Different Day, Same Shit.

The following comes courtesy of Lane Crothers, a.k.a Politicalprof, a professor of politics and government at Illinois State University, in Normal, IL.:

I remember when the lottery for higher education passed in SC. Every student that went to college received a voucher for x amount of dollars. So what do you think happened to the cost of higher education in SC. The tuition increased by the same amount as the voucher.

This is a valid concern. There is no doubt that many universities have taken the increased availability of student loans and/or support programs from state and local governments and used them to raise their tuitions to meet the monies available. Thus, rather than economize, they saw opportunities to build “up charges” into their pricing, and get “extra” money (beyond the money cut by the state) into their budgets.

On the other hand, as the article I linked to noted, this was more common at major research universities than it was at “mid-level” universities like mine. At places like mine, tax replacement more or less accounts for current tuition rates.

Moreover, it seems to me that our understandable focus on tuition has left us incapable of seeing the real complexity of running a campus. Because of budget cuts in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, most campuses have huge backlogs of what we call “deferred maintenance”: the operating costs required to maintain, repair and replace aging buildings and infrastructure. When the states started chopping funding (again) in the 2000s, lots of campuses (like mine) were filled with buildings where plumbing, electric systems, roofs and other components were deteriorating quickly. So, yeah: lots of campuses took “extra” money and used it on buildings. Indeed, in some cases they used it to fix roofs; in others, they built climbing walls in elaborate student rec centers.

I get that people feel squeezed 87 ways to Tuesday. I was unspeakably blessed to have gotten through higher ed when I did, and I am — frankly — worried at how even someone with the advantages I have will pay for college for my children when they get there … many, many years from now. I do really, sincerely, get it.

The plain truth is that society no longer considers higher education a public good that the public should subsidize through taxes. Rather, society considers college a private good individuals should pay for on their own. This transition is occurring at a time when the existing architecture of higher education — lots of physical campuses spread around states — is aging, but no credible alternative has emerged to replace it. (Online just has too many problems to work for most people.)

So this generation is getting squeezed on both ends: they have to pay to maintain the old system even as the public bails out. It’s not pretty.

Sometimes I get sad.

A number of my fellow bloggers have been on the case of a certain school system superintendent by the name of Casey Wardynski. I already covered him on two separate occasions, highlighting how he hails from an organization that exemplifies the term "controlled chaos" when it comes to public education and how he wowed the administration of Huntsville City Schools with his military background and no-nonsense posturing. Except that most of his actions have been a bunch of nonsense. Dangerous nonsense that would have had people screaming for previous superintendent Ann Roy Moore's head on a commemorative platter.

Not only has he made sure that the Broad Foundation got a return on its investment, he's also called on several of his closest friends to get in on the fun. He's "cleaned house" by playing musical chairs with teachers and principals, shut down a number of schools and closed the city's only alternative school in favor of a far-flung private "treatment program" with little to no accountability. He's also managed to be incredibly hostile to anyone who asks him exactly what the flying hell is going on. All the while, he receives praise and pats on the back from a largely cowed and sycophantic school board and an equally cowed and sycophantic press.

Meanwhile, he's looking for ways for the school system to get out from under its "unitary status," including putting the kibosh on majority-minority transfers that help many of the kids from the poorer northern half of the city into schools in the wealthier southern half. I suspect that by loading up the schools on the north side of town with "failing" students, there will be an impetus to "do something" about the low test scores they're producing. Instead of actually addressing the underlying issues of poor performance, there may be a drive towards converting said public schools into "experimental" charter schools. But at least you get free laptops out of the deal.


Conservatives are interested in proving their point about public schools by doing all they can to make them fail. Once that's done, the wreckage can be dismantled and swept away in favor of charter schools and privately-owned academies. I sincerely doubt that Casey Wardynski is actually doing anything to make the school system he's in charge of any better. However, I have complete confidence that he's reshaping the school system as a showpiece for why converting the "dysfunctional" public schools into a privatized charter system is much better.
The endgame is directing billions of education dollars away from federal educational institutions (most of which aren't likely to exist anymore) and into the hands of private companies charged with the administration of charter and private schools. Paraphrasing Major General Smedley Butler, "It's a racket."

