This made my day.
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All of them? Every single one?
Is that Pink Floyd played forward or backward? If it’s in the south, I’d guess backward.
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I don’t think it’s my finest work, but I needed to fill the Pink Floyd vacuum before someone else did.
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And now I have to…
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I think put DeVos in that “Trump” bubble and we’ve got a winner.
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The voucher program in NY has been called a success.
Education is mostly a state and county-level thing. I’m not that worried about what will happen under Trump.
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So…I just finished paying some parking tickets (those things are like super-duty remoras of dry land, they don’t EVER go away), maybe $100 worth. I couldn’t mess with my Driver’s license, my vehicle tags/registration, and probably more stuff without having to pay those fines.
So. HOW IN THE FUCK does someone simply walk away from $5.2 million in fines from an election commission? And it’s rhetorical, because the answer is: lawyers. Lawyers are to wealthy people as the Mega Mushroom is to Mario, and that’s fucked up.
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Yes, what’s the worst that could happen to education across the country after appointing a Secretary of Education who wants to eliminate or further hobble the (minimally) standards-setting federal department she’s put in charge of?
[On a related note, what’s the worst that could happen to the WSJ’s brand if the crazytown op-ed writers were allowed to take over the paper’s regular reporting duties, too?]
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It’s a bit more complicated than that. Betsy’s dad was Edgar Prince, founder of Prince Corp, a good-sized automotive parts supplier. (Edgar was, BTW, a self-made hundreds-of-millions-aire, so you can imagine how much of the bootstraps shtick Betsy grew up with.) Her mom is Elsa Prince, noted disruptor of gay marriage efforts (as in at least half-a-mil in donations to defeating Prop 8 in California and a similar measure in Michigan) and supporter of numerous other conservative Xian causes.
Together, the two parents helped bankroll, found, and lead orgs like Family Research Council/Focus on Family; Betsy no doubt picked up the conservative activist bug from her folks. (Not quite sure what led her brother Erik to found Blackwater – happily for me I’m a few years older than the kids, so never had to deal with them growing up.)
Prince Corp – sold as JCI when Ed died, now JCI Tyco in an Irish-based tax dodge that makes Apple look like an amateur – continues to employ thousands in the West Michigan area and elsewhere. Betsy’s husband’s biz, Amway, was also a huge employer in the area for, oh…at least 20+ years, running production lines for their stuff plus contracting production for major brands; again, thousands of good jobs. (Offshoring tanked most of the factory work, but Amway still employs many many white collars in engineering, marketing/packaging, translation, legal, etc.)
It’s a generational story of great good and energetic evil, as the kids of self-made fortunes seek their own answers to the age-old question of, “Let’s see what we can fuck with next!”
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Erik Prince’s sister … and I thought this couldn’t get any worse.
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Will the Department of Education be sending in Blackwater to take over schools with poor test scores?
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Suburbia is what you mean, isn’t it?
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After Erik Prince’s original brand became a source of shame, the company’s name was changed to “Academi.” So … perhaps? At the very least they’ll be getting federal endorsements for K-12 security contracts.
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You are (¿deliberately?) conflating two recentish “innovations” to American education:
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charter schools, new schools with lowered accreditation and oversight, and
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voucher programs, in which select students are given scholarships from the general education fund to existing private schools.
The problems with these two are quite different and the fact that the students selected to get vouchers would have improved outcomes should not be surprising. One should also consider the outcome for the students left behind in schools whose budgets are decreased by more than one student’s worth.
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Accurate would be “anti-public education”, and public education being what she will oversee I’d say calling her anti-education may be overstating her position, but it’s also somewhat accurate relative to her proposed new job.
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