE A DEMOCRACY WHILE LIVING IN AN IMPOSSIBLE WORLDTomgram: Solnit on Our Impossible World and Welcome to It!Last May 30th, with the help of Mark Danner, I graduated all of you (as well as a whole class of English students at Berkeley). I swore at the time that this would be "the last commencement Tomdispatch will attend for a while." As it happened, "a while" turned out to be less than a calendar year -- but can I help it if the English Department at Berkeley insists on inviting Tomdispatch writers to usher its students into the cold, cold world? This year in George Bush's America, they evidently thought their graduates needed a little more encouragement than usual, and so invited the lovely, hopeful Rebecca Solnit, author of the just revised and expanded Hope in the Dark (as well as, most recently, A Field Guide to Getting Lost), to put a little glow in the air, a little bounce in the step. She delivered as ever. In fact, she delivered the following address which I just couldn't help passing on to all of you. So, for one more year, consider yourself an honorary Tomdispatch graduate of the Internet University of hard knocks, mixed metaphors, and strange analogies. Enjoy Solnit. Then shut off that computer and smell the spring air! Tom Welcome to the Impossible WorldBy Rebecca Solnit Some of you here today receiving degrees took time off to explore the world, work for a cause, or earn enough money to get to college, but I suspect the great majority of you went straight through from high school and thus were likely born in 1984. What does it mean to be born in 1984, the ominous year that hung over humanity for 36 years after George Orwell made those four numbers a synonym for totalitarianism; what does it mean to be born atop the high wall at the end of the grim future of the imagination? I thought of that as soon as I was invited to give this talk, thought about the enormous gap between when Orwell, on the beautiful isle of Jura in Scotland, wrote this bleakest of anti-utopian novels in 1948, and the actual 1984, as well as the no less profound chasm between 1984, real and imagined, and the present moment. To contemplate those chasms is to recognize, in the most literal sense, just how utterly unpredictable the future is. To recognize that is to realize that a rapidly changing world requires an ability to appreciate uncertainty, and what in books we call wild plot twists, at least as much as the wobbly gift of prophesy. I thought of these things with the tools with which we English majors graduate into the world -- not the tools that enable you to splice genes, cantilever bridges, or make piles of money, but those that enable you to analyze, to see patterns, to acquire a personal philosophy rather than a jumble of unexamined, hand-me-down notions; those that enable you not to make a living but maybe to live. This least utilitarian of educations prepares you to make sense of the world and maybe to make meaning; for one way to describe the great struggle of our time is as the endeavor to become a producer of meanings rather than a consumer of them -- in an age when meaning as advertising and marketing, as others' definitions of pleasure and terror, is daily forced down our throats. To make meaning, to change the world, or just to read it thoughtfully (which can itself be insurrectionary)… And never has our world been so overloaded, so rapidly changing, and so full of surprises that require us to change our minds, rethink possibilities, and then do so again; never has it required such careful reading. In my own case, the kind of critical reading I first learned to do with books, then with works of art, turned out to be transferable to national parks, atomic bombs, revolutions, marches, the act of walking -- a skill transferred not only to feed my writing but my larger path through the world. Books themselves sometimes change the world directly: you can talk about nonfiction like Diderot's Encyclopedia, about the Communist Manifesto, The Origin of Species, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, about an essay that mattered a great deal only a very long time after it was written, Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," and about a book in that Thoreauvian vein whose practical impact we might actually be able to measure. In 1975, Edward Abbey published his novel about a charming bunch of what the Department of Homeland Security would now call domestic terrorists, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The novel changed the English language in a small way by popularizing monkey-wrenching as a verb for sabotage, but it did more. (And here, being an English major and thus a lover of obscure scraps of information, let me mention that the word sabotage itself comes from the wooden shoes French workers -- actually peasants just off the land -- wore. Not so long after the Industrial Revolution, such workers would sabotage machinery by throwing their wooden shoes, or sabots, into it, and so jamming up the works.) Anyway, in the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, the protagonists plan to blow up Glen Canyon Dam, the huge and ultimately useless structure strangling the Colorado River upstream from the Grand Canyon. The novel helped prompt the founding of Earth First! -- which has not