Show me the numbers.

Lately I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about various ideas in the governor’s office and state house regarding stealing the final vestiges of educational local control and accountability.

Hell, apparently there was a hearing in the state house yesterday allegedly giving Vermonters a chance to testify on this very subject … actually designed to tell a select committee why they should go ahead and take accountability for our kids education away from the local communities. Yeah … great place for that hearing … well away from the folks who stand to lose the most … the kids and their parents and the concerned community members too busy to pander to your schedules and locations.

The songs are all the same: if only the STATE could run our schools, if only we had fewer school boards providing oversight and policy guidance, if only there were fewer school districts, if only those nasty dirty locals didn’t get in the way … if only … THEN everything would get inexpensive and the heavens will open up and school building choice (not educational choice mind you) and better course offerings will ensue.

Show me the numbers.

Show me how substituting a super-superintendent and 3 sub-superintendents is going to save money over having 3 superintendents. Because that is what is going to happen when you consolidate supervisory districts. Oh, you may not call all of them superintendents, but that’s what they’ll be in form and function and you’ll have to pay the commensurate salaries.

Show me how much better things will get for grade school kids when they have to spend hours each school day in a school bus getting to and from their now non-local primary school buildings. Or, if you acknowledge they shouldn’t be doing this, tell me why the individual town’s aren’t better suited to watching over their youngsters as opposed to the STATE? Hasn’t Burlington already shown folks a path forward? Do you really have to steal that idea as your own?

Tell me about these savings that will be guzzled up by the gasoline and diesel fuel required to send the k-12 generations all over the map because, once centralization and school closings begin, that is exactly what will happen.

Tell me about the savings in salaries you’re expecting? Are you going to shift gears and give yourselves wider latitude in who can be hired as a teacher to save a few bucks … the same latitude you refuse the local school boards? Or maybe you’re going to make use of shared resources and modern communications technology … you know … what the local schools are already doing?

Tell me why the most heavily centralized school districts in the country, mostly the urban ones, are the exact same school districts that required a federal law (no child left untested) to correct?

SHOW ME THE NUMBERS!

PS. I do understand you can’t really show me the numbers. I’ve read enough to thoroughly understand the numbers contradict this drive for centralized command and control over our kids education.

PPS. Odum, if you don’t think moves like this are designed to kill off public education: just think about loss of control and accountability with a parallel increase in mandated cost. People will be dying for a voucher to a religious school that discriminates in who it accepts and saves them a boatload of cash. These assholes know what they’re doing.

The Markowitz campaign sent out the musical playlist for the “official” campaign kickoff event earlier this week:

The “Deb for Vermont Official Announcement Play List”

Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go)

Dierks Bentley

Back On the Train

PHISH

Rock with You

The Jacksons

Blinded by the Light

Bruce Springsteen

The Best

Tina Turner

Shining Star

Earth, Wind and Fire

Sir Duke

Stevie Wonder

This is Our Moment

Kenny Chesney

Ain’t No Stopping Us Now

McFadden and Whitehead

Still the One

Orleans

Use Somebody

Kings of Leon

Cross posted from Border Jumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.

It’s hard to believe that more than 90 percent of the workforce in Zimbabwe are part of the informal sector. These workers do everything from selling bananas and playing music to selling stone carvings and other crafts. Unfortunately because they are not considered part of the formal economy, they are often the most exploited-or ignored-by the government. As a result, in 2002, they formed the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy Associations (ZCIEA), an associate of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), to help gain a voice for their members in government.

These workers, who traditionally competed against each other and with the formal sector -are now coordinated and working together to tackle pressing issues such as social security, disability benefits, improved infrastructure, working conditions, and many others.

The Informal Economy is being helped by ZCTU together with their elected leadership to lobby legislators to change the laws to that they become user friendly.

We were given the opportunity to visit two community projects coordinated by the informal workers association with President Beauty Mugijima and program coordinator Elijah Mutemeri.

