MERCI BIEN, JE RÉPÉTE, SARA, FOR GIVING ME THAT SHOT THAT SAVED MY LIFE, UNE QUÉBÉQUOISE,
QUI ÉTAIT SI GENTILE THAT NIGHT
HER COMPANIONS ON ER NIGHT SHIFT SHOULD REALLY WATCH HER IN ACTION, THEY MIGHT LEARN SOMETHING
THIS SONG SORTA GOT STUCK ON ME, I'M NOT A BIG FAN OF CELINE DION'S
BUT HERE GOES
Divas Las Vegas - Celine Dion - I'm alive (live)
Billy Idol Interview
Billy Idol - Sweet Sixteen
Billy Idol - dancing with myself
Billy Idol White Wedding High Quality
Billy Idol (Storytellers) - Cradle Of Love
Jogo do Poder com Dilma Rousseff (1 de 6)
Jogo do Poder com Dilma Rousseff (2 de 6)
Jogo do Poder com Dilma Rousseff (3 de 6)
Jogo do Poder com Dilma Rousseff (4 de 6)
Jogo do Poder com Dilma Rousseff (5 de 6)
Jogo do Poder com Dilma Rousseff (6 de 6)
Gilberto Gil - Lamento Sertanejo (COM DOMINGUINHOS)
Gilberto Gil - Esperando na Janela
Gilberto Gil - Não Chore Mais (No Woman, No Cry)
Dilma Rousseff -- discurso -- Fiep -- parte 01
Dilma Rousseff -- discurso -- Fiep -- parte 02
Dilma Rousseff -- discurso -- Fiep -- parte 03
October 6, 2010
SCHOOL "REFORM" IS ABOUT CLASS, NOT CLASSROOMS
SAM SMITH
Unanswered in all the noise about "education reform" is why, over the past decade, America's establishment has become so obsessed with controlling public education, a complete reversal of two centuries of American faith in locally controlled schools.
There are answers that the op-eds will give you, such as the need to compete in the global marketplace, but this is pretty weak stuff and not the raw material for major presidential policy under two administrations.
There are answers that can be found in the general shift in government towards data as a worthy substitute, or delaying tactic, for action. As long as you're assessing something you don't actually have to do anything about it.
Then there's the milking of the cash cow of testing. For example, the Washington Post now gets the bulk of its profits from the Kaplan education division, profits bolstered by the paper's constant editorial boosting of the test tyrants. And Neil Bush started a company designed to help students pass the tests of his brother's No Child Left Behind policy.
Certainly there is precedent for this, such as the efforts to privatize Social Security and subsidize health insurance companies, all part of a three decades rip-off of public programs by private industry.
But how, for example, does one explain that this effort has been carried out with such an extraordinary absence of knowledgeable educators or skilled teachers? What has happened is as if we had tried to reach the moon with space vehicles designed by economists, lawyers and corporate buddies of the president.
It has, in the end, a hopeless mush of sleaze, stupidity and statistical static, all having remarkably little to do with real education.
There is, however, an even more disreputable matter lurking in the background that has not been exposed, debated or confronted - namely growing evidence that the assault on public education is part of an urban socio-economic cleansing that has long been underway as the upper classes attempt retrieve the cities they surrendered to the poor many decades ago.
For several decades, I followed this phenomenon as a journalist in my hometown of Washington, DC. It was a topic seldom mentioned in the corporate media and not polite to mention at all in the better parts of town.
