In 2009, CEOs of the fifty corporations responsible for the biggest layoffs were paid an average $12 million--42 percent more than the average pay for the Standard & Poor's 500.
There is certainly a lot of horrible news on how America's fairly poor business administration practices of the past decades ARE STILL continuing to drive American business, schools, economy and life in general. When will American labor and teachers wake-up and stick it to bad business models in school and national development--including political economic development?
First, many leading teachers, like Chicago's Karen Lewis, have only recently noted how America's recent penchant to once-again blindly love corporate America will continue to lead to horrible lives and lifestyles in America (and elsewhere) this decade.
KAREN LEWIS stated on Democracy Now Friday, " Well, the problem is that the whole idea of the [American] business model doesn't work in education. In the business model, you can select how you want to do something. You have an opportunity to innovate in a way that discriminates. It's very easy to do. Whereas in a public school system, where we do not select our children--we take whoever comes to the door--what we need is actually more resources and more support for the people that are there and the work that's being done. However, again, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein--I don't know about Joel Klein--none of these people are superintendents. You have to have, again, credentials for that. These are business folks. Look, the business model took this country to the brink of Armageddon in 2008. And yet, we want to follow a failed business model and imprint that on top of public education? No. And these things are not innovative. What they are is they're terrorism. They're "my way or the highway.' And they're still not producing, quote-unquote, "results.'
Nobody disagrees with accountability. That's not the issue. The issue is, what do you use? We still know that high-stakes testing basically tell us more about a student's socioeconomic status than it does anything else. And until we're honest about that and want to deal with the fact that we have neighborhoods in our cities and across the nation that have been under-resourced, have been devalued for decades, and for some reason or other, the schools are supposed to fix all that and change that."
Why weren't good universities, business schools, and teachers stating this in the classroom decades ago? Could they all have been brainwashed by the Chicago School of Economics?
Meanwhile, in another interview on Democracy Now on Friday, the lead author of a report, entitled "Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession" stated "the CEOs of the fifty corporations responsible for the biggest layoffs were paid an average $12 million--42 percent more than the average pay for the Standard & Poor's 500" in 2009.
Come on, America, there ought to be laws to stop this stupidity in a depression!
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