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Is America’s Most Controversial Education Group Changing Its Ways?

by LillianHefner Posted on February 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Audrey Pribnow, with Teach for America, leads her class at University Academy in Kansas City, Missouri. Photo by Tammy Ljungblad/TNS/ZUMAPRESS.com

Last weekend, Teach for America, the nonprofit that places freshly minted college graduates in schools to teach for two years, held a national summit in Washington, DC, to celebrate its 25th anniversary. The event featured a number of the organization’s most celebrated alumni who helped build today’s education reform movement—known for its passion for testing, ranking of teachers, and deep support of charter schools. Michelle Rhee, the former DC schools chancellor was there; so was Eva Moskowitz, the head of the largest chain of charter schools in New York City, and Michael Johnson, the Colorado senator who helped pass one of the early laws mandating the use of test scores in teachers’ evaluations.

As soon as the summit began, Teach for America’s zealous supporters and fierce critics took to Twitter. “Please tell me that somebody is protesting this awful, anti-public education conference,” writer and author, Nikhil Goyal, tweeted. Joel Klein, a former superintendent of New York schools who now works for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, tweeted, “Teach for America has produced more great leaders fighting for educational equity than any other.” Teach for America alum Gary Rubenstein launched a #FactCheckTFA25 hashtag that he said would deflate many of the organizations’ exaggerations about its successes.

It’s hard to think of an education reform organization today that is more well-known and more divisive than Teach for America. Many advocates say Teach for America is on the front lines of fighting educational inequity and racism by sending top talent to the most struggling classrooms; opponents charge that Teach for America sends poorly trained teachers into schools with high rates of kids in poverty that need qualified teachers the most. Opponents also argue the organization’s elite recruits often displace veteran black and Latino teachers.

In the last three years, a stream of articles and open letters from Teach for America alums have fanned the flames. In 2013, Olivia Blanchard published an essay in The Atlantic, “I Quit Teach for America,” in which she declared that the five-week summer crash course that she—a typical Teach for America recruit—took before being placed in a school didn’t prepare her to fix the wrongs in the most challenging classrooms. That same year, Gary Rubenstein, a former recruiter for Teach for America, wrote an open letter to Wendy Kopp, the founder of the nonprofit, stating that the previous 2010 summit made him ashamed of the organization: “It was disappointing to me that the theme of the summit was generally about how charter schools were THE answer and how ‘bad’ teachers and unions are THE problem. It felt like TFA was trying to convey the idea that ‘We figured it out. Now we just have to scale up,’ despite the fact that nobody has really conclusively figured ‘it’ out.”

A number of studies conducted over the past 10 years have suggested that Teach for America educators have been no more effective raising children’s test scores than teachers from all other avenues (though studies show Teach for America educators, compared with other teachers, have increased kids’ math scores slightly more than their reading and writing scores, according to journalist Dana Goldstein). Studies have also shown that there can be negative impacts from high teacher turnover, and others have called into question the impact of “no excuses” pedagogical approaches that can be found in charter schools.

Such findings—and the drop in the numbers of new applicants for Teach for America—have sparked an unprecedented debate within the organization and have led the organization to create a slew of new initiatives. Teach for American now has pilot programs to help teachers stay in the profession longer and programs to expand training time beyond the five-week summer courses. There is a new educational justice training program that draws on scholarship by African American scholars, including Gloria Ladson-Billings and Lisa Delpit, to help corps members create more culturally relevant classrooms. For the first time, Teach for America alum and critic Amber H. Kim facilitated a panel at the DC summit for the organization’s opponents titled, “Critics, Not Haters.”

Christina Torres joined Teach for America in 2008. She teaches English at the University Laboratory School, Honolulu, Hawai’i. Image by Marc Marquez.

Honolulu-based English teacher and Teach for America alum Christina Torres told me that the nonprofit is now far too large to view it as a one-dimensional organization. The organization represents a huge variety of beliefs. Today there are about 11,000 Teach for America educators who are still teaching in the classroom. And the new corps members are more diverse in class and race: Close to half of the 2015 corps are people of color, and 47 percent of them come from low-income or working-class backgrounds.

Torres, who refers to herself as “Mexipina” (her father is Mexican and her mother is Filipino), now has over four years of teaching under her belt. For the past two years, she has worked in a progressive, integrated charter school serving Asian American, Samoan, and Native Hawaiian students and kids from Guam. Last weekend, in between Teach for America panels, I asked her about this year’s summit.