The first project was a village where they are working with the local community to build a school in an area where hundreds of people were forced to relocate during “Operation Restore Order.” As part of a de-urbanization program under Mugabe, the controversial leader of the country, nearly 2 million workers were forcibly removed from their homes in cities, stripped of their belongings, and forced to live in rural areas, without any agriculture skills or training. We met with this community who, despite having very few resources and little volunteer support, are trying to build a school to teach area children. They recently succeeded in getting accredited by the local government and the community is pushing public officials for additional resources to build the school. The visit was especially inspiring because the teachers working there endure long commutes because they believed in helping the community. Many families in the makeshift town are also raising orphans or abandoned children, as well their own.

The second project we visited is an orphanage for children that the union is helping support. As we arrived children were singing, clapping, and rushing to offer us hugs and high fives. Most of these hundreds of kids lost their parents to HIV/AIDS, and the orphanage provides them not only with a place to go to learn and go to school, but also gives them a family.

The teachers and caretakers who work there are mostly volunteers and you can see that they share a deep commitment and passion for the future of these kids.

Stay tuned for a small-dollar donation drive to help this orphanage in the coming weeks.

Well, I have to say, it’s a good thing that “the environment” is not in any danger.  Otherwise, I’d be a little concerned that VY is waiting until April to start repairing its leaks.  The reasoning?  

Because it is near impossible, during plant operation, to get into the pipe tunnel where a leaking pipe is located, the repairs will have to wait until it is offline for refueling…

But it’s all good, because they have a “conceptual plan” to take care of that.

Now, just a bit of history: this leak was discovered in January.  Specifically, January 6th.  And April is… let’s see… too damned many months to be leaking radiation without shutting down the plant for repairs.

Oh, and we’re not talking early April.   We’re talking April 24. That’s 108 days later.  But hey, at least they’ve got cool toy robots investigating:

A small robot that was exploring the underground pipe tunnel believed to be the source of the radioactive tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor has fallen victim to one of the contributing factors of the leak – radioactive “mud” from deteriorating concrete and radioactive water.

I feel better now.

• NTodd of Dohiyi Mir is running for the State House as an independent. With Philip Baruth running for Senate, could that make for two bloggers hitting the Statehouse next session? If so, they’ll find they aren’t the first, as Republican/Vermont Tiger blogger Oliver Olsen beat them there after being appointed by the Governor to the late Rick Hube’s seat.
• Star Trek or Star Wars? Doug Racine says Star Trek. Good man.
• In case you haven’t already heard or read, gubernatorial candidate Matt Dunne is about to become a dad again. Congratulations Matt! Pretty challenging timing for campaigning though (kiddo is expected in June). Perhaps any lost time can be offset by the public “awwwwwwwww” factor.
• Definition of a self-impressed jerk.
• Margolis dissects the gawd-awful House Bill that would allow high donors to the State Colleges or UVM to maintain anonymity, carving out another open records law exemption. What a terrible idea, terrible precedent. Dunno if it passed today.

(Continuing the policy of promoting diaries from officeholders and officeseekers – promoted by odum)

I am excited to tell you about something I’ve been working on for several weeks. All of us candidates have been saying how essential it is to achieve universal access to affordable health care — and I’ve been figuring out how to actually make that happen.

The escalating cost of our current system is crippling our state, our families and our businesses. Health care in Vermont will cost $1 billion more in 2012 than it does today if current trends continue — this is a crisis, and we cannot let it continue.

That is why today, I introduced a revised version of S.88 — so that we can design the system that will deliver health care to Vermonters, and answer all of the questions that need to be answered to implement this new system. My bill calls for the state to hire independent advisors, who will be overseen by a panel of Vermonters, to provide the state with a “menu of options.” These advisors will design three different health care systems — fully design them, not just study them — and deliver back to the legislature a full implementation plan for each of the three possible systems.

This will not be easy. Change comes with uncertainty and risks. But the option of doing nothing is simply not acceptable. We are now paying the price of a broken system, and that price will only go up. The time to move forward is now. Please join me and help me to build the system we need.

There is more information on my website, and when you visit you can sign on as a “citizen co-sponsor” of the bill. I’ll also be posting a copy of the bill as introduced on the site very soon. It will change as it moves through the process – probably several times – but I am committed to the goal of access to affordable, quality health care for every Vermonter.

