Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links - Education Watch, BBC Apologizes for Selling Out, BP Oil Lingers

Reader's Picks



  • Science



  • Health/Nutrition



  • Security



    • Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery

      Copy is not theft. Most of the privacy problems people have are Windows exploits and the power non free software owners help themselves to in the first place. As usual, the NYT is lost in a maze of details and misses the big picture.





  • Defence/Police/Aggression



  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife





  • Finance



  • Anti-Trust



  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying



    • BBC to issue global apology for documentaries that broke rules
      Independent revealed programmes were made by third-party in pay of governments and firms

      Techrights has written a lot about Microsoft BBC corruption. The apology is a good first step. The BBC should abandon broadcast to focus on publicly financed program production and public domain distritution to free itself from money problems. More money, not less should be provided for this.





  • Privacy

    • Austrian Law Student Faces Down Facebook
      In less than a year, Mr. Schrems's one-person operation has morphed into a Web site, Europe Versus Facebook, and a grass-roots movement that has persuaded 40,000 people to contact Facebook in Ireland, where its European headquarters are located, to demand a summary of all the personal data the U.S. company is holding on them... Mr. Schrems filed the grievance after using a provision of Irish law to obtain from Facebook a copy of all of the information the company had been keeping on him. ... Facebook was routinely collecting data [1,222 pages worth] that he had never consented to give, like his physical location, which he assumes was determined from his computer's unique address identifiers, which can be traced geographically. Facebook was also retaining data he had deleted...




  • Education Watch

    • The F-word of Ed Reform — and its unholy alliance with right-wing union-busting
      There is a word for this kind of anti-democratic collaboration between business and government, but we haven’t used it much since the 1940s: fascism.

      This article is a good run down of what's going on in the world of civil servant union busting and "education reform"



    • More Anti-Charter School Resolutions in Washington State

      It looks like a good backlash it on the way. That's good for Washington state and a good example for the rest of us.



    • 60% Teach for America , Inc. recruits and 40% credentialed teachers in Lousiana

      Louisiana would have money for their schools and other things if government had the guts to tax the multinationals that run cancer alley.



    • New Orleans: Beachhead for Corporate Takeover of Public Schools
      New Orleans is important in the national education debate, but not for the reasons we commonly hear; it is important because it is the beachhead for a national movement to remove schools from local democratic control and accountability. The privatization trade-off is that the public sacrifices control of schools for a privatized system that delivers better education for the same tax dollar. While the citizens of New Orleans certainly lost control of their schools [after Hurricane Katrina], it cannot be said that they have received a better education, if that also means an equitable education, nor can it be said that it came at the same cost. ... Hurricane Katrina was the perfect storm for the corporate education movement: No democracy, no unions, and a goal of 100% privatization of all public schools. It is no mystery why they chose New Orleans as their beachhead.


    • The Myth of “Choice” in New Orleans: How the Recovery School District, Through the Charter School Movement Has Cheated Nearly 5000 New Orleans Students Out of Access to Real “Choice”


    • An essay by a former Teach for America recruit: Why I did TFA, and why you shouldn’t
      I’m glad I ‘did’ TFA. Twenty years ago they filled a need. Putting a few hundred barely trained teachers into the toughest to serve schools was one of those concepts that was ‘so crazy, it might just work.’ We weren’t always doing ‘good,’ but we also weren’t doing much harm. Our five or six hundred teachers were pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. Over the next twenty years, TFA did a lot of growing, but not a lot of evolving. They replicated their institutes and increased their regions. The 2011 corps is nearly 6,000, twelve times as big as the cohorts from the early 90s. Unfortunately, the landscape in education has changed a lot in the past twenty years. Instead of facing teacher shortages, we have teacher surpluses. There are regions where experienced teachers are being laid off to make room for incoming TFA corps members because the district has signed a contract with TFA, promising to hire their new people. ... TFA has participated in building a group of ‘leaders’ who, in my opinion, are assisting in the destruction of public education.


    • Occupy the DOE in DC from March 30th to April 2nd
      The key lever is the vaunted score on high-stakes state standardized tests, used to justify a slew of controversial decisions. As a result of ten years of this kind of reform, we are experiencing schools just as segregated by race and social class as they were in the 1950s. We in the United States are also experiencing a teaching profession that is constantly undermined and under attack. The culture of punishment and competition created under No Child Left Behind and now Race to the Top has proven to be a massive failure.


    • The NAACP Resolution on Charter Schools: Segregation is Not Innovation




  • ACTA

    • ACTA bombshell: Germany refuses to sign anti-piracy treaty amid protests [Update]
      With protests against the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) set to rage across Europe on Saturday ... More recent reports suggest Germany is simply delaying its decision on signing ACTA until a later date, rather than refusing to sign the treaty outright. This is a lesser victory for ACTA opponents, but still a sign that the public outcry against the agreement is having an effect.

      Go protest till they kill it properly.









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