And it's a racket that most likely won't involve many of the poor inner-city urban youths (a.k.a. blacks and browns). Public education will hang on as a dumping ground for the so-called "scraps" that no private or charter school wants. These schools want to look good and having kids who are considered "hard to teach" and perpetual "low achievers" brings down the test score averages and makes the place look bad. Those with disciplinary problems are likely to end up in a "wilderness behavior modification" program with no contact with family or legal representation.

At some point, I want to make a special post about the current state of education in America and how it is doing a grave disservice to black American children. There are several flaws in the system that allow black kids, especially young black boys, to "slip through the cracks" and wind up as fodder for our wonderful "School-to-Prison" pipeline.

I don't know if this was intentional, or if it was a simple case of insensitivity or utter cluelessness, but something like this should never appear on a homework assignment, or any place else, for that matter. I bet you would never see the following question on any assignment at any school, ever:

Each concentration camp had 103 Jews. If seven Jews were placed in gas chambers each day, how many would remain in 1 week? 2 weeks?

Now, why are black parents making a fuss about all of this?

“Something like that shouldn’t be imbedded into a kid of the third, fourth, fifth, any grade,” parent Terrance Barnett told WSB-TV. “I’m having to explain to my 8-year-old why slavery or slaves or beatings are in a math problem. That hurts.”

Indeed it does.

Something I've noticed in the video that accompanied this report: the kids featured had their fathers present. No single mothers being depicted in stereotypical outrage - just concerned fathers making disapproval of this stunt known.

If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities. Getting good grades is the key to having more options. With good grades you can choose different, better paths. If you do poorly in school, particularly in a lousy school, you’re severely limiting the limited opportunities you have.

And I would use the technology available to me as a student. I know a few school teachers and they tell me that many inner city parents usually have or can afford cheap computers and internet service nowadays. That because (and sadly) it’s oftentimes a necessary thing to keep their kids safe at home then on the streets. And libraries and schools have computers available too. Computers can be purchased cheaply at outlets like TigerDirect and Dell’s Outlet. Professional organizations like accountants and architects often offer used computers from their members, sometimes at no cost at all.

If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study. I’d become expert at Google Scholar. I’d visit study sites like SparkNotes and CliffsNotes to help me understand books. I’d watch relevant teachings on Academic Earth, TED and the Khan Academy. (I say relevant because some of these lectures may not be related to my work or too advanced for my age. But there are plenty of videos on these sites that are suitable to my studies and would help me stand out.) I would also, when possible, get my books for free at Project Gutenberg and learn how to do research at the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia to help me with my studies.

I would use homework tools like Backpack, and Diigo to help me store and share my work with other classmates. I would use Skype to study with other students who also want to do well in my school. I would take advantage of study websites like Evernote, Study Rails, Flashcard Machine, Quizlet, and free online calculators.

I wasn't raised a poor black kid. Perhaps a black kid who could have had a bit more than he was given from the start (don't we all?), but at no point did I feel or see myself as being poor. But when guys like these start assuming they can do what they believe ordinary black kids to somehow be incapable of doing, it fucking irks me. The smug, self-assured "oh I could have done that a lot better" attitude fucking irks me.

Like I said, I wasn't raised poor, so I'll use quotes around that word to make an important distinction. Hopefully that won't detract from the following message too much.

When I was a "poor" black kid, my parents made it my #1 priority to read, which in turn instilled a love of reading (and eventually, writing). Other kids didn't have that sort of parental motivation needed to push their kids to read better. It's a tall order to expect a struggling kid to get himself to read better when no one seems to want to help him.