Mother Jones: Why did you join Teach for America?

Christina Torres: I chose it partially because when they recruited me, they touched on some aspects of race and access to education that had affected my own family. My family had worked really hard to ensure my brother and I had received a great public education. Many other schools that kids like me went to didn’t have every AP class offered, free SAT prep, or the hundreds of little privileges I received. This lack of quality and parity was heartbreaking. Teach for America also made it easier to get into the classroom.

MJ: Why did you choose a charter school now?

CT: They offered the job! But also the school has an incredibly strong, positive culture and I work with amazing teachers. I also believed in their charter’s purpose, which is to build a school that acts as a laboratory for innovative curriculum that then gets scaled to the state level.

I have a lot of qualms about the charter movement from what I experienced while I worked in charter schools in Los Angeles. I think they often don’t add anything to the community. However, this charter serves a function I believe in.

MJ: What criticisms—that Teach for America is elitist? Or disrespectful of veteran educators—do you think are deserved?

CT: The criticism that TFA is white, elitist, focused on testing, and short of pedagogical seriousness could also be a applied to a lot of schools and traditional teacher prep programs. Education and teacher training often inherently value white culture. That’s not an excuse, but it seems like the focus on TFA alone minimizes the larger issue that education as a system needs to be inherently rethought. I think TFA is beginning to own its part in that, though, and we need to not just pay lip service to it.

MJ: How do you feel when you hear that Teach for America placed teachers in a city like Seattle in 2010, when there were no teacher shortages or Chicago in 2013, while veteran teachers, often educators of color, were laid off?

CT: Frustrated. It makes me feel angry and sad. Also, it makes it harder to do the work in places with real shortages, such as Hawaii or the Native American reservations.

MJ: What makes you feel like TFA is evolving?

CT: Just the fact that we’re discussing race and privilege—including panels at the summit this year for white folks to begin dismantling their own systems—in such a frank way is completely new. Also, the explicit push for people to teach beyond two years was pretty shocking.

MJ: Is more work needed?

CT: The organization is still deeply entrenched with charters in a way that makes me feel very uncomfortable. The amount of space and funding we give to alumni startups instead of investing that money in already existing structures or entrepreneurs in communities we serve also feels strange. The amount of celebrity we apply to some “higher-up” folks like Wendy Kopp is also something I want to move away from.

MJ: Gary Rubenstein wrote in his blog that most of the summit’s panels were heavily “reformer.” Did you think so?

CT: I think the panels were split between the two sides of TFA: Some were “rah-rah TFA,” but others were all about the work. All the panels I went to were about the empowerment of communities and students of color—culturally responsive pedagogy, student activism, native student education. I felt like I got diverse viewpoints and I was pushed. Characterizing the summit as “mostly” reformer focused seems strong. I think the panels reflected varying interests and beliefs.

MJ: Did the conference address issues or race in a meaningful way?

CT: The TFA Native Alliance Initiative panel focusing on NACA Native American Community Academy charter schools was huge in importance. NACA is an example of what nontraditional schooling should be: a space for communities to create safe, culturally relevant, and innovative education that needs to be protected or cultivated.

But by far, the student activism panel was the strongest part of the summit. The students themselves were given the microphone without any scripts or agendas so they could share their thoughts, beliefs, and stories. Seeing students challenge us as educators was huge to both validate and challenge my own beliefs.

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Is America’s Most Controversial Education Group Changing Its Ways?

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Even the Guy With the $100 Million Super-PAC Says Campaign Finance Is Broken

by SondraChesser Posted on February 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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You can’t avoid campaign finance reform in the run-up to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. It feels a little weird to type that, given the continuous series of setbacks reformers have suffered on that issue over the last decade, but it’s true. Talk to anyone at a Bernie Sanders rally and it’s the first thing that comes up; on the Republican side, Donald Trump has made his lack of big donors a centerpiece of his campaign.

