The 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure grades 15 categories of infrastructure, including levees (http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/report-cards).  So how is America doing?  The report notes, “….. for the second time,America’s infrastructure rates a cumulative grade of D.  While not all categories fare as badly or are plagued by the same problems, delayed maintenance and chronic under-funding are [...]

Kaplan University  charges the following populations different amounts for a 180 quarter unit Bachelor of Science degree: $30,000 for active duty military, $41,000 for veterans, $50,000 for international students and $68,000 for low income Title IV eligible students.   Why do the poor pay more? Kaplan blames it on a government regulation called the 90/10 [...]

  For-profit colleges–such as The Art Institutes, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College, and South University–generate millions in profits for Wall Street.   Meanwhile students get the short end of the stick. Typically at for-profit schools, tuition is higher, debt is larger, and graduation rates are lower than at traditional schools.   That’s why the Service [...]

School segregation and the doctrine of separate but equal were the law of the land until 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v Board of Education: We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. . Sixty years [...]

Elizabeth Bucher, 19, who is attending a California community college in Sonoma County (Santa Rosa Junior College), did all she could to get into Biology 2.1 this semester, the last class she needed to transfer to UC Davis.  The problem is that the classes were full and the seats were not available.  The students were [...]

Newt Gingrich has recently been lauded by some and under attack by others for his comments regarding child labor.  Newt, you might remember, proposed that children should be janitors in their schools so they might learn personal responsibility and the value of a ‘job’. This of course is familiar bantering among the financial elites and [...]

Dear Rethinking Schools friends, Did you see the news last week? On Friday, we learned that our book Rethinking Columbus was banned — along with other books used in Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program, including Paulo Freire’s A Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America, and Elizabeth Martinez’s 500 Years of Chicano History in [...]

Did you know that 76 Percent of For-Profit College Students Attend Schools that are Wall Street Owned?  Did you know that 86 Percent of Revenues Come from Federal Taxpayer Dollars?  Did you know that For-Profit Colleges Spend the Majority of Revenues on Marketing and Profit while Few Services Are Provided Except Recruiters?  And tuition is [...]

ON Dec 23,  2011 Judge Barbara Rothstein  dismissed a shareholder’s lawsuit against Donald Graham and the Washington Post alleging WaPO defrauded investors because  Kaplan U engaged in deceptive and unethical marketing practices.  The lawsuit: Plumbers Local 200 v  Washington Post, Donald Graham and Hal Jones,  was filed in US District Court in the District of [...]

  Picture of Thieves in Dante’s Hell   A new report from the American Academyof Pediatrics (AAP) indicates that children in poor urban neighborhoods need more chances for old-fashioned playtime in their daily lives.   A number of experts in the report have raised concerns that in the current climate of treating youth not as if [...]