—LOOK! A totally useless study designed to scare people funded by a company that offers Internet filtering.
“One in five parents think their children’s school grades are suffering due to the amount of time they spend on social networking websites, a new study has found.
A questionnaire completed by 4,427 adults, found that 20% of parents believe their child’s education is being hampered by the amount of time they spend on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and other other non-educational web pages.”
I worry about the one-sided treatment of education issues, not only in Rhode Island, but in the national media. The corporate reformers seem shocked when anyone questions their narrative. They see no downside to their dogmatic belief in closing schools and firing principals and teachers, nor to their dogmatic faith that higher test scores are the goal of education. They accuse critics of “defending the status quo,” even though it is they who are the status quo, the champions of get-tough accountability. They don’t understand that they might be wrong, that their critics deserve a hearing, and that disagreement is healthy.
A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university.
A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University’s economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting “political economy and free enterprise.”
I am really worried that these students are coming out of this course not only no better off than they were before, but actually worse because they feel that they have confirmed the validity of their prejudices. After all, the primary sources say that white, Christian Americans wanted to help the Cheyenne, so it must be true. These are Harvard undergrads in 2011 who are honest-to-goodness, unironically arguing that it’s a damn good thing that white Americans put Cheyenne children in boarding schools where they could be civilized. And they think that they learned that in my course. It is a disgrace.