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ROG seemed to have got the job of taking West Midlands Class 323 units to Doncaster Wagon Works for attention . The latest instalment is signal checked at Rotherham Masbrough and comprises of 57310 with 323240 running as the 5Q23 1122 Soho LMD - Doncaster Wagon Works .
6 12 21
Route 42 started a new contract on 1st October and a few changes were made. It was permanently extended from Denmark Hill to East Dulwich Sainsbury's and converted to double deck operation. In addition, due to the closure of Tower Bridge, it has been temporarily cut back to Tower Bridge Road, Druid Street. This is likely to continue until 30th December.
The route has received an allocation of MHV class MCV EvoSeti bodied Volvo B5LH's for the time being. This contract was awarded late and I believe these buses are actually for route 185 officially. An order of EH class ADL Enviro 40H MMC's has been made for the route, but whether they end up on it is to be seen (Go-Ahead has a lot of orders at the moment and I wouldn't rule out some deviation.) There were actually a couple of EH's on the route today but a good photo evaded me, with the autumn sunshine creating its challenges.
In this photo MHV3 is pulling away from the temporary northern terminus destined for the new southern one. This bus was delivered in April for route 40.
I've had this snow removal contract for a very long time. I do their sidewalks, entrance ways and the Songhees walkways in front of their building along with their parking areas...I took these photos with my cell phone from the seat of my bobcat. I do snow removal services with my bobcat. These photos were taken Jan 16 2020
Victoria B.C. Canada
Olympic Green Landscaping
During the 15th and 16th April 2022, the WCML between Crewe and Norton Bridge was closed for track renewals. Therefore, all traffic (Freight and Passenger) were diverted via the Potteries Line. For two days, we got to see some workings unusual for the area.
One of the highlights of the diverts, was this 'celebrity' Class 66. This one was in the Biffa Red/Yellow Scheme, in relation to a contract GBRailfreight currently have.
66783 'The Flying Dustman' passes through Longport, on the 4M21 1221 Felixstowe South Gbrf to Trafford Pk Euro Tml Gbrf
16th April 2022
The North American Aviation P-51 Mustang is an American long-range, single-seat fighter and fighter-bomber used during World War II and the Korean War, among other conflicts. The Mustang was designed in 1940 by a team headed by James H. Kindelberger of North American Aviation (NAA) in response to a request from the British Purchasing Commission. The commission approached NAA to build Curtiss P-40 fighters under license for the Royal Air Force (RAF). Rather than build an old design from another company, NAA proposed the design and production of a more modern fighter. The prototype NA-73X airframe was completed on 9 September 1940, 102 days after contract signing, achieving its first flight on 26 October.
The Mustang was designed to use the Allison V-1710 engine without an export-sensitive turbocharger or a multi-stage supercharger, resulting in limited high-altitude performance. The aircraft was first flown operationally by the RAF as a tactical-reconnaissance aircraft and fighter-bomber (Mustang Mk I). In mid 1942, a development project known as the Rolls-Royce Mustang X, replaced the Allison engine with a Rolls-Royce Merlin 65 two-stage inter-cooled supercharged engine. During testing at Rolls-Royce's airfield at Hucknall in England, it was clear the engine dramatically improved the aircraft's performance at altitudes above 15,000 ft (4,600 m) without sacrificing range.
The North American P-51D-5-NA Mustang (USAAF Serial No. 44-13521), famously known as "Marinell," is a beautifully restored, airworthy World War II combat veteran fighter aircraft. Currently registered as G-MRLL, it is based at the Imperial War Museum Duxford in the UK.
Completed at North American Aviation’s Inglewood, California factory, the aircraft was shipped to England on 6 June 1944 (D-Day). It was assigned to the 504th Fighter Squadron, 339th Fighter Group (Eighth Air Force), stationed at USAAF Station F-378 in Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire.
The aircraft bore the squadron code 5Q-B. Its primary pilot, Captain Bradford V. Stevens, named the Mustang "Marinell" after his fiancée, Mary Anella Stokes. Over its brief 45-day operational career, the aircraft was credited with four enemy aircraft destroyed. On 13 August 1944, while on a fighter-bomber combat mission over France, the aircraft was downed (potentially by flak) near Feuquières. Its pilot that day, 2nd Lt. Myer R. Winkelman, was tragically killed.
The wreckage remained in France for decades, partially displayed in a local museum, before being acquired by aircraft restorer Maurice Hammond in 1998. It underwent a painstaking, multi-year restoration back to factory specifications at Hardwick Airfield in Norfolk. "Marinell" took to the skies once again on 26 July 2008, wearing its original wartime 504th Fighter Squadron markings. It is widely celebrated on the airshow circuit as one of the most authentically restored airworthy P-51 Mustangs in existence.
Following brief stints under Italian ownership (Carlo Coltri) and US registration (N383FJ), the fighter returned permanently to the UK in 2023. It is currently owned by Marinell Limited, managed by Northwind, and maintained by the Aircraft Restoration Company at Duxford.