Even Jeb Bush, whose $100-million super-PAC, Right to Rise, is blanketing the airwaves here in the Granite State (and has a spin-off dark-money group, Right to Rise Policy Solutions), says something needs to be done. Taking questions at a Nashua Rotary Club on Monday afternoon, Bush told voters that it will take a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and stop the glut of dark money entering the political process:

The ideal thing would be to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that allows effectively unregulated money for independent groups, and regulated money for the campaigns. I would turn that on its head if I could. I think campaigns ought to be personally accountable and responsible for the money they receive. I don’t think you need to restrict it—voters will have the ability to say I’m not voting for you because some company gave you money. The key is to just have total transparency about the amounts of money and who gives it, and to have it with 48-hour turnaround. That would be the appropriate thing. Then a candidate will be held accountable for whatever comes to the voters through the campaign. Unfortunately the Supreme Court ruling makes that at least temporarily impossible, so it’s going to take an amendment to the Constitution.

Now, Jeb hasn’t turned into Bernie Sanders. He’d just like unlimited donations that aren’t anonymous, and he’d like whatever is disclosed to be disclosed a lot quicker. The subtext here is that while Bush is benefiting from a nonprofit that accepts anonymous unlimited donations, his backers have expressed a lot of frustration with outside groups supporting Jeb’s rival, Sen. Marco Rubio. Right to Rise chief Mike Murphy said last fall that Rubio is running a “cynical” campaign fueled by “secret dark money, maybe from one person.”

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Even the Guy With the $100 Million Super-PAC Says Campaign Finance Is Broken

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Here’s a New Way to Judge Your State’s Schools

by WilhelmMunson Posted on February 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last time I called Diane Ravitch, our country’s leading education historian and one of the most vocal voices in education reform, she was on another call with the producers of The Daily Show. It was 2011, and The Daily Show was about to air a segment about the low salaries that teachers earn and Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s intentions to cut teachers pay and reduce workers’ collective bargaining powers. The producers were calling to invite Ravitch to come on the show to talk to Jon Stewart about teachers and education reform.

At the time, reducing the power of teachers’ unions, promoting charter schools, and using standardized test scores to weed out “bad teachers” and close “failing schools” had become the most popular silver bullets of the education reform movement. Michelle Rhee, the former chief of DC schools, had become the most prominent public face of these kinds of education reforms—ones that Ravitch was critiquing on The Daily Show. Rhee had come out in support of Walker’s policies.

In 2010, Newsweek published a cover story called “The Key to Saving American Education: We must fire bad teachers.” That same year, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Rhee announced that she was forming a national organization called Students First to promote her ideology among state policymakers. In 2013, Students First came out with “report cards” that graded each state’s performance against the reform movement’s education agenda. The report cards, like the policies Rhee and her allies pushed, received frequent—and fairly positive—media coverage.

When commentators and reporters needed a countervoice, Ravitch became the go-to progressive critic. She was not the only prominent academic who questioned the attacks on teachers, but she was the most vocal, thanks in part to her media savvy and punchy writing—and her 125,000 Twitter followers. In 2013, Ravitch and her allies launched the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit advocacy group that aims to counter what she calls the “right-wing propaganda.” Her organization pushed forward its own brand of education reform policies: more equitable school funding, early childhood education, integrated classrooms, reduced use of testing, and stronger professional development for teachers. This Tuesday, the Network for Public Education published its own version of state report cards, rating every state using 29 factors, such as policies on testing, school finance, teacher pay and rates of attrition, mentoring programs for teachers, and controls on charter school expansion, among others. No states received an overall grade of “A,” but Iowa, Nebraska, and Vermont got the highest grades. New Jersey was the only state to get an “A” for equitable funding. Alabama, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Vermont all scored high for rejecting the use of tests to punish teachers or students.

Things are not going so well for the proponents of test-based and market-driven education reforms, Ravitch wrote on her blog a few months before her group released its report cards. She then went on to cite research—much of it included in the report cards—showing the failed promises of Rhee-style reforms: Charter schools on average don’t produce higher test scores than public schools; online charter schools perform much worse than public schools; teacher evaluations that include test scores haven’t helped to “weed out the bad teachers” and identify the best; achievement gaps haven’t changed. “Michelle Rhee has stepped away from the national stage, into apparent obscurity,” Ravitch wrote, “even though her organization continues to fund right-wing anti-public school state-level candidates.”

My second call to Ravitch was this past Tuesday, to ask her about the organization’s report cards, and the surprises her team found. Ravitch was joined by Carol Burris, the executive director of Network for Public Education.

