Viktor Orbán’s pet university is all about propaganda – I know, I was there

Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), the conservative Hungarian educational institution funded by Viktor Orbán’s rightwing government, has been expanding internationally. It opened a centre in Brussels, bought a university in Vienna and has plans for new branches in other western European cities, including London.

I did a fellowship with MCC in Budapest last year and am concerned about the institution’s expansion. Its views are closely aligned with those of Orbán, and it funds academics who disseminate Orbán’s positions. In a way, it serves to extend his influence across Europe and beyond.

‘Education Must Be Available to Every Child’: An Interview with Jitu Brown

Jitu Brown is a community organizer who serves as national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance, a grassroots education advocacy group. Brown has been an education activist for the past twenty-six years. Beginning as a volunteer with youth programs on Chicago’s South Side, he became a board member of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization in 1993. We spoke by phone in early November.

Q: How did you become an activist?

Jitu Brown: I’m from the South Side of Chicago, educated in the Chicago public schools. I sort of flamed out playing college football and was in the music industry. I had the choice of either signing with MCA Records as a solo artist or doing what was pulling at my spirit, which was community work. And I made the best decision of my life. I left the music industry and I started volunteering with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, doing youth program work.

Where are Charlie and Dave, Mrs. Koch’s two mischievous boys?While the Koch brothers have stayed out of the national limelight since the White House was acquired by Trump and Company, that doesn’t mean the two right-wing billionaire brats are any less active in trying to supplant American democracy with their little laissez-fairyland plutocracy. In fact, in late June, you could’ve found them in one of their favorite hideaways with about 400 other uber-wealthy rascals, plotting some political hijinks for next year’s elections.

What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?

Leigh Robinson was out for a lunchtime walk one brisk day during the spring of 2013 when a call came from the principal at her school. Will, a third-grader with a history of acting up in class, was flipping out on the playground. He’d taken off his belt and was flailing it around and grunting. The recess staff was worried he might hurt someone. Robinson, who was Will’s educational aide, raced back to the schoolyard.

Will was “that kid.” Every school has a few of them: that kid who’s always getting into trouble, if not causing it. That kid who can’t stay in his seat and has angry outbursts and can make a teacher’s life hell. That kid the other kids blame for a recess tussle. Will knew he was that kid too. Ever since first grade, he’d been coming to school anxious, defensive, and braced for the next confrontation with a classmate or teacher.

School Board, Sell Your Mall? That's No Way to Fund Education

You couldn't find a better example of B.C.'s shoddy approach to school funding than Education Minister Mike Bernier's half-baked, last-minute proposal that the Vancouver School Board sell Kingsgate Mall to cover part of its budget deficit.

The ongoing dispute between the provincial government and the board is, on one level, simple enough. The school trustees went through the budget process and decided that meeting student needs, after some cuts, would cost $502 million in the coming fiscal year.

To Tackle Inequality, Start with BC's Two-Tier Education

We don't talk much about two-tier education.

Two-tier health care, sure. Governments reject the idea that a sick child from a wealthy home should get better treatment than a child from a poor home.

But B.C. governments have been happy to let parents with money buy their children a big educational head start over the equally bright poor kid a few neighbourhoods away.

Charles Koch’s Disturbing High School Economics Project Teaches ‘Sacrificing Lives for Profits’

Charles Koch is known for being CEO of industrial giant Koch Industries and a chief financier of the massive conservative political operation he runs with his brother David. In recent years, student activists and investigative journalists have exposed another of Koch’s hats: mega-donor to hundreds of colleges and universities, often funding free-market-focused academic centers housed at public and private schools alike. One Koch-funded program is advocating cutthroat economics to grade school students, even sacrificing lives for profits.

Who Wins as Endless Shortfalls Destroy Public Education?

It's a cruel rite of spring in British Columbia. School boards are told by government what money they will get for the coming year, and by their own figuring, it's not enough.

The trustees must then decide whom to sacrifice: perhaps teachers, by closing programs; perhaps a community, by closing its school.

Or perhaps themselves, if they refuse to sacrifice anyone else.

Cut Admin to Save School Costs? How Original, Premier

With the release of the Vancouver School Board's preliminary budget proposals for 2016-17, we are into yet another spiral of cutbacks and recriminations.

The VSB proposal, an 88-page document, sets out yet another bleak prospect: a shortfall of over $27 million. That means program cuts, layoffs, and school closures. The board will hold a series of meetings this month to hear from stakeholders about which programs, which people, and which schools face the axe. As T.S. Eliot said, "April is the cruellest month," and it will also be among the bitterest.

Paddles, Stun Guns and Chemical Sprays: How US Schools Discipline Students

"Brian was a regular kid," longtime communications professional Kathy Parrent says, "a boy who liked to make everyone in our third grade classroom laugh. One day he said something smart-alecky, and our teacher grabbed him by the collar, lifted him up, opened up the coat closet, threw him in and locked the door. The rest of us sat in stunned horror, terrified. Brian immediately began banging and screaming, 'please, please, let me out,' but the teacher kept him in there for what felt like an eternity."

As Parrent speaks, her voice breaks and it is clear that Brian is still vivid in her mind's eye. "I remember that he was wearing a white shirt and when the teacher finally opened the door, he was covered in blood. My first thought was that he must have cut himself, but no. He'd had a nosebleed, something that happened to him all the time. It was awful. He might have deserved to be reprimanded; I don't know. What I do know is that more than 50 years later, I can still see the blood."

So the privately educated are the new underclass? Spare me the sob story

I have lived in Britain – mainly on, sometimes off – for 25 years, but there are still two things about this country I don’t understand. Number one: why do so many of your classic TV shows have such bizarre titles? Last Of The Summer Wine? Only Fools And Horses? Can you imagine what it was like to move here in the 90s, from the land of the prosaically titled Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, to a country where one of the most popular shows was called Drop The Dead Donkey?

