Cathleen Leué, technically my ex-wife but we had gotten back together several years ago, unexpectedly passed away last night. I will miss her terribly. Blogging may be light or non-existent for awhile.

A controversial 2009 law in India outlawed the practice of holding failing students back and making them repeat the entire year of school in classes 1 through 8. In India, it’s called “detention” and at least one student union staged a protest this Spring to bring detention back, arguing that automatic promotion undermines academic quality and standards. But the Times of India published a story June 4, 2013 showing that automatic promotion might be working. It showed that average test scores were rising in states that had been following an automatic promotion policy prior to 2009, but falling states that were still holding kids back. The national drop out rate also fell by almost 30 percent after the law went into effect.

A groundbreaking experiment that bombarded US high school students with inspiring text messages was found to be a success on all counts except one: it made no difference to how the students performed in school.

Like I said, totally unsurprising. You knew this already. And yet, no matter how many different ways you illustrate this, it's still pretty remarkable. Instead of trying to ameliorate the effects of a broad economic trend, we've done everything we possibly can to accelerate it. That includes tax policy, financial deregulation, trade policy, anti-labor policy, and much more. And since there's approximately zero evidence that any of this has actually increased economic growth, it means that U.S. policy for the past 30 years has been aggressively dedicated to shifting income share away from the poor and middle class and into the pockets of the already rich.

We’ve been living with Glass since my co-conspirator returned with it on his brow, and simply by being present it has a warping effect on the social fabric.

A controversial 2009 law in India outlawed the practice of holding failing students back and making them repeat the entire year of school in classes 1 through 8. In India, it’s called “detention” and at least one student union staged a protest this Spring to bring detention back, arguing that automatic promotion undermines academic quality and standards. But the Times of India published a story June 4, 2013 showing that automatic promotion might be working. It showed that average test scores were rising in states that had been following an automatic promotion policy prior to 2009, but falling states that were still holding kids back. The national drop out rate also fell by almost 30 percent after the law went into effect.

On the first episode of "The Art of Punk" we dissect the art of the legendary Black Flag. From the iconic four bars symbols, to the many coveted and collected gig flyers, singles, and band t-shirts, all depicting the distinctive Indian ink drawn image and text by artist Raymond Pettibon. We start of in Los Angeles talking to two founding members singer Keith Morris, and bass player Chuck Dukowski, about what the scene was like in 1976 - setting the stage for the band's formation, as well as the bands name, and the creation of the iconic four bars symbol. Raymond Pettibon talks with us from his New York art studio. Back in LA we meet with Flea, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, about how the art, the music, and that early LA scene impacted his own life and career. To wrap it all up we sit and talk at length, with Henry Rollins, at MOCA Grand Ave in Los Angeles, about all of the above and more.

Starting with the obvious, this sentiment makes important assumptions about access. That access to the Internet and its content is uniform across the world. But it’s not. The Internet is a very different experience if you have a smartphone as your only means of access, versus if you have a laptop. Behind the hardware, there are questions of corporate policies and pricing mechanisms that influence access. Bandwidth caps, bandwidth pricing can influence how people use their phones, and in many parts of the world also how they use the wired network.

Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).

So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income.

Within months of John White’s appearance we were instructed: to stop verifying data with charter schools virtual schools did not need to verify attendance and should be discouraged from attempting to for any reason not to investigate dropout numbers that made no sense to implement a VAM system with highly suspect data (and to allow the data to become even more suspect) to alter the way MFP was funded to take money from traditional public school districts to fund charters and state schools – which had previously been funded by budget line items

I thought that Julian Assange’s point in this piece in the NYTimes were fascinating, but I was particularly struck by his description of “the white geek’s burden.” My colleague, Beki Grinter, has pointed to a similar rhetoric going on with MOOCs — that the United States is offering MOOCs for “the developing world” such as “Africa.” As she points out in her blog post, even that phrasing ignores the complexity of languages and cultures in the enormous continent of “Africa.” Are MOOCs another example of the US gadget consumerism that Assange critiques in his essay?

