Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (80154)	6/5/2010 5:28:49 PM
From: Oeconomicus	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

The Weekend Interview with Madeleine Sackler: Storming the School Barricades A new documentary by a 27-year-old filmmaker could change the national debate about public education. WSJ 6/5/10 Excerpt: In the spring of 2008, Ms. Sackler, then a freelance film editor, caught a segment on the local news about New York's biggest lottery. It wasn't the Powerball. It was a chance for 475 lucky kids to get into one of the city's best charter schools (publicly funded schools that aren't subject to union rules). "I was blown away by the number of parents that were there," Ms. Sackler tells me over coffee on Manhattan's Upper West Side, recalling the thousands of people packed into the Harlem Armory that day for the drawing. "I wanted to know why so many parents were entering their kids into the lottery and what it would mean for them." And so Ms. Sackler did what any aspiring filmmaker would do: She grabbed her camera. . . . But on the way to making the film she imagined, she "stumbled on this political mayhem—really like a turf war about the future of public education." Or more accurately, she happened upon a raucous protest outside of a failing public school in which Harlem Success, already filled to capacity, had requested space. "We drove by that protest," Ms. Sackler recalls. "We were on our way to another interview and we jumped out of the van and started filming." There she discovered that the majority of those protesting the proliferation of charter schools were not even from the neighborhood. They'd come from the Bronx and Queens. "They all said 'We're not allowed to talk to you. We're just here to support the parents.'" But there were only two parents there, says Ms. Sackler, and both were members of Acorn. And so, "after not a lot of digging," she discovered that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) had paid Acorn, the controversial community organizing group, "half a million dollars for the year." (It cost less to make the film.) Finding out that the teachers union had hired a rent-a-mob to protest on its behalf was "the turn for us in the process." That story—of self-interested adults trying to deny poor parents choice for their children—provided an answer to Ms. Sackler's fundamental question: "If there are these high-performing schools that are closing the achievement gap, why aren't there more of them?" Full column here.

To: Sully- who wrote (80154)	6/5/2010 5:30:36 PM
From: Sully-	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Abysmal job numbers By: David Freddoso Online Opinion Editor 06/04/10 10:00 AM EDT Analysts had expected 540,000 new jobs, but cautioned that temporary U.S. Census jobs would account for 425,000 of those. In other words, the expectation was for roughly 115,000 “real” jobs. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen that way. In fact, on net, we gained just 20,000 non-Census jobs in May. <<< Employers added 431,000 nonfarm jobs nationwide in May, the biggest increase in a single month in a decade, the Labor Department said Friday. But the bulk of the growth was in government jobs, driven by hiring for the Census, and private-sector job growth was weak…Altogether, 411,000 of the jobs added were for Census workers whose positions will disappear after the summer. >>> We keep hearing that the stimulus is really ramping up and that we’ll see more job creation. But perhaps the administration should just consider (as Geraghty suggested yesterday) making the Census permanent. Read more at the Washington Examiner: washingtonexaminer.com