always been perfect but has sometimes been useful, even heroic, in the protection of the environment. In 1981 Earth First! announced its arrival on the scene by rolling an immense length of plastic painted to resemble a crack down the wall of Glen Canyon Dam, saying with this that the dam was neither immutable, nor inevitable. From its creation in the early Sixties until then, the dam had seemed just that; since then it has become ever less crazy and hopeless to dream, think about, even work for the opening of its sluice gates and the rebirth of the wild river. The same is true of another dam that famously broke another writer's heart, Hetch-Hetchy Dam inside Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada, built in the teens of the last century. That praise-singer of peaks and Sierra Club cofounder John Muir mourned its construction; you young Californians may live to see its dismantling. I can't say nobody imagined we would come to such a pass, but I can say that few did, maybe not even Muir and Abbey. Let me reach for another book, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, to cite the Red Queen's reprimand of Alice's rational assertion that "one can't believe impossible things." The Queen replies, "I daresay you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." You might want to take up the Red Queen's practice. For we are impossible people living in an impossible world -- or at least inconceivable to the great majority not so long ago. The year 2006 would certainly have been even more unimaginable from the perspective of 1984 than 1984 was from the perspective of 1948. Who would have believed it if you had told someone in, say, 1954, or even 1974, of our world as it is now in all its scientific, genetic, social, political, environmental, and sexual transformation, this melting, mutating, tainted world that still holds such hope? Various forms of federal collapse and repression have long been anticipated, but a dynamic and vocal Latino population, same-sex marriage, radical food activism? Oddly enough, I don't think that science fiction is particularly good at teaching you to anticipate such unexpected change, but perhaps fiction in general and poetry can indeed provide lessons in unpredictability. For me one of the great pleasures of writing nonfiction is that real life supplies coincidences and upheavals too improbable for novels. The amazing thing about the novel 1984 is that Orwell could invent the Ministry of Truth, Big Brother, thought crimes, and the Memory Hole, but in his book women are still hanging cloth diapers on clotheslines. It's easier to prophesy global politics than laundry, but our lives are shaped by both. And fiction and poetry, as well as movies, music, and conversations, help generate the changes that don't come as revolutions or reforms but as shifts in how people think about their daily lives and acts -- and by this I mean not just changes in sensibility but in what people consume, who they support, embrace, even love. You can see, for example, that the arts have led the battle against homophobia and other kinds of intolerance. As the San Francisco poet Diane DiPrima likes to say, "The only war that counts is the war against the imagination," and every creative act, every thoughtful inquiry, every opening of a mind is a triumph for our side in that war. Books matter. Stories matter. People die of pernicious stories, are reinvented by new stories, and make stories to shelter themselves. Though we learned from postmodernism that a story is only a construct, so is a house, and a story can be more important as shelter: the story that you have certain inalienable rights and immeasurable value, the story that there is an alternative to violence and competition, the story that women are human beings. Sometimes people find the stories that save their lives in books. The stories we live by are themselves like characters in books: Some we will outlive us; some will betray us; some will bring us joy; some will lead us to places we could never have imagined. George Orwell's 1984 wasn't a story to shelter in, but a story meant to throw open the door and thrust us into the strong winds of history; it was a warning in the form of a story. Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang was an invitation in the form of a story, but even its author didn't imagine how we might take up that invitation or that Glen Canyon Dam might have taken on a doomed look by 2006. "The universe," said the radical American poet Muriel Rukeyser, "is made of stories, not atoms." I believe that being able to recognize stories, to read them, and to tell them is what it takes to have a life, rather than just make a living. This is the equipment you should have received. The good thing about being born in 1984 is that it should inoculate you against nostalgia. The actual 1984 was no Arcadian daydream, no uneventful utopia; it hovers back there in no golden haze. This week in 1984, Ronald Reagan was campaigning for his second term against a feeble Democratic candidate; democracy and human-rights activists from Poland to the Philippines were being imprisoned and otherwise repressed for daring to demand something better than dictatorship; AIDS was a big new disease and political issue with no effective