Image courtesy of the Network for Public Education

Mother Jones: Why are these new state report cards important?

Diane Ravitch: There were all of these state reports coming out from right-wing groups like Students First and the American Legislative Exchange Council arguing that the definition of success is getting rid of public education and taking away any right that teachers might have. These create a climate when there is report card after report card agreeing that the future should be privately managed charter schools. There is nobody on the other side other than the unions, which are immediately discredited. There need to be two sides to the debate. Right now the education conversation is presented as what Students First is promoting is all that works.

We felt it was important to set up this other criteria and show how effective school systems operate: They are adequately funded, have preschools; they make sure that their teachers are professionals, and they don’t give away their authority. This is how the best nations in the world operate. They don’t operate through vouchers and charters.

MJ: Why is New Jersey the only state that got an ‘A’ in “School Finance”?

DR: New Jersey had court rulings that required the state to adjust its school funding. They have done a lot of redistribution to make sure that poor districts get more resources. What they still haven’t done anything about is segregation. Today they have a group of districts—called the Abbott districts low-income districts that receive higher levels of funding per student than the average spending in the state—that get a lot of money but are intensely segregated. These schools remain in high poverty and segregated areas, like Newark.

MJ: How is New Jersey doing with improving kids’ test scores and closing the gap between black, Latino, and white students?

DR: If you look at National Assessment of Educational Progress NAEP scores in New Jersey, it’s one of the highest-scoring states in the country, even though it has very poor, low-performing districts. When it comes to achievement gaps, there is nothing to brag about, but it is doing much better than Washington, DC. In 2008, we had a Time magazine story with Michelle Rhee on the cover telling us that DC was going to lead the way in how education reform should be done, but DC continues to have an achievement gap that’s twice that of other cities and twice that of New Jersey.

MJ: Your report says the gap in spending per student in poor schools compared to rich schools has grown 44 percent in the last decade. Why?

DR: One important reason is that the federal policy has tilted completely toward testing and accountability and away from equity. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was all about equity and equitable resources for low-income students, and then in the 1990s that began to change. In DC, policymakers think that if we can only have high enough standards, tough enough tests, and hold people accountable, we can close the achievement gap. And it hasn’t happened. Yet the new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, is based on the same test-based and market-driven framework and ideology, except it lets the states do it.

MJ: Research consistently shows that when teachers are allowed to learn on their jobs and have a voice in decision-making processes, kids’ achievement improves. Typically, the presence of such practices is measured as the hours teachers are paid to collaborate and plan. That wasn’t in your report. Why?

Carol Burris: There are so many factors we wished we could have included, but couldn’t. Francesca Wilson, the researcher at the University of Arizona who worked with us, was able to get limited data from the National Center of Educational Statistics on this issue. But once we put the report cards out, we hope that people will suggest what other factors we should be including. In general, it was a challenge for us to find recent data and cross-national sources for everything.

MJ: Your report cards also don’t include any student test scores or graduation or college acceptance rates. Why is that?

CB: The point of the report card is not to judge individual schools or even to judge kids. We wanted to look at factors that states can control through policies. If you change specific research-based practices that we identified, then the outcomes that you can expect would be higher test scores. But to use something like NAEP standardized scores without proper controls for poverty, it didn’t make sense to us. We really wanted to look at the “inputs” of educational systems, such as funding or class size, that research shows increase achievement.

MJ: What impact do you hope to have?

CB: We hope the readers will think deeply about the path that we are on and engage in grassroots campaigns at the district or state house level. We need to make sure that policymakers who are truly committed to public schools move beyond popular silver bullets that have failed in the last decade and pay attention to policies that are actually effective.

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Here’s a New Way to Judge Your State’s Schools

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Marco Rubio Is Very Upset That President Obama Went to a Mosque

by ChesterSaylors7 Posted on February 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, President Barack Obama visited a mosque for the first time as president, and offered perhaps the least controversial comment imaginable: “You’re part of America too,” he told his hosts. “You’re not Muslim or American; you’re Muslim and American.”

Sen. Marco Rubio was not impressed, telling voters in New Hampshire:

I’m tired of being divided against each other for political reasons like this president’s done. Always pitting people against each other. Always. Look at today—he gave a speech at a mosque. Oh, you know, basically implying that America is discriminating against Muslims. Of course there’s going to be discrimination in America of every kind. But the bigger issue is radical Islam. And by the way, radical Islam poses a threat to Muslims themselves.