In 2006 I wrote, "Part of the socio-economic cleansing of the capital city - still underway - included draconian measures to discourage the minority poor from staying in DC. Some of these were fiscal -- such as a tax break for predominately white first-time homeowners but no breaks for the lower income blacks pushed out by them. But they also included a variety of punitive measures including new restrictions on jury trials, increased lock-ups such as for trivial traffic offenses, stiffer sentencing, soaring marijuana arrests, a halving of the number of court-appointed defense attorneys, increased penalties for pot possession, and the shipping of inmates to distant prisons
And in 2007: "This is a 60% black city undergoing socio-economic cleansing. One suburban county has so many black former DC residents that it is known here as Ward 9. But it's no joke. Here are just a few of things that have happened: Huge budget cuts of which 60% of the burden fell on the poor; closing of four of the city's ten health clinics; slashing the number of public health workers; cutting the budget for libraries, city funded day care centers, welfare benefits, and homeless shelters; creation of a tax-subsidized private "charter" school system; dismantling the city's public university including a massive cut in faculty, destruction of the athletic program and elimination of normal university services; selling the city's public radio station to C-SPAN; transferring prisoners to private gulags hundreds of miles away; a dramatic increase in the number of lock-ups including for traffic stops; and the subjugating of the elected school board to an appointed board of trustee."
There were other signs: the destruction of public housing units, the removal of a homeless shelter from the center city, and even a blockade of a crime- hit black neighborhood - with entry permitted only for approved cause - not unlike apartheid South Africa or the Israelis in the West Bank - about which the liberal gentry class said nothing.
In other words, it was absolutely clear and absolutely unmentionable that the upper classes - both white and black, incidentally - wanted the city back again and were using a plethora of tactics to achieve this goal, especially after our energy consciousness increased and it became apparent that the suburbs were no longer the favored haven, but the ghettos of the future.
Furthermore, it was clear that satisfying this goal was behind most of the major new city programs, ranging from the subway to the baseball stadium - only please always call it economic development rather than getting rid of the poor.
Public education "reform" fit the plan in some ways. For example, although it was widely claimed that charter schools did not discriminate in their selection of students it was obvious that parents - a central factor in any child's ability to learn - differed drastically between those with enough ambition to apply for a charter school seat and those either indifferent or with too much else on their mind. The charter schools were in this way a subtle part of socio-economic cleansing as they helped to reduce the old public facilities to what were once called "pauper schools."
Then there was the carefully crafted schemes for closing "failing" public schools. But there is far more to schools than aggregate test scores. They help define a community, anchor its loose pieces to common ground, and provide a place for children to meet and play in a decent and clean environment.
Describing DC's plans to close eleven schools (mostly in order to build condos), DC Statehood Party activist Chris Otten argued a few years ago, "There are lots of ways we can use our publicly owned properties -- homeless services and shelters, child care, before- and after-school care, services for children with special needs, transitional housing and permanent affordable housing, health care, literacy programs, training for jobs and workforce readiness, senior services, gardening and green spaces, recreation. It's outrageous that Mayor Fenty would rather transfer them to his friends and other well-connected and powerful real estate and development interests."
But Fenty and other mayors were not only willing to get rid of such schools, they were wiling to damage community in the process and force young residents to travel far away from their community and its values. It was not only bad educationally cruel it was mean to the communities as a whole.
But these schools were located on suddenly valuable ground and so the government stole from the children and their parents and gave to the developers.
But there was something more at work.
It took the recent DC mayoral election to make me realize that I had been putting too much emphasis on educational considerations in examining what was happening. What I had missed was that the war on schools was not designed to bring the upper classes into the education system but primarily as a a marketing tool to bring the upper classes and corporations back to the cities. The message was, as with crime sweeps, baseball stadiums and the subway. It was now safe, folks, to live here.
In DC, the battle peaked between incumbent mayor Adrian Fenty, who with his school chancellor Michelle Rhee was strongly committed to the Bush-Obama school model, and his opponent and strong critic, Vincent Gray.
Eddie Elfanbeen did a precinct by precinct analysis of the contest. Some 31 precincts gave Fenty 75% or more of the vote while 53 gave him 25% or less. All of the top Fenty precincts were heavily white while all the top Gray precincts were heavily black. But more significant perhaps was that the former were all upscale precincts while the latter were at the lower end of the income scale. .
This year Fenty got 80% of upscale white Ward 3 and 16% of far poorer and black Ward 8.
