Sunday, December 11, 2016

Miracle at the Connecticut State Education Department - Somebody Woke Up!

This news was unreported and buried by Connecticut's MSM. CT News Junkie seems to be a sole source.  This is the kind of news the State government wants to keep buried. Business as usual. Hide the racism.  Hide the incompetence.Let's all be polite because that's what its all about.

I've been watching Connecticut do everything in its power to ignore, slow, and kill any attempt at closing a racial and class divide that keeps generations of children and young adults on a treadmill to early death, povrty subsistence, or a life in prison. We don't call it that.  We call it an education gap.  the gap being that the poor and urban populations of color must understand that there's nothing here for them - no college track, no snowflake, entitlement  treatment - no future except that their children will rinse and repeat this same cycle.

So yeah, a miracle of sorts happened. A State of Connecticut Board member aroused from a bureacratically induced coma;

State Board of Education member Malia K. Sieve listened for close to an hour Wednesday as her fellow board members and professionals in the field discussed Connecticut’s disappointing results on a well-known nationwide science test.She listened to speakers and watched slide-after-slide on an overhead projector of other states surpassing Connecticut in the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress science assessment.< She listened as some said the “good news’’ was that the achievement gap between minority and white students has shrunk since the last testing period in the state.
When she finally spoke up, her words captured the full attention of her fellow board members.“I’m so fired up, not in a good way,” Sieve said. Sieve is a director at HCM Strategies where her full-time job is to work with institutional leaders on education policy. “I’m tired of us all talking so politely,” Sieve said. What the test results clearly indicate, Sieve said, “is we do a better job with one population. We’re doing a whole lot better by our white kids.”Apologizing for getting emotional, Sieve went on to say that, “We act like if we talk politely — it will all be fine.”But by doing that it means “we have not decided that we have to do anything differently yet,” Sieve said. Sieve’s passionate words came after a presentation about nationwide science tests taken by fourth and eighth graders in 2015 that showed Connecticut is falling behind other states, though Education Department Chief Performance Officer Ajit Gopalakrishnan and Renee Savoie, an education consultant, termed the state’s performance as “stagnant.’’

Yeah, "stagnant" is one way of putting it. Maliciously racist might be another. we've been engaged in this dance of irresponsibility for many, many decades.  The State Board of Education has been as worthless a bureacratic body as any in government. Hickups such as this one are a rarity and as you an see, you'll never hear about them unless you look hard.

Truth is that the high stakes testing is a lousy metric for evaluating our schools.  CT is mired in the Orwellian double-speak OF No Child Left Behind and all its draconian successors. All these programs dumb-down educational experiences for kids, Even by this poor metric iyt becomes obvious that CT schoolchildren can be reduced to incompetent parrots when subjegated to generations of comformity indicing brainwashing.

"Stagnant". Brain-dead is closer to the truth.  Malooy needs to flatten these organizations and repeal all the idiotic legislation that has so poisoned the system that we no longer recognise it. making it all go away is the best remedy for this nonsense.

Renditioning Teenagers

In a recent article in the Vice digital  magazine entitled "The Legal Industry for Kidnapping Teens" by Serena Solomon we are given a tour of one of the more controversial aspects of the never-ending "tough-love" industry.

The recipe for finding consumers for this business is simple.

"A critical aspect of the whole operation is gaining parental permission through an affidavit or power of attorney agreement. These agreements temporarily transfer parental rights to the youth transport company, giving workers permissions that include authorizing medical attention or restraining the young person. 
"In general, parents have enormously wide discretion with respect to decisions regarding their children. They can decide to leave their children with people and give them parental rights and no one can interfere," Philip Elberg, an attorney who has worked on cases involving the troubled teen industry, told me.
Elberg added that the large number of abuse complaints triggered by the troubled teen industry isn't matched by the small number of lawsuits because, among other reasons, unless there is a serious physical incident such as injury, sexual abuse, or death of a young person, there isn't much legal ground to stand on after authority has been handed over by the parent."Parents are often the victim," said Bush. "They are desperate to help their child and someone who is supposed to be a professional tells them that this is what they are supposed to do.""
So what happens to the teenager when their parents sign over parental rights?

The troubled teen or "tough love" industry is made up mostly of for-profit companies that promise to fix drug addiction, mental illness, and attitude problems. At the center of this industry are the behavioral programs, some accused of abusive practices and even causing the death of teen clients. If the behavioral program is the entrée, then the transportation service is the appetizer, often setting the tone for the treatment the young person will endure for the months or years to come. 
"They can be abducted against their will and this meets all the criteria of trauma," Dr. Nicole Bush, an associate professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, told me. Bush helped found the Alliance for the Safe, Therapeutic, and Appropriate Use of Residential Treatment (A START) to help protect young people from negligent residential programs and youth transport services.
Several of her teen clients who attended residential programs attribute their post-traumatic stress disorder to the youth transport services that picked them up. One client said she was taken when an SUV pulled up next to the family car. Another described two large men escorting her from a restaurant where she was eating with friends."They talk about nightmares, not being able to sleep alone, or needing a night light," Bush told me. "These are people are in their 20s and 30s, more than a decade after the event."
Bush is quick to point out that not all youth transport services are equal. A 2015 article in the Child and Youth Care Forum found after surveying 350 young people who attended a wilderness program (where nature expeditions are used as a type of therapy) that whether young people were transported or dropped off by a parent had little impact on the treatment outcome.
As far as I can see, "tough love" sure looks a lot more like "rough love" than anyone cares to admit.