I, too, dislike it.

The video claims that putting more women to work will drive economic development—yet women already make up a bigger percentage of the workforce in poor countries than in industrialized ones, but development is stalled. “What poor countries need to stimulate sustainable growth are not women taking out loans to buy cows but better governance and better terms of trade with rich countries,” Ms. Carella says.

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Has the ‘Girl Effect’ Been Good for Antipoverty Efforts?

Interesting article and discussion. There’s both the standard arguments about neglecting women’s second-shift obligations and the representation of developing countries as needing to be Saved by the West, but it also makes an argument that the entire paradigm is out of whack. It’s easy to package a message about poor women and livestock, but harder to engage people with large-scale policy discussions which will ultimately make the biggest dent in overall poverty, which will benefit women in particular since they are statistically more affected by poverty than men by dozens of measures.

It bears mentioning that nations with high-performing school systems—whether Korea, Singapore, Finland, or Japan—have succeeded not by privatizing their schools or closing those with low scores, but by strengthening the education profession. They also have less poverty than we do. Fewer than 5 percent of children in Finland live in poverty, as compared to 20 percent in the United States. Those who insist that poverty doesn’t matter, that only teachers matter, prefer to ignore such contrasts.

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—	The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch (via silas216, robot-heart-politics) BAM. (via marthaq) Diane Ravitch: maybe not too little too late? Just say it louder, lady.

Why is it that in most children education seems to destroy the creative urge? Why do so many boys and girls leave school with blunted perceptions and a closed mind? A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.

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Aldous Huxley (via epsteinian)

My self-satisfied answer has something to do with high-stakes testing, low-wage teachers, and the evolution of our current education system from Industrial Revolution era models of manufacturing plants. Throw in a dash of conspiracy theorizing about the government preferring a largely complacent citizenry (especially those in public school, who are generally already in a lower socio-economic class and need to be kept there, dammit), and you’ve got the basic platform of most radical education reform thinking.

Huxley: always right. Maybe even more right than Orwell.

(Source: epsteinian)

The report found that of the 672 foundations that gave at least $1 million in grants for education between 2006 and 2008, only 11 percent devoted at least half of those dollars to programs for students from marginalized communities. The report also found that only 2 percent allocated at least a quarter of their education funding for systemic change efforts involving advocacy, community organizing, and/or civic engagement.

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Report Calls for More Funding to Support Disadvantaged Students, Systemic Reform

NEWS.

Seriously though, this is ridiculous and upsetting. You’d think foundations supporting education reform would at least pretend to care about those students who are most in need of radical change. If only because those’re the kids dragging the test scores down! I am no longer naive enough to expect any organization with money to have an interest in changing the systems that keep the poor in poverty and the rich in wealth, lousy and prejudicial public education being perhaps the single largest and most effective among the lot. But listen, there are a lot of brown kids in those schools, and the population’s only going to grow. Until the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing tide of Charter School growth wins out entirely and we’re back to enforcing Brown v. Board of Education with the National Guard, public schools won’t get any better while ignoring the kids they have the most weighty obligation to serve.

Plus, that 2% allocation is for stuff conservatives LOVE like telling black people to just be better parents already. But I guess “community organizing” became a dirty word circa 2008, didn’t it.

I’m not saying it’s a Poll Tax, but:

Between printing, copying, and postage, it just cost me nearly five bucks and a dedicated 45 minutes, not counting the time to fill out the application itself, to send in my voter registration for New York. A fiver and a few minutes may not seem like a lot, but as an Unemployed American, I find it a little ironic that I have to squeeze my budget even tighter in order to ensure my constitutional right to vote for officials who might actually create a job for me.

And to be totally honest? That five dollars matters right now, and the 45 minutes was the difference between me being able to finish an application before I have to leave the house or not (circa now). I don’t know the right solution (although there’s always the ol’ indelible ink on the thumb trick), but the current arrangement strikes me as fishy.

Surely the current conditions of our economy have pushed many more into poverty and countless others to the brink. And yes, safety net benefits have eased the pain a bit. But ultimately we need to broaden the lens in which we confront the problem. Otherwise, as our economic troubles continue, we’ll only be able to declare, at best, our nimbleness in averting a larger crisis — and nowhere near solving the underlying structural problems.

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—	Arnold S. Cohen, President and Chief Executive, The Partnership for the Homeless. NYTimes.com (via abbyjean) Yep. ‘Bout right.

Fewer Than Half of African-American Males Graduate on Time, Report Finds »

And New York gets a whopping 25% high school graduation rate for Black Male Students period, forget late.