Arne Duncan works in Washington, D. C., which is also the location of the headquarters of the American Educational Research Association, so he has plenty of access to cutting-edge educational research. He traveled to the recent AERA convention in San Francisco, where he said in a major address the “solution to mediocre tests is not to abandon assessment” but to generate “much better assessment." That statement is not only iggernant, it meets the classic definition of insanity, attributed to Albert Einstein, which is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Only teachers were found to be able to distinguish between schools. The Research Alliance suggests that teachers’ scores should be weighted more heavily. The Research Alliance found that school survey scores were inconsistently associated with student test scores and graduation rates. Even when there was an association, a very large difference in school survey scores might only be associated with a very small difference in test scores.

LOS ANGELES, CA – JUNE 11, 2013 – 686 Technical Apparel announces exclusive outerwear design collaboration with Captain Elliott Neese for the crew of the Saga. The one-of-a-kind 686 technical jackets and bibs, constructed with proprietary Infidry 20™ (20,000mm) waterproof fabric and designed exclusively with Neese for the crew of the Saga, will debut tonight on The Deadliest Catch, airing on Discovery Channel.

So I was quite surprised when I got a tip from a teacher at a school that is co-located with a charter high school that the charter school was grading their own Regents.  I checked around and got confirmation from another charter school that they, too, were grading their own Regents.  For charter schools, it seems, the centralized grading is merely optional.  So much for accountability.

Once a month, at 10 am, the University of Michigan releases its consumer confidence index. But not everyone gets it at the same time. Thomson Reuters pays Michigan a million dollars a year for early access:

So when right-wing attacks on the Common Core developed outside of the Beltway in the past year, the evolving chaos on the right came on top of existing policy differences among Very Serious Conservatives. If the politics of symbolism weren’t so disturbing at their base, I could enjoy some time watching the resources Jeb Bush’s foundations are expending to defend the Common Core. But Glenn Beck’s blatherings are too popular to indulge in Schadenfreude. I also could point out how the Finn/Petrilli piece skates over the incompatibility of simultaneously defending voucher policies and academic curriculum standards (including rigorous science education standards), but the deeper issue is the fundamental irrelevance of that inconsistency to the Common-Core conspiracy theories.

The Justice Department found that students at the Birch School were segregated from the rest of Mt. Pleasant High School despite federal mandates to provide as much integration as possible for students with developmental disabilities. They were taught to work in sweatshop-like conditions in what’s known as a sheltered workshop, where they performed duties such as bagging, labeling, collating and assembling jewelry, all for wages well below minimum wage.

Aside from the "fetch my coffee for free" aspect, unpaid internships shut out people from less wealthy backgrounds from important, desirable, lucrative, and influential career paths.

Other than that, the biggest problem I have with Glass is wearing it around. I’ve tried to wear it out in public a few times and it’s incredibly strange. At first I thought I was just embarrassed to be wearing this goofy computer on my head but this morning I realised it’s more than that. Our current office is on the second floor of a larger building with multiple tenants. Downstairs is a daycare and when I arrive in the morning for work I see a lot of parents dropping their kids off. As I was walking in today I heard the front door open and I quickly slid my Glass down off my head and slung it around my neck. A woman passed me by and I gave her a polite smile. As I got inside the building I moved the Glass back up to my head but I realised the reason I took it off was because I didn’t want to be rude.

If the recession was so bad that millions of people started selling themselves into slavery, or entering contracts that required lifelong feudal oaths to employers and foregoing basic rights, in order to survive, this would raise no important liberty questions for the libertarian minimal state. If this new feudal order was set in such a way that it persisted across generations, again, no problem. As Freeman notes, “what is fundamentally important for libertarians is maintaining a system of historically generated property rights...no attention is given to maintaining the basic rights, liberties, and powers that (according to liberals) are needed to institutionally define a person’s freedom, independence, and status as an equal citizen.”

