Dave Chandler

Let the Billionaires Run Our Schools?

Get out of the way students, parents, teachers and local elected school boards -- the educrats employed by the billionaire foundations of Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Wal-Mart family know what is best for your child's education.

That is the unspoken but genuine theme we are hearing from the editorial page of the Denver Post and education 'leaders' in Colorado and across the nation.

They call themselves "reformers, but let's be clear about what the truth is: the corporatization of our public education system is the status quo -- they masquerade as "reformers", but in Colorado, for instance, this philosophy has been in place since Roy Romer was governor, over fifteen years ago.

The charter 'movement' is in large measure now a scheme to create so-called public-private partnerships out of our schools, that is, you pay and a non-profit corporation comes in and runs the classroom. The 'Race to the Top' lottery set-up by Obama's Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, is a way to impose low-wage teachers, a national curriculum, national standards, and national student records data collection on all of our schools. Make no mistake, these are essentially the same policies that the so-called 'accountability' reforms started in the mid-1990s and that were institutionalized in Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' law in 2001.

The 'reform' has been in the process of being implemented for over a decade and still the education of our young people lags and stagnates -- it is time to boot this failing 'reform' philosophy and try something new.

But ... the educrats and politicians are predictably under the mesmerizing sway of much, much money, courtesy of a gang of billionaires and their ideologically corporate philanthropic foundations.

The article link below is a 'must read' for anyone attempting a greater understanding of what is going wrong in our public schools.

We desperately need more decentralization of decision-making in education, more local control, more empowerment of parents, more listening to our children as students, more freedom for teachers to teach, and more emphasis on learning as a joyful and meaningful experience. And we also need less obsession with money as the only solution to all problems, less high stakes testing, less tyrannical administrators, less invasive data collection on students, and less brow-beating from Washington, D.C. and the penthouse suites of billionaire philanthropists telling us that we don't know how to best educate our own children.

Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools | Joanne Barkan/DissentMagazine.org

Pop!!! Go Your Fire District Taxes!

Our 'tax and spend' Arvada Fire Protection District is portrayed in stark black-and-white as our property tax notices for 2011 are received this week from the Jeffco county treasurer.

Homeowners in Arvada and the district will note that the tax levy for Jefferson County government's entire general fund stands at 16.0990. The AFPD levy has now risen to 14.8120. The difference: only 1.287 mills.

Taxpayers of the Arvada Fire Protection District -- basically one city of just over 100,000 -- are paying nearly as much in taxes for just one government service that it takes to run the general services of the whole county government with a population of about 550,000 people.

And remember, folks, this is a permanent tax hike ... and when or if the assessed value of your home rises, so will your tax bill!

Pop!!!
Go the taxes ... and no doubt Pop!!! will go the spending by the AFPD's board of directors.

Teen Marijuana Use: Guest Post

In reference to:

Experts Worry That Medical-Pot Laws Promote Teen Use | Denver Post-January 1, 2011

Substance-abuse experts, alarmed by the rapid growth of Colorado's medical-marijuana industry, are intensifying their efforts to study the industry's impact on drug use.

The experts say they especially worry that increasingly permissive attitudes surrounding marijuana use might be leading to higher teenage drug use and addiction rates. ...

By Kate Plagenz-Chandler

Studying the impact of the medical-marijuana industry on teenager’s use of the drug is certainly one way to confirm or dispel the concerns voiced by substance-abuse-prevention workers in the medical marijuana debate.

However, it may also be useful to consider that when teenagers obtain their pot from someone with a medical-marijuana card, it decreases their purchase of marijuana from criminal drug dealers, whose source of the weed is more than likely deadly Mexican drug cartels.

Yes, it is illegal for teenagers to be smoking pot and the people who are providing them with the drug are acting outside the law, but the marijuana they are using is grown legally. As a regulated substance, medical marijuana is known to be a quality controlled product, unlike what may be purchased elsewhere.

This would suggest that just as liquor stores are socially sanctioned purveyors of alcohol, so too have medical-marijuana dispensaries become socially sanctioned sources of pot. As such, dispensaries provide teenagers with a way to “inhale” that does not make them morally complicit in the death of innocent people and decreases their exposure to questionable street grade marijuana and possible criminal violence.

No matter where pot comes from, the article reported that experts worry that “increasingly permissive attitudes” are contributing to higher teenage marijuana use. As with any drug, be it medical or recreational, be it aspirin, or alcohol, or pot, and no matter what a person’s age, it seems to me that the focus of discussion should be about informed behavior and personal responsibility rather than prohibition and criminalization.

If smoking pot becomes as socially acceptable as drinking beer then anyone choosing to use either drug must be a knowledgeable consumer. They need to know how the drug effects the body and the mind, the possible side effects, and the signs of addiction. Many adults part take of alcohol in a responsible manner and the same can be done with marijuana.

As for young adults, while abstaining may be preferable, as their brains are still developing, research could be done to see whether allowing them to occasionally use marijuana or alcohol within the home and with parental supervision, leads to learned moderation and less overall drug use. As it is now, making alcohol off limits until the age of twenty-one has proven to be a law that is frequently, and sometimes tragically, ignored.