The Good, the Bad, and, well, you know the rest:
While America is busily spreading democracy (code for opening new venues for various capitalists) around the world, we learn that "an analysis of the nation’s biggest mergers over the last 12 months indicates that the securities of 41 percent of the companies receiving buyout bids exhibited abnormal and suspicious trading in the days and weeks before those deals became public" (The New York Times).
Of course we all learned in grade school that capitalism was the process of developing a better mouse trap which would cause investers to beat a path to our doors so that we could start manufacturing the mouse trap and then marketing it to customers.
Ooops! Guess that's just not the case. Turns out that capitalism is mostly about arranging buyouts so that a company's stock shoots up in anticipation that the campany's real value will also improve—usually as a result of the company firing large numbers of its employees or renegotiating its contracts with said employees so that they no longer have health benefits.
The Business of Newspapers:
Today's New York Times offers a story of the Knight Ridder newspaper company that at one time was one of the leading publishers of newspapers in the country and one of the most profitable. It was also known for its excellent journalism, having won no less than 85 Pulitzer Prizes. For those interested in the state of American business and capitalism, this is a good place to start.
We've all heard far too often about how the Internet is changing the way things work, including or maybe "especially" the newspaper industry. News gathering/publishing entities depend on pushing advertising at us in order to pay for their costs in going about their business.
The hitch comes from the dirty little secret that every business person knows: Advertising dollars are finite.
On Education:
Today's New York Times contains an editorial on a subject we addressed recently, the failure of the Charter School concept to alter the quality of education in the U. S. The Times article focuses on what they consider the key factor—America's failure to recognize the value of quality instruction.
The truth is that America doesn't value education. During a brief period in our country's history, usually designated as the Cold War Era, education seemed to be one of, perhaps the most highly esteemed value. There are those who say that fear of communism pressured America to place such a high regard for education in our culture. However, the actual fact of the matter is that America was recovering from the Depression and World War II, and people quickly recognized that education was the one sure approach to achieve some security against the vicissitudes that those periods of time presented us with.
When the culture at large places a high value on education, people will demand that text books be the most up to date and accurate as possible. They will require their schools to hire the best teachers. And they will demand from their children the sort of acceptance of responsibility for learning that has not existed in this country since the mid 1970s.
Every teacher knows that good students will learn regardless of the quality of the teacher, while poor students seldom learn much of value even from the best teachers. This doesn't mean that we should accept poor instruction, but it certainly means that we must demand that our children become good students first. Then we can demand that teachers be better, text books be more than simply adequate, schools be safe (AND SMALL) and places that augment learning rather than simply warehouse our youth and serve as locations for sporting events.
As long as parents and the community at large place more emphasis on the high school football team's winning record and denying the theory of evolution in biology classes, education will never be more than a business, an entity that accumulates dollars for the benefit of a few.
While America is busily spreading democracy (code for opening new venues for various capitalists) around the world, we learn that "an analysis of the nation’s biggest mergers over the last 12 months indicates that the securities of 41 percent of the companies receiving buyout bids exhibited abnormal and suspicious trading in the days and weeks before those deals became public" (The New York Times).
Of course we all learned in grade school that capitalism was the process of developing a better mouse trap which would cause investers to beat a path to our doors so that we could start manufacturing the mouse trap and then marketing it to customers.
Ooops! Guess that's just not the case. Turns out that capitalism is mostly about arranging buyouts so that a company's stock shoots up in anticipation that the campany's real value will also improve—usually as a result of the company firing large numbers of its employees or renegotiating its contracts with said employees so that they no longer have health benefits.
The Business of Newspapers:
Today's New York Times offers a story of the Knight Ridder newspaper company that at one time was one of the leading publishers of newspapers in the country and one of the most profitable. It was also known for its excellent journalism, having won no less than 85 Pulitzer Prizes. For those interested in the state of American business and capitalism, this is a good place to start.
We've all heard far too often about how the Internet is changing the way things work, including or maybe "especially" the newspaper industry. News gathering/publishing entities depend on pushing advertising at us in order to pay for their costs in going about their business.
The hitch comes from the dirty little secret that every business person knows: Advertising dollars are finite.
On Education:
Today's New York Times contains an editorial on a subject we addressed recently, the failure of the Charter School concept to alter the quality of education in the U. S. The Times article focuses on what they consider the key factor—America's failure to recognize the value of quality instruction.
The truth is that America doesn't value education. During a brief period in our country's history, usually designated as the Cold War Era, education seemed to be one of, perhaps the most highly esteemed value. There are those who say that fear of communism pressured America to place such a high regard for education in our culture. However, the actual fact of the matter is that America was recovering from the Depression and World War II, and people quickly recognized that education was the one sure approach to achieve some security against the vicissitudes that those periods of time presented us with.
When the culture at large places a high value on education, people will demand that text books be the most up to date and accurate as possible. They will require their schools to hire the best teachers. And they will demand from their children the sort of acceptance of responsibility for learning that has not existed in this country since the mid 1970s.
Every teacher knows that good students will learn regardless of the quality of the teacher, while poor students seldom learn much of value even from the best teachers. This doesn't mean that we should accept poor instruction, but it certainly means that we must demand that our children become good students first. Then we can demand that teachers be better, text books be more than simply adequate, schools be safe (AND SMALL) and places that augment learning rather than simply warehouse our youth and serve as locations for sporting events.
As long as parents and the community at large place more emphasis on the high school football team's winning record and denying the theory of evolution in biology classes, education will never be more than a business, an entity that accumulates dollars for the benefit of a few.
posted by Jim | 12:55 PM
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