The first recorded game of baseball took place in Surrey in 1749, a specialist in the game's history says.

I alluded to this in a previous post, but spending a little time in Brussels really drives home the extent to which American national security agencies' internet snooping is making trouble for American high tech companies.

I live in a country generally assumed to be a dictatorship. One of the Arab spring countries. I have lived through curfews and have seen the outcomes of the sort of surveillance now being revealed in the US. People here talking about curfews aren't realizing what that actually FEELS like. It isn't about having to go inside, and the practicality of that. It's about creating the feeling that everyone, everything is watching. A few points:

I suppose an interesting story which could be fleshed out is just how do 29-year old GED having/bounced out of the military/basically no college dudes get high security clearances?

Sadly, I’m getting to experience this right now as Massachusetts refuses to believe that I moved to New York mid-last-year. It’s mindblowing how hard it is to summon up the paperwork that “proves” to them that I’m telling the truth. When it was discovered that Verizon (and presumably other carriers) was giving metadata to government officials, my first thought was: wouldn’t it be nice if the government would use that metadata to actually confirm that I was in NYC not Massachusetts. But that’s the funny thing about how data is used by our current government. It’s used to create suspicion, not to confirm innocence.

Similarly, states that required students to have higher scores on their state tests in order to be judged proficient did not have stronger NAEP scores than states that grant proficiency status even to students who miss half of the questions. Loveless notes that states that made their tests tougher to pass did show improvement in NAEP scores, but that is likely the result of a phenomenon that does not depend on better standards. States are likely to raise the minimum proficiency score only after they see their scores going up, not before.

The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. The data-security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the "most common retort against privacy advocates." The legal scholar Geoffrey Stone refers to it as an "all-too-common refrain." In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal, thus making the contest with security concerns a foreordained victory for security.

For all its impact, the Common Core is essentially an invisible empire. It doesn’t have a public office, a board of directors or a salaried staff. Its Web site lists neither a postal address nor a telephone number.

There can never be enough super rich Americans like me to power a great economy. I earn 1000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1000 times as much stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, we go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally. I can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or cars or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the vast majority of American families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages.This is why the fast increasing inequality in our society is killing our economy. When

The Oakland Tribune reports on the “hidden costs” of a partnership between San Jose State, Udacity, and an Oakland charter school where students were enrolled in the college’s for-credit math program: “It turned out some of the low-income teens didn’t have computers and high-speed Internet connections at home that the online course required. Many needed personal attention to make it through. The final results aren’t in yet, but the experiment exposed some challenges to the promise of a low-cost online education. And it showed there is still a divide between technology-driven educators and the low-income, first-generation college hopefuls they are trying to reach. To make it work, the institute had to issue laptops to students, set aside class time for them to focus on the online course, and assign teachers to make sure they stayed on task.”

From the standpoint of the National Security Agency the fact that U.S. online services companies have such large foreign customer bases is a huge opportunity. The legislative and judicial frameworks around surveillance do not appear to give foreigners anything in the way of protections. But foreign customers may not be very happy with that arrangement. Over and above the use of PRISM snooping as grounds for formal legal barriers to U.S. Web exports, there's just a great business opportunity here for someone to build a webmail service that's based in Berlin or Paris or Stockholm or someplace else where the local government is prepared to erect a firm privacy framework.

It was especially interesting to see how this second guy reacted when the single somewhat thoughtful and informed Congressman, whose name I didn’t catch because he came in and left quickly and his name tag was miniscule, asked him about whether or not he taught his students to be skeptical. The guy was like, I teach my students to be ready to deal with big data just like their employers want. The congressman was like, no that’s not what I asked, I asked whether they can be skeptical of perceived signals versus noise, whether they can avoid making huge costly mistakes with big data. The guy was like, I teach my students to deal with big data.

The Board and Gist had a very animated hour-and-a-half debate last night in executive session, which can be closed to the public. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be. And the two parties had this highly scrutinized and politicized debate with a room full of reporters on the other side of a glass wall. It’s hard to see how they could have a reasonable expectation of privacy behind a glass wall. Could I also not report on it if they put it on TV?

