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Students, Beware: Private Student-Loan Companies Are Not Your Friends | The Nation

6 Sep

This year, as these students prepare to sign away their futures, they would do well to consider a report released by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). On July 20, the agency designed by Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren released “Private Student Loans,” a devastating expose of the $150 billion private student loan industry, one of the banking world’s Goliaths. The report is both an official account of private lenders’ underhanded “subprime-style” tactics as well as a sharp warning against taking out private loans that put students at risk of financial ruin.

via Students, Beware: Private Student-Loan Companies Are Not Your Friends | The Nation.

One of the grievances from the Monpelier Manifesto: “A higher education system that is becoming so expensive that only the rich will be able to attend college; all others look forward to debt slavery.”

 

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Raising the Ritalin Generation – NYTimes.com

19 Aug

It struck us as strange, wrong, to dose our son for school. All the literature insisted that Ritalin and drugs like it had been proved “safe.” Later, I learned that the formidable list of possible side effects included difficulty sleeping, dizziness, vomiting, loss of appetite, diarrhea, headache, numbness, irregular heartbeat, difficulty breathing, fever, hives, seizures, agitation, motor or verbal tics and depression. It can slow a child’s growth or weight gain. Most disturbing, it can cause sudden death, especially in children with heart defects or serious heart problems.

More than likely it IS wrong to drug kids for school. There are lots of things wrong with primary school. One of them is that kids don’t get as much physical activity as they used to, and what we got was not enough. Schools don’t have recess as often as they used to. No wonder kids get fidgety. Rough-and-tumble-play is built into the mammalian life-world. Our bodies and brains need and want it. Also, school is so boring.

For a different perspective on ADHD see Music and the Prevention and Amelioration of ADHD: A Theoretical Perspective.

via Raising the Ritalin Generation – NYTimes.com.

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Harkin Report Condemns For-Profit Colleges – NYTimes.com

31 Jul

According to the report, which was posted online in advance, taxpayers spent $32 billion in the most recent year on companies that operate for-profit colleges, but the majority of students they enroll leave without a degree, half of those within four months.

“In this report, you will find overwhelming documentation of exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes, taxpayer dollars spent on marketing and pocketed as profit, and regulatory evasion and manipulation,” Mr. Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a statement on Sunday. “These practices are not the exception — they are the norm. They are systemic throughout the industry, with very few individual exceptions.”

via Harkin Report Condemns For-Profit Colleges – NYTimes.com.

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Outsourcing isn’t the problem – Salon.com

19 Jul

What’s going on? Put simply, America isn’t educating enough of our people well enough to get American-based companies to do more of their high-value added work here.

Our K-12 school system isn’t nearly up to what it should be. American students continue to do poorly in math and science relative to students in other advanced countries. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Sweden, and France all top us.

American universities continue to rank high but many are being starved of government funds and are having trouble keeping up. More and more young Americans and their families can’t afford a college education. China, by contrast, is investing like mad in world-class universities and research centers.

Here’s the nut:

The core problem isn’t outsourcing. It’s that the prosperity of America’s big businesses – which are really global networks that happen to be headquartered here – has become disconnected from the well-being of most Americans.

 

via Outsourcing isn’t the problem – Salon.com.

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What’s a Community Garden Community?

9 Jul

Two questions, closely related, but not the same:

What’s a community garden?

What’s a garden community?

So, what IS a community garden? I suppose it’s a garden that, in some sense, belongs to a community rather than belonging to a private individual or organization.

In what sense CAN a garden belong to the community? There is the legal sense. This requires that the community form itself into a legally recognized organization and that that organization, in turn, owns the land on which the garden is created. But, legal ownership of the land is not necessary nor sufficient. The land can be donated, and it need not be donated to anyone or any group in particular. It need only be made available.

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Gardens require labor. This IS necessary. Where does that labor come from? Why, from the community. People donate their labor to the garden, creating the beds, planting, weeding, watering, aerating, and harvesting. Where do the fruits go, the vegetables, flowers, herbs, and, yes, fruits? To the community.

