Tag Archives | school

Notorious For-Profit Prison Company Doing ‘Drug Sweeps’ Of Arizona Public School Students

By on December 17, 2012 in News 8

Corrections Corporation of America, recently sued over its collaborating with violent gangs, is now partnering with police to conduct “lock down sweeps” in which high schoolers are locked in their classrooms while canine units search their possessions for illegal contraband. Via PR Watch:

An unsettling trend appears to be underway in Arizona: the use of private prison employees in law enforcement operations.

The state has graced national headlines in recent years as the result of its cozy relationship with the for-profit prison industry. Such controversies have included the role of private prison corporations in SB 1070 and similar anti-immigrant legislation disseminated in other states; a 2010 private prison escape that resulted in two murders and a nationwide manhunt; and a failed bid to privatize nearly the entire Arizona prison system.

And now, recent events in the central Arizona town of Casa Grande show the hand of private corrections corporations reaching into the classroom, assisting local law enforcement agencies in drug raids at public schools.

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Corporate Workfare Arrives In British Classrooms

By on December 11, 2012 in News 10

Red Pepper explains the United Kingdom’s new “studio schools,” under which teenagers spend half their day performing menial jobs for corporate sponsors for little or no pay, with the (accurate) purpose being to prepare them for the real world:

Launched quietly in 2010, studio schools allow private businesses to run state education for 14 to 19-year-olds with learning ‘on the job’ and not in the classroom.

Almost any business can set up a studio school by paying a voluntary subscription of just £8,000 to the government. In return, the government builds and maintains a school, but the power to run the school remains firmly in the hands of private sponsors. National Express, GlaxoSmithKline, Sony, Ikea, Disney, Michelin, Virgin Media and Hilton Hotels are just some of the corporate players who have bought into the scheme.

Predictably, these sponsor firms only pay the minimum wage – and that’s only for their over-16 students.

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D.A.R.E. To Cease Teaching Middle Schoolers About The Evils Of Marijuana

By on December 10, 2012 in News 7

Not because they realized that their efforts amount to creepy brainwashing, but because a study suggested that being warned by D.A.R.E. increases, rather than decreases, tweens’ likelihood of smoking pot. Reason writes:

D.A.R.E., the national nonprofit that has promoted “Drug Abuse Resistance Education” to elementary, middle, and high school students since the early 1980s, will all but drop anti-drug material from its curriculum for fifth and sixth grade students.

“D.A.R.E. America has determined that anti-drug material is not age-appropriate,” a state affiliate leader told Reason. “The new curriculum focuses on character development”…[and] does not bring up the subject of marijuana at all.

The curriculum change is likely part of an ongoing attempt by the organization to restore its credibility with the scientific community. In 1999, the American Psychological Association conducted a study of D.A.R.E. graduates and concluded that its curriculum was ineffective. The Government Accountability Office announced in 2003 that D.A.R.E.

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Are American College Students The Coal Miners Of Today?

By on November 23, 2012 in News 5

Via Counterpunch, Darwin Bond-Graham argues that students are positioned at a “choke point” in the debt economy:

Now that we know the debt situation is untenable for an entire generation, what are we going to do about it? UC Santa Cruz professor Bob Meister is advocating the university and the plight of the student as a starting point for a wider movement against debt. Historically students have been galvanizers, taking direct action at seemingly impossible moments. Will they do it now?

Meister compared the students of today to the coal miners of early industrial capitalism. Under that regime of production, coal miners had the power to shut down the economy because they labored away at the site of a singular choke point of value extraction upon which all the spinning looms and colonial plantations depended. Students now occupy a choke point, according to Meister. Student loans are assets in the books of banks and the personal fortunes of the wealthy 1%, used to leverage up debts throughout all other sectors of the economy, debts that penetrate into the social collective and reinforce financial servitude for the masses.

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Louisiana Middle School Textbooks On Dinosaurs, Earth, Creation

By on November 21, 2012 in News 86

Buzzfeed has a selection of jaw-dropping excerpts from a 5th grade science textbook currently in use in state-sponsored schools in Louisiana. Included are the birth of the world thousands of years ago, dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, the sham of carbon dating, and, as an added bonus, the constant and exclusive use of only male pronouns in reference to human reasoning, judgement, and knowledge:

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California Parents Fear Yoga In Schools Indoctrinating Children Into Eastern Religions

By on October 25, 2012 in News 38

Are we doing enough to keep our children safe from yoga? Via Yahoo! News:

Encinitas, CA — A group of parents is bent out of shape by free yoga classes at schools in this San Diego County beachside community, fearing they are indoctrinating youngsters in eastern religion.

“There’s a deep concern that the Encinitas Union School District is using taxpayer resources to promote Ashtanga yoga and Hinduism, a religion system of beliefs and practices,” the parents’ attorney, Dean Broyles, told the North County Times. In an Oct. 12 email to district Superintendent Tim Baird, Broyles called the yoga program unconstitutional and said he may take unspecified legal action unless the classes stop.

The lessons are funded by a $533,000, three-year grant from the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes Asthanga yoga. The classes involve traditional eastern breathing techniques and poses.

Jois Foundation Director Eugene Ruffin denied the group is religious.

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Prescribing Mood Drugs For The Symptoms Of Childhood Poverty

By on October 16, 2012 in News 11

New York Times on the growing trend of doping up poor kids suffering from academic and social issues, since it’s apparent we’re not going to improve their surroundings:

When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools.

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”

Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians.

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A 2009 Letter From Occupy University Of California

By on September 21, 2012 in News 19

Via We Want Everything, looking back on an Occupy California manifesto from calling for the disruption and occupation of university spaces, using tactics which are now more familiar:

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do).

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Money Will Movitate The Digital Tracking Of Schoolchildren

By on September 13, 2012 in News 44

There’s money to be made in the cattle-style tracking of kids with RFID-chip IDs, and so the practice may become widespread, Wired writes:

Two schools at the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-chip-laden student-body cards when classes began last Monday. Like most state-financed schools, their budgets are tied to average daily attendance. If a student is not in his seat during morning roll call, the district doesn’t receive daily funding for that pupil. But with the RFID tracking, students not at their desk but tracked on campus are counted as being in school that day, and the district receives its daily allotment for that student.

There appears to be dozens of companies who…offer their RFID wares to monitor students in what is still a tiny but growing market. Among the biggest companies in the market: AT&T.

About two dozen health and privacy advocates who signed an August position paper blasting the use of RFID chips in schools.

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Houston School Districts To Use Electronic Cattle Tags On Children

By on June 5, 2012 in News 11

Photo: ken ratcliff (CC)

In a sense, it’s positive that we at least care about our children’s whereabouts as much as prized livestock. The Dallas Morning News writes:

Two school districts in the Houston area have begun monitoring students whereabouts on campus by issuing them identification badges with radio frequency identification technology – the same technology used to track cattle.

The Spring school district in Houston has distributed the ID badges to about 13,500 of its 36,000 students since December 2008. The Santa Fe school district, about 30 miles south of Houston, began using the badges this year.

School officials say the devices improve security and increase attendance rates, a figure that’s important because some school funding is tied to attendance. ”It feels like someone’s watching you at all times,” said Jacorey Jackson, 11, a sixth-grader at Bailey.

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