by David Safier Remember a few months ago, a movie, "Won't Back Down," starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis and Holly Hunter? It was about some parents and teachers who circulated a petition to take an inner city school away from the evil district bureaucracy and the corrupt teachers' union and turn it into — I … Read more
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
I was really looking forward to the tiresome act of the Neocon war monger Three Stooges — John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman — finally coming to an end now that Lieberman is retiring and leaving the Senate. Frick! I forgot about Shemp! Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) has replaced Lieberman in the "new" Three Stooges.
The "new" Three Stooges have been advancing the FAUX News Fraudcasting conspiracy theory du jour on Benghazi, Libya ever since Willard "Mittens" Romney exited stage right.
It has not gone well for McCain. Michael Tomasky on How John McCain Humiliated Himself on Susan Rice:
We don’t yet really know as a society what a person has to do to
completely and utterly cancel out a record of war heroism, but we may be
about to find out. If this CBS News report is even close to accurate, John McCain’s arguments of the last few weeks about Susan Rice are thrashingly demolished. He has, or should have, zero credibility
now on this issue. It will be fascinating to see if he emerges from the
holiday weekend subtly chastened, attempting to shift gears a bit, or
whether he keeps the pedal to the paranoid metal.
The first of three public forums on the Tucson Unified School District's (TUSD) proposed desegregation plan took place on Monday night.
Fellow BfAZ blogger Dave Safier posted a very detailed first-person account of the forum here this morning, and today's Arizona Daily Star's also offered a thorough account that overlaps somewhat with Safier's but also includes other facts. (KGUN 9 video here.)
Safier writes from the viewpoint– as he admits– of commentator who has "expended thousands of words trying to explain the value of the MAS program". The Star reporter gives a newsier account of the meeting and offers some more basic background.
Why a third article? Here, I offer here some history, a broader analysis of the issues, and a call for action. Read more after the jump.
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
The Septegenarian Ninja Turtle, Mitch McConnell, the man who has abused the rules of the Senate to such an extraordinary degree that he has rendered that institution dysfunctional and broken, incapable of addressing the people's business even in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is whining mightily about how Democrats intend to neuter his ability to hold the Senate hostage to his tyranny of the minority by adopting senate rule changes, including filibuster reform, when the new Congress convenes in January. Now that's chutzpah.
This is the equivalent of a man on trial for murdering his parents asking for the leniency of the court because he is now an orphan.
Politico reported on Monday that the GOP warns of shutdown over filibuster:
Here’s
what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is considering: banning
filibusters used to prevent debate from even starting and House-Senate
conference committees from ever meeting. He also may make filibusters
become actual filibusters — to force senators to carry out the nonstop,
talkathon sessions.
Republicans are threatening even greater retaliation if Reid uses a
move rarely used by Senate majorities: changing the chamber’s precedent
by 51 votes, rather than the usual 67 votes it takes to overhaul the
rules.
by David Safier
"They were speaking her language, and she understood what they said."
At Monday night's public forum on the proposed desegregation plan for TUSD, there was no shortage of excellent, eloquent speakers. But the line above, from a woman who is a TUSD grad, currently a licensed counselor and a mother whose daughter was in the Mexican American Studies program, is the one that stuck with me. I've expended thousands of words trying to explain the value of the MAS program, and she succeeded in just 11 words. If you want to reach students who feel alienated from their school-based education and see no reason to apply themselves, no reason to care, you have to find a way to make the education relevant to their lives. There's no one strategy that works. But somehow you have to find a way to get past their defenses, often erected to fend off their feelings of failure. You have to find a way in. And one way is to "speak their language" so they understand what you're saying.
In the case of MAS, that means talking about the world from a perspective the students understand, teaching about history from a different viewpoint, reading literature that has the cadences and experiences students can relate to, shaking things up so the barriers reluctant students create to protect themselves from investing too much of themselves in their educations are broken down. Get students to care about what's going on in class, and they're going to benefit, sometimes in remarkable ways.
For a summary of the ideas presented to the Special Master and others who listened to the speakers, keep reading below the fold.