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"Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss'd to me

I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door."

Hundreds of Oregon Corporations Escape the Minimum Tax

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Half of the US Is Broke

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The myth of the Christian country

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“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

FDR, 2nd Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 1937

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Middle East friendship chart

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Corporations enriching shareholders

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Facts not fiction on universal gun background checks

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"Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere"

Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The GOP - Not One of US.

Wall Street, our new criminal class...       

   Business in the USA is sitting on $2 trillion dollars refusing to invest their own funds in expanding and hiring workers.  

   When one adds to this the reserves that banks, equity firms and hedge funds have - the picture is clear - "capitalism in the USA is on strike." 

   The engine of our economy - the spirit of entrepreneurship is not in evidence today.  So much for business being dynamic and risk taking. 

   They hire K- Street lobbyists and their ilk at the state level because they are averse to risk taking - pleading for tax breaks, tax credits and endless loopholes. 

   The "business of business" in America today is not about job creation, it's about wealth hoarding and redistribution from the middle class to the top 1%. 

   So for those who claim government doesn't create jobs, my response is that business doesn't either until given "corporate welfare" by government.  The fact is that the private and public sector are highly integrated, something the anti-tax, anti-government Tea Party types don't understand. 

   Job creation requires public/private partnerships but the benefits of such collaboration should go to the 99% not just the 1%.  

 

RAD'S

WEBSITE PICKS: 


 

  • A Middle East View      

Rami G. Khouri

  • RealClearPolitics:

Realclearpolitics

  • Jim Hightower:   

Jimhightower.com

  • Robert Reich:

Robert Reich

  • Thomas Friedman: 

Friedman Column

  • Nicholas Kristof: 

Kristof Column

Oregon's Motto: 

She flies with her own wings! 


Hard Times in Oregon: 

Hardtimes

The Oregon story - the rich get richer, the poor and middle class lose ground.  Check this front page Oregonian article out. 

Oregon wage gap widens

Homelessness in Oregon - a call to action

Chuck Currie The crisis of homelessness


  

      Oregon's coming 34th out of 41 states in the Obama "Race to the Top" illustrates the failure of leadership from Governor Kitzhaber and his predecessors as they have built an educational bridge to nowhere called high stakes testing.

   Instead of being in a race to the top we seem to be dumpster diving to the bottom despite doing education reform since 1991.  Insanity is termed doing the same thing over and over again.  When can we put a fork in this stupidity? 

   To confuse matters more the Oregonian's editorial board has pontificated that this was a lost opportunity to get federal funding for innovation.  How firing principals and teachers equals innovation is a mystery to me.   

   The way to reform schools is to reduce class sizes, to encourage teacher collaboration and to support their continued education.  High stakes testing and performance based assessment of teachers are NOT the answer!    

   If you want students to succeed you first have to resolve the issues they confront before they come to school.  Children who face poverty, hunger, homelessness, health care issues and family instability require wrap around services for them and their families, 24/7.   

   Every child needs a safe home of their own and parents who know how to be good parents.   

There is only one way to address this impending crisis.  Schools must have a stable source of funding. Until that happens - we will limp from crisis to crisis.   

 

 

    

    Why does the richest nation in the world have the moral blight of homeless people?

Invisible People

http://www.npr.org


 Homelessness

    Connecting the dots between homelessness & hunger in Oregon and Washington County: 

Homelessness:  

•    The faces of the homeless are families with children, single men and women, vets, and many who are impaired. It is estimated that in Washington County up to 56% of homelessness occurs to families.

Hunger:

•    Hunger is highest among single mother households (10%) and poor families (15%) as well as renters, unemployed workers and minority households. 

     In Washington County, Oregon's "economic engine," the divide between the affluent and the working poor continues.  We have a 19,000 unit gap in affordable low income rental housing.  County political and business leaders are indifferent to this crisis...   

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If you want to e-mail me "comments" use my Yahoo back up e-mail address russdondero@yahoo.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RAD Lines

See my FACEBOOK @ Russ

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Trump & The Mob

http-//www.politico.com#13C5A6C


Trump's role models are Vladmir Putin and Benito Mussolini.  He has contempt for our checks and balances system.  He wants to "rule" not govern like a strong man, a despot.  He will shredd the Constitution anytime he feels the urge to do so and like all despots he only listens to his inner circle.  And he is paranoid and narcissistic. 