To be clear: America discriminates against Muslims.

In 2012, Wired reported that “the FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that ‘main stream” sic American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a ‘cult leader’; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat.” That investigative series on federal law enforcement’s prejudices against Muslims won a National Magazine Award. In 2011, the Associated Press reported on how the NYPD, with the help of the CIA, spied on America mosques and even infiltrated Muslim student associations. That series won a Pulitzer. Last week, Buzzfeed reported on the intense pressure applied by the federal government on Muslim immigrants who apply for citizenship. My colleague Kristina Rizga has reported on the pervasiveness of anti-Muslim bullying in schools. One of the candidates who beat Rubio last week literally proposed banning Muslims from entering the country; the other limited his ban to people from predominantly Muslim countries.

This is all pretty easy to find online, but in Rubio’s defense, the Internet is pretty spotty in New Hampshire.

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Marco Rubio Is Very Upset That President Obama Went to a Mosque

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The Feds Are Finally Investigating the San Francisco Police, But Here’s the Catch

by BessMEIF Posted on February 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Nearly two months after San Francisco police officers shot and killed a 26-year-old black man named Mario Woods, officials at the US Department of Justice have announced that they will launch a comprehensive review of the department’s policies and practices.

The federal review will “help identify key areas for improvement” in the department’s operational policies, training practices, and accountability procedures, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement released Monday.

The announcement comes amid a public outcry over Woods’s death last month, which sparked protests and prompted city officials to call for an independent investigation into the incident. On December 2, officers surrounded Woods on a sidewalk in the Bayview district neighborhood after identifying him as a possible suspect in a stabbing that took place earlier that day. The incident was recorded by several onlookers who uploaded cell phone footage to social media, attracting widespread attention.

Push for review

One video showed Woods standing with his back against a wall, facing at least six officers pointing their guns at him. They ordered him to drop the knife. When Woods did not comply, officers fired bean bag pellets and pepper-sprayed him. At one point, Woods appeared to walk away from the officers, and seconds later multiple shots rang out. A total of five officers opened fire, San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr later told reporters. Woods was pronounced dead at the scene. The officers who fired their guns were placed on leave after the shooting, but have since returned to desk duty. Woods’ family and supporters have demanded the firing of Suhr, who formerly headed the Bayview police station. Family members, who say Woods had struggled with mental health issues, have also filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the city.

Several members of San Francisco’s board of supervisors, community leaders, and civil rights advocates have called for an independent investigation into Woods’s death and the department’s use of force policies. Suhr and San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee also jointly requested the federal review, according to the DOJ statement, and “have publicly committed to providing the resources necessary for its successful completion.”

Protesters march toward Super Bowl City in San Francisco, Jan. 29, 2016. Jaeah Lee

The Justice Department’s review into SFPD, however, differs significantly from the “pattern and practice” investigations into police departments such as Ferguson and Cleveland. Pattern-and-practice investigations, handled by the Civil Rights Division and meant to identify department-wide civil rights violations, typically result in court-ordered reforms that are monitored by a judge or a third party, and sometimes last more than a decade. The SFPD review, led by the Office of Community Oriented Policing, will result in a report laying out recommended reforms as well as progress reports on their implementation. But those reviews tend to take place in a shorter time period, and the reforms are not legally binding.

Other cases

Woods’s death is the latest in a long line of controversies involving the San Francisco police and their use of force against citizens, particularly those suffering from mental health issues, and communities of color.

More than 60 percent of all fatal police shootings by SFPD cops since 2010 involved people who had a history of mental health problems, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Last February, 20-year-old Amilcar Perez-Lopez was shot to death by two plain-clothed SFPD officers in the Mission District neighborhood. Officials said he was carrying a knife.
A month later, a judge cleared four other cops for their involvement in the March 2014 death of 28-year-old Alex Nieto, who allegedly pointed a Taser at police officers. District Attorney George Gascon said the officers, who fired a total of 59 shots, reasonably mistook the Taser for a pistol.
SFPD also came under heightened scrutiny last April, when Suhr moved to fire 8 officers over their 2012 exchange of racist and homophobic text messages. In December, a judge ruled that the officers could not be fired or otherwise disciplined because the department waited too long to address the case, allowing a one-year statute of limitations for any personnel investigations—set by the Peace Officer Bill of Rights—to lapse.