Rhee and the school system was obviously a factor. As Natalie Henerson pointed out in the Atlantic, "Among white Democrats, 68 percent said Rhee is a reason to support Fenty. Fifty-four percent of black Democrats cite her as a reason to vote against the mayor, according to a Washington Post poll. In an earlier August poll by Clarus Research, Rhee got her most unfavorable ratings from black women, only 15 percent of whom viewed her favorably."
Now, here's the hooker. Only five percent of the public school system consists of white students. So why did it matter so much? For example, why did heavily gay precincts - with a constituency least likely to ever use the school system - give over 70% of their vote to Fenty?
It seems that it mattered because school test scores represent a symbol that the city is getting the poor under control or out of the way. It was not about educating the city's young but about marketing to the city's newcomers. Another poll, for example, found that Fenty won overwhelmingly the vote of those who had lived in DC less than ten years and Gray those who had lived there longer.
Thus, it was not unlike the crime war phenomena. Back in the nineties I noted that "Between 1985 and 1988, in the wake of the revived drug war, murders in Washington, DC soared from 145 a year to 369. During this period, the city's office of criminal justice planning did an unusually detailed analysis of homicides. The report illustrates [that] it was virtually impossible to be killed in Washington if you were a young white girl living in upscale Georgetown on an early Thursday morning in July. If, on the other hand, you were a young black 20-year-old male living in low-income Anacostia, dealing drugs on a Saturday night in June, your chances of being killed were far greater than the overall statistics would suggest. And if you were not buying or selling drugs at all, your chances of being killed in DC were about the same as in Copenhagen."
But being safe and feeling safe are two different things. And, as with crime, it was important for effective marketing to be seen as keeping the problem population under control.
To be sure, whatever appeal school "reform" had, it was not matched by the facts. For example, here are DC's scores according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress broken down by income class (based on food stamp eligibility)
Several things to note here. The overall improvement was minimal - but half as much for the poor as the better off. Furthermore, the gap between the scores of the better off and the poor actually widened by far more than the overall improvement percentage. So, as 8th grade reading improved 2% for the better off between 2002 and 2009, the gap between these two groups increase by 19%. Obviously, we are not talking about better education here.
And DC was far from alone. Just recently it was reported that in Massachusetts, 57 percent of public schools had fallen short of the yearly progress standard.
Diane Ravitch has noted other flaws in the school reform con:
"A study released days ago by Sean Corcoran of New York University showed that a teacher who was ranked at the 43rd percentile, using student test scores, might actually be at the 15th percentile or the 71st percentile because the margin of error in this methodology is so large."
"Privately managed charter schools do not get better results on average than regular public schools. Some are excellent, some are awful, but most are no better than their public counterparts. Even the Superman movie admitted that only one in five (actually, only 17%) of charters get great test scores. Twice as many charters (37%) are even worse than the neighborhood public school."
"One group of teachers in Nashville was offered bonuses up to $15,000 if they raised students' math scores; another, the control group, was offered nothing. The average teacher pay is about $50,000, so this was a significant incentive to get higher scores. Over the three years of the study, both groups produced the same results."
Of DC, Leigh Dingerson wrote recently:
"There’s nothing remarkably visionary going on in Washington. The model of school reform that’s being implemented here is popping up around the country, heavily promoted by the same network of conservative think tanks and philanthropists like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton Family Foundation that has been driving the school reform debate for the past decade. It is reform based on the corporate practices of Wall Street, not on education research or theory. Indications so far are that, on top of the upheaval and distress Rhee leaves in her wake, the persistent racial gaps that plague D.C. student outcomes are only increasing. . .
"Despite glowing reports from the adoring media, D.C.’s education miracle is a chimera at best. . . "
But that, it turns out, was probably the point: to create a political illusion that would support the city's myth, sell real estate, and attract new residents and businesses. Just as it didn't matter that Washington's Metro was designed in a way that actually increased rather than reduced street traffic, it didn't matter that school reform didn't improve things. It only had to seem to change things.