And so it is with the Lafayette Community Learning Garden in Jersey City, NJ. While is has been organized out of the Morris Canal Community Development Corporation, MC CDC doesn’t own the land. The land has been donated, if only for a couple of years, by a local developer. Local businesses provided materials, supplies, food and drink on work days, and plants. The community itself has been providing the labor. Some people knew about the garden before ground-breaking and signed up ahead of time. Others pitched in when they saw things happening. Continue reading →

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Wiping out for-profit schools – Student Loan Debt – Salon.com

20 Jun

On a conference call with reporters Wednesday morning, Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., promoted a bill she has introduced that would prohibit for-profit colleges from using taxpayer-funded financial aid for marketing, recruiting or advertising purposes.

Make no mistake, Hagan’s bill, if it becomes law, would cut for-profit schools off at their knees. The top 15 publicly traded for-profit colleges derive 85 percent of their revenue from federal financial aid. If they can’t spend that money on marketing, recruiting and advertising, then they effectively can’t market, recruit or advertise — or at least not at anywhere near the scale they currently do.

via Wiping out for-profit schools – Student Loan Debt – Salon.com.

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Politics and Education Don’t Mix – P.L. Thomas – National – The Atlantic

27 Apr

…the central flaw in the need for structure and hierarchy is that politics prefers leadership characteristics above expertise. No politician can possibly have the expertise and experience needed in all the many areas a leader must address (notably in roles such as governor and president). But during the “accountability era” in education of the past three decades, the direct role of governors and presidents as related to education has increased dramatically–often with education as a central plank in their campaigns.

One distinct flaw in that development has been a trickle-down effect reaching from presidents and governors to state superintendents of education and school board chairs and members: people who have no or very little experience or expertise as educators or scholars attain leadership positions responsible for forming and implementing education policy.

The faces and voices currently leading the education reform movement in the U.S. are appointees and self-proclaimed reformers who, while often well-meaning, lack significant expertise or experience in education: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, billionaire Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee (whose entrance to education includes the alternative route of Teach for America and only a few years in the classroom), and Sal Khan, for example.

Design and operation of specific programs must be in the hands of local experts: Continue reading →

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Protester’s New Front: Student Loan Debt

23 Apr

Alexander Zaitchik, writing in Salon:

A year ago, the student debt crisis was a quiet one. Default-triggered cascades of compounding interest and collection fees were matters of lonely shame and anxiety. Journalists writing on the issue networked through friends and family to find subjects willing to go on record. Then the debt-confession signs started popping up at OWS protests, and stories of debilitating student debt were everywhere. Numbers that had been a source of private depression became symbols of generational defiance. “I have $80,000 in student loan debt,” declared a typical sign. “How can I ever hope to repay that now?” Others demonstrated the vertiginous arithmetic of the classic default spiral: “Borrowed $26,000. Paid back to date $32,000. Still owe $45,000.”

There’s no shortage of statistics capable of illustrating America’s economic elephantiasis. Taxes, health care, wages — take your pick. But it’s the student debt numbers that most shock college graduates over 50. If you went to school in the 1960s or ’70s, it doesn’t seem possible that the class of 2012 is graduating with an average debt load of more than $25,000. The macro milestones tend to get more press — America’s $1 trillion in aggregate student debt now surpasses that owed on its credit cards — but it’s the 25 large that makes boomers whistle and start talking about the days when a semester at Berkeley cost the same as a trip to the laundromat.

Years ago: Continue reading →

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10 States Given Waivers From No Child Left Behind Law – NYTimes.com

9 Feb

“After waiting far too long for Congress to reform No Child Left Behind, my administration is giving states the opportunity to set higher, more honest standards in exchange for more flexibility,” President Obama said in the statement. “Today, we’re giving 10 states the green light to continue making reforms that are best for them. Because if we’re serious about helping our children reach their potential, the best ideas aren’t going to come from Washington alone. Our job is to harness those ideas, and to hold states and schools accountable for making them work.”

via 10 States Given Waivers From No Child Left Behind Law – NYTimes.com.

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Black Church Activism on Education and Incarceration – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com

3 Feb

Second, black churches need to resist the wave of attacks against public workers. These groups, traditionally those who have needed the protections of unions, also form the bedrock of the black middle class. If black churches do not wake up to the practical threat of the political discourse that vilifies those who work for all of us, we may witness the shrinking of the middle class even as the poorest among us become increasingly mired in poverty with nowhere to go other than to prison.

via Black Church Activism on Education and Incarceration – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com.

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