According to a new investigative report, 12 year old Tamir Rice did not have a gun or even a pellet gun in his hand when police pulled up and gunned him down at a recreation center in November 2014.
And the various reports that said Rice was killed 2 to 3 seconds after police arrived on the scene are wrong. According to this new report, the 12 year old boy was killed one second after the police car stopped a few feet away from him.
Tamir Rice did not have enough time to remove his hands from his pockets before being shot, and his hands weren’t visible to the officer, according to the analysis released late Friday night by attorneys for Tamir’s family.
The new report and two others from experts already used by the family are the latest analysis of evidence to be released as a grand jury considerswhether to bring charges against the officers in Tamir’s death. The boy was shot after authorities received a report of a man pointing and waving a gun outside a recreation center in November 2014.
Previous reports concluded that officer Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir within 2 seconds of opening his car door. The new analysis determined it happened even faster, within less than a second, according to the review by California-based shooting reconstruction expert Jesse Wobrock.
I’ve been in the education business for 31 years and I’ve seen many a fad come and go, from Teacher-proof curricula to shared decision-making to Differentiation to Cooperative Learning, Curriculum Mapping, Goals 2000 and various reading programs that focus on inventive spelling, phonics, whole language and learning vocabulary in context. Many of my colleagues didn’t believe me when I said that our present testing fetish would also shuffle off the educational stage at some point. What caught me by surprise was just how quickly that would happen.
The focus on testing and corporate-style accountability began with the publication in 1983 of A Nation at Risk, a report that essentially regarded the American education system as having failed our students, our economy, and our values. It repudiated many of the reforms that liberals had foisted on the system in the 1960s and 70s and said that if we didn’t correct those flaws we would fall behind other countries whose schools were beginning to produce students who knew more math, science and analytical skills. Conservatives adopted the report as the clarion call for privatization, a back-to-basics curriculum that stressed factual recall, and of course, tests to measure not just students, but teachers, with the secondary goals of loosening the grip that the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers had on school policy and defeating Democrats who relied on union support.
And they almost succeeded. The testing movement – which reached its pinnacle last year and is now under more assault than what we are using to fight ISIS – is in rapid decline. Last year, 44 states gave the PARCC tests which measure how thoroughly students have learned the Common Core Curriculum Standards. This school year 7 states, including New Jersey, will be giving those tests. The rest will be giving a test adopted by their own Education Departments. Further, some states, most notably New York, won’t be using the tests to evaluate teachers. The retreat is notable.
Is the assault over? Not by a long shot, but it is weakening. Conservative groups are still trying to get states to funnel money to Charter Schools, which, on average, do no better than public schools. Many charters do better within certain geographic areas, but much of that has to do with state governments that are abandoning public schools that are in poor urban centers. The fight to limit collective bargaining for teachers and other public workers reached its height in 2013 and has since paused, although the damage done to teachers’ pay and benefits has been significant. And although New York is backing away from using tests to evaluate teachers, more states need to follow them for the good of education everywhere.
The bottom line is that teachers are doing a magnificent job with the dwindling resources and increased scrutiny that came with the rise of the know-nothing conservatives. Aligning teacher evaluation with student test scores only illustrated that the overwhelming majority of teachers were effective. Clearly, the know-nothing’s intent was to use the test scores to fire teachers they thought were failing our students. That hasn’t happened because their assumption was incorrect. They won’t admit it, but it’s true.
The next fight will now be on the state level as we return to local standards and local tests. In the past, most states created tests where 90% of the students scored in the proficient range. That’s just not statistically feasible. We do need national standards and we do need to measure how students are learning. The reaction to the Common Core and PARCC will not make this possible, and that’s to the country’s detriment.
Have no fear, though: If history is any guide, this reaction will only last a few years and something else will come along and replace it. Will it be better or will it be worse?
Leave it to the GOP (and some uninformed Democrats) to make a frightening situation something to panic over. The Paris attacks were terrible. The threat of more terrorist attacks on Europe is very real. But if you want to stop terrorists from coming into the United States, tampering with the refugee system is exactly the wrong place to start.
The United States has accepted about 70,00 refugees into this country since 2009. And there’s a lengthy process. One-third of them were from countries that, on first glance, might supply potential terrorists. How many of these refugees turned out to be terrorists or involved in potential terrorist plots? None. Further, if ISIS or any other group wanted to send potential terrorists to the United States, why would they choose a process that is thoroughly vetted and could take up to two years? It makes no sense. Which is why, I’m sure, the Republicans are pursuing legislation that would affect the refugee program.