Meanwhile the real city remained.
In 2008, one in five DC residents was poor, a higher rate than in any year since 1997-98. Since the late 1990s, some 27,000 more DC residents fell into poverty. Thirty-two percent of the District of Columbia's children live in poverty, nearly twice the national average. And in 2008 there were over 52,000 families on the waiting list for affordable housing.
But perhaps most important for the educational system, and discussion about it, is something hardly ever discussed: in the first decade of this century, employment among residents with a high school diploma fell to the lowest level in nearly 30 years. Just 51 percent of DC residents at this education level were working.
Every one in the system - parents, teachers, students - knew this reality and reacted accordingly. This, more than any other factor, defined public education in DC. But few wanted to face it.
After all, the poor don't balance your budget. Cutting their services and shoving them out into new suburban ghettos can. And they certainly don't attract tax paying residents and businesses. So you talk the talk of education reform but walk the walk of socio-economic cleansing.
Outsiders: The trouble with the Roma
Europe's most persecuted minority has become the subject of increasingly draconian laws. But recent treatment of the Roma shames our continent, argues Peter Popham
Monday, 4 October 2010
This Thursday, in a hall in the Council of Europe's headquarters in Strasbourg, a group of academics, government advisers and gypsy representatives will get together to discuss the next steps in a pan-European project entitled "The Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005 to 2015".
The idea of the "decade", according to its authors, is to "improve the socio-economic status and social inclusion of Roma". The next phase will see Romanies stepping forward in museums and other institutions in Britain, Greece, Germany and Slovenia and talking about their culture, "getting people to talk to them and get to know them, to get rid of some of the fear," as one of the organisers puts it.
It's a low-key initiative, very modestly funded – but it has attained a new importance. Thanks to France's President Sarkozy and his policy of targeting their communities for repatriation, gypsies suddenly find themselves at the centre of European debate. How did this come about?
Gypsies have been at the margin of European affairs ever since they arrived from India nearly a millennium ago. They have no claims on territory, have never started a war, are far from homogeneous and have produced few figures who bulk large in our history books. In the past they were usually in motion, trundling around the edges of European history, earning a living in the nooks and crannies of society, fortune telling, basket weaving, horse trading, dealing in scrap metal. They might be seen as people of doubtful honesty, capable of sly tricks, or seductively wild, depending on circumstance, but whatever they were it was of fleeting importance. They had their world, we, the gaje (non-Romanies), had ours.
Just as only a few Romanies have been feted as culture heroes in the gaje world, few have become notorious. Their crimes were of a scale with the rest of their low-key, inconspicuous lives, picking pockets being the most obvious. But now Sarkozy in France and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Italy would have us believe that the Roma community as a group represents a security threat so grave that it demands the removal of its members en masse. One is reminded of the Criminal Tribes Act passed by the British in India in 1871, which stigmatised 161 communities there as "born criminals". A recent study concluded that the Act was a result of "profound ignorance of India's social structure and cultural institutions".
Are the French and Italian governments, by targeting gypsy communities en masse and demanding their removal, doing something similar today? And if so, what lies behind it?
While it was President Sarkozy's policy which brought the assault on the Roma to the world's attention, it was in Italy that the policy of treating gypsies en masse as criminals was first put into place – paradoxically, by a leading politician of the left, a former Communist.
Gypsies have been emigrating to Italy from the Balkans since the 15th century. Today, the Romany population of Italy is thought to be around 180,000, perhaps twice that of Britain. Most of them have been sedentary for centuries. As elsewhere, what has kept them distinct from the majority population is their language, culture and folkways.
What has changed over the past 20 years is the arrival in the West of relatively large numbers of Romany immigrants from eastern Europe: from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, fleeing the wars that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early Nineties; and from Romania following the death of Ceausescu, the fall of the Communist regime, and the opening of the borders around the same time.
