Student Reporter Damon Weaver Interviews President Barack Obama:
This kid is great. I bet Obama could still dunk if he wanted to!
http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP-695ATg-c
Go Bills,Colin
Monday, August 17, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
From activist Leonard Fein...
The future is not something we discover around the next corner. It is something we shape, we create, we invent. To hold otherwise would be to view ourselves as an audience to history, and not its authors. History, and even our own lives, cannot always be turned and twisted to make them go exactly where we should like. But there is, for people of energy and purpose, more freedom of movement than most ever exercise. *
*From Reform Is a Verb : Notes on Reform and Reforming Jews (1972), p. 152
The future is not something we discover around the next corner. It is something we shape, we create, we invent. To hold otherwise would be to view ourselves as an audience to history, and not its authors. History, and even our own lives, cannot always be turned and twisted to make them go exactly where we should like. But there is, for people of energy and purpose, more freedom of movement than most ever exercise. *
*From Reform Is a Verb : Notes on Reform and Reforming Jews (1972), p. 152
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Coming Soon...
Teaser: I will be writing an in-depth rant of the eventual privatization of education in America. I'll be making the correlation to the privatization of health care in the 1980s and what it might mean for America coming soon. Something to think about...we all know what an HMO is right? But do you know what an EMO is? You will....
Tonight at 11.
Go Bills,
Colin
Monday, July 13, 2009
MMJ
For those that are tired of me talking about this band or this album, sorry.
I was just thinking with the cross-genre nature of the album again and i think that this album, Evil Urges, has produced some of the best, if not the best, songs i heard last year across a few genres. It had an incredible ambient/electronic song (Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt. 1&2), the best alt-country song (I'm Amazed), the best funk/freakout song (Highly Suspicious), the best soft rock James Taylor impersonation (Sec Walkin'), a great guitar heavy rock song (Aluminum Park) and a song that eludes my classification, but is just lyrically and emotively awesome (Smoking From Shooting).
I think such a wide variety of people would appreciate an album like this, especially those who would appreciate the band's effort cross boundaries and make something worth that can't rated with five stars on a toolbar. My buddy talked recently about music becoming "disposable" as we download and borrow more and more. The next time you download a really great album just think, would you go to a museum and take a photo of a beautiful painting or watch cell phone videos of a great play? This album needs to be appreciated and owned by listeners.
I would include some links to these songs but until then go here and buy it the old fashioned way:
http://www.recordarchive.com/
Go Bills,
Colin
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Still Alive
This is promise to write again soon. Thanks to a friend who actually said to me, "Hey I check out your blog." That has inspired me to write a few more entries. That and that I got a new Mac! Here's a cool link to keep anyone who might read this interested....
http://vimeo.com/3558720
Go Bills,
Colin
http://vimeo.com/3558720
Go Bills,
Colin
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Policy Design: A Rant
I wrote this as a reflection for a class I'm taking at the University of Rochester. As far as rants go its pretty benign. I mention a couple of articles which I will try to also post. I hope you get jazzed* up by this as much as I am.
*jazzed=excited/angry/impassioned
Schneider starts by categorizing how and why policy is designed by doing a survey of different theorists. He says that the context of the policy should be a large determinate for its design and implementation. One thing I focused on in Schneider’s article was a component of context Schneider referred to as “citizenship”. When I think citizenship I think of being part of a community, looking over your shoulder for the person next to you. I feel that we have a strong lack of citizenship when it comes to education policy. As Kumashiro might say, we are afraid to be upstanding citizens for this cause because it might threaten people’s own lifestyle. Where are the advocates for education? Who besides some researchers and writers, such as Jonathon Kozol( pictured), are making noise about the inequities that pervade almost every single large urban community? Of the many “tools” in policy design that Schneider discussed, the Hortatory tool seems to be only reserved for policies that would be considered by Wilson as clientist or entrepreneurial, or in other words, policies that have dollar signs attached. Sure there is money to be made in education, just look at the McGraw-Hill cronies of President Bush, but there are far less politicians making public pleas for equitable education funding than there are for a dozen other issues.