It would be far easier for a potential bomber to come in as a tourist. Or as a worker who doesn’t need a visa. Or as a student. But of course, no politician wants to shut down tourism or interfere with students who want to come to the U.S. to study or with someone who will do a job that an American won’t or can’t (including high tech jobs that require math, which seems to be another GOP weakness). That would be an economic catastrophe. So instead, they’re going after the one program that vets all applicants over a specified period of time as their target.
Fear has been the coin of the realm for the Republican Party since 2001. They’ve run on a platform that says only they can keep us safe and I’m sure they’ll plug that exhausted line until November. What they need is a detailed plan for actually fighting ISIS both militarily and diplomatically with our allies. It will take thought and political will rather than blame. So far, I haven’t heard anything that gives me confidence in their ability to confront the threat.
I’m being a bit of a coward by posing my title as a question, but I do firmly believe that the western world is headed towards a much larger, more coordinated and, ultimately, more deadly military conflict. If it sounds like war, smells like war, destroys like war, breeds intolerance like war, then it must be a war.
And we’re in one.
I fear that there are more attacks coming in places that think they’re prepared, but are not. After all, Vladimir Putin thought he was going to help Assad in Syria and escape the fate that has befallen the United States, France and Great Britain. He was wrong, and 224 Russians savagely and tragically lost their lives. The French have been attacked twice this year. Israel is under constant threat.Who’s next?
I went on Facebook on Friday night after reading about the attacks and saw many people who had attached the peace sign with the Eiffel Tower in it, the French flag, and pictures of the people I know from their Paris vacations. But I also saw some vitriolic hatred directed towards all Muslim, and I mean ALL Muslims, even though they are not terrorists, and I saw the requisite number of posts calling President Obama a Muslim and blaming him for this, and seemingly every other attack, whether it was on US soil or not. It’s still gauche, evidently, to blame GW Bush for September 11, but blaming Obama for an attack on Paris is de rigueur, at least among a certain segment of the population.
Foreign policy will be a key factor in the upcoming presidential election and the GOP field had better begin focusing on policies other than building a very high wall on the Mexican border, throwing people out of the country and reestablishing the fortress America that served us so badly from 1924 to 1965. It also means that Bernie Sanders had better come up with a foreign policy plank that offers Democrats a choice between him and Hillary Clinton. Obviously, she has the most experience in the field by a wide margin. She’s got to make Americans believe that she can keep us safe, but engaged in the world. We need to stay strong.
My heart goes out to those who lost a loved one or who was injured in the attacks. The world has now shifted.
OK, let’s go back to the halcyon days of the 1969-70 school year when I was in fourth grade. My teacher was one of those cool, hip, young people who knew how to reach children, to excite them to learn, and to inject a bit of reality and responsibility into them as they began to navigate the world. She was the kind of teacher that every child has, I hope, at least once during their schooling. I was lucky enough to have her as a teacher twice.
One of the great activities I clearly remember from that school year was a unit we studied on pollution that included not only classwork on the issue but an assembly in front of the school. We made posters. We wrote skits. We listened to CCR’s Who’ll Stop the Rain(lyrics).
And we wrote songs.
One of them was based on the Pepsi Cola jingle, “You’ve Got a Lot to Give.” Sing along with me:
It’s the pollution generation Comin’ at ya, goin’ strong. Put yourself behind pollution If you’re livin’ You won’t for long.
I also seem to remember a pollution song based on the Marseillaise, but I can’t seem to recall the words.
We were a cheeky group. She was a great teacher.
And Mrs. MacDowell also knew a heck of a lot more than Exxon did, if contemporary news reports are believable. How is that possible? Because Exxon and other energy companies are not telling the truth about what their scientists were telling them about air pollution and the environment. Even in 1970, as a ten-year old, I had heard about the “Greenhouse Effect” and how pollutants in the air were being trapped and were causing the planet to heat up.
But Exxon? They say they didn’t know. I don’t blame the scientists who work(ed) for the company. I’m going to assume that they stuck to science and dutifully reported what they knew to the best of their ability. To believe otherwise would call into question their credibility and morality. I’m going to blame the company because it has shown time and time again to be on the wrong side of propriety, from the Valdez tragedy to employee protections to today’s allegations about covering up what it knew about the effects of fossil fuels on climate.
