Fred Klonsky’s PREA Prez Blog

Mother Jones

Since rebel union teachers and angry parents forced an agreement to turn L.A.’s Locke High School over to Green Dot and reorganize the school into small schools, the district has all but abandoned Locke and cut funding for non-police security aides. Now, just as Green Dot is about to assume responsibility, all hell has broken out. Small Talk

Usually around this time of year, budget discussions are in full swing. However, these are not usual times and this is certainly not a usual year. The House and Senate are seemingly moving forward with separate budget proposals for FY 09. This is similar to what happened last year, and the result was a session that didn’t end until December. IEA Capitol Buzz

School district leaders have a critical choice to make: Will their schools pro-actively model and teach the safe and appropriate use of these digital tools or will they reactively block them out and leave students and families to fend for themselves? Unfortunately, many schools are choosing to do the latter. As a technology advocate, I can think of no better way to highlight organizational unimportance than to block out the tools that are transforming the rest of society. Schools whose default stance is to prohibit rather than enable might as well plant a sign in front of their buildings that says, “Irrelevant to children’s futures.” Scott McCleod

John McCain decided that he couldn’t have Paul Manafort of the lobbying firm Davis, Manafort, and Freedman as chair of the Republican National Convention because the firm used to lobby for Ferdinand Marcos when Marcos was dictator of the Philippines. (Manafort also worked for Victor Yanukovich, the Kremlin puppet displaced running the Ukraine by the Orange Revolution, though not before his opponent had been poisoned with the evident involvement of the Ukrainian intelligence service.) Apparently the involvement of McCain’s campaign manager, the senior partner in Davis, Manafort, and Freedman, isn’t of any concern.

So McCain chose instead Doug Goodyear of the lobbying firm DCI, Inc. — which used to lobby for the SLORC, the tyranny that rules Burma. Part of its mission was to characterize as “falsehoods” complaints about systematic rape made in Burma. Those complaints were issued by the U.S. state department. Mark Kleiman

The Whitney Biennial is one of my favorite things about living in New York. I make my plans to see it with a sense of anticipation. Honestly, I’ve never seen a show at that museum - Biennial or not - that I haven’t found interesting. Lots of people have a hard time with contemporary art, and there’s plenty of it that I find ugly (but not in an enlightening way), meaningless, trying too hard to be meaningful, or just weird. I have little patience for sculpture or video installation, but I go and look at it all anyway, because next to the 10 foot brick of rainbow colored snot you might see something that startles. I still remember my favorite pieces from past shows like they are old friends - except I only met them once, for a few minutes. Ms. Frizzle