The single most critical moment was the entry of Romania into the EU on 1 January 2007, which enabled Romanian citizens to move around the EU at will. Hundreds of thousands of migrants poured into Italy as a result, more than into any other country. The panicky realisation that they could not easily be removed led to a mood of crisis. A small but very visible fraction of them – no one knows how many – were Romanies.
As in Italy, the Romany populations of Romania and Yugoslavia had been settled for hundreds of years. "We lived in our own villages," says Dijana Pavlovic, a Romany born and raised in Serbia who now lives in Milan. "One of my grandfathers was a blacksmith, the other was a carpenter. They were illiterate, but they were settled people: the only time they went travelling was when they had to look for work."
But while Italy's Romanies remained socially marginal and relatively deprived, Tito and Communism had given those in Yugoslavia the opportunity to improve their lives. "It was Communism that gave my parents the chance to go to school," says Pavlovic. "Education in Tito's Yugoslavia was free and compulsory, and after school they got jobs: my father in a warehouse, my mother in a factory." Dijana was the family's first university graduate. Today, Romanies in Serbia have TV and radio news programmes and newspapers in their own language, and are represented by Romany politicians.
In Romania, too, most of the community led settled lives for centuries, though their conditions of life were much worse than in Yugoslavia: Romania's gypsies were slaves until the mid-19th century; most are still very poor, and they still suffer from the prejudices of the majority community. This, as well as the arrival of mass unemployment, explains why many chose to go west.
Reaching Italy, they found the affluent land they had heard about – but became victims of their new country's prejudices. Eighty-four per cent of Italians still believe gypsies to be nomads, and it was as such that they were treated. "Very few of the Romanies who arrived from Bosnia and Kosovo, fleeing the war, were recognised as refugees," says Pavlovic. "You weren't entitled to the status of refugee, precisely because you were a gypsy. And that's the crux of the problem."
Because the Italian authorities decided that nomadism was their natural condition, they made no steps to settle the new migrants in houses like other refugees, but instead created camps for them. The press still calls these campi nomadi, nomad camps. It was a way to sidestep the challenge of integrating the Roma into local communities.
The result was ghettoes. And they did what ghettoes always do: they prevented their inmates from developing in step with the rest of society, gave the majority a distinctive, defenceless scapegoat for their problems, and became the focus of tensions that flared up fiercely in times of economic trouble – like now.
At first glance, the gypsy camp in Milan's Via Idro looks nothing like a ghetto. There is abundant greenery, the caravans and campers and small wooden houses are interspersed with grass and shrubs, and small dogs and chickens and children run about unimpeded. But this is land nobody else would deign to live on. Penned in by the River Lambro on one side, a canal on the other, and the city's ring road on the third, it is fetid and plagued by flies and mosquitoes. Many of the 110 residents have been here for more than 20 years.
They have by now achieved a sort of normality. The numerous children go to school. The parents work at casual labouring jobs. In a corner of the camp, the oldest residents keep the flame of gypsy tradition going with a stable of horses that they rear to sell. Unwholesome and isolated as it is, Via Idro has an atmosphere of relative calm and stability, and many of its residents, most of them Italian citizens of long standing, seemed fairly cheerful about their lot. But that is about to change – due to what happened in Rome in November 2007.
The Italian capital was dramatically unprepared for the influx of new migrants from Romania after1 January 2007. Informal camps sprang up around the city, including many along the banks of the Tiber, to the consternation of locals. The subway trains swarmed with beggars and accordionists, windscreen cleaners popped up at every intersection. Small, dark-skinned strangers gathered by communal rubbish bins outside apartment blocks, expertly gutting them for anything of value. The city government looked on and did next to nothing.
As elections approached towards the end of that year, a mood of hysterical anger towards the new arrivals took hold. Then, in November, the wife of a naval captain was mugged and murdered in a dark lane on the city outskirts. The murder, it was alleged, was committed by a Romany who lived in a nearby camp.