When I was a "poor" black kid, I was lucky to have parents who worked to give me access to libraries and computers, back when other poor families didn't even have cable, let alone Internet service. Many poor families still don't have Internet service. Many poor families are computer illiterate. Many don't have access to a library or a community center with computers.

As a "poor" black kid, I had nary a clue about sources of information such as Cliff's Notes and Google Scholar. I had to be shown how to get to these resources by parents, relatives, teachers, etc. I wouldn't have been able to find them on my own except by sheer luck, never mind the nature of the Internet today.* To expect them to take advantage of these resources and deem them lazy and unmotivated when they can't take advantage of them reeks of intellectual dishonesty, to say the least.

Besides, I wouldn't have been able to study or share homework with other students online. Most of us didn't have computers. Or Internet access. Or both. Or had any motivation to study after dealing with our home lives.

Gene Marks, perhaps you shouldn't assume what you would do if you were this or that. Not even when you think you know the entire situation. Knowing the ins and outs about something doesn't give you permission to opine about what you'd do if you were in someone else's shoes. But plenty of people have already told you about that. So do us all a favor and knock it off.

*I grew up during what could be considered the final transformation of the Internet (or World Wide Web, as it was called then) into the Internet we all know, love and occasionally bitch about today. That was around the mid to late 1990s, back when my household used AOL floppies (not CDs, floppies) as coasters, Netscape was The Shit™, 56k was as fast as most households could have hoped to go, and AOL and Compuserve were the two main ways people logged onto those series of tubes. Memes did not exist, neither did 4Chan or YouTube. Google? No, Yahoo, Altavista and Lycos were the top search engines of the day. Damn, I feel old.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

While the United States is still somewhat civilized in that metric, in comparison to places like, say, Mexico, Turkey or North Korea, we're doing our damnedest as a nation to change that, for the worst. The U.S. continues to trend southward on the list of "first-world nations you'd actually want to live in." When it comes to healthcare, education, advances in technology, per-capita income, amount of leisure time and general happiness, we're falling farther and farther behind our European and Asian contemporaries. At least we'll always be numero uno when it comes to military strength and expenditures...

When kids talk about their schools, quite a few will liken them to prisons. Not because they just don't plain like school (who does when you're a kid?), but because the schools have, for the most part, have replicated the rigid, regimented and highly controlled environment that resembles most maximum security prison environments. In many cases, you can thank zero-tolerance measures and building architects who design most new schools to be cinder-block enclaves with limited access and limited distractions. That means no windows and few entry and exit points save for the fire escapes. And they'd get rid of those, too, if they could.

I had the pleasure of going to a high school that was built in a hillside during the late 1950s, as a Cold War-era solution to surviving a nuclear attack and the resultant radiation fallout that followed. It didn't help that it was just a few miles away from a rather important military installation with a lot of stuff that made it nuke-worthy by Soviet standards. As a result, you had a hexagonal structure surrounded by other hexagonal stubs buried in a hillside, with no classroom windows. As this school was quite old by the time I attended, the HVAC and ventilation system was usually FUBAR and any decent temperature or fresh air regulation had to be done by opening the emergency doors in the classrooms that were lucky to have one. However, this school wasn't "urban" enough to warrant metal detectors and the school didn't seem to embrace the "zero-tolerance" policies with the fervor schools do today. Other schools I went to before that were built as most schools were before Brutalist architecture and the need for controlled environments came into vogue.

Not only do you have the buildings as instruments of control, you also have the adherence to class schedules, the assigned lunch seating, the requirement to travel to and from as a group at the appointed times, etc. I understand this is all necessary for young minds that have yet to handle independence with the measure of respect and good judgement that most kids have yet to develop, but I can't help but notice how the entire school environment resembles the corrective institution in a growing number of ways. It's a feeling you can't really put your finger on, but you know it's there.

