Next Time Deformers Trot Out The "China's Kicking Our Ass On Test Scores" Meme

The high scores on standardized tests that Chinese students garner have not brought increased wisdom to the geniuses running the country, that's for sure.

Between the poisoned environment, the "casino capitalism" of the economy, the "ghost cities," the increasing cancer rates and other health-related crises,  and the explosions from toxic chemicals that are so large they can be seen from space, perhaps we have enough evidence that we should stop worrying about how well China does on standardized tests?

To be frank, the high test scores don't seem to translate to all that much that is positive.

15 Towns Look To Secede From Andrew Cuomo's New York

15 towns in the impoverished Southern Tier of New York are fed up and ready to head to Pennsylvania:

Conklin, NY (WBNG Binghamton) The local economy is pushing one organization in Upstate New York to pose a question: Is it possible to secede to Pennsylvania?

The Upstate New York Towns Association is researching this very topic. The group says a few factors pushing its research are high property taxes, low sales tax revenue and the recent decision to ban hydraulic fracturing in New York.

...

There are 15 towns interested in the secession, according to the Towns Association. These towns are in Broome, Delaware, Tioga and Sullivan counties. The association declined to name the towns without their permission and also declined to comment on specifics at this time. As of now, research is ongoing. The group will be updating Action News with all of their findings in the coming weeks.

The association said it's comparing taxes and the cost of doing business in the two states. It says the facts show there is a huge difference between the two.

Also being considered are things like workers comp, surcharges, unemployment and health insurance. The association's understanding is that the secession would have to be approved by the New York State Legislature, the Pennsylvania State Legislature and the U. S. government.

"We're comparing the taxes in Pennsylvania compared to those in New York," said Finch. "There's a great, great difference. Right now, we are being deprived of work, jobs and incomes."

Cuomo banned fracking, which, considering the environmental risks, I thought was a good idea, but then did nothing to help the region of the state that was in most desperate need of the economic boom fracking would have brought.

These towns are never going to be able to secede from New York, but perhaps a call for secession will force Cuomo to focus some state aid on the region.

Or maybe not - Cuomo doesn't seem to much care about anything but his own agenda and priorities.

The Daily News Can't Wait For The Security State To Replace Unionized Doormen

The Daily News has a propaganda piece cheerleading for technology that will replace doormen while still making sure the riff-raff don't get where they don't belong:

An Israeli general is at work on a “biometric security” system that he believes will have New Yorkers tossing out their keys and maybe ditching their doormen, too.

Using sophisticated scanners that can recognize a person’s face, voice, build and stride, the system can unlock your door in under two seconds. Any strangers not in the database will be denied access. 

“This is only the beginning,” says General Aharon Farkash, the founder and president of the firm FST21. “This is the way people will enter buildings in the 21st century.”

To help establish FST21 in the states, Farkash opened a North American office earlier this month at 7 World Trade Center. Should you drop by, you’ll be greeted by one of its security devices. But unless he’s beamed a code to your phone or you work there already, there’s no convincing the small 8-inch scanner to let you in.

...

“Cities are crowded, often dangerous places, with the gap between rich and poor growing,” Farkash says. “We need a way to live safely but also comfortably next door to one another.”

For those worried about privacy as well as security, Farkash stresses that the system is self-contained, so it is impossible to hack from outside. It also stores no data of users coming and going beyond two weeks.

“I was the Israeli NSA, so I can tell you I know privacy, and the best effort is being made to keep things private,” Farkash says.

Gee, sounds fabulous.

Except I don't buy that part about keeping things private and anybody who has even scanned an article in the last year about NSA spying shouldn't either - they'll be tracking everywhere you go via this "biometric security" apparatus, the cell phone you carry and the credit cards you use to purchase items.

Such is life in the 21st century.

But besides our privacy and humanity, what else do we lose in the tradeoff when every building starts using "biometric security"?

Why, unionized jobs of course!

For individual homeowners, it offers the convenience — and cool factor — of not having to fumble for the keys anymore, especially with the kids and groceries in hand. For condo and co-op boards, it could mean serious savings.

“It’s much cheaper than a doorman,” Farkash says. “To have 24-seven coverage, that’s four shifts a day, at least $250,000 a year. Our system is 70% less to install, and 90% less to maintain each year after that.”