treatment; and all across the U.S. deregulated savings and loans were beginning to collapse, taking people's hard-earned savings with them. Thanks to related policies, a new American subgroup that had hardly existed in the 1970s was beginning to appear, the mass of people we call the homeless. And the U.S. was busily intervening in the worst possible way in the politics of Central America. What the Middle East is to Bush Jr., Central America was to Ronald Reagan, a place to assert U.S. might with ruthless disregard for human rights. Those who imagine that the American torturers in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib are some appalling new aberration need to remember that, in El Salvador and Guatemala in 1984, the most hideous kinds of torture were in widespread use. Although these were generally not directly inflicted by U.S. troops, they were carried out with U.S. training and funding, and often with CIA direction. The U.S. also had a powerful anti-intervention movement defending the right of Nicaragua's Sandinista Government that had overthrown the U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza, and the rights of the rebellious in Guatemala and El Salvador, those rebelling against brutal regimes in blood-soaked civil wars. At the same time, President Reagan had just stepped up the nuclear arms race and many in that moment anticipated an end-of-the-world nuclear war any time, a war with what Reagan called the Evil Empire, aka the Soviet Union. This generated a powerful antinuclear movement that changed quite a few things around the world, a movement that, sadly, dissipated when the Cold War came to an end and we failed to seize the fabled "peace dividend." The sudden vanishing of the Soviet Union was one of the most impossible things the Red Queen could have imagined before breakfast. You who were born in 1984 would have been entering second grade as the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War went on hold -- only to be reborn as the War on Terror. Now, there are two ways I can bring this story of where we were then and where we are now forward. One you probably know; and, if you have been in too many graduate seminars, you also know that it could be called a declensionist narrative: Reagan was bad; Bush is worse; we have lost a lot of wilderness, polar ice, species, rainforest, battles, independent media outlets, family farms, and so forth; while gaining a lot of weapons systems, marketing strategies, TV channels, genetically modified organisms, and pavement. This is all true, and the reason why I seldom bother telling this story myself is that it is told so well, even exhaustively, by so many of my compañeros on the left. There's "another way of telling," as the great writer John Berger says, and a lot more stories. When I consider the state of the world I go back to those Dickens novels in which so many characters are onstage that there can be no single conclusion. Think of Great Expectations, in many ways the most purely tragic of his novels, with Pip and Estella forever separated and forever saddened by the hard lessons they have learned. (At least in the unsweetened original ending.) Tragedy, my splendid undergraduate English professor told me, ends in exile, comedy in marriage. But remember that Dickens in all his multifarious generosity gave us many stories in one book. After all, in Great Expectations, Biddie and Joe seemed to be living as happily ever after as Pip's great friend Herbert and his dear girl. Great Expectations is a tragedy, but only for the major figures, and perhaps these millennial years are a tragedy for the U.S.A. and a few other giant countries like Russia, but not for all smaller countries. Bolivia and Chile, for example, have begun to bloom, and India is most certainly in both the best and the worst of times. For others and elsewhere it has been an era of miracles, if not of paradises. You have probably heard all too many mythologizing stories about "the Sixties," you who were born in the late 1970s and 1980s, but you have not heard nearly enough about the ferocious and sometimes very powerful activism of the 1980s and 1990s. While there is little to be nostalgic for in 1984 itself, there is in the later 1980s, which may well have been the greatest era of revolution this world has ever seen. Certainly, 1989 was a year to compare with 1789 and 1848. Those Polish and Filipino activists who were being squelched in 1984 triumphed a little later, as did the Koreans, grasping democracy from the bottom up from the military autocrats who had ruled over them for so long. The U.S.-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown by a defecting army and what came to be called "people power" twenty years ago this spring. Poland's Solidarity labor movement was only part of a great surge of boldness that ultimately toppled the Soviet empire in the fall of 1989 in a series of breathtaking events that let Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland be free and, two years later, resulted in the full dismantling of the Soviet Union. Its sudden vanishing was one of the most impossible things the Red Queen could have imagined. The CIA and other U.S. intelligence pros never for a second anticipated that such a thing might happen, even as Eastern European and Russian writers, artists, union organizers, and others dreamed it and organized it into being. The student uprising in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in the summer of 1989 ended in tanks and Orwellian oppression, but the spark it lit may not be extinguished. 