It seems that the policy that I can’t escape discussing, No Child Left Behind, only makes use of one of the tools that Schneider discuses in his article, the use of inducements and sanctions. He mentions two other tools to drive policy that to perfectly align to a bit of education policy. It seems to make plain sense that upon implementation there has to be more than one way to unsure a policy does what it is supposed to do. It seems capacity building makes sense because it would empower a municipality or school to make changes for its own well being. The same can be said for the hortatory tools that would engender some outrage in people that might not know about the problems that many under served schools face. I shudder to think this, but are these tools not utilized because it would be too difficult? The fact that our government isn’t doing everything possible, utilizing every tool possible, hints to me that they might want this inequity to remain. Kumashiro would probably agree with this statement. He mentions how Billings thinks of the “Achievement Gap” as a debt rather than a gap. This says to me that our politicians in power have been borrowing against poor black people’s ability to tolerate an unacceptable quality of education.
Questions:
1. Does education policy get more scrutinized than other types of public policy? If so, is it more scrutinized for particular reasons?
2. This week’s unanswerable question: Is there a definitive way to make every person care about the welfare of all children? How long before we see advertisements that prey on people’s guilt by asking for donations for an inner-city school or neighborhood? Advertisements that ask for just “a dollar a day” and look just like the ones with Sally Struthers and the starving children of third world countries!
Kumashiro's Article (shorter)
*jazzed=excited/angry/impassioned
Schneider starts by categorizing how and why policy is designed by doing a survey of different theorists. He says that the context of the policy should be a large determinate for its design and implementation. One thing I focused on in Schneider’s article was a component of context Schneider referred to as “citizenship”. When I think citizenship I think of being part of a community, looking over your shoulder for the person next to you. I feel that we have a strong lack of citizenship when it comes to education policy. As Kumashiro might say, we are afraid to be upstanding citizens for this cause because it might threaten people’s own lifestyle. Where are the advocates for education? Who besides some researchers and writers, such as Jonathon Kozol( pictured), are making noise about the inequities that pervade almost every single large urban community? Of the many “tools” in policy design that Schneider discussed, the Hortatory tool seems to be only reserved for policies that would be considered by Wilson as clientist or entrepreneurial, or in other words, policies that have dollar signs attached. Sure there is money to be made in education, just look at the McGraw-Hill cronies of President Bush, but there are far less politicians making public pleas for equitable education funding than there are for a dozen other issues.
It seems that the policy that I can’t escape discussing, No Child Left Behind, only makes use of one of the tools that Schneider discuses in his article, the use of inducements and sanctions. He mentions two other tools to drive policy that to perfectly align to a bit of education policy. It seems to make plain sense that upon implementation there has to be more than one way to unsure a policy does what it is supposed to do. It seems capacity building makes sense because it would empower a municipality or school to make changes for its own well being. The same can be said for the hortatory tools that would engender some outrage in people that might not know about the problems that many under served schools face. I shudder to think this, but are these tools not utilized because it would be too difficult? The fact that our government isn’t doing everything possible, utilizing every tool possible, hints to me that they might want this inequity to remain. Kumashiro would probably agree with this statement. He mentions how Billings thinks of the “Achievement Gap” as a debt rather than a gap. This says to me that our politicians in power have been borrowing against poor black people’s ability to tolerate an unacceptable quality of education.
Questions:
1. Does education policy get more scrutinized than other types of public policy? If so, is it more scrutinized for particular reasons?
2. This week’s unanswerable question: Is there a definitive way to make every person care about the welfare of all children? How long before we see advertisements that prey on people’s guilt by asking for donations for an inner-city school or neighborhood? Advertisements that ask for just “a dollar a day” and look just like the ones with Sally Struthers and the starving children of third world countries!
Kumashiro's Article (shorter)
http://rapidshare.com/files/195796783/03-Kumashiro.pdf.html
Schneider's (long!!)
http://rapidshare.com/files/195797334/02_20-_20Schneider.pdf.html
Go Bills,
Colin
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