Sunday Stuff

All the best to New York educator Sheri Lederman over her utterly needless (should be, anyway) fight over using something called value-added modeling to evaluate teacher performance, another example of the many ills of standardized testing (and we can’t blame the Repugs entirely for this, with Andrew Cuomo and Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan sitting on that stupid panel telling us everything is OK)…



...and speaking of educators, this video is a backgrounder on the story of Natalie Munro, the Bucks County teacher who claims that she was fired because of disparaging comments about students on her blog, even though (as the clip reminds us) the school board said she was let go because of poor performance. If it turns out that the school board is right, then this really is an open-and-shut case, though it makes me a bit suspicious that a court found that she can’t sue the school board, as was recently ruled as noted here.

I’ll be honest; if Mrs. Doomsy and I found out that one of the teenaged one’s teachers had posted disparaging comments about students online, we’d be mad as hell. Would I necessarily want that teacher fired if his/her performance was good otherwise? I don’t know.

I just know that some friends of ours are teachers, and they basically are told that they have to work miracles in the face of mandatory testing, ever-diminishing budgets, incompetent administrators and “parents” who can’t even take care of themselves, let alone their offspring (and oh yeah, the supposed “crisis” over the alleged student shortage of STEM majors, which is nothing but a scam to generate more H-1B visas to create a glut of workers for a shrinking amount of jobs to keep wages depressed).

I also have a feeling that, with the incarceration of Kim Davis, the wingnuts are looking for a new “values” hero or heroine, and I have a suspicion that they may decide to make Munro the new object of their twisted affections, as it were…



…and speaking of faux outrage, good for Cenk and Ana giving it right back to Billo and the other news mannequins at Fix Noise being pulled by Roger Ailes’ puppet strings (here); I have to admit that I’m on the fence when it comes to Black Lives Matter – I think they should tone down the rhetoric and try more to build bridges instead of walls (protesting Bernie freaking Sanders??!!), though they definitely have a right to be angry and that should be respected – if BLM is a “hate group,” then I’m a Chinese aviator (NSFW of course...one more thing; Dr. George Tiller was murdered in his church, not at his clinic)…



…and I think this calls for this song one more time; haven’t put it up for a little while.