But at least we have a president who supports the same dumb as rocks charter school/high stakes school competition model that has such a proven success record under mayoral control in this fair city. At least there’s Race to the Top. I wonder if they realize the title of that program begs the obvious question: “which race?”

Canally points to the latest productivity numbers released in a separate report on Tuesday that show companies may have stretched their employees too thin. The Labor Department said worker productivity fell 0.9% in the second quarter, the first decline in 18 months.

That data may mean employers need to start hiring again. But instead, companies have been spending on new equipment and capital - rather than their payrolls - as they remain skeptical of the economic outlook, he said.

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Jobless claims jump to 5-month high - Aug. 12, 2010

First and foremost, UGH. Leave it to American business owners to: a) do that effed up Puritan thing where they sequester money away so that money makes more money, rather than using it as money is supposed to be used by real people, to facilitate trade of necessary goods and services ‘cause it’s just more convenient than bartering, and b) use their money to buy ROBOTS to increase productivity instead of supporting real people in their communities. Capitalism FTW, as always!

My secondary, slightly more tempered and qualified response, is that the methods through which the government has attempted to incentivize hiring over doing those other “things wealthy people do” strategies for stabilizing and growing businesses have been weak across the board and, significantly, were designed in such a way as to be completely useless to businesses in the nonprofit sector. That is, the sector in which an uptick in hiring would have an immediate effect on communities receiving increased services, which would then ripple outwards into healthier economies in all sectors.

In other words: Dear Mr. President, remember those people formerly known as your base? The politically progressive crew who disproportionately choose low-paying Public Interest jobs if they’re relatively privileged, and thankless service-sector jobs with insufficient protection for workers if they’re not? The ones who, in a different era, might happily have signed up as teachers or public artists or nutritionists or administrators for shelters and hospitals, when those services were government funded through the WPA? You’re screwing us. Again. You’re funneling money to for-profit corporations who are not mission-bound to advance the interests of the public. In fact, they are mission-bound to produce a profit by any means necessary, up to and including taking horrible care of their employees, clients, and stakeholders. YOU KEEP MAKING CONCESSIONS AND GIVING MONEY TO THE BAD GUYS. THEY DIDN’T VOTE FOR YOU. WE DID. THROW US A DAMN BONE HERE.

*Full disclosure, I didn’t actually vote for the dude specifically because I did not buy his progressive cred when push came to shove. But he’s what I’ve got and as the man put it himself, he is the president of everyone, not just the people who voted for him.

More than half of public school students in New York City failed their English exams this year. »

Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, said she had encouraged teachers and parents to greet the news “not with disappointment and not with anger.”

I WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO RESPOND WITH EXCESSIVE DISAPPOINTMENT AND ANGER. These are our fucking kids, and they’ve been fudging data for two terms already in order to pretend that their horrid, social-Darwinist, automaton-creating educational philosophy was adequately preparing them to be happy, productive citizens. THEY HAVE BEEN LYING TO US and now they’ve been caught and the administration is telling us to simmer down.

Do not simmer. Now’s the moment, call someone and tell them that you are boiling over and will not be easily placated. Tell them you want your kids to not only know how to read, but to love reading and love learning and not develop stress disorders because they’re being pressured to achieve against stupid, arbitrary standards and aren’t even given the tools to achieve in a way that gives them opportunities for creativity and exploration and ownership.

I AM DISAPPOINTED AND ANGRY, MADAM AND RELEVANT SIRS. And you will continue to hear about it.

The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek »

I’m still stuck on this article. I want to make this required reading for everybody who deals with children regularly or influences policy that impacts them or contributes to the culture that’s stealing their little souls. (so… we’re back to absolutely everyone then, aren’t we Dinah). Another really important excerpt:

In early childhood, distinct types of free play are associated with high creativity. Preschoolers who spend more time in role-play (acting out characters) have higher measures of creativity: voicing someone else’s point of view helps develop their ability to analyze situations from different perspectives. When playing alone, highly creative first graders may act out strong negative emotions: they’ll be angry, hostile, anguished. The hypothesis is that play is a safe harbor to work through forbidden thoughts and emotions.

In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity. A Michigan State University study of MacArthur “genius award” winners found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.

From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn’t easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.

They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic.

I’m not sure I agree with that last point at all… you show me a truly creative person who is neither dark, anxious, or neurotic on a more than occasional basis, and I will show you a very good poker face or a plagiarist. But kids being bored at school is a huge, huge problem. We need to be helping them find a way in to all the material we want them to learn, which means creative teaching methods and catering to the learner, rather than being concerned with whether the kid can use very specialized knowledge in a very specialized setting like, say, a standardized test.