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The Savagery of One True Religion | Dear Ohio, Part 5

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Dear Ohio,

I was listening to the soaring soundtrack of The Mission today, and it made me think of you. The film tells the story of a church-state conflict that arises in the 1750s and ultimately crushes a tiny Jesuit mission and the people who built it, members of the Guarani, indigenous peoples who inhabited tribal lands deep in the rain forests of central South America.

In the film, a tiny slice of the larger political fight for power over the Guarani takes place among Spain, Portugal, and the Vatican. The losers are the Guarani believers who took refuge in the mission – one of many that had been established by the Jesuits – in the hope not just of eternal salvation, but of earthly deliverance from the hands of the slave-trading countries that had invaded their lands. The natives’ hope is destroyed as Catholic European soldiers murder the natives as they attend Mass.

At this point, Dear Ohio, you’re probably wondering why the music from this film makes me think of you. As you well know from my previous correspondence, I write to you because you are the bellwether election state. And it seems of late that religion and politics have become welded together in a way that is galvanizing the electorate in Ohio and all other states in the Union. (How ironic to have this happen in a country where it is common to hear people say, “Never talk about politics or religion,” and where we celebrate a history of government and church being separate in order to promote freedom among all believers and non-believers.)   [Read more…]

A Forgotten Massacre in Baghdad

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By Kilian Colin

I was few years old. I only remember snapshots of the war on Iraq in 1991.

I remember my parents and other families in the shelter rushing out of the shelter after hearing another shelter was bombed by a U.S. airstrike. People were crying and yelling while fleeing for their life. When we left the shelter that night, the sky looked like there was a firework show with a strong bombing sounds.

As a child, I smiled while watching the fireworks and wished it will continue forever. It really wasn’t a fireworks show; it was the U.S. airstrike and the Iraqi defense shooting each other like in a Star Wars movie. I didn’t understand what was going on until a few years later.   [Read more…]

A Rotten Peach Poisoning Atlanta Public Schools

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Sadly, the Atlantic Public Schools (APS) are careening from one destructive tragedy to the next. On the heels of the great cheating scandal of 2009, APS hired a leader of the destroy public education (DPE) movement as schools’ chief. Her “district turnaround” model includes making APS an all charter system.

Somehow, I got included in an email conversation between Ed Johnson, well-known education activist from Atlanta, Georgia, and a group of professors who study education issues. Mr. Johnson who ran for the Atlanta school board and has had opinion pieces published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, shared data from the just released NEAP testing. He provided eight graphs supporting the following conclusions:

“This preliminary look at APS offers the immediate data story that, in recent years, APS White-Black academic gaps have been made worse. It is the same data story the Georgia Milestones Assessment System also tells; details differ, of course. So-called school transformation, school turnaround, school reform, school choice, and closing public schools and opening charter schools must be considered negative contributing factors, as they promote bold, disruptive change; scripted teaching; instruction delivery; personalized mechanistic learning; and rigid academic performance. These matters are contrary to purposeful, systemic improvement of APS as a public institution or public good.”

  [Read more…]

Tammy Duckworth Makes Senate History (Again)! | Video Worth Watching

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Tammy Duckworth makes Senate history (again)! The Washington Post reports that:

It’s not every day that a 10-day-old infant makes history. But that’s what happened Thursday when Maile Pearl Bowlsbey, newborn daughter of Sen. Tammy Duckworth, was carried onto the Senate floor.
Maile, born April 9, became the first child permitted on the floor of the Senate under a rules change that allows children up to age 1 to accompany their parents to votes.

  [Read more…]

‘Community Hero’ Attorney Steve Binder and San Diego’s Homeless Court Program

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Attorney Steve Binder recalls being in kindergarten in Flint, Michigan, and he and other children were sometimes asked what they would like to be when they grew up.  “We all replied doctor or lawyer or teacher. None of us responded ‘I want to be homeless and be a substance abuser.'”

And yet homeless populations are in every major city — and many are veterans.  In San Diego alone, the latest count for homelessness is over 9,000, 30 percent of whom are veterans.

Binder, a retiring deputy public defender, has just been named a Community Hero for his creation of a Homeless Court Program in 1989. The honor is given by KPBS and the National Conflict Resolution Center.   [Read more…]

Fake Teachers, Fake Schools, Fake Administrators; Time to End the Charade

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The destroy public education movement (DPE) has given us Teach for America (Fake Teachers), Relay Graduate School (Fake Schools) and from the Broad Superintendents Academy (Fake administrators). None of these entities are legitimately accredited, yet they are ubiquitous in America’s major urban areas.

