I have been steadily writing more diaries lately and I have been trying to see how I can put some of them to good use during election season. Typically, with election issues I make my contribution by commenting leaving the fact finding and analysis to some of the great diarists we have on DKOS. With that in mind I have decided to devote my Saturday diary each week to placing focus on service organizations that I am familiar with.

Why read this diary? Maybe you are tired of only reading campaign diary after campaign diary. Or maybe you want to learn about some organizations doing some good right NOW, even with our current buffoon of a president. Maybe you are awesome and love me just because. (looking at you mom) I will admit many of the organizations will be located in the New England , where I am from, but not all of them! Like for example the organization I have chosen to focus on today; Nuestro Ahora- a non-profit which provides orphaned children of El Salvador the chance to attend an institution of higher learning.

Join me for more after the jump.

So it started with the gas tax holiday...

He said the average consumer would save a "quarter and a nickel" a day, and only $28 in three months.

McCain told a town-hall audience in Denver: "I want to give the American consumer a little bit of relief just for the summer. Maybe they'll be able to buy an additional textbook for their children when they go back to school this fall."

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$28? For a textbook? Would that my life were so easy.

Solving the crisis in education is completely possible, and we can't afford to ignore the state of our schools any longer.

This is a book review of Kate Menken's English Learners Left Behind, which details the difficulties faced by "English language learners" under the testing regime faced by NCLB, with special emphasis upon problems the author observed and researched in New York State.

(crossposted at Docudharma)

McCain said many things yesterday that pissed me off in his NAACP Convention speech. Yes, I commend him for going even though he really didn't have much of a choice. When he wasn't the "presumptive nominee" he didn't bother to show up to talk to the Black folks. Remember last fall when Tavis Smiley hosted debates for all of the presidential candidates. ALL of the Democrats showed up, but the four Republicans that were in the lead at the time didn't bother to show up:

"Let me take a moment right here and now to say hello to those of you viewers from home: Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senator John McCain, Gov. Mitt Romney and Senator Fred Thompson," Tom Joyner, the syndicated radio host, said in his opening remarks, to knowing laughter from the audience.

And it's not that he was too busy, because he was willing to go on the Hispanic debate:

The debate comes shortly after Univision, a Spanish-language network, canceled a Republican debate only Mr. McCain agreed to participate.

But I digress, this diary is about education and his very WRONG policies.

Jump

America: land of innovation, of the can-do spirit, of Yankee ingenuity.

Americans were the first people in the world to declare independence from an empire -- and get away with it. Americans dug the Erie Canal, reversed the flow of rivers, invented powered flight and the skyscraper, harnessed the power of the atom, sent men to the moon and brought them back alive. We supplied the world with an abundance of food and high-quality manufactured goods. We defeated fascism, take credit for having defeated communism, co-founded the United Nations, absorbed tens of millions of immigrants and made a single people out of many. We are one goddamn amazing country.

Or at any rate, we were. Something happened to us around 30 years ago. Suddenly, things seemed so awfully difficult. Preposterous, even. Reducing poverty? Building a 200-mpg automobile engine? Signing the Kyoto Protocols? Manufacturing consumer goods domestically? Fighting crime and terrorism without recklessly abrogating civil liberties? Forget it. It's too hard. Too inconvenient. Too unprofitable. Too much of a hassle. Or it might mean that we had to follow the same rules as every other country, that our specialness didn't render us exempt.

We've turned into Emo Nation, for crying out loud.

Before, after, but preferably not during  the Netroots Nation panel Energizing America:  Setting an Agenda for Progress, take the time to visit and explore a truly Energy COOL visitor.  

The Austin Independent School District will bring their Plug-In Hybrid Electric School bus (PHESB), one of very few in the nation, to outside the Convention Center and have people their to explain the bus, its successes, and the systems.  

NOTE: Coding problems kept me from post the full discussion at Daily Kos.  For a robust discussion of school buses see the full post at EENR and Docudharma.

As some of you may know, I write a lot about the entertainment industry & the gossip that surrounds it. One thing I've touched on in the past is the robbery that occurs at the snack bar in movie theaters. I've recommended theater owners dress their staff with ski-masks & guns so the atmosphere is right when charging people $4 for a Coke, $6 for a bucket of popcorn, and $5 for a hot dog that has been spinning in a rotisserie oven for God knows how long.

But there are places worse than the movie theater snack bar. I know that's hard to believe, but it's true. They're called university bookstores.

By some estimates, college textbook prices are up 186% since 1986. To add insult to injury, after a student spends an exorbitant sum for books, at the end of the semester the very same bookstore will only buy them back for a fraction of what they charged, if they'll buy them back at all since they need to waste trees by using a new edition of world history next semester. Unless Doc & Marty got in the DeLorean, traveled back to ancient Greece & screwed up the space-time continuum, I don't think much has changed about the Peloponnesian War.

I'm a bitter, burnt-out veteran of thirteen years teaching in the public schools who has a passionate desire to do one thing with my students: make them better than they were when they walked in.  I have taught in a rural school and an urban school.  I have taught history, literature for reluctant readers, special education and, yes, Algebra.  I used to coach but I saved my interest in pornography for home where I can look at grown-ups on the internet.

I voted "go away" before I read any of the comments.  I read the diary and was gripped by The Fear: People want the schools to solve a current events problem and, since everyone who has ever gone to school is qualified to address education issues, people will write about what "they" ought to do.

The Miguel Angel Asturias Academy is a non-profit school in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala that breaks cycles of poverty, racism and sexism through popular education.  These are stories from the ground. Although a school in Guatemala isn't directly related to US politics, our stories touch on themes of immigration, education and economic justice.

Yesterday I introduced Jorge Chojolan in the context of his time spent in exile and how he returned to his country to transform the educational system for social justice.  Today I want to focus on a key transformative event from his childhood that forever tied him to education for social change.

Bill Graves’ article "State university leaders get raises" in the 7/12/08 Oregonian reports that the Board of Higher Education approved salary increases of 4% to 6.5% for six of the Oregon University System presidents (OIT’s president was not listed). The combined salaries of these six presidents will be $1,788,120. And all get additional forms of other compensation. This, along with what we pay for the Superintendent of Public Instruction, is what we pay for our public educational leadership in Oregon.

Math mania will be an occasional series.  This post is an edited version of one I wrote for Education/Uprising, more than a year ago. A list of earlier diaries is here).

What if kids loved to learn?

What if at the end of class, they wanted it to be longer, and kept the teacher in the hallway answering questions?

What if they learned that coupling their imaginations to their powers of reasoning would give them a tool of awesome power for exploring the cosmos?

What if an 11 year old got so excited by his insights that he yelled out

OH WOW! I get this now!

What if all this happened in math class?

We need to equip our nation to succeed in life.

The Miguel Angel Asturias Academy is a non-profit school in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala that breaks cycles of poverty, racism and sexism through popular education.  These are stories from the ground. Although a school in Guatemala isn't directly related to US politics, our stories touch on themes of immigration, education and economic justice.

Many thousands of refugees fled Guatemala to Mexico and the United States during the Guatemalan Civil War.  Miguel Angel Asturias Academy founder Jorge Chojolan was one of many refugees—he needed to flee because the government deemed his work in education subversive.  What did Jorge do that was so "subversive"?  What did he do during his time in exile?  Why did he return to Guatemala?  I’ll answer these questions and more on the flip—the first of three diaries presenting Jorge Chojolan.

Recent articles have suggested that Obama sacrifice teachers unions in attempt to broaden his appeal to independents in the fall.  

"We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of biography"   Oscar Wilde

To save our education system, we need not institute testing or accountability so much. We should seek to bring the arts back to education! A generation of children are being left behind because the arts are not offered as a viable alternative mode of study (especially in poor communities) Our educational bureaucracy stresses tests, science, and math. However, they forget that the abstract arts are also important. One can only do so much using just half their brain.

The Miguel Angel Asturias Academy is a non-profit school in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala that breaks cycles of poverty, racism and sexism through popular education.  These are stories from the ground. Although a school in Guatemala isn't directly related to US politics, our stories touch on themes of immigration, education and economic justice.

Because of the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) it is now politically popular to talk about how we need to get the world's population to the $2 a day level.  Currently, in Guatemala 80% are at or below the $2 level.  What does this look like in regards to education and human rights?  More on the flip.

I am reporting this press release about an alleged academic freedom case in Red Oak, Iowa. I have not been able to find any corroboration of the case. However, I have a reasonable trust for Common Dreams and the details given of the case are credible to me given my own experiences and those of others I am aware of. If the facts of this case are true, it is disturbing. Also disturbing is the lack of public interest in such cases.