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Mc Mike

Mc Mike's Journal
Mc Mike's Journal
July 1, 2014

Here's a few notes, professor

I caught your 'simile - synonym' correction, thanks for tossing it. I'll leave 186 unedited, this line shows acknowledgement of my mistake, well enough.

Drop the lawyer act, just come right out and accuse mad of lying about having taught. Otherwise, your long-winded response in #187 -- with 4 sets of q and a s which don't really say what you want, but just imply it -- appears to be a tactic that is taught in 'De-Railing Conversations 101'.

Your use of 'motivation' in your third q shows you could use some time brushing up on definitions or reading comprehension, because it was a question about mad's actions, not the reasons she has for performing them. So bringing motivation into your answer doesn't respond to the question in a clear way, it just further obscures things. To a lesser extent, minor academic mistakes like mis-spelling weird and compliment can be avoided by clicking the helpful 'check spelling' box to the lower left of the reply box. These things tend to discredit your intellectual and academic capabilities, but there's no harm in being mistaken, as long as you learn from your mistakes.

If you feel that hostile responses populate the thread, at some point a reasonable person might take a moment to reflect on their own style and ask 'could it be something I'm doing that engenders this common response from diverse sources?' My take on your style is that you have a very thin veneer of 'humor', where you write accusations of lying and whining in a veiled manner. The accusations show real hostility, (YOU are angry), and you chortle up your sleeve that you got one over the jury system again. But it's not a happy laugh. If you're pretending to be polite, you aren't really convincing anyone else that is the case.

Your virginity simile, and exhaustive list of synonyms, aren't disturbing or shocking, they're just odd stylistic flashes that add nothing to the discussion. It's odd and ironic that you permit yourself these useless flashes, since you indict blogs as 'not primary sources', yet here you are on-line essentially functioning as a blog yourself, indicting blogs. And there are plenty of primary sources in the posts from mad or Diane Ravitch, which brings the derailed conversation back to the fore. This was written in the WaPo blog (of Post Education reporter Valerie Strauss), and it's something that you dismiss because, you know, it's a blog (so the arbiter can arbitrarily declare that primary sources and expert opinions aren't meeting their high expectations, and can therefore be mislabeled and ignored):

"Apparently, the department believes that more testing will help special education students achieve more in school. But since No Child Left Behind started, the standardized test-based “accountability” era more than a dozen years ago, there has been no evidence to show that standardized tests have improved student achievement, or that linking test scores to teacher evaluations has created better teachers."

It's a fact. It's a widely acknowledged fact, that bears discussion, and mad and other public ed advocates are trying to discuss it. You keep ignoring the testing end of things (example posts #70, 101, 139, and 186 are places where the issue was brought up, and you gloss over it, like you just don't see it.) The advocates and opponents of high-stakes nclb testing are continuing to say that public education is losing ground, it's observable reality. Opponents have been saying for over a decade that l'il bush's policy was just an attack on public education, an attempt to destroy it and steal the money for his wealthy cronies. But they were just bloggers with an opinion. (As usual, advocates are saying we should just stay the course, we just haven't enacted the policy fully enough and it needs more power and time to succeed.)

An afficionado of The Smirking Chimp, who use a 'lost virginity' simile to prove a point, might appreciate this: l'il bush's education policy is 'the Iraq invasion' of education policies. Bloggers opposed the Iraq debacle, saying that it was a horrible idea. Proponents said that there was no primary source to back up the assertions that his team was only interested in oil, profits, power; he was 'really' doing it for peace, democracy, national security, humanitarian interests. Opponent bloggers were all over the place with their conjectures (it was for the oil, it was revenge against Hussein, it was the chimp one-upping his dad for Freudian reasons, it was so he could consolidate power as a war president, it was so he could take Iraq's oil off the market to benefit the Saudi Exxon bottom line, it was so contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater could bleed us for obscene profits, etc.) They may have disagreed about the motives, but all agreed that the chimp was lying, and the results would be disastrous. Proponents said that those bloggers were all over the board, and had no proof that their suspicions were justifiable. These proponents' objections served to enable the bush Admin.

Here we are, 11 years later, and the results are disastrous. The opponents' predictions were proved true, the proponents' justifications proved disastrously false. Similar to his foreign policy, the chimps' Iraq War style education policy is a disaster, that he lied about to get implemented. We still get to see the architects of these failed plans opining on primary sources, all the time. Because the big money people are happy about the results, though they vary wildly from the stated aims used to justify the policy implementation. I'm not blaming you for Iraq with this simile or analogy, you just remind me of the Iraq policy proponents when you pursue your justification of l'il bush's 'Iraq Invasion' Education policies. Same tactics, same de-railment, same 'you can't prove it', for the same results.

Does your business happen to involve work with Rhee, Pearson, Broad, Gates, or any of the other witches brew of profiteers who want to destroy education and make big bucks out of denying non-rich Americans of the ability to learn? I only ask because it would go a long way towards explaining why duty called the educator-businessman to dust off the old account and suddenly re-enter the fray to forcefully back the Iraq invasion of education policies, while making thinly veiled insulting false accusations against a demonstrably good educator and Democrat like mad. Especially when any competent researcher knows that all over the country bad news is pouring in about educational opportunities for non-wealthy public school students, whether you accept the sources as primary \ substantive or not.

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