The 2013 Virginia General Assembly, with the strong support of Governor Bob McDonnell, passed House and Senate bills creating A-F School Report Cards that will exacerbate the current academic disparities that typify the Virginia system of public elementary and secondary education. Since the inception of the No Child Left Behind Act[1], the primary federal goal of our public schools has been to close achievement gaps for economically-disadvantaged students.  While gains have been made to improve achievement for students in poverty, overall test scores in schools with high poverty rates continue to lag behind more affluent schools that serve fewer students who live in poverty. It is no surprise that 85 percent of the schools that would score a C or below under the new rating scale have student poverty rates higher than 50 percent. In fact, the average free and reduced price lunches rate for the 52 schools that would have a D or F on their report card is an astounding 78 percent. These schools are also prime candidates to be taken over by the state under the Governor’s Opportunity Education Institute if substantial gains in overall student achievement are not made quickly.

For example, there are the plans for Gogebic Taconite to blow off the tops of mountains along a 22-mile stretch not far from Lake Superior in order to build a massive iron mine. How massive is the iron mine? I am glad you asked. The iron mine is so massive that the company needs to lease over 3000 acres of what is now forestland just to build a procession pland, and the dump in which it plans to toss whatever horrible byproducts the mine produces, which will be more than several, I assure you. The Iron County Board has voted to allow the company to get out from under a county forest law aimed at protecting, well, the forests in the counties of Wisconsin, so the ball has rolled pretty far down the hill here. But the dump is scaring the hell out of people.

But, of course, that's also part of the new Silicon Valley parable: dream big, privatize the previously public, pay no attention to the rules, build recklessly, enjoy shamelessly, invoke magic, and then pay everybody off. 

He said: "People are not taxed on profit, they are taxed on income, corporations should be taxed the same as people in my mind, that is how it should be, that would make things fair and right.

For example, in high-performing districts, the academic performance of peer schools is often separated by a tiny fraction of a percentage point.  Westfield High School saw 97.8% of its students pass the Language Arts High School Proficient Assessment (HSPA) versus 97.9% of Chatham High School students.  This earned Westfield a peer rank of 45 versus 58 for Chatham.  In fact, “14 of 31 schools in the Westfield High School peer group achieved a 98% passing on the Language Arts High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA), and yet their percentile ranks ranged from 39 to 84, regardless of the identical passing score of 98%.”[2]  Unfortunately, this kind of information is not easily obtainable from the reports, which provide no data comparing a school’s performance to its peers except for the useless rankings.

They may well be right. A teacher with 10 years in will have to go at least another 17 without getting two consecutive ineffective ratings. If you're brand new, you'll have to survive a full 27 years of junk science VAM evaluations, and you'll have to survive a number of principals (I have survived six, so far) and admins who may not think you're the cat's pajamas (jeez, I am old).

Eventually we found a massive group fight against Electro and joined in. I was one of five the Things hitting this dude and I felt like a complete jackass. It’s very cool to be the Thing. It’s dumb to be one of many the Things. Also I have a hard time believing there are many bad guy type problems that five the Things could not solve.

Ha, you ain't at Studio 54 now, asshole, I thought as I watched David and Bianca traverse the piles of dogshit on the floor that Hilly Krystal's Saluki's had deposited. Then I went outside and stole the hubcaps off his limousine. I fucked that up though, and read in the New York Post the next day that their limo got a flat tire on the way home.

Until you see it, you never realize how separate the sphere of the rich is from that of everyone else.

What's the money gone to? It seems like a little of everything. Top administrators get paid more than they used to, and there are more of them. Schools have invested a lot in information technology, but that's generally been layered on top of other pieces of infrastructure rather than replacing anything. Schools compete to attract the applicants with the highest SAT/ACT scores so they try to make nicer buildings. One can debate how valuable these investments have been, and different institutions differ, but this is the story. In the face of budget cuts, prestigious public colleges and universities have started spending more money in pursuit of fairly hazy goals. And that's what makes a lot of us skeptical about the case for further subsidies.