I certainly understand that institutions will do whatever they need to do to survive, and the oil and gas industry is no exception. After all, this is the group that came up with the oxymoronic term “clean coal” to try and make the world’s greatest pollutant and killer of far too many miners sound acceptable. It’s also an industry that probably sees low gas prices as a short-to-medium-term good for its survival since many Americans have moved away from hybrid cars in response to lower prices. We even seem to be acting irrationally by taking the savings we’re seeing in low prices and buying slightly pricier premium fuel.
And then there’s the political angle. President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline project became a formality because of the low price of oil, the glut in the very refineries and storage tanks that the Canadian oil was supposed to occupy, and the plain fact that the promised jobs from the pipeline project were not going to approach the economy-saving levels that many conservatives, and labor unions, envisioned. Plus, the Canadian oil is actually getting to the United States through other means, so destroying the Midwestern landscape for a pipeline was not necessary. Obama rightly measured the impact on the environment and cannily waited until a great Labor Department employment report materialized, then mercifully killed the proposal.
As for the Republicans running for president, their views on the environment, climate and energy policy are, to be kind, ignorant. They see no reason to act on what is clearly happening to the earth, preferring to stick their heads in the sand and wait for the Montana banana industry to flourish (catchy as the jingle would be). Forget about Carson and Trump, who will not be elected president in 2016. Certainly, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have seen the devastation wrought by climate change on eco-sensitive Florida, and Chris Christie, who used to be somewhat reliable on the issue, certainly saw what happened during Sandy and the October snowstorm of the previous year. All of them are in favor of more drilling, more oil company benefits and, most tragically, more United States involvement in the Middle East, which is rapidly coming undone by climate, politics and religion. For these reasons alone they are unelectable.
So thank you Mrs. MacDowell for being one of the early few who knew about the climate problem and doing what terrific teachers do: Telling your students, waking them up, getting them to act.
If only Exxon, other energy companies and the Republican party were as smart as you are.
The network serves mostly black and Hispanic students and is known for exacting behavior rules. Even the youngest pupils are expected to sit with their backs straight, their hands clasped and their eyes on the teacher, a posture that the network believes helps children pay attention. Ms. Moskowitz has said she believes children learn better with structure and consistency in the classroom. Good behavior and effort are rewarded with candy and prizes, while infractions and shoddy work are penalized with reprimands, loss of recess time, extra assignments and, in some cases, suspensions as early as kindergarten.
Backs straight? Hands clasped? Candy as a reward for good behavior? More homework as a punishment for bad behavior? Any public school teacher who attempted any of these would be severely reprimanded. In addition, this is not the way we’re supposed to be teaching in the 21st century. What happened to cooperative activities? Differentiation? Healthy snacks? Imagination?
By the time the week was over, the entire know-nothing education reform movement was in question. Not that teachers and others who actually work in education didn’t already know this. Because they lived with the terrible reforms every day and had little influence on whether those reforms should have been imposed in the first place. After all, the political process is slow and those right-wing money machines that were attempting not just to change the schools but also to destroy the teacher’s unions had a vested interest in drawing out the process so that the public could catch a ride on the train as it crashed in Conjunction Junction.
Not so bad, right? At least we only messed up one generation of children.
Yes, friends, education came roaring back as a national priority with the release of both the PARCC and the NAEP exams this week. In a nutshell, students did not perform very well on the tests. The reasons? Well, there’s the rub. According to those who comment on such things, they range from the fact that more students are living in poverty to the truth that the Common Core Standards, which are the basis for the PARCC exams, have not been around long enough for students to have internalized them. As for the NAEP, the answer is even muddier, but the consensus seems to be that last year’s exam asked questions about curriculum that students have not been taught.
Really? If I gave tests on information I hadn’t taught my students, I could be fired. That hasn’t stopped the know-nothings from using tests to evaluate teacher performance and use the information to retain or let teachers go. This year we’re using flawed tests created by people who are not in classrooms based on standards that have not been sufficiently implemented.
Interesting, yes? It shows that students in almost every state, save Massachusetts, do not perform proficiently on the test. Remember; the NAEP is called “The Nation’s Report Card” because it is given in every state, so it gives us an unsparing look at the differences in each state’s curriculum strength and delivery.
Want more stark proof? I knew that you did. Take a look at the 2013 NAEP Report that graphically shows the remarkable differences between student performance on the NAEP with their performance on their state’s end-of-year evaluation. Scroll yourself down to pages 3 and 4. Those graphs tell you the difference between NAEP scores and state tests scores. In every state but two–NY and MA–there was a gap between how students performed on state tests versus the NAEP. Isn’t it scary enough to be posted on Halloween? Many states were clearly giving easy tests and skewing the results.