     

Hundreds of Oregon Corporations Escape the Minimum Tax

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Half of the US Is Broke

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The myth of the Christian country

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Housing Needs in Oregon 

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"There are men who believe that democracy... is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate [and that] tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future..." 

FDR, 3rd Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 1940

  • "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild


  • Miguel de Cervantes, from The Duke - "I accuse you of being an idealist, a bad poet and an honest man."  Cervantes' response - "Guilty as charged, I have never had the courage to believe in nothing."   from Man of La Mancha  


Professor Kingfield, from the Paper Chase

   "I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you." 

- George Bernard Shaw

 

BLOGS:

From the Left Wing:

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman - The New York Times

Democracy Now
democracynow.org

The Daily Kos

dailykos.com

Blue Oregon

blueoregon.com

 

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." 

- Emilie Buchwald 

 


    "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." 

- Justice John Paul Stevens, Bush v. Gore, 2001

    The state of our union - check out the map, it's a reality check for those who can't figure out why people are so ticked off... 

americanobserver

 



"Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war"

- John Adams

"Loyalty to country always.  Loyalty to government when it deserves it."  

- Mark Twain  

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  

- George Santayana 

"The love of one's country is a natural thing.  But why should love stop at the border?" 

- Pablo Casals

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." 

- William Butler Yeats  

 

"You see things; and you say, 'Why?' 

But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"  

- George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah" (1921) 

"...the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society...  The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government..."  

- James Madison, Federalist Papers #11 

"Why … should we have government? Why not each individual take to himself the whole fruit of his labor, without having any of it taxed away?”   

The legitimate object of government, is to do for the people whatever they need to have done, but which they can not do, at all, or can not do, so well, for themselves – in their separate and individual capacities … There are many such things … roads, bridges and the like; providing for the helpless young and afflicted; common schools … the criminal and civil [justice] departments."    

- Abraham Lincoln 

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society  

- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 

"Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates, but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole..." 

- Edmund Burke  

“It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again, and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.  These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions.”  

- Jonathan Swift 

A RAD rhetorical question - Were Madison & Marx "Marxists"?  

 

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments."   

- James Madison

 

FYI:  

Squareapace has closed the "comments" section on my blog as a way around this contact me via my Yahoo e-mail address posted on the left sidebar...   

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 


 

 

  

 


  

 

