THE BLUE STATES has moved

Education in America

Since GOP's record wins in 2010, education has been on the chopping block not only at the state level but also the federal level by turning our public education system into voucher programs or charter schools, which privatizes the system, and cutting Pell Grants and higher education funding that is putting college out of reach for a higher number of low and moderate income households.

There is a great article, The Destruction of American Education And What We Must Do About It, by Dr. Norman D. Livergood that makes very valuable points on our current educational system and the trajectory it is taking.

From a study in 2003:
Some thirty million adults in the U.S. do not have the skills to perform even the most basic tasks such as adding numbers on a bank slip, identifying a place on a map, or reading directions for taking a medication. Eleven million Americans are totally illiterate in English.

Only twenty-nine percent of Americans have basic reading and computing skills. One out of every twenty Americans lacks the ability to understand what is going on in the world or to develop an informed opinion for voting.

Republican's widely touted voucher system:
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court in a 1998 ruling allowed their voucher system to stand, some 6,000 students make use of the vouchers, worth about $5,000 apiece. This results in $30 million being funneled from the budget of the Milwaukee school district into the coffers of the Catholic Church and other private schools. With this new ruling, the program can now be fully utilized, so that 15,000 students can leave the system, cutting the funding of the public schools by $75 million.

Republican supporters of the voucher hide the fact from the public that the crisis in the schools is largely the product of decades of federal, state and local spending cuts, tax breaks to big business and attacks on teachers' and other school employees' wages and working conditions.

The newly-sanctioned voucher system will intensify class and social distinctions. The top schools will be reserved for the wealthiest layers of society who can pay to send their children to elite private schools and academies. Next below on the totem pole will be the private and for-profit schools for middle-class and working class children, whose parents will have to work longer hours and go further into debt to scrape together thousands of dollars to pay tuition costs.

At the very bottom will be the public schools, left for the poorest and most disadvantaged working class students. Unable to do little to help working class youth develop learning skills, the role of these schools will be little more than training lower-class students for low-paying jobs.

The state of Americans and education:
Americans are rapidly losing a sense of the traditional American values. Anti-intellectual, racist or right-wing multiculturalism has replaced education, bought-and-paid-for-politics has replaced democracy, funneling billions to the fat-cats has replaced statesmanship, and attacks on constitutional liberties has replaced political and judicial oversight.

If you examine graduate courses on Global Economy, for example, you'll not find a single mention of the terrible human costs: rising unemployment in the home economies, slave wages in the third world countries where manufacturing is relocated, runaway immigration, and a constant degradation of the environment.

Freire worked to help third-world people overcome illiteracy. Today, his insights can be applied to two different kinds of illiterate people:

Those who cannot grasp the sense of letters or symbols.

Those who can "read" (in the grammar school sense) but who cannot read: understand the meaning of the words they see.

There are those today, for example, who "read" about such things as worker layoffs and American corporations relocating their manufacturing plants in China or Indonesia, but who do not understand the meaning of what they "read."

Another kind of modern-day "illiteracy" occurs as people "read" or "hear" the "news" in newspapers or on TV, and allow themselves to be taken in by the propaganda that such "news" involves.

The article in its entirety: http://www.hermes-press.com/education_index.htm

Corporate Takeover of America (well, actually the world)

Over the past 3 decades, corporations have steadily been monopolizing more and more power of our government. We all know they do this by funding/donating money to representatives for their campaigns, and once elected, well then our reps work for them. The very rich and the corporations are not going to give their money away for free; expectations always come with it.

I thought it was bad until the decision on the Citizen's United case by SCOTUS. Now our government is almost completely controlled by special interest groups, corporations, and the extremely wealthy in our nation (for that matter in the world).

It is enraging to me and should be to every middle/lower class American the fact that our political system is completely funded by these people leaving us out in the cold. The only few options left to us are unions, which the numbers are dwindling, and our numbers and the ability to gather and protest. The only thing we have going is the fact that this kind of power rests in only a handful of people/corporations (in the thousands if not hundreds) and WE NUMBER in the MILLIONS.

Here is another disturbing reach for these "elites." In Florida back in 2008, Charles Koch donated $1.5 million to Florida State University's Economics Department to be given over 6 years equating to $250,000/year. For this donation Koch's very own advisory committee will pick candidates to fill teaching positions that are funded by his donation. The candidates will have to be approved by Koch. This gives him complete veto power on any new hires.

Florida State University's economics department needs to reconsider its relationship with billionaire Charles G. Koch, who pledged $1.5 million to the school as long as professors hired with the money hew to Koch's Libertarian philosophy. The arrangement reeks of pandering and undermines academic freedom, the cornerstone of American higher education.

Under the terms of a 2008 deal with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, FSU's economics department is scheduled to receive $1.5 million over six years to hire professors. But faculty members hired with foundation money must be approved by an advisory committee handpicked by Koch. That means Koch effectively holds veto power, an arrangement rarely found in the academic community and that threatens independent thinking.

The one thing the misguided and basically uneducated Tea Party has shown us over the past 2 years is we still can influence our representatives. We have one thing going for us that they don't, brains. We know the issues, the politics and cannot be persuaded by false news/reporting. The corporations have to be stopped before we turn into The United States of Corporations.