There was a time in the United States of America when scoundrels perpetrating this kind of fraud were jailed and fined. Today, they are not called criminals; they are called philanthropists. As inequitable distribution of wealth increases, democratic principles and humane ideology recedes.

It is time to fight the 21st century robber-barons and cleanse our government of grifters and sycophants.   [Read more…]

Destroy Public Education Proponent Advocates Vouchers

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Late in March (2018), the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report on vouchers. CAP, a neoliberal leaning think tank, sums up Their report with this quote, “How bad are school vouchers for students? Far worse than most people imagine.”

After reading the report, I distributed it through my twitter feed. I am not a big fan of CAP, but felt the report was valuable except for their continued support for the charter school choice agenda. I guess they are only half as bad as DeVos.

The next day Corey A. DeAngelis, a policy analyst at the Cato Center for Educational Freedom, replied to my tweet with a link to his post refuting the CAP study.   [Read more…]

The Homeless Hoarder’s Hunger Book | National Poetry Month

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By Lyn Lloyd-Smith

The Homeless Hoarder’s Hunger Book

Into the coffee shops of idle eyes
She hikes her threads of tat-torn cloth
And residue of mildew breath.
She deftly drags a bulging pram,
Brimming with her rubbish child
Of cradled, cherished, bloated bags,
And crumpled faces off the road,
Her precious offspring
From the moon-blown streets.
  [Read more…]

Fifteen Years Later: Remembering the Invasion Of Baghdad | Readers Write

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By Kilian Colin

On April 9, 2003, I woke up to the sounds of bombs.

My bed was shaking and my sister, who was sleeping in the bed next to me, was awake crying and shaking in her bed. It was like an earthquake with very scary sounds. Shards of glass from the windows covered my bed. My parents ran into the room. My father said let’s go downstairs.

We lived in a 1-bedroom apartment on the second floor. We went downstairs and knocked on our neighbor’s door. He neighbor opened the door and let us inside his apartment without saying a word. He was clad only in underwear and held a copy of Quran in his hand. His name was Abo-Allaa.   [Read more…]

It Is My Fault | National Poetry Month

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San Diego Free Press continues its National Poetry Month coverage with the poem Stan Levin, a local activist with Veterans for Peace.

I was not a good kid,
not at home
not at school.
Once I slapped my first grade teacher
and she slapped me back.
I did not like school
and I did not like kids
who liked school
I’m not smart.
I did not like smart kids
Two high schools threw me out
I couldn’t get a good job.
As soon as I could
I left school
I left home
I left the neighborhood

and everything I was mad at.   [Read more…]

Oakland is California’s Destroy Public Education Petri Dish

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These are interesting times in Oakland, California. The public-school system is again teetering on the edge of financial collapse. The Destroy Public Education (DPE) movement has succeeded in privatizing more than a quarter of the district and has fomented financial turmoil. Concurrently, a dynamic young woman, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, has been selected as the new Superintendent of Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). On that news, Oakland Magazine’s headline blared, “Finally Some Stability.”

Mike Hutchinson, an education activist from Oakland, told Capital & Main that districts like OUSD are being used as a kind of policy Petri dish by charter supporters. It is how they are refining takeover strategies outlined for Los Angeles by the Broad charter expansion plan.   [Read more…]

An Open Letter to the Bellwether State | Dear Ohio, Part 4

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Dear Ohio,

This is my fourth letter to you, my sister state, for we are all sons and daughters of this democracy, however embattled it now may be. And it must be remembered that in modern times, no presidential candidate has reached the White House without Ohio’s blessing. So I come to you once again, with a heavy heart, to see if those among you who care so deeply for our country, can still embrace the notion that all of us belong.

There was 10-year-old boy I met one day in my work as a lawyer for low-income families. His mother brought him to me because he was deeply depressed. Two thoughts bumped about in my mind when I made his acquaintance. The first was that I had never met a boy of 10 who was deeply depressed. The second was that it seemed odd a mother should seek help for a depressed child from a lawyer.

The boy was a beautiful, brown-skinned, big-eyed, dark-haired youngster whose eyes followed closely the adult conversation. He sat uncomfortably in the chair across from my desk, while his mother described the problem.  He was facing charges in juvenile court for loitering and non-attendance at school. He didn’t want to get up in the morning, didn’t want to walk to the bus, couldn’t get through the school day, wasn’t interested in anything.   [Read more…]

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