I had a teacher in college whose lectures were so incredibly clear that it made me think physics was the easiest thing in the world. Until I went home and tried to do the problem set. He was truly amazing, but sometimes I think he was TOO good. I didn't struggle to understand his lectures--but maybe I should have. 

It was reported earlier today that Maxwell’s, the Hoboken, NJ venue that served as that city’s cultural hub in the late ’70′s and early 1980′s, eventually becoming one of the planet’s more revered rock clubs (and a stage the great and not-so-great all longed to play on), will close at the end of July. Club co-owner/booker Todd Abramson cited rising rent, crummy parking and creeping dumbfuckery on Washington Street (“a lot of the bars downtown are fighting with each other for who has the most giant TVs. That’s what Hoboken nightlife has become”), and while my first reaction was, “hey, at least you’re not next door to this place“, I can sympathize. Maxwell’s had a huge hand in the commercial revitalization of Hoboken, but the influx of $$$ and traffic shouldn’t be confused with hordes of people hoping to get a glimpse of Bob Bert (not most of the time, anyway).

Wages as a percent of the economy just hit another all-time low. Why are corporate profits so high? One reason is that companies are paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP

In terms of state provisions, what’s available? It’s difficult to say. Families do get state provisions, such as income support. On the other hand, because of the economy and the recession, prices have risen. It’s hard for a family with four children to survive on state provisions for a whole month because the food is very expensive. Education-wise, schools are segregated. Slovakians and Roma won’t share the same classrooms or playgrounds. It’s like going back to the time of racial segregation in America. The non-Roma are raised with this fear and the idea that Roma are horrible human beings, and vice-versa.

b) The students are not themselves describing Terabitihia; they are asked to "select" from two possible descriptions. In other words, the students are answering multiple choice questions, not open-ended questions.

Poverty is getting so concentrated in America that one out of five public schools was classified as as a “high poverty” school in 2011 by the U.S.  Department of Education. To win this unwelcome designation, 75 percent or more of an elementary, middle or high school’s students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. About a decade earlier, in 2000, only one in eight public schools was deemed to be high poverty. That’s about a 60 percent increase in the number of very poor schools!

The cirrus7 nimbus is built like a sandwich. Different layers of laser-cut aluminum is stacked to form a heat sink case. A simple and cost-effective design is the idea behind the concept. It does not require any heat pipes.

That's right. It is not a majority position against a national health care plan or "big gummint" or any other of the typical beltway signifiers of a "center right nation." It turns out that only 35% of the country has that attitude. The majority either support the plan or want more. I doubt that most people every understand that from the way the polls are presented

Senator Bennett from the state of Colorado has re-introduced the Growing Excellent Achievement Training Academies for Teachers and Principals (GREAT) Act, a bill to reshape teacher preparation, drastically lowering the standards for those doing this crucial work. The bill boasts support from the New Schools Venture Fund, Democrats for Education Reform, Stand For Children, Teach For America, TNTP, NCTQ and many more "reformers."

Getting back to full employment—not debt, deficits, sequester, debt ceilings—is what we ought to be talking about (along with R&R, of course).  I’m happy to say, in fact, that in my travels outside this benighted town (DC), it’s the question I get asked most often (“why isn’t Washington doing anything about jobs!!??”).

It was the state's first successful campaign to remove an administrator, and a sign of the power that can be wielded by a group of disaffected parents. But the outcome has prompted elected officials and education groups to call for closer monitoring of trigger campaigns.

In 2013, SC now sits poised to abandon the exit exam: “But S.C high school students would no longer have to pass an exit exam to graduate if a state House bill becomes law–welcome news for the thousands of students who struggle year after year to pass both the test’s math and English sections.”