Some experts have already expressed concern that the DOJ’s current review of SFPD does not go far enough.

“It doesn’t have the teeth that the Civil Rights’ Division investigation does,” Aaron Zisser, a former attorney for the division told the San Francisco Examiner on Monday. The current review, Zisser said, was a strong indicator that there will not be a broader civil rights investigation.

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The Feds Are Finally Investigating the San Francisco Police, But Here’s the Catch

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Sanders to Press: Stop Trying to Get Me to Attack Clinton

by AngelicaBattagli Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sen. Bernie Sanders is sick of the media’s attempts to get him to attack Hillary Clinton. “I’m not going to be engaged in personal attacks on Secretary Clinton, or anybody else,” he said after repeated questioning from reporters outside an event Tuesday morning in Des Moines. But whatever distaste he has for going negative doesn’t seem to be enough to keep him from getting in a few digs at his leading Democratic opponent in the caucuses that will take place here in Iowa in less than a week.

Sanders—who has steadily crept up to a statistical tie with Clinton in Iowa polling averages—spoke before a local chapter of the United Steelworkers, where his typical lines on boosting unionization through a card-check program, fighting against trade deals, and taxing the rich were rapturously received. After the event, his staff gathered reporters outside the campaign bus for a quick question-and-answer session. Before letting anyone pose a question, Sanders launched into a diatribe about what he saw as two of the main contrasts between Clinton and himself that he thought would appeal to the union crowd.

The first was Social Security, which Sanders said “doesn’t get the kind of attention, in my view, that it deserves.” He wants to impose payroll taxes on incomes over $250,000 a year—which are currently exempt—and use that revenue to pay for better Social Security benefits. “You do that, we expand benefits by $1300 a year for people making less than $16,000 on Social Security,” he said. “That is my view. To the best of my knowledge, that is not Secretary Clinton’s view. And I would hope that she would join me in standing up with the millions of seniors and disabled veterans who are struggling on inadequate Social Security benefits.”

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Sanders to Press: Stop Trying to Get Me to Attack Clinton

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Here Is What Blogging Has Done To Me

by WinfredBSB Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I wrote a post that listed a bunch of things people have said about Ted Cruz, along with a bunch of things I made up. But which were real and which were invented? Here was the answer:

All statements whose ordinal number takes the integer form 2n+1 or 2n-1 have been invented. The rest are real.

I got some pushback about this, mostly asking what the hell kind of crap was this, anyway? So here goes. Here’s where it came from:

  1. At first I was just going to toss in a few fake statements and put the answer key below the fold. But then I realized that anyone who got here via a direct link would see the answers right away.
  2. So then I figured I’d add eight fakes in all the odd slots. But if your eye drifted down to the answer, you’d see “odd” right away.
  3. So I put it in small type. But even that was readable.
  4. So then I figured that instead of “odd,” I’d say that all the fakes were of the form 2n+1. My geeky readers would appreciate it.
  5. Then I looked for a link that defined “odd,” so that my non-geeky readers had a fighting chance of figuring things out. The only simple one I found defined odd as 2n+1 or 2n-1. So I changed the text to match.

This was pretty obviously a pointless waste of time. Welcome to my world. This is what blogging has done to me.

Anyway, in case you didn’t figure it out, all the odd numbered statement are fakes. The rest are real. The scary thing is that I didn’t have any trouble coming up with eight plausible fakes.

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Here Is What Blogging Has Done To Me

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Quote of the Day: First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Women and Children

by EsmeraldaSalo8 Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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From the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, after attending a Donald Trump rally in Arizona:

I had never previously been to a political event at which people cheered for the murder of women and children.

This is the crowd response to Trump’s confirmation that “he meant it when he said that he would ‘take out’ the family members of terrorists.” As usual, it’s pure affect. Trump talks big on national security: he’s the most militaristic guy you’ve ever met, he’ll ban Muslim visitors and crush ISIS, and other world leaders will unanimously back down under his steely gaze. But when you actually look at the policies he supports—giving him the benefit of calling them “policies” in the first place—Trump has made it clear that he’s actually pretty dovish. He doesn’t really want to intervene around the world. He doesn’t especially want to do the hard dealmaking of negotiating treaties. He wouldn’t instantly tear up the Iran deal because, after all, a deal’s a deal. He wants to boost military spending, but only because he thinks a big army will scare other countries away from messing with us to begin with.