Oh, goodie - another technological advance that will replace jobs humans do.

On the plus side, when the people who used to have jobs but can no longer find them in our increasingly globalized, technology-laden economy start to steal to eat, the "biometric security" will keep them out of your condo.

On the negative side, you (or I) may be the one the security is looking to keep out.

More plutocratic propaganda from the Daily News masking itself as "journalism".

NY Post Publishes Devastating Article About NYC Economy - Never Once Mentions Bloomberg As The Culprit

Here's a taste of the Post article:

New York City is stuck in the economic misery lane of middle-class jobs flight and an unemployed and underemployed class faced with long-term joblessness and rising hunger, according to the latest economic research.

The city is emerging from the worst of the Great Recession, but this so-called recovery is nothing to write home about.

The unemployment rate is 8.4 percent and has eclipsed the nation’s average. More disturbing, the city’s “underemployment” rate surpassed New York state’s by just over 1 point.

The city’s “underemployment” rate stood at 14.8 percent in the first half of 2013.

That figure counts the underclass of workers officially unemployed, working part time, or who are no longer counted as unemployed but are willing to work, according to an analysis of New York State Department of Labor data by New York’s Fiscal Policy Institute.

“We do have an issue with lower-paying jobs coming in, and Wall Street is not back to where it was before the recession,” said Jim Diffley, regional economist for IHS Global Insight. “There have been a lot of job gains in the leisure and hospitality sectors.”

But on the whole, these jobs do not have the pay or benefits of the jobs lost in banking or other middle-class vocations.

...

“Much of the job growth that has occurred has been in jobs that will make it hard to build a stable future for working New Yorkers,” a Fiscal Policy Institute report says. “Trends have continued in which New York has lost tens of thousands of middle income jobs in manufacturing, construction and government.”

The rest of the article is just as devastating - a single mother of three who had her hours reduced from 40 a week to 20, had her benefits cuts and now must make it on just a few hundred dollars a week.

And this woman is the coordinator of the Park Slope soup kitchen Christian Help.

The article says that like 2 million other New Yorkers, she needs to get by with the help of food stamps.

The article also goes on to report that while "food insecurity" - a phrase used to denote a time when people do not have access to food - has remained stable across the nation, it has risen in New York State.

In the Bronx, 23% of households are food insecure.

The very same newspaper, the NY Post, writes glowing reviews of the Bloomberg years on their op-ed pages, slams Bill de Blasio as a "class warrior" for running a campaign that acknowledges the "Tale of Two Cities" economic divide in New York, and then publishes this devastating article about the economic "malaise" (their word, not mine) New York City is suffering through in 2013.

Who is at fault for this malaise?

Bill de Blasio?

You can bet if he's mayor in 2014, within a month or so, they'll start to blame this stuff on him around.

And yet, Bloomberg, the mayor who has done everything in his power to assuage and cajole the rich people of this city - including going down to Goldman Sachs and soothing the tears of the brain trust when a former staffer published a Times piece about how evil the firm is - gets off free and clear in the Post article.

It's not his fault he's rezoned huge swaths of the city and turned them into playgrounds for the rich, given tax deals to real estate developers to knock down tenements and build luxury apartments, refused to raise taxes on the wealthy, refused to negotiate contracts with unionized municipal workers (the core of the middle class in this city), demonized teachers as greedy, lazy scum even as he has praised the bankers and hedge fund managers on Wall Street who helped bring about the '08 collapse through their own greed and criminal activity.

Not Bloomberg's fault at all, say the Posties.

You can bet if de Blasio is somehow elected mayor in November, they'll make sure they make it his fault in February.

That is, if the Post is still in business.

As Bloomberg noted in that infamous New York Magazine article yesterday, the Post is suffering its own "economic malaise"" - it loses $100 million a year.

The Brazilification Of The United States

From Lloyd Green:

Five years into the Obama presidency, we are further from the Great Recession but also closer to a new normal—economic dystopia.