1992 brought a deeper revolution reaching back farther in time, one that throws open the doors of my own imagination. This revolution was lovingly crafted by scholars, by poets, by tribal leaders and ceremonial elders, by speakers of endangered languages, organizers, and activists -- mostly indigenous ones because this was the great indigenous reclamation that transformed the quincentennial of Columbus's bumbling arrival in the Americas from a sugar-coated commemoration of conquest into an anticolonial insurrection. Back then, the native people of the Americas were supposed to be conquered, silenced, even extinct -- many of us non-natives were raised to believe that they were, especially those of us who grew up earlier than you did on the old textbooks that reduced the extraordinary richness of languages and cultures in Native California to a handful of primitive diggers, rooting up grubs to eat with sharpened sticks. Stories matter, and here the stories and the circumstances have changed, unbelievably. In 1994, an indigenous army walked out of the remote Lacandon jungle of Chiapas, in Mexico's poorest and southernmost state, and staged a revolution, not only in what the status of Indians would be in that country but in the nature of revolution too. These were the Zapatistas, named after an earlier Mexican revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata. Their mouthpiece was a nonnative guy who called himself Subcommandante Marcos and who reinvented the language of politics as something poetic, paradoxical, playful -- who found another story to tell. The Zapatistas burst onto the world stage on January 1, 1994, when you would have been going on 10 years old, in response to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which went into effect that day. That measure made so many Mexicans so much more desperately poor and has everything to do with the millions of Mexican migrants arriving here today. The Zapatista response to NAFTA was the beginning of a remarkable, unforeseen, and still-raging war against corporate globalization. As it happened, they had been inspired to rise fifteen months before by the indigenous questioning of the quincentennial. Even the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez couldn't anticipate the Zapatistas but writers like the Uruguayan history-poet Eduardo Galeano and John Berger welcomed them. And when they arrived, the story of what was possible changed. Twelve years later, on January 22 of this very year, the poor, mostly indigenous nation of Bolivia elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, a story that has taken 514 years to come not to its happy ending but to at least an auspicious, audacious new beginning. President Morales was an impossibility a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty years ago, when only a Red Queen would have believed in him. In Latin America, from Mexico to Chile, from the mid-1970s into at least the late 1980s, most countries were governed by military juntas, by dictators, by regimes that relied on terror and torture to thwart the will of the people. One by one in the past twenty-two years, those regimes have been overthrown, voted out, gradually transformed, so that Latin America, that former continent of carnage and fear, is now a beacon of hope for the rest of the world and many of its governments lead the fight against corporate globalization. That seemed impossible in 1984. What, then, is impossible in 2006 that you who are still so young will live to see become actuality? More atrocities, more miracles and shocks, much that is now unimaginable. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." The state of the world is always a jumble of opposing ideas, of uprisings and crackdowns, of wonder and horror. Fitzgerald's forgotten next sentence is, "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." Hopeless is one story, otherwise is another; go tell it on your mountain or internship or wherever you're headed, but never forget that you know how to dismantle stories, how to question them, how to compare and contrast them, and maybe sometimes how to invent or reinvent them. This is vital, since your task as the young being cut loose at this moment of graduation from what we, the old, have to give is to reinvent the universe, the universe made out of stories -- to change the stories, to tell them, to bury them, and to give birth to them. A difficult task, but not an impossible one. Not if you remember, as readers and scholars might, that we are living in an impossible world already. Rebecca Solnit's Tomdispatch-generated Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities is out in a new and expanded edition. Her most recent book is A Field Guide to Getting Lost. [This is the text of the 2006 commencement address for the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley.]Copyright 1984/2006 Rebecca Solnit. Source: www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=83153