Much Royal Navy contract ongoing at Cammell Laird Shipyard at Birkenhead Wirral, just seen is the mast of Daring class destroyer HMS Dauntless (D33) at the time completing a upgrade to her power supply, the nearest mast is HMS Daring (D32) that had arrived from Portsmouth NB for the same upgrade. In the centre is RFA Tideforce (A139) for regular maintenance.
Go North East's unallocated Volvo B9TL/Wright Eclipse Gemini 2 6161 (LJ62 KZP), which carries the base livery of Go North East's corporate livery, is pictured here in the yard at Saltmeadows Road Depot, Gateshead, following delivery after repaint and refurbishment at Bus & Coach World, Blackburn. 15/02/18
New in October 2012, this vehicle was previously with Go-Ahead London General as fleet number WVL502 at Putney Garage.
It was recently displaced from Go-Ahead London's fleet and purchased by Go North East, in line with the contract for service 22 (Putney Common - Oxford Circus) being retained by London General with a new allocation of 22 Hybrid double-deck vehicles (a mixture of new Volvo B5LH/MCV EvoSeti plus existing examples already in the fleet), from 21st October 2017.
Representing an investment of over £1.5 million, 13 of these buses (WVL496 - WVL508) have now been acquired by Go North East. They will be refurbished and repainted at Bus & Coach World, Blackburn, prior to assimilation into Go North East's fleet.
As part of the refurbishment at Bus & Coach World, Blackburn, the entire batch will undergo exterior repaint, centre door conversion, fitment of an entrance door ramp, seats re-trimmed including extra padding, buggy bay created, with free customer Wi-Fi and new white LED destination displays also fitted.
Mechanically, this entire batch of buses have been fitted with a new Ecolife campaigned gearbox.
This example is the first to have been delivered, and carries Go North East's corporate livery.
LONDON COLNEY, ENGLAND - AUGUST 08: Arsenal's Ethan Nwaneri signs a new long-term contract at Sobha Realty Training Centre on August 08, 2025 in London Colney, England. (Photo by Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
NAS North Island plays host to a rotating group of half a dozen civilian bizjets. All of the other jets are either grey or white, this is the only one with green paint-- and I have to admit, when I first saw it coming in, I thought it was unpainted zinc chromate.
D&E Coaches Volvo B10M Alexander PS B8YST is seen parked up at their bus depot in Inverness awaiting a school contract back on 4th April 2016
The Orbital ATK Antares rocket, with the Cygnus spacecraft onboard, launches from Pad-0A, Monday, May 21, 2018 at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Orbital ATK’s ninth contracted cargo resupply mission with NASA to the International Space Station will deliver approximately 7,400 pounds of science and research, crew supplies and vehicle hardware to the orbital laboratory and its crew. Photo Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)
Investment Banker and Hedge Fund Manager - Suspected Financier and Money Launderer of the Servants of Freedom. ntel suggests he will be in a skyscraper in Nak-Hu for a meeting. His security detail will be at it's lightest during the meeting on the 42nd floor.
(for a contract build in Eurobrick's GREAT BRICK WAR)
Lothian Buses have now lost the running of service 63 and as of Monday 31st August the council have awarded the service to First Bus.
First 63249 at Edinburgh Park on a service 63 working to Riccarton and Balerno. 31st August 2020.
From 1971 - 1972, SELNEC PTE took delivery of 21 experimental double-decker buses for service evaluation. All were bodied by Northern Counties of Wigan with SELNEC's newly designed 'Standard' bus bodies. Six of these buses were Leyland PDR1s (EX1-6), and the rest (EX7-21) were Daimler Fleetlines. The last five (EX17-21), arrived in February 1972 as dual-doored buses. The Fleetline chassis for these vehicles had originally been ordered by Rochdale Corporation.
EX17 TNB757K
EX18 TNB758K
EX19 TNB759K
EX20 TNB760K
EX21 TNB761K
Of the five, EX20 was delivered in an allover advert livery for Barclaycard, becoming the first SENEC bus to carry an allover advert.
Towards the end of 1972, SELNEC decided to renumber EX1-EX21 into the 5xxx & 6xxx series to match the rest of the double deck fleet. EX17-EX21 became 6250-6254, which fitted into the Rochdale District numbering series, these buses being allocated to Rochdale at that time. SELNEC and later GMPTE, continued to use the EX numbering system for experimental buses under evaluation.
In 1974, 6253 (EX20) was painted into to standard orange & white livery fleet livery, as the Barclays advert was likely looking tired and out of contract. Around the same time, Fleetline 7361 (YNA316M) took up the mantle of being the poster-board for Barclaycard.
The picture shows 6253 on the bus stands off South Parade, Rochdale in 1974. 6253 is devoid of its SELNEC Northern decals, as it is likely on the cusp of the GMPTE takeover of SELNEC in April 1974. The building behind the bus was at the time a Burton's menswear store.
These buses were later painted into what became the standard GMPTE livery, which used a darker shade of orange than the former SELNEC livery. 6250 (EX17) went onto received the 1980 brown, orange and white 'Jaffa' livery.