Yes, the unemployment rate has edged down to 7.6 percent, but America is well on its way to becoming a nation of part-timers and full-time temps. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of  involuntary part-time workers rose by 322,000 to 8.2 million in June, while the ranks of temporary-help services employees have swelled to a record 2.68 million. Meanwhile, the employment-population ratio, the percentage of adult Americans who hold a job, has dropped nearly 2 percent to 58.7 percent since Barack Obama took office.

Remarkably, both political parties are accommodating to this new reality of “Brazilification,” a term coined by Douglas Coupland in his 1991 novel Generation X and defined as the “widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.” On a good day, Brazilification looks like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala, a party for the well-heeled, well-dressed, and well-coiffed under the dazzle of blinding lights. But, on a bad day, Brazilification is bankrupt Detroit, post-Katrina New Orleans, or the shuttered mining and mill towns 24/7, except bleaker.

For now, see the grim world of Bruce Springsteen’s 2012 album Wrecking Ball. For the future, look for pockets of wealth surrounded by functional despair, where the “haves” are cocooned or walled-off from the “have-nots.” As Sherman McCoy said in Bonfire of the Vanities, “Insulate! Insulate!” And the Masters of the Met do just that.

 One might add the firing of thousands of Chicago public school teachers and the simultaneous hiring of Teach For America interns to replace them as another sign of Brazilification.

What The Minimum Wage Should Be

From the devout Communists at Bloomberg News:

If the minimum wage had simply tracked U.S. productivity gains since 1968, it would be $21.72 an hour -- three times what it is now.

The minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

It should be $21.72 an hour.

We simply cannot afford to raise the wages for the working classes of this country.

Because after all, how can the crooks on Wall Street possibly get by on less than record profits and compensation?

Wall Street, World Financial Markets Very Sad Free Fed Money May Be Coming To An End

From The Guardian:

Stock markets worldwide plummeted on Thursday, after the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, rattled investors by signalling an end to America's drastic recession-busting policy of quantitative easing.

Share prices across the globe have surged over the past year, helped by an unprecedented injection of cheap money, with the Fed buying up $85bn (£55bn) worth of bonds every month, and the Bank of Japan pledging "shock and awe" QE to revive a stagnant national economy.

But when Bernanke laid out a timetable on Wednesday night for cutting off the Fed's bond purchases by mid-2014, his words prompted a violent sell-off, which began in New York after European markets were closed, and ricocheted around the world on Thursday, from Tokyo to Istanbul and Oslo to Jakarta. In London, the 2.98% decline in the FTSE 100 index was the steepest since September 2011.

Elsewhere in Europe, shares suffered their biggest one-day fall in 19 months, with Spain's Ibex losing 2.9%, and the German, French and Italian markets all down by more than 3%.

The slide on Wall Street resumed when US markets reopened on Thursday. After heavy selling throughout the day the Dow Jones closed down 2.3%.

"We've had a market that for some years has been addicted to stimulus, and it's taken a brave man to say it has to end somewhere," said Neil Mellor, of BNY Mellon. He added that the true test of whether the US economy was strong enough to cope without QE would come when the prop of cheap money had been removed. "We don't know if there's a credible recovery there; we're peeling back the plaster."

Bond prices also fell worldwide, a trend that will push up borrowing costs for governments and consumers if it is sustained. Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's outspoken director for financial stability, warned last week that through QE, policymakers had deliberately inflated "the biggest bond bubble in history".

Let's repeat: "through QE, policymakers had deliberately inflated 'the biggest bond bubble in history'".

From a tech bubble to a real estate bubble to a commodity bubble to a bond bubble.

That's the 21st century economy in a nutshell.

Phonied up profits and stock prices propped up by the Fed printing press and cheap money.

NY Times: Low Income, High Achieving Students Still Struggle In Post-Secondary Life

The central tenet of education reform is that public education is failing students from low income families, particularly students of color, by failing to give them the "rigorous" training and skills that students from higher income families get.

Education reformers say if we just fire the teachers and close the schools where low income students are going and reopen these as "No Excuses!" charters or other reformy institutions, hold the teachers who teach these students to test-based accountability and evaluations and impose a rigorous, top-down curriculum of high standards, these students will flourish in their post-secondary lives.