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on May 18, 2006 16:41:25 GMT 4
She’s Baaack!Posted by Laura Flanders May 15th, 2006 What day is it when Laura Bush makes an appearance on the Sunday schmooze shows? It’s a very, very bad day for the president and his administration. It’s an old routine by now. When the going gets rough, the White House calls in the Bushwomen and so it was again this past Sunday. It’s hard these days to look at George W’s poll numbers without getting vertigo, but on Fox News, Laura Bush dismissed the polls and polling generally. At the very same time, the administration’s supporters were elsewhere on the shows, extravagantly flaunting the ABC/Washington Post poll from earlier last week which conveniently suggested some Americans are fine with the seizure of their cell phone records. Fox can be expected to pander, but so it turns out can every network. On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, the First Lady did what she’s always called upon to do: she attempted to lull the nation into the false illusion that anyone in the Bush family cares about non-millionaire Americans. The host had a stellar opportunity to skewer Bush family values when the First Lady said that rebuilding Gulf Coast schools was a top personal priority: “It’s certainly among the most important work that I’m doing right now, the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, because schools have to be rebuilt or families can’t come back.” If Stephanopolos had cohones he’d have pointed out that the last time any member of the Bush family promoted school rebuilding post Katrina, it was in order to channel some charity back to the family. When Barbara Bush made a contribution to the Presidents’ Katrina Hurricane Relief Fund she got a tax deduction but the money went with the instruction that it only be spent on school software programs bought from Neil Bush’s company. The Bushes have yet to find a crisis they or their friends can’t make a buck off. In the days since Laura Bush’s reappearance on TV, some have expressed qualms about “going after” the Bushwomen. Writing for Alternet, Jan Frel — whom I like, and have written pieces for — writes: “It may not have been appropriate to go after Laura Bush when she was pushing for her pet projects on literacy and AIDS in Africa but the question arises, if she’s going to come out and make an outright political defense of her husband, does that put her in the category of “fair game?”" Pet projects on literacy aside (they’ve mostly had their budgets cut by her husband anyway,) there has never been a shortage of factors qualifing the First Lady as fair game. Every First Lady has been that in any case (and if you doubt it, read Blanche Cook’s account of the villification of Eleanor Roosevelt. ) And Laura Bush has been an equal partner in the President’s fatal games. Lest we forget, in late November, 2001, it was Laura Bush who changed the tone on the assault on Afghanistan. After weeks of macho talk, the Bushmen had failed to apprehend Osama Bin Laden — either dead or alive — and in public opinion, the gung-ho spirit was beginning to sag. At the same time, the US Air Force started dropping its largest non-nuclear bomb — the Blu 82 Daisy Cutter — from cargo planes over the mountains Afghanistan. A 15,000-pound dumb device, the Blu 82 devastates an area the size of several football fields, killing every thing that breathes. Just that week, out came Laura Bush to deliver the President’s Weekly Radio address (as one reporter put it “all by herself.”) Just in case anyone thought that the most powerful nation in the world was blowing an impoverished, feudal state to bits for revenge, La Bush cast the whole operation as a strike for female liberation. “The people of Afghanistan — especially women — are rejoicing,” said Bush. In fact, some were gathering up the remnants of their friends and family. Liberal critics have laid off the Bushwomen for reasons having to do with “propriety?” I don’t think so; more like sexism: the guys don’t take the women seriously. Whatever the reason, it’s way, way past time to take off any remaining gloves. C’mon guys. If reporters had given Bush’s hench women even half the scrutiny they give his men, perhaps Lady MacBush’s approval numbers wouldn’t be twice as high as her husband’s. Source: www.wimnonline.org/WIMNsVoicesBlog/?p=154
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on May 30, 2006 15:54:42 GMT 4
APOCALYPSE NOW - 2006 "We're really sorry for the mess you're inheriting." "NOT RIGHT TO BE SILENT WHEN YOUR COUNTRY IS WRONG"MER - MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 29 May: How appropriate on the American Memorial Day to loudly and eloquently be warned that all so many have fought and died for is now terribly endangered -- put at risk in fact as never before by the very officials with the flags in their lapels ad nauseum proclaiming their patriotism while more than ever endangering their countries future and indeed the entire world.
Bill Moyers, first well-known as Press Secretary to President LBJ, since then one of America's most eloquent, courageous, and credible thinkers and journalists, gave the following address a few days ago at Hamilton College. How fitting as well that he choose as his title the same as that of the haunting Vietnam-era movie.
