While public schools go begging...

Cities spend billions on militarization

Thousands of local police departments nationwide have been amassing stockpiles of military-style equipment in the name of homeland security, aided by more than $34 billion in federal grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a Daily Beast investigation conducted by the Center for Investigative Reporting has found. Obvious question for Occupiers is, who are these WMDs really pointing at?

Answers could come from Chuck Wexler who runs the govt.-funded Police Executive Research Forum (PERF).  Despite implausible denials here and in this obviously embedded NPR story, it was Wexler who coordinated those conference calls with city police chiefs to discuss their response to the Occupy Wall Street movement last fall. He basically admits PERF'S involvement in this Tweet from Nov. 1

Those conference calls were the prelude to the Oakland attacks on occupiers which led to the wounding of Iraq war vet, Scott Olsen and to the pepper spraying of passive protesters at UC-Davis. Now the cost to those cities is likely to skyrocket as they face lawsuits over free speech, use of force.

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ABC News reports that anti-govt. anti-taxer Rick Perry's security costs Texas taxpayers up to $400,000 a Month. And he's not even a Chicago alderman.

Ben Falik (really) at Huffington, claims there are some really great deals in Detroit if you want to buy a school.

"What's stopping me from opening my own charter school?" Not much, in all likelihood... You'll want to choose a name for your school that exudes credibility and markets the particular mission of the school. Assuming it's still available, I recommend Academy for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.

The White Party

Columbia prof, Thomas Edsall writing in today's NY Times, points out that the GOP has become the "white party," armed strategically with a racist, anti-Latino, anti-immigrant election strategy. It's a strategy that worked successfully in the mid-term elections. In the current Republican primary, says Edsall, any Republican candidate that, even momentarily stumbles on this, will pay for it in the polls. Case in point was Rick Perry.

The once-ascendant Perry torpedoed his own bid during a Sept. 22 debate in Orlando, Fla., when he endorsed using taxpayer dollars to educate the children of illegal immigrants. A single sentence started him on a downward slide:

If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.

Edsall thinks that the major threat to the Republican “white” strategy is a revival of the high turnout among minorities that carried Democrats to victory in 2008. Republicans, however, are taking advantage of their newly won control of state governments across the country to enact laws designed to suppress minority turnout .

I would add an even greater threat is the reticence of Democrats to mobilize their own base and forcefully push for immigration reform. Now that Rahm Emanuel is no longer chief of staff, maybe there's a shot.

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Birmingham Mayor William Bell told Democratic members of Congress at a hearing on Alabama's new immigration law that the legislation smacks of apartheid and Jim Crow laws. Bell told the lawmakers at an ad hoc hearing on Monday that the law passed this year by Alabama's Republican-controlled legislature places financial burdens on cities and could force police officers to employ racial profiling.

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In an attempt to invoke the memory and passion of the civil rights movement, a group of Democratic lawmakers will stand today in a historic church in Birmingham to help rally opposition to the state's new law that seeks to get tough on illegal immigrants.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES:

Fred Shavies

"That’s our Birmingham. So, twenty years from now this movement could be the turning point, the tipping point, right. It’s about time your generation stood up for something. It’s about time young people are in the streets. [...] Ya’ll don’t need to throw gas canisters into a group of people occupying an intersection."  -- Undercover Cop At Occupy Oakland Condemns Police Brutality

Mitt Romney

“Sometimes you wonder, would there be someway to introduce some private sector competition, somebody else that could come in and say, you know, each soldier gets X thousand dollars attributed to them and then they can choose whether they want to go on the government system or the private system and then it follows them, like what happens with schools in Florida where they have a voucher that follows them.” -- TPM

How He made his millions

“Millions for me, a pink slip for thee,” is the playbook of many private equity firms, and Romney was one of their savviest players. -- Columnist Robyn Blumner

Rick Perry

“I will defend waterboarding until I die.” -- At Republican debate

Michelle Bachmann

"America Should Be Less Socialist… Like China." -- TPM

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Where's the Zuckerberg $$?

"We don’t know what the foundation is doing or how they intend to spend the other money. With that money comes a responsibility to the public to be clear about its use." -- Newark Teachers Union President Joe Del Grosso

From Education Nation

"This (teacher salary issue) really strikes home for me because when I know passionate, excellent teachers who've left the classroom, it's not because of lack of dollars, it's lack of voice. We want a chance to be the decision makers. We're on the ground, we know what need to be done and we want the chance to do it." -- Melanie Allen, a Boston teacher.

Monty Neill

"The Obama-Duncan plan for ―flexibility‖ in the administration of the ―No Child Left Behind‖ (NCLB) federal education law offers little more than a leap from the frying pan to the fire – and even adds gasoline to the fire." -- FairTest

Cheating

"Cheating scandals have been rolling up the East Coast like a hurricane this year, from Atlanta to Washington, Pennsylvania and New Jersey." -- Sharon Otterman, New York Times

John Kass

Perry makes No Child Left Behind seem like a fairy tale with a happy ending. And if he loves government muscle so much, shouldn't he have run for mayor of Chicago? -- Tribune

Just what Perry needed to save his crumbling campaign

...Duncan

T-bagger Gov.Perry's "Texas miracle" has been a disaster for public education. He's cut $8B from the public ed budget and fired 50,000 teachers despite a glob of state oil revenues and lots of federal military dollars to spend.

Arne Duncan rode the myth of the  "Chicago miracle" all the way to Washington. Now Duncan has jumped into the 2012 campaign with a weak jab at Perry and Texas schooling. The problem with the Duncan/Perry dust-up is --they're both worse.

But what about the fact, I responded, that on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Texas' fourth- and eighth-graders substantially outperformed their peers in Chicago in reading and math? "I would have to look at all the details, but there are real challenges in Texas. And like every other state, they should be addressed openly and honestly as in Illinois, as in Chicago, and everywhere else." -- Rotherham at Time

"Texas," writes Rotherham, "may be slightly below the national average, but it's doing a lot better than Chicago, which only graduates about 56% of its students."

Irony: Duncan ought to sync with his buddy Rahm in Chicago. Sinking high school test scores there have prompted Emanuel to once again, hold up Texas, with it's supposedly longer school day, as his ideal.

The real reason for Duncan's ire -- Perry is openly calling, not only for an end to NCLB/Race to the Top and for abolishing the D.O.E., he's even raised the possibility of Texas' secession from the U.S. How Duncan's boss would love to run against that!

But Arne's recent history as a political campaigner is pretty grim. Remember how he jumped into the Fenty for Mayor campaign last year to try and save Michelle Rhee's job and helped snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.Now Duncan has T-Party Republicans across the land begging: "Attack me, attack me!"