The NY Times is running a front page story today that puts a lot of water onto that white-hot reform meme:

Poor students have long trailed affluent peers in school performance, but from grade-school tests to college completion, the gaps are growing. With school success and earning prospects ever more entwined, the consequences carry far: education, a force meant to erode class barriers, appears to be fortifying them.

“Everyone wants to think of education as an equalizer — the place where upward mobility gets started,” said Greg J. Duncan, an economist at the University of California, Irvine. “But on virtually every measure we have, the gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. It’s very disheartening.” 

The growing role of class in academic success has taken experts by surprise since it follows decades of equal opportunity efforts and counters racial trends, where differences have narrowed. It adds to fears over recent evidence suggesting that low-income Americans have lower chances of upward mobility than counterparts in Canada and Western Europe. 

Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor’s degrees, according to Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski of the University of Michigan. Now the gap is 45 points. 

While both groups improved their odds of finishing college, the affluent improved much more, widening their sizable lead. 

Likely reasons include soaring incomes at the top and changes in family structure, which have left fewer low-income students with the support of two-parent homes. Neighborhoods have grown more segregated by class, leaving lower-income students increasingly concentrated in lower-quality schools. And even after accounting for financial aid, the costs of attending a public university have risen 60 percent in the past two decades. Many low-income students, feeling the need to help out at home, are deterred by the thought of years of lost wages and piles of debt. 

In placing their hopes in education, the Galveston teenagers followed a tradition as old as the country itself. But if only the prosperous become educated — and only the educated prosper — the schoolhouse risks becoming just another place where the fortunate preserve their edge. 

“It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that a low-income student, no matter how intrinsically bright, moves up the socioeconomic ladder,” said Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford. “What we’re talking about is a threat to the American dream.” 

 The Times looks at four high-achieving students from Galveston, Texas to illustrate the problem:

Angelica Gonzales marched through high school in Goth armor — black boots, chains and cargo pants — but undermined her pose of alienation with a place on the honor roll. She nicknamed herself after a metal band and vowed to become the first in her family to earn a college degree.

“I don’t want to work at Walmart” like her mother, she wrote to a school counselor. 

Weekends and summers were devoted to a college-readiness program, where her best friends, Melissa O’Neal and Bianca Gonzalez, shared her drive to “get off the island” — escape the prospect of dead-end lives in luckless Galveston. Melissa, an eighth-grade valedictorian, seethed over her mother’s boyfriends and drinking, and Bianca’s bubbly innocence hid the trauma of her father’s death. They stuck together so much that a tutor called them the “triplets.” 

Low-income strivers face uphill climbs, especially at Ball High School, where  third of the girls’ class failed to graduate on schedule. But by the time the triplets donned mortarboards in the class of 2008, their story seemed to validate the promise of education as the great equalizer. 

Angelica, a daughter of a struggling Mexican immigrant, was headed to Emory University. Bianca enrolled in community college, and Melissa left for Texas State University, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s alma mater. 

“It felt like we were taking off, from one life to another,” Melissa said. “It felt like, ‘Here we go!’ ”

Four years later, their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality. Not one of them has a four-year degree. Only one is still studying full time, and two have crushing debts. Angelica, who left Emory owing more than $60,000, is a clerk in a Galveston furniture store. 

Each showed the ability to do college work, even excel at it. But the need to earn money brought one set of strains, campus alienation brought others, and ties to boyfriends not in school added complications. With little guidance from family or school officials, college became a leap that they braved without a safety net. 

The story of their lost footing is also the story of something larger — the growing role that education plays in preserving class divisions.

The struggles these students have suffered that have short-circuited their dreams have not been caused by "bad teachers," they are not due to "failing schools."

Economic inequality, a nation that has rigged its economic system and its social and political institutions for the benefit of the affluent - that's the problem:

Income has always shaped academic success, but its importance is growing. Professor Reardon, the Stanford sociologist, examined a dozen reading and math tests dating back 25 years and found that the gap in scores of high- and low-income students has grown by 40 percent, even as the difference between blacks and whites has narrowed. 

While race once predicted scores more than class, the opposite now holds. By eighth grade, white students surpass blacks by an average of three grade levels, while upper-income students are four grades ahead of low-income counterparts. 

“The racial gaps are quite big, but the income gaps are bigger,” Professor Reardon said.