Whether you are American 'celebrating' Memorial Day, or not a citizen of The Empire, this graduation address by Bill Moyers makes for very important reading and pondering today.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Apocalypse now Bill Moyers to college grads: "We're really sorry for the mess you're inheriting." May. 25, 2006 | I will make this brief because I know you have much to do between now and your farewell to Hamilton tomorrow, and that you are eager to get out and enjoy this perfect day in this glorious weather that somehow never gets mentioned in your promotional and recruitment literature. I know so many Hamilton alums that I feel at home here. One of my closest friends and colleagues, David Bate, graduated in 1938, and patriot that he is, headed right for the U.S. Navy where he served throughout World War II. David's father graduated from Hamilton in 1908 and two of his children continued the tradition. I asked David what he learned at Hamilton and he told me Hamilton is where you discover that being smart has nothing to do with being warm and dry ... Just kidding! Thank you for inviting Judith and me to share this occasion with you. Fifty years ago both of us turned the same corner you are turning today and left college for the great beyond. Looking back across half a century I wish our speaker at the time had said something really useful -- something that would have better prepared us for what lay ahead. I wish he had said: "Don't Go." So I have been thinking seriously about what I might say to you in this Baccalaureate service. Frankly, I'm not sure anyone from my generation should be saying anything to your generation except, "We're sorry. We're really sorry for the mess you're inheriting. We are sorry for the war in Iraq. For the huge debts you will have to pay for without getting a new social infrastructure in return. We're sorry for the polarized country. The corporate scandals. The corrupt politics. Our imperiled democracy. We're sorry for the sprawl and our addiction to oil and for all those toxins in the environment. Sorry about all this, class of 2006. Good luck cleaning it up." You're going to have your hands full, frankly. I don't need to tell you of the gloomy scenarios being written for your time. Three books on my desk right now question whether human beings will even survive the 21st century. Just listen to their titles: "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Convergence Catastrophe"; "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed"; "The Winds of Change: Weather and the Destruction of Civilizations." These are just three of the recent books that make the apocalypse prophesied in the Bible ... the Revelations of St. John ... look like child's play. I won't summarize them for you except to say that they spell out Doomsday scenarios for global catastrophe. There's another recent book called "The Revenge of Gaia" that could well have been subtitled, "The Earth Strikes Back," because the author, James Lovelock, says human consumption, our obsession with technology, and our habit of "playing God" are stripping bare nature's assets until the Earth's only consolation will be to take us down with her. Before this century is over, he writes, "Billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be kept in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable." So there you have it: The future of the race, to be joined in a final and fatal march of the penguins. Of course that's not the only scenario. You can Google your way to a lot of optimistic possibilities. For one, the digital revolution that will transform how we do business and live our lives, including active intelligent wireless devices that in just a short time could link every aspect of our physical world and even human brains, creating hundreds of thousands of small-scale business opportunities. There are medical breakthroughs that will conquer many ills and extend longevity. Economic changes will lift hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty in the next 25 years, dwarfing anything that's come along in the previous 100 years. These are possible scenarios, too. But I'm a journalist, not a prophet. I can't say which of these scenarios will prove true. You won't be bored, that's for sure. I just wish I were going to be around to see what you do with the peril and the promise. Since I won't be around, I want to take this opportunity to say a thing or two that have nothing to do with my professional work as a journalist. What I have to say today is very personal. Here it is: If the world confuses you a little, it confuses me a lot. When I graduated fifty years ago I thought I had the answers. But life is where you get your answers questioned, and the odds are that you can look forward to being even more perplexed fifty years from now than you are at this very moment. If your parents level with you, truly speak their hearts, I suspect they would tell you life confuses them, too, and that it rarely turns out the way you thought it would. I find I am alternatively afraid, cantankerous, bewildered, often hostile, sometimes gracious, and battered by a hundred new sensations every day. I can be filled with a pessimism as gloomy as the depth of the middle ages, yet deep within me I'm possessed of a hope that simply won't quit. A friend on Wall Street said one day that he was optimistic about the market, and I asked him, "Then why do you look so worried?" He replied, "Because I'm not sure my optimism is justified." Neither am I. So I vacillate between the determination to act, to change things, and the desire to retreat into the snuggeries of self, family and friends. I wonder if any of us in this great, disputatious, over-analyzed, over-televised and under-tenderized country know what the deuce we're talking about, myself included. All my illusions are up for grabs, and I find myself re-assessing many of the assumptions that served me comfortable much of my life. Earlier this week I heard on the radio a discussion in New York City about the new Disney Broadway production of "Tarzan," the jungle hero so popular when I was growing up. I remember as a kid almost dislocating my tonsils trying to re-create his unearthly sound, swinging on a great vine in a graceful arc toward the rescue of his distressed mate, Jane, hollering bloody murder all the time. So what have we learned since? That Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weismuller, who played Tarzan in the movies, never made that noise. It was a recording of three men, one a baritone, one a tenor, and one a hog caller from Arkansas -- all yelling to the top of their lungs. This world is hard on believers. As a young man I was drawn to politics. I took part in two national campaigns, served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and have covered politics ever since. But I understand now what Thomas Jefferson meant back in 1789 when he wrote: "I am not a Federalist because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men, whether in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or anything else. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." Of course we know there'll be no parties in Heaven. No Democrats, no Republicans, no liberals, no conservatives, no libertarians or socialists. Just us Baptists. The hardest struggle of all is to reconcile life's polar realities. I love books, Beethoven, and chocolate brownies. Yet how do I justify my pleasure in these in a world where millions are illiterate, the music never plays, and children go hungry through the night? How do I live sanely in a world so unsafe for so many? I don't know what they taught you here at Hamilton about all this, but I trust you are not leaving here without thinking about how you will respond to the dissonance in our culture, the rivalry between beauty and bestiality in the world, and the conflicts in your own soul. All of us have to choose sides on this journey. But the question is not so much who we are going to fight against as it is which side of our own nature will we nurture: The side that can grow weary and even cynical and believe that everything is futile, or the side that for all the vulgarity, brutality and cruelty, yearns to affirm, connect and signify. Albert Camus got it right: There is beauty in the world as well as humiliation, "And we have to strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful ... in the presence of one or the other." That's really what brings me here this afternoon. I did put myself in your place, and asked what I'd want a stranger from another generation to tell me if I had to sit through his speech. Well, I'd want to hear the truth: The truth is, life's a tough act, the world's a hard place, and along the way you will meet a fair share of fools, knaves and clowns -- even act the fool yourself from time to time when your guard is down or you've had too much wine. I'd like to be told that I will experience separation, loss and betrayal, that I'll wonder at times where have all the flowers gone. I would want to be told that while life includes a lot of luck, life is more than luck. It is sacrifice, study, and work; appointments kept, deadlines met, promises honored. I'd like to be told that it's okay to love your country right or wrong, but it's not right to be silent when your country is wrong. And I would like to be encouraged not to give up on the American experience. To remember that the same culture which produced the Ku Klux Klan, Tom DeLay and Abu Ghraib, also brought forth the Peace Corps, Martin Luther King and Hamilton College. And I would like to be told that there is more to this life than I can see, earn, or learn in my time. That beyond the day-to-day spectacle are cosmic mysteries we don't understand. That in the meantime -- and the meantime is where we live -- we infinitesimal particles of creation carry on the miracle of loving, laughing and being here now, by giving, sharing and growing now. Let me tell you one of my favorite stories. It’s by Shalom Aleichem and it has stayed with me for many years now. The story is about Bontshe Shvayg, one of the accursed of the Earth. Every misfortune imaginable befell him. He lost his wife, his children neglected him, his house burned down, his job disappeared—everything he touched turned to dust. Yet through all this Bontshe kept returning good for evil everywhere he could until he died. When the angels heard he was arriving at Heaven’s gate, they hurried down to greet him. Even the Lord was there, so great was this man’s fame for goodness. It was the custom in Heaven that every newcomer was interrogated by the prosecuting angel, to assure that all trespasses on Earth had been atoned. But when Bontshe reached those gates, the prosecuting angel arose, and for the first time in the memory of Heaven, said, “There are no charges.” Then the angel for the defense arose and rehearsed all the hardships this man had endured and recounted how in all the difficult circumstances of his life he had remained true to himself and returned good for evil. When the angel was finished, the Lord said, "Not since Job himself have we heard of a life such as this one." And then, turning to Bontshe, he said, "Ask, and it shall be given to you." The old man raised his eyes and said, "Well, if I could start every day with a hot buttered roll..." And at that the Lord and all the angels wept, at the preciousness of what he was asking for, at the beauty of simple things: a buttered roll, a clean bed, a beautiful summer day, someone to love and be loved by. These supply joy and meaning on this earthly journey. So I brought this with me. It's an ordinary breakfast roll, perhaps one like Bontshe asked for. I brought it because it drives home the last thing I want to say to you. Bread is the great re-enforcer of the reality principle. Bread is life. But if you're like me you have a thousand and more times repeated the ordinary experience of eating bread without a thought for the process that brings it to your table. The reality is physical: I need this bread to live. But the reality is also social: I need others to provide the bread. I depend for bread on hundreds of people I don't know and will never meet. If they fail me, I go hungry. If I offer them nothing of value in exchange for their loaf, I betray them. The people who grow the wheat, process and store the grain, and transport it from farm to city; who bake it, package it, and market it -- these people and I are bound together in an intricate reciprocal bargain. We exchange value. This reciprocity sustains us. If you doubt it, look around you. Hamilton College was raised here by people before your time, people you'll never know, who were nonetheless thinking of you before you were born. You have received what they built and bequeathed, and in your time you will give something back. That's the deal. On and on it goes, from generation to generation. Civilization sustains and supports us. The core of its value is bread. But bread is its great metaphor. All my life I've prayed the Lord's Prayer, and I've never prayed, "Give me this day my daily bread." It is always, "Give us this day our daily bread." Bread and life are shared realities. They do not happen in isolation. Civilization is an unnatural act. We have to make it happen, you and I, together with all the other strangers. And because we and strangers have to agree on the difference between a horse thief and a horse trader, the distinction is ethical. Without it, a society becomes a war against all, and a market for the wolves becomes a slaughter for the lambs. My generation hasn't done the best job at honoring this ethical bargain, and our failure explains the mess we're handing over to you. You may be our last chance to get it right. So good luck, Godspeed, enjoy these last few hours together, and don't forget to pass the bread. Source: tinyurl.com/zhx7c NOTE FROM MICHELLE: Bill Moyers is one of my personal heros. Not only is he a fantastic thinker, he is a courageous individual too. Bill left a highly lucrative career with PBS to join the private sector and speak the truth. I wonder how many more will follow his lead?
