borderland/sidebar

I agree to a certain degree with Steve (who has forgotten more about the publishing industry than I have ever known) that the Palin book with be a best seller out of the chute. Where I part company with him is the notion that those sales will be driven only by the true believers. Sarah Palin has achieved that unique brand of American freak show singularity by becoming equal parts Paris Hilton, William Hung, and a flaming NASCAR crash. We want to turn away appalled/disgusted/embarrassed by and for her but she is so alternately amusing and then infuriating and then baffling that we don’t want to miss an episode and so we sneak guilty peeks only to roll our eyes once again.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Arundhati Roy. She’s speaking to us from New Delhi, India. She has just published a new book called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. Arundhati, why “listening to grasshoppers”? ARUNDHATI ROY: Oh, it was the name of a lecture that I did in Turkey last year on the anniversary after the death of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist who was shot outside his office for daring to talk about the Armenian genocide of 1915, which you’re not supposed to talk about in Turkey. And my lecture was really about the historical links between progress and genocide. And “listening to grasshoppers” was—referred to the testimony an old lady called Araxie Barsamian, who’s the friend—mother of my friend David Barsamian, who is Armenian and who talked about how, you know, the wheat had ripened in her village in 1915, and suddenly there was this huge swarm of grasshoppers that arrived. And the village elders were very worried about this and said it was a bad omen. And they were right, because a few months later, when the wheat had ripened, the Turks came, and that was the beginning of the Armenian genocide for her. And so, I talk about—the whole lecture was really about how societies are prepared for genocide and how genocide is, you know, it’s like part of free trade, and how, you know, genocides that are acknowledged, and denied, and prosecuted, all have to—all depend on world trade, and always have done, and about how I worry that a country like India, that is poised on the threshold of progress, could also be poised on the threshold of genocide. And that essay was written in January of last year. And now, as you see, the troops are closing in on the forest areas where the poorest people live. And they will be sacrificed at the altar of progress, unless we manage to show the world that we have to find a different way of seeing and a different way of going about things. But here in India, there’s the smell of fascism in the air.

by Nomi Prins and Christopher Hayes

As we mark the end of the first year of the financial bailout, the public seems to regard the government’s actions with a toxic combination of rage and confusion. People are pissed off but too bewildered to know what to do with that anger. The confusion isn’t an accident. The government hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about how it’s made buckets of money available to the banking sector. When it does disclose some information—such as in July’s SIGTARP report from the Treasury or the Federal Reserve’s weekly balance sheet—it’s in the form of intimidating descriptions, accounting mumbo jumbo and technical reports that do little to illuminate just what the hell is going on.

What’s worse, banks and the establishment press have portrayed TARP as the sum of the banking industry’s federal subsidies.

While Arne Duncan was invoking the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, in an effort to rally support for NCLB re-authorization, a federal court, in his home town was putting the final nail in the coffin of Chicago’s 29-year-old school de-seg agreement. Catalyst’s Sarah Karp reports that, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras scrapped the CPS desegregation consent decree—a move that likely will result in the district abandoning the use of race as a factor in the admissions policies of magnet and selective schools. The move by U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras also halted the court’s monitoring of the district’s bilingual program, which activists claimed is still inadequate and in need of supervision.

Let’s be blunt: Find one single teacher drawing breath that needed a secretive committee of two dozen experts to tell her that high school students ought to be able to “discern the most important ideas, events, or information, and summarize them accurately and concisely.” This is not a standard, it’s a platitude. As a goal or statement of purpose, it offers as much guidance and direction as military orders to “win the war.” We do not lack clarity on our goals. We lack clarity on how to achieve them. The draft of the voluntary standards promotes tacitly the same flawed concepts that have driven reading instruction for decades.

By Jeremy Scahill

Republican Congressional leaders are continuing their witch-hunt against ACORN, the grassroots community group dedicated to helping poor and working class people. This campaign now unfortunately has gained bi-partisan legislative support in the form of the Defund ACORN Act of 2009 which has now passed the House and Senate. As Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has pointed out, the legislation “could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex:”

Not too bad. Even more galling than the Common Core‘ers disregard for the overall critique is their rejection of smaller suggestions for improving the clarity and precision of specific standards

Who does Math in the Real World?

This is something to keep handy for a day when you don’t have a lot going on.

Torture is immoral, illegal, and does not “work” reliably at all if one wants accurate intelligence - in fact, humane and legal methods are significantly more effective. Sure, torture is great for inflicting pain, producing false confessions and terrorizing populations, but the truth-to-lies-because-oh-my-god-make -the-pain-stop ratio is pretty shitty. I would hope this was common knowledge by now. Scott Horton passes on some important additional evidence:

An e-portfolio is created from many small, inter-connected pieces. Google’s suite of web-based products offers a rich environment for creating e-portfolios, which incorporates several different elements and tools, depending on your purpose:

“E-Portfolios for Learning” provide an environment to reflect about your learning, telling your own story of growth over time. These working portfolios are often structured as journals or blogs where you can include samples of your work along with personal reflections.

“E-Portfolios for Personal Branding and Self-Marketing” let you develop a “resume on steroids” for showcasing skills and samples of your best work to potential employers, customers, or graduate schools.

“E-Portfolios for Assessment/Accountability” are used by educational institutions to document achievement, sometimes replacing or supplementing standardized tests, or more traditional forms of evaluation.

If you are interested in creating an e-portfolio for one of these purposes, here is a recommended process…

Of these, the Common Core standards only address the first — language for information. Arguably, language for social interaction is less applicable when English is the native tongue, but more alarmingly, we’re proposing to virtually remove “language for literary response and expression” from our curriculum. I’m not going to spend the whole evening looking up reading and writing standards for the rest of the world, but I’d be shocked if any other country had the narrowness of vision to impose such barren, culturally-inert expectations on their own children.

The complete lack of a philosophical explanation of the Common Core standards is symptomatic of the underlying problem. These things have to slip under the radar without ruffling any feathers or raising any questions about whether they can be “objectively” assessed.

Pass or Fail Jorge? A Teacher’s Dilemma Jump to Comments Today, she must tell the principal who has to be held back. What should she do with Jorge? Jorge is a year older than everyone else in the class; he had been held back once. In reading and math he is still at least a year below grade level but he has improved a lot in each subject. He does his homework turning in papers often filled with smudges and wrong answers. In class, he raises his hand to answer questions, occasionally getting the right answer. He never stops trying. He is the most anxious-to-please eleven year-old the teacher has ever had. But he is at the bottom of the class academically.