The need for control and regimentation is manifested by students who act out because they're either bored or frustrated. Since the public school experience is largely regimented out of necessity (or laziness, in many cases), there's no way that a school teacher can fine-tune the curriculum to accommodate a student for whom the standard method of learning simply does not work. Lots of people require hands-on experience and end up doing better in trades and careers that feature tactile and tangible experiences. And since public schools usually lack the funds, will and foresight to identify underlying problems that could result in a miserable school experience for a kid, those problems are either ignored or doped away with copious amounts of Adderall or Ritalin. For others, they act out, and the zero-tolerance policies come into play.

Private schools are a whole 'nother kettle of fish. I had the opportunity to go to quite a few when I was a young kid, specifically a small, church-run school in the middle of a "distressed urban environment." The entire experience was different from any public school I've been to at that point -- the classroom experience was less restrictive and regimented. There was less stress, even though the environment was just as competitive (or far more, in many cases) as other ordinary public schools. Fewer fights, fewer disruptions and more opportunities for a custom-tailored educational experience that actually benefits kids. But it was expensive, and single parents with other household expenditures can't swing the private school bills as well as financially established families, and those are few and far between in most urban areas.

So, where am I going with this? Well, the Tea Party made plenty of public institutions targets in their scheme to dismantle and replace them with privatized entities. Actually, it isn't so much the Tea Party orchestrating this as they are simply the dumbassed foot soldiers doing the bidding of the real power brokers funding the so-called "grassroots" organization. Public schools are one of those targets.
(More after the jump)

I watched the GOP economic debate on a Bloomberg stream earlier tonight. If you want to know how I felt about it, look at my Twitter posts, because I'm not about to go into detail about it again. Next time, I'll create a nice little tag to keep everything in one place. Honest.

Poor Herman Cain really thought it was his time to shine. Too bad the GOP establishment (the Powers That Be™) already have their hearts set on Mitt Romney, nevermind if he practices some goofy Utah cult religion. The rest of the nation will just have to learn to live with it, even Alabama.

Redeye didn't like Herman Cain's softshoe routine any more than I did. Neither did Dr. Boyce Watkins. To sum things up, they both see Herman Cain as the perfect "get out of being/seeming racist" card for white conservatives. Herman Cain: The Ultimate Racial Grievance Neutralizer™.

- How come when protesters threaten violence or even broach the mere appearance of becoming violent, it is considered to be a fucking tragedy of epic proportions worthy of martial law and swift crackdowns by law enforcement, but when a conservative mentions running over a few protesters with his car, "well, he didn't mean nothing by it" or "come'on, it's just a joke! Can't you take a little joke?"

In the conservative world, threatening to kill someone because their political ideology is different than yours is regarded as "a harmless joke." But someone who merely considers doing or saying anything that could possibly harm conservatives in any way is fair game for the most brutal state sanctioned punishment available.

- Arch-villain Skeletor, currently in a meat-and-skin-covered form he calls "Rick Scott," wants college kids in the state of Florida to forget about all that nonsense about getting a useless liberal arts degree and instead knuckle down and go for a "STEM" degree: degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Nothing wrong with expressing his preferences, except he plans to fuck liberal arts majors over by pulling the rug on the funding received by liberal arts and social science sections at Florida's public universities. After all, if you want to chase a useless degree in Anthropology or Philosophy, you might as well do it at a private institution and rack up over a $100k in non-dischargeable student loans.

If this is touted as a "money-saving measure," shouldn't they look at the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on their athletics programs? Of course not. Monetary pursuits that reward a chosen few but placate millions are not to be trifled with.

- Speaking of student loans, people are wondering whether we should forgive a large portion of student loans and mortgages currently held by millions of Americans. Of course, the lending and banking industry would just die if they didn't have all of that debt to hold over America's heads, so expect that idea to be a no-go for the foreseeable future.

Unless, of course, everyone simultaneously defaults on their student loans. *cue evil laughter*

- A young man follows his dreams in Romania, only for his life to be cut short in a barroom brawl over a woman. My heart goes out to Chauncey Hardy's family and friends, who are surely in some deep, deep pain over what happened.

