High Stakes Testing
Makes Cheating Inevitable
Over the last four years, standardized
test cheating cases have been confirmed “in 37 states and the District of
Columbia, and patterns of systemic cheating in about a dozen jurisdictions,”
said Bob
Schaeffer, of Fair Test. “The
only solution is a comprehensive overhaul of No Child Left Behind and the
over-testing system that has been mandated.” Schaeffer said evaluation of
student progress should be “based on the work students do in the classroom over
time.”
Mumia on the Real Dr. King
Political prisoner Mumia Abu
Jamal, serving a
life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison, sent a message to a gathering at New
York’s historic Riverside Church on the anniversary of the Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr’s assassination. “ MLK, who broke with President Lyndon Johnson in a
speech at Riverside on April 4, 1967, “was an adversary of the military
industrial complex and the mammoth business interests that support it. This is
why state power marked him, quashed his voice, and gave him up to a violent
death,” said Abu Jamal.
Free the Cuban Five
“The U.S. government categorically denies
it has political prisoners in its gulags,” said Luis Rosa, a Puerto Rican activist from Chicago who
spent 19 years in prison on political charges. Rosa spoke at a Columbia
University event demanding freedom for the Cuban Five and all U.S. political
prisoners. The U.S. “uses denial to violate our most basic human rights,” said
Rosa, “to perpetuate the lie that it is the ultimate defender of freedom,
justice, democracy and human rights in the world.” Imani Brown, of Columbia’s Caribbean Students
Association, said “American neocolonial systems of power…is the driving force of
the prison industrial complex.”
Petition to Take Back Obama’s Peace
Prize
Norman Solomon, the former
anti-war congressional candidate and co-founder of RootsAction.org, says the
state of peace in the world “has gone from bad to worse” in the 40 months since
President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. RootsAction.org is circulating a
petition, asking the Nobel committee to take back the prize, which was awarded
early in Obama’s first term. As one petitioner wrote: “A pre-emptive peace prize
works about as well as pre-emptive war.”
“See No Evil, Hear No Evil” at
EPA
“When you consider the level of assaults
that the planet is under, if ever in our history we needed a strong voice at the
agency for communities and people, it’s now,” said Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo,
noted whistleblower and a leader in the No Fear Coalition. She said Gina
McCarthy, President Obama’s new choice to head the Environmental Protection
Agency, is just another representative of the “envirotocracy – green paint on
top of a corporate structure” – very much like former EPA chief Lisa Jackson and
other predecessors who “hear no evil, see no evil.”
Where Did Haiti Aid Money Go?
A new report by the Center for Economic
and Policy Research, in Washington, calls for more transparency and
accountability in U.S. AID’s dispensing of monies to Haiti. “The Haitian people
know how much money was pledged, and they know how little they’ve seen,” said
the CEPR’s Jake
Johnston. “There’s
becoming a whole lot of resentment.”
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