And, no, these numbers are not confined to 2009 and 2013. They are similar in every year the NAEP has been given.You could look it up. And you should, because this has been education’s dirty little secret for too long.
The lesson here? There are many. One is that both the NAEP and the PARCC are difficult tests that hold students accountable to standards that require much more reinforcement over time. The PARCC has not been in existence long enough for us to adequately measure its accuracy. The NAEP has been showing us for years that students across the country are not getting a rigorous enough training in content and skills that a truly educated person should have.
More important is that for years, at least since the No Child Left Behind Act began mandating tests in the early 2000s, most states have been giving easy tests based on easy curricula and calling themselves satisfied with their education systems. This is the main reason why we need the Common Core Standards. They will ensure that students throughout the country be held to the same standards no matter where they live. The political opposition to the Core Curriculum has been centered on federal government involvement in what should be a state concern. The state test scores invalidate that argument. Many of the states have been committing educational fraud. National standards will go a long way towards fixing that.
The president was correct in saying that we are focusing too much on testing, but testing is not going away and it shouldn’t. What we need are tests that measure what students know based on verifiable standards and that ask students to perform evaluative tasks that stretch their brains and their imaginations. We haven’t achieved either of those yet. That will require that classroom educators be intimately involved in the evaluative process. It will happen, but we need the know-nothings to step aside and let the teachers take over this process.
This happened in Henderson County, North Carolina on Monday. No conclusion yet on what exactly happened to two-year old Abigail, but as she was being transported to the hospital after being shot by a 20 gauge shotgun, she died.
“It’s a very, very traumatic situation for everybody involved,” Maj. Frank Stout with the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office said. “We’re going to take this very slowly, very deliberately, before any charges or any talk of charges are made.”
The 3-year-old was pronounced dead at the hospital.
According to CBS News, the older boy retrieved the gun from atop the refrigerator Saturday night and a game of “Cops and Robbers” began with his 3-year-old brother and the loaded gun. Shortly after, the bullet struck the infant in the face, killing him.
Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says their father Michael Santiago told investigators that he was a former gang member and felt he needed the gun to protect his family.
Santiago is now facing felony charges for the death of his 3-year-old son.
Later this week the country will celebrate a milestone: the date that Marty McFly used to travel to the future in Back to the Future II, the second movie of the trilogy that represents the greatest expression of Reagan-era optimism that Hollywood has yet produced. If only the remaining GOP candidates would sit down and watch all three movies. Then again, they’d reject their sunny demeanor and hopeful message as liberal claptrap and probably only find succor in the fact that almost everyone in the future has a gun.
According to the right, we are being invaded by hordes of illegal immigrants who are sucking up our resources, taking our jobs and marrying our women. The EPA is bent on destroying free enterprise by covering us in regulations, and the president wants to take our guns. And those are the more moderate accusations. Meanwhile, the Democrats put forward a future that included a higher minimum wage, expanded child care and paid time off, health care and a narrowing of the gap between the wealthy and everyone else.
For those of us who remember the politics of the 1980s, it is a stark contrast. Reagan was the smiling optimist and the Democrats were the scowling pessimists warning the country about the threat of nuclear war. Of course, many of the Reagan-era policies did lead to significantly negative outcomes, such as the orgy of prison building that now houses more prisoners than any other country, and the wealth gap created by Reagan and Bush tax cuts. But other policies did clean up some of the entitlement messes and the economy took off and helped a large number of people.
Today, the Republican Party is not just the party of “no”, it’s the party of “never.” They will never raise taxes. They will never acknowledge climate change. They will never recognize a women’s right to an abortion. They will never acquiesce to gay marriages. They will never allow anyone who came to this country illegally with any chance at either becoming a legal resident or a citizen. They will never talk to Putin or the Iranians. Never, never, never.
How incredibly dangerous.
Yet, they continue to say NEVER in their debates and on the campaign trail, especially the three candidate who will never (I borrowed the word) be elected president, namely Trump, Fiorina and Carson. But even the candidates who do have a chance–Bush, Rubio, Paul and Christie (I’m telling you, do not count Christie out just yet)–are part of the never caucus.
The Democrats, by contrast, were a far more voluble on what is possible in this country. They spoke about how we can address the wage gap, address the changing climate and protect people’s rights. Hillary still has problems with Benghazi and the e-mail issue, but recent Republican comments clearly show that their investigations are political, and that gave her the opening she needed at the debate to claim the high ground, at least for the moment.