I hope you will read the bill, sign on, and work with me to create the new system that will lead the way to true reform.

http://dougracine.com/about/po…

Doug Racine

I think we’ve all had the experience of opening a cell phone and flashing on some Star Trek episode or line. Or maybe we all haven’t, but I sure have. The Star Trek flip-open communicator’s resemblance to a modern cell phone is downright uncanny. So it is fitting that this clip begins with a discussion of cell phone coverage in Vermont, and ends with Doug Racine taking an unequivocally pro-Star Trek position on perhaps the most controversial nerd question of our times. Note his near-poetic capturing of the geewhiz New Frontier optimism the show represents.  

I wanted to make sure I got at least one question that spoke to character, a question that could not be answered with a canned policy regurgitation, a question that riffed on John Hodgman’s roasting of the President at the 2009 Correspondent’s Dinner (VIDEO HERE).  But rather than quiz a candidate on the esoterica of nerdaphernalia, I thought why not boldly go where no one has gone before, a galaxy far far away?

After the interview, the discussion continued and I was impressed with how Mr. Racine reflected on how, particularly in earlier episodes, the women were pretty much reduced to serving coffee in go-go boots. He also mentioned recently re-seeing the movie M*A*S*H. The movie he remembered liking when it first came out now looked to him like mean-spirited humiliation of a strong woman. Having a Governor who can evaluate evolving gender politics in popular culture could take some getting used to.

Part 1 HERE

Part 2 HERE

[Note: No endorsement implied. Just continuing the VTblogosphereTV tradition of showcasing the qualities of the guest.]

Doug Racine’s website

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…they’ll introduce a congressional rebuke of the recent political ad from an organization spearheaded by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol (the “Dept. of Jihad” ad) which suggests that lawyers defending guantanamo inmates are in league with (or at sympathetic to) al qaeda. From Greenwald:

One of the most inane acts undertaken by the Democratic Congress was its formal and highly bipartisan condemnation of MoveOn.org’s “Petraeus/Betrayus” ad.  Regardless of one’s views of that ad, formally opining on the views of private citizens is not the role of Congress.  But since they did that, and apparently believe that repugnant political campaigns merit Congressional disapproval, shouldn’t there be some form of formal sanction for the far more pernicious and genuinely McCarthyite attacks on DOJ lawyers from Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol’s “Keep America Safe”?  So reprehensible was that campaign that numerous right-wing lawyers have vehemenetly condemned it — including Ken Starr, David Rivkin, Ted Olsen, and even (ironically) former Bush official Cully Stimson — with most of them signing a letter decrying it as “a shameful series of attacks” that are “destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications.”

A reminder of that MoveOn vote:

Last week, Senator Leahy and Representative Welch broke with Senator Sanders and brought several flavors of shame to the liberal community under one, all-encompassing umbrella – the vote to rebuke MoveOn. While first and foremost, I find the vote both bizarre and cowardly (for its myopic waste of time on the one hand, and the pointless “Sister Souljah”-style sacrifice of an ally deemed – apparently – disposable on the other), the fact is that it was also an affront to the tradition of free speech in this country.

Don’t get me wrong – I didn’t like that vote and I don’t like the idea of a new one to rebuke this latest attack (and I differ with Greenwald on that). But it does make for an interesting question, the answer to which will tell us whether or not the MoveOn votes by Mssrs. Leahy and Welch were based on genuinely held principles, or whether they were just afraid of the big bad Republican noise machine. Obviously, one would hope it was the former, even if I disagreed with those principles.

If you haven’t yet seen it, the ad in question is below the fold.

(I don’t necessarily agree with Rama that the point here is to destroy public education, but I have no doubt that at least part of the point is ultimately to bust the union. – promoted by odum)

When you’re out to destroy public education, it certainly helps to keep the annoying public out of the discussion:

The Dover School Board held an emergency meeting Monday morning to draft a letter protesting the closed-door policy of a design group named by the Department of Education.

(Dover objects to closed-door meetings, Brattleboro Reformer, 03/09/10)

The excuse by Douglas’ little boy?

Tom Evslin, chief technology officer for the state of Vermont and coordinator of the Challenges for Change efforts, said the meetings were designed to include just the team members to allow for a more free exchange of ideas.