Imagine our criminal justice system working this way. Instead of the current due process system in which the accused must be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, let's instead assume a teacher-evaluation model system in which anyone arrested two times would be automatically found guilty unless he could establish his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt.

Mark my words that in the not-too-distant future, nobody will be willing to admit that they were once associated with the ‘reform’ movement. Unfortunately for most of them, there is a very permanent and easily searchable record of exactly what ideas they supported.

The evidence is there. Policy elites choose to ignore such evidence because it is slower, requires different allocation of resources, and challenges the current orthodoxy that U.S. schools are irreversible failures and need total transformation.

But when someone like Cerf comes in and, for all intents and purposes, vacates the decisions that follow from the process, it calls into question the validity of the entire system. How do I or any other educator know this can't happen the other way as well? What if the Commissioner decides to overturn an arbitrator's decision in favor of a teacher on a tenure charge simply because he decides he wants to?

At current wages, the supply of qualified doctors could easily be increased. Alternatively, if doctors' wages were reduced there would be no decline in the supply of qualified doctors. That's because the supply of qualified doctors is being doubly restricted, first by regulations that make it exceedingly difficult to import qualified doctors from abroad and second by cartelization that prevents medical schools from training more doctors.

Shoring up all these bridges would be a major investment of mostly blue collar manpower. And as it turns out, the country has a desperate need for jobs, especially ones that don't require a college degree.

It would take a perverse, malevolent government not to take the opportunity to fit those two puzzle pieces together. Wouldn't it?

The basic point is that a higher baseline for inflation would make liquidity traps, in which conventional monetary policy is up against the zero lower bound, less likely and less costly when they happen. Ball estimates that if we had come into this crisis with an underlying inflation rate of 4 percent, average unemployment over the past three years would have been two percentage points lower. That’s huge — it amounts to millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of extra output.

Describing those who do the bidding of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel as, “an army of zombie pigs who know how to do nothing but feed”, The Nation’s Dave Zirin takes a dim view of Emanuel’s plans to gift DePaul University with $100 million for a new basketball arena, at the same time Chicago is closing scores of public schools and health clinics. All of this, Zirin points out, “for a non-descript basketball team that has gone 47-111 over the last five years” (“These aren’t the actions of a mayor. They’re the actions of a mad king.”) But hey, at least that Lollapalooza radius clause seems pretty solid.

Ages of consent have been ratcheted up in recent decades, as has hysteria about all teen sex generally. Maybe 18-year-olds shouldn't be having sex with 14 and 15 year olds, but they sure were when I was in high school. It's one thing to try to prevent these relationships, quite another to destroy lives over it. Put people in this range of ages together in a building 5 days a week and these types of relationships are to be expected.

in other words, I said, research does show that education is not often based on research, but research also shows that education that is based on research is inappropriate and counterproductive.

Things were getting sloppy, to be sure. Photos of us from the rest of the day show beer spills down the front of our light-colored shirts; we looked like toddlers who had spit up all their Gerber. Horses seen thus far: zero. Pairs of people making out: approaching double-digits. Girls in bras with literally no top over the bra: four. People throwing up: two. Pairs of people making out—dare I even mention this?—while leaning against one of the Port-a-Potties: one.

Is that just a wild coincidence or something grander that an education “reformer” was put in charge of the IRS?

If true, Chicagoans should shudder. Even better, they should take a field trip four hours east to Detroit. The Motor City has gambling, and I’ve been to their casinos. If you ever want to see exhausted families spend their last dollars in hopes to make enough to last the month, go to a Detroit casino. That’s the future Rahm Emanuel dreams about for the working people of Chicago. The difference now is that the pigs aren’t feeding at an overflowing trough. They’re feeding on the last grizzled meat sticking to our bones. There’s simply not enough slop to go around and people are fed up with being fed upon.