« LINE OF THE DAY | Main | LINE OF THE DAY »
Monday
Apr252005

OREGON'S CIM/CAM SCAM

school kids.jpgI was on a sabbatical leave in '91 when the Educational Act for the 21st Century was passed by Oregon's legislature and signed by Governor Roberts. Oregonians love to be on the cutting edge of social change.  We invented the initiative, referendum and recall in the early 20th century, in the '60s under Governor McCall we passed The Bottle Bill, saved Oregon's beaches and in '73 passed Senate Bill 100 - setting up Oregon's land use planning system.  In the '90s under Governor Kitzhaber we created the Oregon Health Care Plan. 
    But sometimes, as the saying goes - "be careful what you wish for - you may get it."  Such caution was thrown to the wind as school reform politics came online in Oregon under the leadership of Vera Katz, then a state legislator - to be implemented by a succession of Superintendents of Public Instruction beginning with Norma Paulus. 
    The CIM - Certificate of Intermediate Mastery although originally designed to create 'outcomes based' learning benchmarks, including portfolios and family service centers in public schools - gradually morphed into a testing regime at grades 3, 5, 8 and 10.  Now with NCLB - we have a 'teaching to the test' system throughout grades 1-10 in Oregon and the nation.  Now the State Board of Education is about to march up the next San Juan Hill of educational reform and require high school graduates in Oregon pass the CAM - the Certificate of Advanced Mastery, yet another series of mandated tests. 
    The rationale of both CIM and CAM advocates is to create a 'world class' work force in Oregon.  Of course that was the original intent in '91. What happened on the way to 'educational nirvana'?  Well the passage of Measures 5, 47 and 50 - which have gutted Oregon's ability to fund current operations - let alone the CIM/CAM.  And the disinvestment has forced local schools to absorb the cost of implementing the CIM, taking money out of the regular curriculum. 
    Classroom time devoted to 'teaching to the tests' is taken away from the 3 Rs, the sciences, social sciences and the arts.  In '91 - the cost of the CIM/CAM was rarely mentioned, but some educated guessing put it at @ $1 billion over a decade.  Needless to say no such investment was made.  But the key is that the CIM/CAM regime was NEVER presented with ANY evidence [research] to back up assumptions behind the plan. I was in the Capital during the debate.  You only saw Vera - nobody else.  In fact the leadership of the OEA was told to 'take a hike' and only handpicked teachers, superintendents and other community leaders were welcomed into the discussion to implement the concept after the legislation was passed.
    The legislature considered the idea a 'free ride' because there was no fiscal impact attached to the concept.  Since that time, Oregon kids and schools have struggled to meet the standards of the CIM. The costs of implementing the plan have been put on the shoulders of local schools. The CAM has been on the shelf except in the case of a few school districts. The political and corporate leadership which has backed the CIM/CAM continue to sing the praises of the plan - despite clear evidence of its failure to move Oregon students ahead of the pack - in the nation or beyond. 
    The Oregon Progress Board last week concluded that K-12 achievement was declining.  The assertion of Katz et al who promised the CIM/CAM would take us to the educational 'promised land' by the turn of the 21st century is still borne. We are years behind schedule - and the goal posts are continually pushed back. But CIM/CAM never made educational sense to those closest to it - teachers, students and parents! 
    Neo-cons are in love with theories of 'market driven' public policy; neo-libs are in love with 'accountability'.  Educational research tells us that success in school is Driven factors like 1) parental involvement in their children's learning, e.g. reading to pre-schoolers 0-3 is fundamental; 2) children coming from safe homes and safe neighborhoods; and 3) attending schools with small classes with 4) well trained teachers who are mentored and encouraged to continue their own education.  The one factor which seems to relate most directly to success in school is coming from a 'middle class home'.
    As long as kids come to school hungry, from dysfunctional families, from the ranks of the poor (1 of 4 Oregon kids) - success in school will NOT be sustainable, no matter how much we test them, even the CIM data shows this. We've put millions of dollars annually into a testing scheme which bankrolls the Oregon Department of Education and their corporate clients which invent the tests. Business wins, not kids, not teachers, not schools.     The failure of so many kids, teachers and schools to pass the test regime [failure rates very from 20% to 80%  depending on schools and grade level] simply passes the blame to them not to the real culprit - politicians on both sides of the political fence who are looking for easy fixes.  It's the old blame the 'victim' game. Who are we kidding?  The CIM/CAM are a sham.
    Move families into safe affordable homes with family wage jobs and you will solve the so-called educational gap.  That's just what we did at the end of WW II by investing in the GI Bill bringing on the most significant growth in our economy ever.  It's about shifting money from GUNS to BUTTER.  You get what you pay for.  When you starve schools of funding, you set students up for failure.
    Does anyone think that a battery of standarized tests given over several days, several times per year really measure one's ability?  At best good 'test takers' are just that 'test takers' not critical thinkers, writers, problem solvers.  Why do college admissions officers look at a student's GPA, SAT or ACT scores, essays, counselor recommendations and the ratings of high schools?  Nobody looks at CIM or CAM scores! They are merely diversions from the hard job of teaching kids the knowledge, critical thinking and collaboration skills necessary for survival in the 21st century.
    Why do Oregon's corporate and political leaders believe ONE SIZE FITS ALL?  Do you REALLY think President Bush could pass his own NCLB test in Texas - the TASS test?  The way he fractures syntax one wonders how he ever got into Yale, let alone graduated?  Answer - he was a 'legacy' admit... To make the critique bi-partisan, the 'policy wonk' who helped Vera create Oregon's testing regime was the same 'wonk' who advised Hillary Clinton on health care reform in '92! I guess this time it was 2 strikes and you're out.  And Vera, Norma et al have never been classroom teachers! 
    How about a task force of K-12 teachers to study how corporate Oregon's can survive in the global market place?  Come on folks, what's the excuse for continuing to promote a costly hoax?  

Reader Comments (1)

Educators are always looking for the "silver bullet" that will solve all of the problems and make all of the students brilliant. Having taught for forty years, I don't believe in "silver bullets"-- the enemy is human nature!
April 25, 2005 | Unregistered CommenterWard N. Mowry

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