(ibid)

Yeah, that’s where the best “let’s drown our government in the bathtub” come from … a place far from the sunlight of public oversight and participation.

Because we just know all about those wonderful ideas that should never be discussed in public.

Cross posted from Border Jumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.

In Harare, on the way to our meeting with Wellington Chibebe, the secretary general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), even our driver was excited for us.

“He is a good, good man. I’ve only seen him on TV, but he’s fights very hard for the people and to promote democracy!”

Since the early 1990s, ZCTU grew increasingly opposed to the government of Robert Mugabe and was the main force behind the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). In fact, MDC’s leader and the current Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Richard Tsvangirai held the same position with the ZCTU before Chibebe.

Chibebe is one of the most vocal-and effective-voices in civil society promoting respect for human rights and democracy. Despite being brutally beaten, tortured, and having his life threatened over the last two decades, Chibebe remains more positive than ever about the direction of his country. It was largely due to Zimbabwe’s labor movement that in the 2008 presidential election Tsvangirai defeated Mugagbe. Yet despite MDC’s victory, Mugabe, refuses to step down and the nation has a “power sharing” agreement.

When we met with Chibebe, he was cautiously optimistic about the power-sharing agreement and the future of democracy in Zimbabwe. “Our role as the labor movement is to fight for democracy and good governance, respect for people’s basic rights, and also social and  economic rights.” He says that while the MDC plays a critical role in promoting democracy, the mission of the union movement will be to hold all political parties accountable to these principles. “We just can’t afford to repeat the same mistake by treating any government or political party as angels from heaven,” he says. While he described the beginning of the power-sharing agreement as “terrible,” Chibebe felt strongly that “things are now getting better, we are able to make some positive changes happen.”

Chibebe was born 300 miles south of Harare. His upbringing herding goats and farming built both a sense of responsibility and social consciousness, he says. “Rural kids grow up different from urban ones, you start fighting for your rights at a very early age. If you aren’t aggressive, you’ll get abused.” He also described how in rural life he had no access to books or libraries, so everyone listened to their elders, learning about the importance of struggle and hearing passionate tales of resistance against the ruling government. Not even a teen when his mother passed away, Chibebe became passionately involved in political struggle for social and economic justice that has lasted his whole life.

Being at the helm of the Zimbabwe labor movement at this moment is no easy task. The country faces unemployment rates of more than 90 percent. The media is controlled by the government. Union leaders are routinely harassed and imprisoned. And the Mugabe government instituted draconian laws to thwart unions, such as arresting any meeting of more than four people. Yet the affiliates of the ZCTU, representing more than 30 unions and every sector of the economy, have remained united. “While it is very difficult at times with unemployment so high to convince people to be in unions, we are still able to recruit and grow.”

Chibebe works tirelessly to bring attention to Zimbabwe’s economic and human rights realities and to pressure the government to reform its ways.  As workers struggle to survive inflation and low paying informal employment, Chibebe has expanded the work of the ZCTU to represent all workers in both formal and informal employment.  ZCTU  fights for economic and social justice not just for his members, but for the fundamental rights of all of Zimbabwe’s workers.

In 2002, Chibebe and the ZCTU had the vision of helping informal sector workers-everyone from street vendors to musicians and artisans-form unions. The desire for social and economic change spread like wild fire when the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Associations (ZCIEA) started in 2002. Presently with more than 1.5 million paying members (out of  3.5 million members), the informal workers now have access to all the resources of the ZCTU such as their lobbyists, their research arm, and the strength and power of their affiliate unions.

Chibebe, and everyone we met with at ZCTU, speaks with great pride about the support they’ve been given by the American labor movement through the Solidarity Center, which maintains an office in the country. “Because of the Solidarity Center and the American worker, we’ve had incredible moral and material support,” Chibebe said. Some of the examples he cites are the role the Solidarity Center plays in supporting their research institute, expanding distribution of their newspaper “the Worker,” their ability to fund a lobbyist, create a paralegal program, training activists and leaders, and getting support from international governments and politicians through organizational delegations such as the visit from the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU).