GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

It’s amazing to see the difference between words and actions from the Obushma administration.

They said they would end the Irag war, close Guantanamo, end the military’s DADT policy, hold banks and financial institutions accountable for the near-collapse of the world economic system, mitigate the worst excesses of NCLB, and make the American food system safer for consumers.

What have they actually done?

The U.S. continues to have as many troops in Iraq now as it did under Bush. In addition, President Obushma plans to send somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 additional troops to prop up the corrupt regime in Afghanistan.

Gitmo closure? Obushma said it would be closed within a year but now the timetable has been extended and the end game for closure is uh, non-existent.

Holding financial companies and banks accountable for the mess? He provided hundreds of billions of dollars in TALF and Federal Reserve Open Market operations money to Goldman, Chase, Citigroup and the rest, so much so that the big boys are leveraged 40 to 1 again, just as they were right before the unraveling of the CDS/CDO market. In addition, the FDIC is nearly bankrupt trying to provide money to depositors who lost everything in small bank closures even as Obushma prints money at will for the big banks. More bailouts are on the way and you can bet the big boys will come out richer and more powerful than before. Nice way to hold ‘em accountable, Obushma!

DADT and gay rights? Obushma talks jive to gay rights groups even as he has his administration work to strengthen the Defense of Marriage Act via the Justice Dept. and ignores his promise to change DADT.

As for NCLB, it’s a doubling down…like standardized tests? Great, cuz’ you’re getting more of them courtesy of Arne and Obushma. Like standards dictated from D.C.? Great, cuz’ you’re getting more of them. Like people who know nothing about education calling the shots on education policy? Great cuz’ you’re getting more of them. Like the continued privatization of public education by neo-liberals looking to make money for themselves a la Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg via education reforms (all that data does get tracked on Gates’ computer systems, doesn’t it?). Great, cuz’ you’re getting more of them.

Finnally, Obushma’s FDA and USDA are being run by the same corporate whores who ran them under Bush. Like genetically modified foods, trillions in corn subsidies and other give-aways to the agri-corps? The you’ll love the Obushma administration.

Change we can believe in? Ha – Obushma is cut from the same corrupt cloth that Bush is from.

Good article on Columbus Day. Based on my informal assessment of my seventh graders, not many of them learned the “three ships” and “great discoverer” perspective on Columbus. The “world is flat” story seems to have hung on, although I’ve read that most educated Europeans believed the world was round in 1492. But just as many of my students know Columbus principally as the one who coveted gold and brought slavery and disease to Hispaniola. And–I hear this one a lot–he didn’t discover America, because the Native Americans were here first!

I must admit some sympathy for the Knight of Columbus quoted in the article: it feels like we’re laying on the revisionist, anti-Columbus lessons pretty heavy these days, and I haven’t found many lessons that find a decent middle ground. Last week, I did a read-aloud of “Encounter” by Jane Yolen, which is a fictional account of Columbus’ arrival from a Taino boy’s perspective. It’s a picture book that leads to excellent discussion of bias and perspective, and it’s got an obvious revisionist tilt. Then, we took a look at Renaissance Europe and the Europeans’ motivations for exploration, and we’ll study the Columbian Exchange this week. I’m trying to be balanced, and still hoping for a way to study Columbus that gives room for critique of both the 1950s textbook account and all-out anti-Columbus revisionism.