Detroit closing half of its public schools

Bobb told to consolidate services, close half of schools to end deficit

Jennifer Chambers / The Detroit News

Lansing— Swift and severe changes are coming to Detroit Public Schools.

State education officials have ordered Robert Bobb to immediately implement a financial restructuring plan that balances the district’s books by closing half of its schools, swelling high school class sizes to 60 students and consolidating operations.

More…

School allegedly used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home

BoingBoing

By Cory Doctorow at 11:49 PM February 17, 2010

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don’t know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I’m getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students’ clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.

Schools are in an absolute panic about kids divulging too much online, worried about pedos and marketers and embarrassing photos that will haunt you when you run for office or apply for a job in 10 years. They tell kids to treat their personal details as though they were precious.

But when schools take that personal information, indiscriminately invading privacy (and, of course, punishing students who use proxies and other privacy tools to avoid official surveillance), they send a much more powerful message: your privacy is worthless and you shouldn’t try to protect it.

Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (PDF) (Thanks, Roland!)

Detroit schools offer class in how to to work at Walmart

32% Inflation in UCLA Tuition Causes Near Riots (14 Arrested, 1 Tasered) [update]

Analysis from RevolutionNot

Basically, all state funded education institutions are looking down the barrel of this gun. This could be further exasperated by any corrections in the market that impact school endowments.

The point is that all institutions, companies, and individuals need to scale back. Our wealth is evaporating. It is being squandered on failed bailouts to failed companies. These actions are not creating jobs and this directly affects those in higher education because when the students are done with school… there are no places left for them except back home. Is an education worth it at this point? Being straddled with student debt for the next 30 years is not going to create wealth in the US.

This is just the beginning people. Things can only get worse as our dollar is intentionally or unintentionally devalued.

If the federal government decided tomorrow that it won’t be paying interest on its own debt money to the Federal Reserve, there would be enough cash for US government to finance all the state deficits twice over without any impact. We could also stop these pointless wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Drugs, etc) and pay for the state deficits 6-10 times over without having to monetize the gap. Also, instead of supporting fascism in America, would could let capitalism run free and let failed companies actually fail like they are supposed to. That bailout money could have financed state deficits 6-8 times over. If you use the real projections of $10 trillion that would be 100 times over.

What do we have to show for the bailouts? Well, a good number of those companies are going bad again and rightly so… their failed business model was never fixed with the bailouts. They only got some limited life support. The rest of us get our daily prozac from TV. Awesome.

Mean while, we are trying to stop the actual, and direly needed, correction. If it takes a depression to fix things then I’m all for it. The longer we put off the pain the worse it will be. If Greenspan stopped making bubbles in the 90s then that resulting recession would have been worse but we wouldn’t be in this situation.

So, my heart goes out to the students at UCLA… and, soon, all the students in America.

District sorry for homeschooler-terrorist link

Security drill concocted scenario with ‘Wackos Against Education’

Posted: September 23, 2004
1:00 am Eastern

© 2009 WorldNetDaily.com

A school district that participated in a terrorist-attack response drill apologized for using a scenario in which children were threated by a fictitious radical group that believes everyone should be homeschooled.

The made-up group, called Wackos Against Schools and Education, was invented by the local government emergency services director.

The Muskegon Area Intermediate School District, or MAISD, in Michigan said it “shared the disappointment of others” when it learned Tuesday’s preparedness drill referenced home schoolers as the fictitious group responsible for a mock disaster.

“We apologize,” the district said in a statement. “The MAISD and local districts were not aware of the scenario, and it was not shared with students or parents who took part in the exercise.”

Dan Stout, chief deputy of Muskegon County Emergency Services, said the scenario was constructed in his office.

A sample scenario was required in order to receive the necessary federal funding to stage the event, he said.

The district said the exercise was “unfortunately clouded by the choice of this fictional group.”

“As educators, we believe that the first and most important teacher is the parent, whether in home schools, public schools, or non-public schools,” the district said. “We all work together to ensure a safe and secure environment for our children to live and grow.”

The statement concluded: “We sincerely regret offending homeschool educators. We believe that all parents are educators and do important work at home with their children.”

The exercise in Muskegon, Mich., using $5,000 of homeland-security grant money, simulated a situation in which a bomb on board a bus full of children knocks the vehicle on its side and fills the passenger compartment with smoke.

Stout told WorldNetDaily the choice of the fictitious group certainly was not meant to offend homeschoolers.

“I don’t think there was any particular objective other than to just have a name,” he said in an interview immediately after the event Tuesday.

A WND reader who saw a story about the exercise in the Muskegon Chronicle, however, said he was “outraged” at the characterization of the terrorists.

Stout said the general idea for the type of group came from the website of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which suggests group names such as “Wackos Against Recreation” and other such “causes.”

In a written apology issued yesterday, Stout said the fictional group he concocted had nothing to do with any real homeschool population.

“Homeschool students and former students are a very important part of our nation,” he said. ‘This scenario will not be used again.”