Stop Downplaying The Underfunding Of B.C. Schools

Dear Mike Bernier,

I write to you today regarding your recent comments about our public schools in B.C. and how you believe there are only a few small groups who believe there are funding issues.

I have to say that I am both shocked and disheartened to know that the very person charged with overseeing our public schools can be so blind to the very obvious issues plaguing our public education system.

Public Elementary School Allegedly Waged Shame Campaign Against Students Who Don’t Believe In God

A lawsuit filed on behalf of a non-religious family details a series of actions by teachers and administrators that, even if they were not designed specifically to humiliate the family’s children, certainly should be expected to have that effect.

According to a complaint filed on behalf of the family, who is identified as the “Does,” teachers at the Swainsboro Primary School in Swainsboro, Georgia “regularly led their classes in Christian prayer,” a practice that violates the Constitution’s First Amendment. When the Doe parents complained that their children’s kindergarten and first grade teachers were leading the class in unconstitutional prayers, their teachers allegedly “told the Doe children to leave their classrooms and sit in the hallway while the rest of the class prayed.” One of the children, a first grader, said that the teacher “used her mean voice” when she told the child to leave the classroom. Meanwhile, Cel Thompson, a kindergarten teacher, allegedly “announced to the entire kindergarten class that Jamie [Doe] was not allowed to pray to God and then told Jamie to wait in the hallway while the rest of the class prayed.”

Prison Education Reduces Recidivism by Over 40 Percent. Why Aren’t We Funding More of It?

Prison isn’t the most intellectually stimulating environment, but the dimmest corners of the criminal justice system may actually be a perfect place to liberate an otherwise wasted mind. A new initiative by the White House to issue Pell Grants to incarcerated students is about to test just how truly corrective our so-called corrections system can be.

The plan to extend Pell Grant access in prisons is described as a “limited pilot program” authorized through a federal financial aid waiver program under the Higher Education Act. Incarcerated adults could apply for grants of up to $5,775 for tuition and related expenses, at college-level programs offered in prison facilities nationwide. Designed to allow for studying long-term effects of education on recidivism, the program moves toward restoring access to Pell Grants for incarcerated people, which Congress removed in the mid-1990s.

Schools as Punishing Factories: The Handcuffing of Public Education

The Nobel Prize-winning author Ngugi wa Thiong'o has insisted rightfully that "Children are the future of any society," adding, "If you want to maim the future of any society, you simply maim the children." (1)

Native American Students In Utah Are Getting Pushed Out Of School At Alarming Rates

Native American students in Utah may be getting referred to law enforcement agencies before they even know how to read.

Fifty-five Native American students in kindergarten through sixth grade were referred to police officers during the 2011-2012 school year in Utah. By comparison, not a single white student in this age group received this action, even though the state educates significantly more white kids, according to a new report from the University of Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law Public Policy Clinic.

Physical Education Takes a Hit: Schools' Emphasis on Testing Is Making Kids Sick

A 2013 study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health laid the problem out in stark terms: Fewer than 50 percent of US youth currently get the recommended amount of moderate to vigorous exercise they need to become healthy adults. Not surprisingly, the amount of movement deemed necessary varies by age; the US Department of Health and Human Services suggests 150 minutes per week for elementary school children and 225 minutes a week for junior and senior high school students.

Indeed, whether it is through game playing during recess, attending regular gym classes, playing a sport, taking dance, karate, Pilates or yoga classes, skateboarding, biking or running, the upshot is the same: Kids, experts agree, should be physically active and should not spend all of their time sitting in class or lazing in front of a TV or electronic screen at home.

But many do.

Chiefs Urge United Nations To Investigate First Nations Education

WINNIPEG - Manitoba chiefs want the United Nations to investigate aboriginal access to education.

Grand Chief Derek Nepinak, with the Assembly of Manitoba chiefs, says he has sent a formal invitation to the UN's special rapporteur on the right to education.

He says Canadians receive some of the best education in the world, but that's not the case for aboriginal children.

Nepinak says First Nation communities are chronically underfunded when it comes to education.

He says the Canadian government is almost certainly breaching international standards and obligations to provide equal access to education for aboriginal children.

The UN's special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples visited Canada in 2013 and called for an improvement in the living conditions of First Nations.

Original Article
Source: huffingtonpost.ca/
Author: CP

With Bill 11, BC's School Wars Keep on Raging

The B.C. government has launched yet another school war with Bill 11 and the continued underfunding of school districts. It's going to be an ugly one, in large part because the BC Liberals are still trying to win a stupid feud that W.A.C. Bennett started 50 years ago.

As discussed in yesterday's Tyee column, Bill 11 appears to threaten student privacy, cripple school boards' autonomy, and remove teachers' control over their own professional development. The head of the B.C. Teachers' Federation, Jim Iker, told The Tyee he's baffled by the bill. Why would a government that just achieved a hard-fought contract settlement with teachers introduced it? "I thought they wanted labour peace," Iker said.

9 Billionaires Are About to Remake New York’s Public Schools—Here’s Their Story

Hedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson stands at a Harvard club podium in midtown Manhattan, facing a room full of investors eating eggs and bacon, and eager to learn more about charter schools. The walls of the wood-paneled room are lined with the portraits of Tilson’s Harvard forefathers. Above the podium where Tilson stands hangs an ornamental gold ship, swaying. In the corner of the room is a large screen, on which the logos of the day’s sponsors, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, float like guardian angels. Two large stone fireplaces dominate the west end of the room. Their exaggerated mantelpieces are each decorated with two empty crests and a laurel—symbols of power drained of any purpose.