Some of the specific causes of Rhee’s early career, such as giving principals the right to accept or reject teachers being transferred into their schools, or not requiring that layoffs be made solely on the basis of seniority, are perfectly reasonable. The mystery of the education-reform movement is why it insists on such a narrow and melodramatic frame for the discussion. You’d never know from most education-reform discourse that anybody before the current movement came along ever cared about the quality of public education. (Remember that the reason both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush became president was that, as governors, they successfully established teacher-accountability regimes that were accomplished in ways that got them reelected and established them as plausible national figures. Rhee treats Clinton as someone who doesn’t have the guts to embrace the cause, and doesn’t even mention Bush.) You’d never know that unionization and school quality are consistent in most of the country (including Washington’s affluent Ward 3) and the world. You’d never know that the research results on charter schools are decidedly mixed. You’d never know that empowered and generally anti-union parents’ and employers’ organizations have been around for decades. (Bush’s education secretary, Margaret Spellings, was once an official of the Texas Association of School Boards.)

Prosody is a modern flexible communications server for Jabber/XMPP written in Lua. It aims to be easy to set up and configure, and light on resources. For developers it aims to be easy to extend and give a flexible system on which to rapidly develop added functionality, or prototype new protocols.

I need to heal from damage to my feelings of self-worth, after decades of repeated assaults on my character, integrity, intelligence, and professionalism. I’m talking about infantile staff development sessions, condescending administrators, demeaning curriculum I was forced to teach, constant blame from the media for all of America’s ills, etc, etc, etc. I may be the only retired teacher out there who feels this way, but I bet I’m not alone.

I'm not sure why we're so reluctant to believe this explanation. Every day we see wealthy, celebrity pundits all around us insisting on the need to "sacrifice" things which will cause them no pain but will make the rest of us suffer. It's very hard not to believe that this is some sort of psychological/emotional/spiritual belief that has overtaken the "winners" in this society, which suggests to me that it's a way of justifying the success they've had, either at the expense of others or in spite of what they know are their own ordinary talents. In order to live with themselves they've had to order their world around the notion that anyone who achieves material success in life does so because of their natural goodness. Those who fail to achieve such success must have failed because we are bad. Therefore, we must be punished.

There are huge challenges for anyone elected to office, and I believe the challenges are greater for someone whose job requires they punch in and out for a regular shift each and every working day. It is hard to juggle meetings with constituents while cleaning 16 hotel rooms. This story will give us a behind the scenes perspective of what it takes to succeed. What does our democracy really look like on the inside? Why aren’t there more low-wage workers in public office? Watch the trailer on Kickstarter!

To see how many kids react to an overemphasis on testing, watch Dropout Nation. PBS Frontline’s Dropout Nation series featured HISD and its Apollo Program in its September broadcast. While there are some good things about Apollo-individulized tutors, more support staff, etc., it’s data driven focus contains the seed of its own destruction. Talking about tests all the time, doing test prep all the time, making kids take tests that they are not relevant to them and that they are not prepared for is wrong.

The idea is that at around 10 a.m. parents take their kids to—as you might expect from the name of this holiday—their local park. And then they leave them there.

So nice of Teach for America to jump on the “schools are broken and we need non-educators to fix them” bandwagon. As seen on every tray in the TSA security line at the Detroit airport. #sigh

Two questions; 1) When is Paul Krugman finally going to have had enough of this, and 2) Who are the bigger douchenozzles? The douchenozzles that get off on other people's suffering, or the respectable contrarian douchenozzles who give them cover? Please open your test booklets and turn to the section marked, "Douchenozzles." You have 20 minutes.

Today, The New Yorker is announcing Strongbox, an online tool that allows you to send messages or documents to our writers and editors anonymously. (Kevin Poulsen, who helped build Strongbox together with the late Aaron Swartz, explains it all in this blog post.) The New Yorker has a long tradition of excellence in investigative reporting; many of the fifty-six National Magazine Awards we’ve won since 1970 have honored investigative pieces, like Daniel Lang’s “Casualties of War” (1970) and Seymour Hersh’s “Torture at Abu Ghraib” (2005). With Strongbox, we hope to broaden and extend that tradition by making ourselves more easily available to sources around the world.