How Much Power and Money Can a Full Plate of Hate Buy for the Oligarchy?

The Republicans’ “one big beautiful bill” will be a real test of how much MAGA voter animosity toward civil rights and human rights can buy Trump.  

Will the Convicted Felon's all-in support for crushing migrants, marginalizing minorities with Jim Crow 2.0, othering LGBTQ people, re-subjugating women, and destroying the separation of church and state be enough to keep poor white undereducated voters quiet about grandma being kicked out of the nursing home (due to Medicaid cuts), groceries more expensive or no long available (food stamp and SNAP funds cut), and the national debt being put on steroids (to pay for massive cuts for the top 1 percent).

"above the snake line"

From NetRoots Nation July 19, Rev. William Barber, the voice of human rights in education:



from Alternet:

Then Rev. William Barber III, leader of the Forward Together movement in North Carolina, electrified the crowd with an address that included support for public education in a moral vision for America.

Six panels on education topics – ranging from curriculum standards, to student suspensions, to student loan debt, to reclaiming the promise of public schools – presented a unified front against current “reform” policies and for a vision of equity and excellence in public education.

Indeed, the dialogue at the meeting made clear the term “education reform” has become a pejorative in the progressive community.

Getting Education Policy Above The “Snake Line” 

As Eskow wrote, “the emotional high point” of this year’s conference was unquestionably Barber’s speech exhorting the crowd to “get our policies above the snake line.”

The “snake line,” Barber explained, marked a line in mountainous territory above which dangerous reptiles cannot live and where the “cold-blooded” can’t survive.

Indeed, America’s cold-blooded education policies can no longer survive above the bright line of progressive values. Netroots Nation showed we’re taking education policy to higher ground. As Barber urged us to do, we’ve turned to each other and declared, “We’re on our way.”

Human Rights: The Civil Rights Issue of This Generation

By now it is abundantly clear that the federal government plans to do nothing about enforcing the Fair Housing Act, which was passed in 1968 as a sop to those grieving the assassination of Dr. King, just as it is clear that the Feds plan to do nothing to stop funding the resegregation and cultural neutering of American minority children by corporate reform charter school missionaries.  

When Arne Duncan proclaimed that he had a Rosa Parks moment as he watched the corporate welfare school informercial, "Waiting for Superman," it was clear that the civil rights movement that began in the 1950s with Brown v Board was on its death bed, and that Arne and corporate foundations were standing by with the pillow.

Duncan's own office just released a new study that documents the grisly reality that Obama/Gates policies embellish each year:

Racial minorities are more likely than white students to be suspended from school, to have less access to rigorous math and science classes, and to be taught by lower-paid teachers with less experience, according to comprehensive data released Friday by the data released Friday by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

In the first analysis in nearly 15 years of information from all of the country’s 97,000 public schools, the Education Department found a pattern of inequality on a number of fronts, with race as the dividing factor.

Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. A quarter of high schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students do not offer any Algebra II courses, while a third of those schools do not have any chemistry classes. Black students are more than four times as likely as white students — and Latino students are twice as likely — to attend schools where one out of every five teachers does not meet all state teaching requirements.

. . . .

The Education Department’s report found that black, Latino, American Indian and Native Alaskan students are three times as likely as white students to attend schools with higher concentrations of first-year teachers. And in nearly a quarter of school districts with at least two high schools, the teacher salary gap between high schools with the highest concentrations of black and Latino students and those with the lowest is more than $5,000 a year.

Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that recruits teachers, said that while the data looked at educator experience and credentials, it was also important to look at quality, as measured by test scores, principal observations and student surveys.

“Folks who cannot teach effectively should not be working with low-income or African-American kids, period,” he said, adding that the problem was difficult to resolve because individual districts are allowed to make decisions on how to assign teachers to schools.

As long as we are willing to listen the nitwits like Daly who claim that separate schools are not inherently unequal because they have the test scores to prove it, and that it is the fault of elected school boards that impoverished schools don't have good teachers, then that is how long we will continue the barbarous crusade to replace urban schools with corporate chain gangs inspired by eugenicists, David Levin and Angela Duckworth--who are hellbent on cognitively rewiring children to make them compliant little happy robots, regardless of the sociological truth.

Looking back a hundred years, it is easy to see the human rights violations of the Eugenics Era that began in England and the U. S. and culminated in Hitler's Germany.  It is time to call the egregious and unrepentant abuse of children that is happening right before our eyes in the total compliance apartheid testing camps what it really is: human rights violations.

The human rights restoration of children in schools will be found in American courts or, if not there, then in the world courts.  Human rights has become the civil rights issue of our generation.  It is time to start acting on this realization.

Robert D. Skeels' Talk at Association of Raza Educators on December 6, 2012

LAUSD District 2 candidate Robert D. Skeels speaking, and the following roundtable discussion at the December 6, 2012 meeting of the Association of Raza Educators Los Angeles. The topic was 'Reclaiming Education is a Human Right during this era of Neoliberalism.' The talk was in preparation for the anniversary of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, celebrated on the December 10 of each year.

School Testing Is A Human Rights Issue

From the MailOnline:

Primary school SATs tests are robbing children of their human rights, the leader of the National Union of Teachers claimed today.

Children have a right to a broad education under international law and should not be made to continually sit exams, Christine Blower said.

Her remarks came as a committee of MPs warned that SATs - taken by 11-year-olds in English and maths every spring - were promoting a culture of 'teaching to the test'.

The testing regime encourages teachers to drill pupils to pass tests, damaging their education, said the Commons Schools Select Committee.

The NUT is in the process of balloting members over a boycott of this year's SATs, due to be taken just four days after the election.

The National Association of Head Teachers, representing thousands of primary heads, is balloting its own members over the boycott, which would involve refusing to administer the tests.

In a keynote speech today to the NUT annual conference in Liverpool, Miss Blower warned that youngsters were being reduced to 'measurable outputs'.

She said that under the United Nations convention on the rights of the child - which Britain signed in 1991 - youngsters are entitled to an education that develops 'their personality, talents, mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential'.

But SATs undermine the right, she said.

'Some of the Articles are about basic human rights; these include the right to a name, the right to be safe and the right to be educated in the round, not only to pass exams,' she told delegates.

'I think that's a pretty high authority on which to rely when we say the SATs regime is wrong and it must go.'

She also said: 'The NUT says "yes" to risk taking and exciting approaches to learning and "no" to children as little bundles of measurable outputs.'

Both Labour and the Tories have pledged to keep SATs, although Schools Secretary Ed Balls has said they are not 'set in stone'.

The Tories say they should be made more rigorous and possibly moved to the first year of secondary school.

Meanwhile MPs on the Labour-dominated select committee repeated their warning that SATs are narrowing the curriculum.

In a report titled From Baker To Balls: The Foundations Of The Education System, they warned that tests undermined teachers' ability to devise creative and innovative lessons.

The report was produced after the committee heard evidence from four former Education Secretaries - Kenneth Baker, David Blunkett, Baroness Estelle Morris and Charles Clarke.

'We were surprised by the wholehearted support from former Secretaries of State for the level of testing that we have now,' the report said.

There had been a 'relentless trend towards increased central control' since the late 1980s, it said.

'We reiterate that we are not opposed to the principle of national testing. Where we do have concerns is the use of the same test for a range of purposes that cannot all be met at the same time,' the MPs said.

'If pupils' attainment is used to judge teachers and schools, teachers cannot be expected to be dispassionate assessors of that attainment, and teaching to the test is a likely consequence.

'We therefore have reservations - as does Ofsted - about the effects of national testing in concentrating teachers' efforts upon certain areas of the national curriculum.'