Archive for April 2016

SO YOU THINK YOU'RE REGISTERED TO VOTE?

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(Mensaje se repite en Español) In hopefully learning from the suspicious disqualification of approximately 125,000 voters in Bernie Sanders home town of Brooklyn during the New York primary on April 19th of this year, I would suggest that Californians who want to be absolutely sure they can vote and be counted in California's primary on June 7th take the preemptive precaution of avoiding any potential unpleasant surprises on election day by now checking their own voter registration status well before the May 23rd voter registration deadline.
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30

04 2016


by Leonard Isenberg
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RACIST PUBLIC EDUCATION STILL ALIVE AND WELL AT LAUSD

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(Mensaje se repite en Español) Predominantly students of color continue to exclusively be subjected to a non-education system of rote regurgitation of multiple choice answers with little or no writing or analysis. Their lessons consist of fragments of texts comprised of words and concepts they have never been taught. What most educational reformers ignore, who either have never been in an innercity classroom or do not care about dealing with the subjective reality they would find there, is that both teachers and students in these schools have an acquired aversion to the Socratic method of dialogue between teacher and student and the critical thinking it is designed to stimulate in both the student and the teacher.
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24

04 2016


by Leonard Isenberg
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LAUSD's MILITANTLY IGNORANT COMMITMENT TO A FAILED MODEL OF PUBLIC EDUCATION...AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

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(Mensaje se repite en Español) Whether it's Donald Trump or those misguided souls continuing to set the course for public education "reform" at places like the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), what they have in common is the complete inability to deal with objective and quantifiable reality in explaining how they intend to achieve their goals or whether these should be their goals in the first place. My favorite unchallenged feel good lie with literally no basis in fact that remains a clearly unattainable goal at LAUSD is that, "All students will be going to college." This flies in the face of the reality that the total capacity of all colleges and universites in the United States is 30% of high school graduates. So college and universities literally could not accommodate LAUSD's goal, even if the students were coming out of high school with mastery of all K-12 prior grade level standards, which they are not.
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16

04 2016


by Leonard Isenberg
1 Comment

INTEGRATING L.A.'s MIRACLE MILE

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(Mensaje se repite en Español) When I was a twelve-year-old kid in Northridge, some neighbors came by all agitated to talk to my folks about "the negros that wanted to move into the neighborhood." They wanted all the lily-white and predominantly gentile neighbors to get together and buy the house to get it off the market...and stop the negroes from moving into the neighborhood. My father, who was from Chicago- and had suffered from antisemitism in his youth- wanted no part of this. He could have gained the illusion of assimilated acceptance for our family in the neighborhood by going along with this and forgeting his own recent past of social ostracism as other Jewish, Irish, and Catholic neighbors seemed willing to do- but he was not. I was never more proud of my father than at that moment.
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12

04 2016


by Leonard Isenberg
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(PHONE)BANKING FOR BERNIE

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(Mensaje se repite en Español) I found myself doing something today that I have never done before. I went on line to: (www.berniesanders.com/phonebank) to call voters in the State of New York and elsewhere to try and encourage them to vote for Bernie Sanders in the April 19th primary. Despite having been told incessantly by the mainstream media from the beginning of the primary season that, "Bernie Sanders is not a serious candidate and he doesn't have a chance of winning," I nonetheless tried to point out to the people I talked with today how it is that somehow Bernie continues to keep racking up victory after victory with his latest on April 9th in Wyoming. My goal was to do my own small part to conquer the public's artificial media nurtured apathy that has attempted to marginalize Sanders from the beginning of the primary season. I found myself pointing out to the folks I talked with that the millions of dollars the Sanders campaign has raised with an average donation of $37 per person continues to give Hillary Clinton a run for her- seemingly endless supply of corporate- money. Money derived from endless $350,000 speaking engagements and dinners with bankers, Wall Street, and other corporate interests sanctioned by Citizens United in their continuing coup over the reminents of America democracy. Was it really part of our Founding Fathers original intent to include corporations in "We the people"?
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9

04 2016


by Leonard Isenberg
2 Comments