But he’ll kill the families of terrorists, and his fans love it. Booyah.

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Quote of the Day: First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Women and Children

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Maine’s Governor Wants to Cut Drug Dealers’ Heads Off in Public

by MirtaHaight Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Adding to his impressive record for unpredictable, oftentimes offensive statements, Maine Republican Gov. Paul LePage on Tuesday suggested the state bring back the use of guillotines to publicly execute drug traffickers.

“I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people who kill Mainers,” LePage said during his weekly radio address on WVOM. “We should give them an injection of the stuff they sell.”

As the host attempted to wrap up the interview, LePage went further.

“What we ought to do is bring the guillotine back.”

This isn’t the first time LePage has called for punishment in the form of public executions. In June, LePage allegedly told a local developer that state lawmakers should be “rounded up and executed in the public square.”

Tuesday’s bizarre guillotine endorsement comes just weeks after he made racially charged remarks at a town hall event, warning residents about out-of-state drug dealers with names like “D-Money” and “Smoothie.” LePage said these drug dealers come to Maine, where state officials are grappling with a growing heroin epidemic, to sell narcotics and to impregnate young white women.

Those controversial comments sparked national outrage, but LePage dismissed accusations that his comments were racist and blamed the media for the backlash.

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Maine’s Governor Wants to Cut Drug Dealers’ Heads Off in Public

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Inflation: It’s a Real Thing!

by IsobelSkinner88 Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Petula Dvorak has gotten a lot of, um, pushback for this column about the kids these days—including hers:

The work ethic of our kids: Where is it? Where are the entrepreneurial snow shovelers? For generations of enterprising children, snowflakes may as well have been dollar bills, y’all, falling from the sky. Kids jostled to be the first to ring the doorbells of the snowed-in, the $5 driveways added up, and that new Atari Defender game cartridge, those rainbow Vans — yours and yours.

But in 2016? Not so much.

….Last year, when we had a mere dusting compared with Snowzilla and the boys were 8 and 10 years old, they shoveled our stairs and sidewalk with verve, and then struck out to ring doorbells to make a buck. The novelty of responsibility was fresh and delicious.

They got three customers: a politician’s wife who was encouraging and delightful, giving them a crisp $5 bill and a load of praise; another neighbor who paid $5; and $0 from a bleary-eyed millennial renter who promised to pay them but didn’t have cash. And never paid up long after the snow melted.

As school was closed for the big dig-out, I tried again to inspire some hustle in my little childlumps, whose only hustle was to get a sleepover going. “There are still lots of cars buried out there,” I said. “I bet you can make enough money for that Lego Poe Dameron X-Wing you want.” No spark in their eyes. What’s going on?

Hmmm. Last year the kids shoveled three houses and they each earned $1.66 per house for their efforts. This year the snow is far heavier. They could probably double their earnings! I wonder why they’re not feeling enthusiastic about this? It’s a head scratcher, all right.

As it happens, lots of kid jobs—snow shoveling, burger flipping, lawnmowing, etc.—have been largely taken over by adults these days. But the real issue here is that adults simply have no feel for inflation. Petula’s father probably got paid $5 for shoveling a walk in 1950, so that’s what he paid Petula. Now she wants to pay her kids $5. Ditto for everyone else in their generation. But $5 in 1950 is about $50 today.

Sure enough, a 30-second bit of googling suggests that the going rate for getting a neighborhood kid to shovel your walk is about $40 or so. More if the storm is heavy and you have a big lot. A professional goes for about $70.

Maybe kids these days are lazy. I don’t know—though the most recent kids I met were so smart and well-behaved that Marian and I were in awe. But hey—maybe they’re lazy too! I didn’t invite them to mow my lawn, after all. But this complaint about snow shoveling is just a personal version of that old chestnut, the business owners who complain they can’t find good workers but then admit they aren’t willing to raise their wages to attract them. Bottom line: don’t whine about lazy kids unless you’re willing to pay them enough to make it worth their time to work for you. For five bucks they’ll feed your cats while you’re on vacation. But only newbie suckers would shovel a walk after Snowzilla for that.

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Inflation: It’s a Real Thing!

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