Once the primaries are done and the nominees chosen, it will be more difficult for the Republican to move credibly to the political center and still maintain the far right’s blessing, than it will be for Clinton to appease Bernie Sanders’ supporters and gain their votes in November. In a general election, most voters want an upbeat message about how the candidates will lead the country forward and solve its problems, not a general indictment of how terrible things are. The problem for the GOP is that the longer their message is carried by the unelectable three, the more difficult it will be for pragmatic voice to be heard.
Don’t be silly, he didn’t buy the guy. He got it from his father – another Responsible gun owner!
An 11-year-old boy has been charged with murder after he killed his 8-year-old neighbor, police said, and witnesses say it was because the girl wouldn’t let him see her puppy.
Deputies were called to the neighborhood in White Pine, about 40 miles east of Knoxville, on Saturday night. The boy shot the girl from inside his home with his father’s 12-gauge shotgun, said Jefferson County Sheriff Bud McCoig.
Latasha Dyer told WATE-TV (http://bit.ly/1KWbDPA) her daughter was playing outside when the next-door neighbor asked to see the puppy. McKayla told the boy “no,” and he shot her, Dyer said. A neighbor, Misty Edwards, said her niece was playing with the girl and saw what happened.
“She was a precious little girl. She was a mommy’s girl. No matter how bad of a mood you were in she could always make you smile,” Dyer told the station. “I want her back in my arms.”
It’s like anything else you don’t believe in or support – if it goes against your values system, then you hit them in the wallet where it hurts most – you boycott! And that is exactly what Gun Control Australia Director, Samantha Lee, is calling for – ending all unnecessary trips to America until Americans, particularly those in the Republican party and their NRA buddies, realize that their inaction on gun violence is literally killing the nation!
“We have 2.1 million Australians visiting the U.S. every year and over 200,000 expats in America. So I believe we have a duty to respond to this tragedy in the U.S. And the way to do this is have a boycott of non-essential travel to the U.S.”
“Millions of dollars are donated by the [National Rifle Association], particularly to the Republican party [in America] In Australia, we need to be cautious that we also don’t take any donations from the firearms industry, and we need to raise this issue with the U.S.”
Francis comes in, John Boehner bows out. There is a certain symmetry to some world events and this is one of those moments.
Here we have a Pope who is speaking forcefully and eloquently about how the issues of the day and all the right wing can do is reject his message as an ill-conceived interference into the political realm. Stay away from climate change and gay rights, they say, and for heaven’s sake, stop talking about immigration. Yet Francis has stayed on message in a way that would make House Speaker John Boehner proud.
Um.
Well, former House Speaker John Boehner, that is. Or at least he will be at the end of October. Poor John tried his best to reign in a fractious caucus of elected government officials who detest government and want it flushed down the sink, or at least shut down so it can’t do more damage to the country, damage like pay out Social Security benefits. Or Medicare. Medicaid. Or keep the national parks open. Get people passports. Inspect our food. Defend the country. Provide funds for the less fortunate. Health care. Investigate crimes. It’s terrible, this United States government we have today.
It’s funny how conservatives have been saying for years that we need to base our actions on religious values and that we have lost our way morally under the weight of godless liberal social policies over the past 70 years. Yet here comes an infallible Pope who can be ignored at will because he has the temerity to say that the United States needs to do more, not less. Take in more Syrian refugees. Care more for the poor. Stop demonizing Muslims. Care for the environment and the globe.
When you put the right wing’s agenda together with the rejection of Francis’s message and stir in the fact that the next Speaker of the House is likely to be an even more conservative than John Boehner, then you will get a party that simply doesn’t like anything. And how do you run and win on that?
Mark this week down as the one that will eventually define the presidential election for the GOP. They have been saying no for far too long and the no backbenchers are about to get a more sympathetic ear for them to yell into. The elites are fighting to rid the field of Donald Trump, and he’ll go eventually, but he won’t go quietly or without tearing down enough of the other contenders to make their jobs more difficult. And the new House leadership is likely to allow some of the less savory bills that Boehner was able to squash to get out of the caucus room and onto the floor.
Pope Francis is actually leading the way for conservatives to re-engage in a balanced conversation. He’s no liberal by any stretch of the imagination. But he is a humanist and he understands that if we don’t take care of everyone, than we really don’t take care of anyone.
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