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Jun 30, 2006 13:47:12 GMT 4
Schooling at The Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts is definitely thinking outside the box. I have found teaching by inquiry to be an effectual form of learning for my child.....MichelleJunior Knows Best Sudbury schools let kids learn what they wantBy Rachel Anderson, Utne.com June 29, 2006 Issue Public, private, parochial, charter, magnet, small-by-design, homeschool. With the array of educational options for kids these days, it can be overwhelming to decide who the right people to teach your children are. The Sudbury Valley School (SVS) in Framingham, Massachusetts, insists that the best educators are actually children themselves. Hara Estroff Marano, writing for Psychology Today, finds that kids doing what they do best -- playing -- is a highly effective teaching method. Writes Marano: "Psychologists believe that play cajoles people toward their human potential because it preserves all the possibilities nervous systems tend to otherwise prune away." The school, which has served as the model for some three dozen others, encourages play, as well as other activities that facilitate children taking control of their own academic destinies and enjoying the resulting confidence. With 25 hours of mandatory attendance each week, staff members (not "teachers") on hand to help interested children, and textbooks available, the Sudbury schools are equipped to help the students map their own courses of learning. Nathan Conz of the Hartford Advocate, encapsulates the tack this way: "There's no need to force material down a kid's throat, especially when it's a subject the kid isn't interested in. In time, a student will learn what he or she needs to know." Conz visited the Mountain Laurel Sudbury School (MLSS) in New Britain, Connecticut. Upon observing two playful students, he declares: "They're free-range children. And that's not a knock. The model seems to have served them well."Conz points to MLSS's first graduate, Nick Marshall-Butler, a 16-year-old whose SAT scores are in the 90th percentile and who plans to take preparatory classes at Harvard Extension. Marano finds that while only about half of the students at SVS go directly to college, most get there eventually, echoing the Sudbury philosophy of bucking tradition and finding one's own path to educational goals. Many of the 800 graduates of SVS have been successful in the gamut of professional options, with 42 percent going on be entrepreneurs. If there's anything to laud, says Marano, it's that most graduates "are unusually resilient," "feel that they are in control of their [destinies]," and "lead deeply satisfying lives." Despite such successes, it's still tough to convince parents to do away with teachers, classes, homework, and grades. Students may come to a Sudbury school for a number of reasons: failure to adhere to test-intensive schools, lack of social interaction in traditional schools, or a propensity for kinesthetic learning. And Sudbury's model is not an option for all. With tuition at $6,000 per student, parents may be taking a leap of faith on a school system that doesn't teach reading. "The youngest and longest-term students are largely from well-educated families that have the confidence to buck convention," writes Marano. Whatever their reasons, some parents are fully embracing the Sudbury model. Jeffrey Hohl, a father of six, sold his house to move closer to SVS. "You don't realize until you're an adult how natural it is to learn, how interesting the world really is. We adults think we know how to do it and that children don't and therefore we have to teach them how," he says. "After spending many years in the business world, it dawned on me that you learn best what you really want to learn."Source: www.utne.com/webwatch/2006_256/news/12189-1.htmlFor more information, links at source:Class Dismissed Free-Range Kids Related Links:A Study In Size Related Links from the Utne Archive:Human-Scale Education Free to Be Me
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