- On the other hand, two heffers were hauled in for hauling off and going ham on one another with a heavy helping of household bleach and ammonia at Wal-Mart. And this is one of the many reasons I prefer shopping at Target. It's a bit more expensive, but at least you don't have two women slinging "American Value"-brand bleach all over each other and 19 other people.

BTW, mixing bleach and ammonia together makes chlorine gas. Chlorine gas is potentially fatal. Just thought you all should know.

- President Obama's "American Jobs Act of 2011" died an ignoble death in the Senate today, 50 to 49. 60 votes were needed, but he couldn't get them from his own damned party. Read as Patricia Murphy at MSNBC's Powerwall orgasms over how this setback is proof positive of Obama's weakness in Washington. Keep this crap up and the various "Villagers" and "emoprogs" will get their secret wish: to have a Republican in the Oval Office for the next 4 to 16 years. That way, they can play perpetual pretend underdog crusaders again while taking GOP "danegeld" because "they have no choice but to." Better to have pocket change to go cruising the cocktail dinner circuit with.

This reminds me of combat vets who cruise the local bars with a batch of shiny medals and a story to spin for each one, to impress the young bunnies and jaded ex-wives. And they get them by deliberately flinging themselves into combat scenarios, whether it actually helps their platoon or not.

- Is this how true Christians are supposed to behave? I'm pretty sure Jesus wouldn't approve -- John 8:7 and Matthew 7:1 is clear proof. Then again, most people who call themselves "Christians" only read bits and pieces of the Old Testament and only the juicy portions that validate their own bigotry and bloodlust:

But who could imagine the hate and rage that would motivate a Pastor to instruct deacons and members of his congregation, Grace Fellowship Church in Fruitland, TN. to physically attack a couple arriving in the church parking lot last Wednesday?

The fact that one of the gay men attacked happened to be the Pastor’s own son, Jerry Pittman, Jr., no doubt contributed to Pittman senior’s noxious edict. According to Pittman Jr., after hearing his Dad yell, “SICK’EM!:”

“My uncle and two other deacons came over to the car per my dad’s request. My uncle smashed me in the door as the other deacon knocked my boyfriend back so he couldn’t help me, punching him in his face and his chest. The other deacon came and hit me through my car window in my back.”

The attackers also verbally assaulted the couple continually with anti-gay verbiage which continued even after a Sheriff’s Deputy arrived on the scene. Bystanders and other congregants made no effort to stop the assault. For that matter, neither did the Deputy Sheriff. Once the barrage of punches ended, the Deputy refused to let the two victims press charges.

Officers of the law may have a sworn duty to protect innocent citizens, but they're not obligated to uphold that promise. Really, it makes them no different than the highwaymen of old or the enforcers found in various dictatorial regimes.

BTW, if the so-called "Christians" were to see Jesus once more, they may try to beat and crucify him again. It's probably why when he promised to come back, he'd only do so when it was time for Judgement. Seems like these folks only respond favorably to the wrath of God, which sucks for the most part. Oh well, Judgement Day's a'comin.

- Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley was finally arraigned on charges stemming from the murder of Aiyana Stanley-Jones in a botched police raid.

Weekley is a 14-year veteran who had been a member of the department’s Special Response Team (SRT) since 2004. He reportedly told his sergeant moments after the shooting, “A woman inside grabbed my gun. It fired. The bullet hit a child.”

But the Stanley-Jones family lawyer Geoffrey Fieger told the Detroit Free Press he was shown a video immediately after the shooting that shows police as the aggressors. The video in question has not been found was reportedly not investigated by police.

“All I know is that the [missing] video is pretty dramatic,” he said. “You can see the gunman shooting into the house from the outside.”

The video that police have “is very different,” he said. “It doesn’t show a thing.”

Chances are his eventual sentence will be light, if he's sentenced at all. Juries have a thing for exonerating officers of the law.

I hate to end this blog post on a bitter note, but it is what it is.