One explanation is simply that the rich have clearly gotten richer. A generation ago, families at the 90th percentile had five times the income of those at the 10th percentile. Now they have 10 times as much. 

But as shop class gave way to computer labs, schools may have also changed in ways that make parental income and education more important. SAT coaches were once rare, even for families that could afford them. Now they are part of a vast college preparation industry. 

Certainly as the payoff to education has grown — college graduates have greatly widened their earnings lead — affluent families have invested more in it. They have tripled the amount by which they outspend low-income families on enrichment activities like sports, music lessons and summer camps, according to Professor Duncan and Prof. Richard Murnane of Harvard. 

In addition, upper-income parents, especially fathers, have increased their child-rearing time, while the presence of fathers in low-income homes has declined. Miss G. said there is a reason the triplets relied so heavily on boyfriends: “Their fathers weren’t there.” 

Annette Lareau, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that the affluent also enjoy an advocacy edge: parents are quicker to intervene when their children need help, while low-income families often feel intimidated and defer to school officials, a problem that would trail Melissa and Angelica in their journey through college. 

“Middle-class students get the sense the institution will respond to them,” Professor Lareau said. “Working-class and poor students don’t experience that. It makes them more vulnerable.” 

And so the result of all of this is that students from low income backgrounds who score higher on tests than students from more affluent backgrounds finish college far less.

There are no simple solutions to this problem, but there are solutions.

Lower class sizes in low income schools.

Provide a safety net for families.

Provide medical care.

Add more counselors and support staff.

Provide access to out-patient services for emotional health.

Give each student a "mentor" who can help them  navigate not only the secondary school process and college application process, but the post-secondary process.

Oh, and do what John Liu suggested last week - award students from low income backgrounds full ride scholarships to CUNY and SUNY.

Don't force them to take on tens of thousands of dollars of loan debt to go to college.

Raise taxes on millionaires and cut tuition and fees at SUNY and CUNY rather than the other way around, as Cuomo has done.

I teach high school seniors.

I keep in touch with many long after they've graduated.

I have helped students with all kinds of problems - from helping them to edit their papers to helping them with their taxes to helping them with career advice and resume preparation to using connections I might have to help them get an interview for a job to taking them to out-patient counseling or support programs to help them work through family or life traumas.  

I've gone to colleges and advocated for them when they needed that.

I take that kind of work as seriously as I do my in class teaching because I see my role as something larger than just "adding value" to my students' test scores.

Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee and Michael Bloomberg and Andrew Cuomo and Barack Obama may not think that kind of work is important.

Certainly the education policies they promote in which high stakes testing and accountability trumps everything else suggests they don't think much about the "other" work teachers and schools have to do to help students from low income backgrounds break whatever cycle they're stuck in.

But if the so-called education reformers really wanted to help students from low income backgrounds break the cycle of poverty, they would provide the social safety net and the school supports needed to do just that and would drop the FEAR-based, test-based accountability nonsense which is, quite frankly, only making things worse for these kids.

The reality is, Obama and Cuomo and Bloomberg and Klein and Rhee and Murdoch and the rest aren't interested in helping kids from low income backgrounds climb the economic ladder.

They're interested in perpetuating the current economic system that is very much rigged in the favor of the 1%.

Thomas Merton once said (I'm paraphrasing) that we should call things what they are and give them their proper name.

The name for an education reform movement that demonizes teachers and schools even as it ignores the real solutions to the vast problems kids from low income backgrounds face is "hypocritical."

They say they are putting "Students First" even as they put corporations first.

They use the motto "Children First.  Always" for the NYC school system as a slam at teachers even as they send kids to schools with cancer-causing toxins in them, or mold, or PCB's.

It is good to see this article in the Times, although it would have been nice to get this on a weekend other than the one before Christmas.

It needs to be read widely and used to rebut the claims of the Rhee's and Klein's and Bloomberg's and Cuomo's and Bush's and Obama's that we can fire our way to economic equality if we just evaluate teachers and schools with rigorous test-based accountability.

The more test-based accountability and Danielson nonsense they put onto teachers, the less time teachers have for the socio-emotional, career and life supports many try and provide their students.