That was all it took: a single ugly crime, and a possible Romany culprit. The city mayor, Walter Veltroni, a former Communist, a novelist and a man who has declared his intention of working for the relief of poverty in Africa when he retires from politics, wasted no time. He ordered the immediate demolition of the city's informal camps, and rammed through an emergency law mandating the expulsion of foreigners, including EU citizens, who were a "security threat". The target was the Romanies. "I am always on the side of the weakest," said Mr Veltroni, "and for me the weakest are those who suffer violence."
But Veltroni's post-Fascist opponents upped the anti-Roma rhetoric even further and stole the election. By the spring 2008, sicurezza ("security") – code for expulsion – had become Italy's populist cure-all. Taken up by Berlusconi and his allies, the chauvinistic and separatist Northern League in particular, the crusade against the gypsies was the single biggest factor in giving the centre-right a landslide victory in the general election.
Two years on, with the economic crisis raging, the contagion of hatred had leapt over the Alps to infect France, where another star-struck politician facing electoral meltdown took the same lesson from it as Veltroni in Rome. And when Sarkozy decided to turn the expulsion of Romanies into a test of wills at the European level, suddenly the issue was everywhere. And a great human tragedy was in the making.
Today the urge to kick the gypsies out has reached as far as the placid camp at Via Idro. Although this place has been home to Romanies for nearly a generation, today the mood is anxious and unhappy: all the residents have been given notice to quit. Ahead of local elections next spring, Milan's city government has promised to solve what they call the "Roma emergency" by the simple expedient of closing all camps in the city, the legal ones as well as the informal ones. Via Idro is to become a transit camp; no one will be allowed to stay for more than three months. Where will its residents go? "We have no idea," said a man identifying himself as Giovanni, an Italian Romany with family roots in Croatia. "They say they are going to put other people here, the Romanians. It's all in the council's hands..."
"The Romanians" are the 600 Romanian gypsies who live in a far worse official camp a few miles away in Via Triboniano, behind the city's biggest cemetery. No greenery here: only high fences, stark, tight-packed containers to live in, guarded night and day by police. After an outbreak of violence two years ago, the inmates were obliged to sign a "Pact of Sociality and Legality", swearing not to steal, not to beg, not to have house guests overnight. They did so as the only way to stay in the camp – but now this camp, too, is to be closed as part of the ruling coalition's drive to rid the city of Romanies. Like Veltroni's expulsion drive, Milan's policy is powered by election fever, and the competition between parties on right and left to be the toughest on the Romanies, who are identified – absurdly, seeing as they account for a mere 1,300 people, more than half of them women and children, in a city of more than 4 million – as the source of the city's problems.
But this is not a policy, just a slogan: gypsies out! Every few days the press announces new sgomberi, the demolition of illegal camps. But once Via Idro and Via Triboniano and all Milan's other camps are closed, their occupants will not simply vanish into thin air. Some will be induced by bribes to return to Romania. But given the high unemployment and discrimination there, they will be back in Italy as soon as they can. The rest will take to the road and build new shanties as soon as they are out of sight.
Against heavy odds, the gypsies in these camps in Milan have been doing what they could to improve their lives: putting their children through school, learning skills, saving money to buy homes. But as the Italian state forces them to adopt a roving lifestyle which their ancestors have not followed for centuries, all that effort goes up in smoke. And the "Decade of Roma Inclusion" is turning into quite the opposite.
FROM THE INDEPENDENT, UK
REAL BUT AIN'T EXACTLY THERE
LEONARD COHEN LIVE IN LONDON | DEMOCRACY | PBS
NEIL YOUNG | MOTHER EARTH (HASSELT, 1995)
CONCRETE BLONDE | EVERYBODY KNOWS
N I C O | H E R O E S
DAVID BOWIE | SLIP AWAY
Joy Division | Closer - The Eternal
TIMARU | GULLS