In 1983, GMPTE withdrew two Manchester 'Standards', the first of the kind, both had been fire damaged. In 1984 as new buses arrived, the withdrawal of the Manchester 'Standards' began in earnest. Dual-doored buses were now firmly out of favour and 6250-6254 were all withdrawn that year. With the exception of 6252 (EX19), all went to scrap. 6252 was acquired by the 16th Middleton Scout & Guide Group for transport. As a consequence, the bus survived long enough to be acquired by the SELNEC Bus Preservation Society for preservation in September 1998. The bus remains unrestored and very recently (June 2025), has been offered for sale by the SELNEC.P.S as a source of spares, suggesting that it is in a poor state of repair.
I am not an expert on Manchester buses, but I hope that my background research and notes above do justice to the subject. I am happy to stand corrected where there is error.
Image scanned from the original 35mm slide in my archive.
View large.
Special NOTE: On Feb. 8, 2012 I attached a comment, readable & easily discoverable on Page 2 of the comments below, that details the vast corporatist scheme, fronted by Jeb Bush, financed in part with hundreds of millions from Rupert Murdoch (FOX nooze), to privatize American public education & reduce it to 'virtual' schools - not to improve anything (as national & international educational research studies clearly show), but rather to become the final recipients of the taxes people pay so that they can skim huge profits off of the top while providing grotesquely inferior services & lots of lying propaganda to keep the public bamboozled. I beg everyone to read the report.
The McGuffey's Ecclectic Spelling Book was published in 1879.
Raymond Cyrus Hoiles (1878-1970) founded Freedom Communications, a newspaper publishing & broadcasting company that has never hesitated to shape the news to fit right wing ideology. When Hoiles was alive & roaring I lived in Orange County, California, home of the equally right wing Walt Disney & Walter Knott, & was frequently compelled to suffer people who agreed with Hoiles' constantly editorialized insistence that public education was a form of theft & communism that must at once be got rid of. Hoiles was motivated by his fundamentalist Christian persuasions, & quite serious. We should restrain our laughter at the abysmal stupidity of his example, because in many ways he & people like him won & are still winning control of public education. - To introduce the article below, I'll say a little about the Christian strategy.
For many years Orange County's teachers worked under a Draconian ruling that forbade the teaching of values. There is no way around the fact, however, that the statement, "Values may not be taught," is itself a value statement belonging to a class of propositions known as Epimenidean Paradoxes. A comparably illustrative sentence would be, "This is not a sentence." Or, a favorite of the best hypnotists, used when addressing a resistant subject, "Do not obey any instruction which I give you."
What, then, was intended by those who created the paradoxical Orange County law? Well, if any teacher dared to say or imply something that would be disagreeable to any person whose beliefs began & ended with church, flag & free-for-all capitalism, then that teacher could be charged with teaching values & be suspended. One family friend, a young man teaching at an elementary school in Anaheim, was charged, hounded, publicly disgraced, threatened with death & discharged from his post, immediately after which he died from a heart attack. The case was depicted in Life Magazine. His only crime was that he was Jewish. His wife, also a teacher, remained bereft & embittered the rest of her long life.
These people became increasingly invisible over time, largely by devising ever more clever ways for gaining control of both education policy & the public dialogue about education.
Ralph Reed, working for Pat Robertson & the Christian Coalition, devised the "stealth agenda" to place fundamentalists in every local school board in America. The plan helped select & fund candidates, who in accord with Reed's instructions never mentioned their religion or religious connections when campaigning for office. In 1983 Reed rigged an election at his university - he got started early, in other words. Recently we learned that Mr. Reed & Jack Abramoff were associate crooks. The revelation forced Reed to abandon his run to become the lieutenant governor of Georgia. Mr. Reed will not disappear, however. He remains a darling of the far Christian right, & owns Century Strategies, a dirty-tricks political consulting & lobbying organization. In 1999 Karl Rove got reed a nice contract with Enron, which was paying Reed $30,000 per month. And guess who recently went to Georgia to try to save poor Reed? Rudy Giuliani, who has the hots to be the next U.S. president & is pandering to the Christians so he can be their new burning Bush.
Stealthiness did not go away when the Christian Coalition folded & Reed went off on his own to rig elections for big bucks. Rather, the stealth moved into policy matters. For instance, all the phony propaganda claiming religious & private education is more successful, creating the excuse to promote vouchers (for which the motives are both religious & racist). Or, most recently, Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which was sought by the Christians not because they believed all the testing of students would lead to improved education, but rather because they wanted teachers to be made too busy preparing students for endless tests about facts to find time to do the great evil thing, which is the teaching of concepts. Teaching concepts leads to teaching logic, scientific & other academic methodologies which by their nature instill respect for critical - read, skeptical - thinking. Dogmatists, advertisers & con men have equal cause to fear skepticism.
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From: Truthdig.com
Taking Back Our Schools--and Fixing Them
Full text with links: www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060425_taking_back_our_sch...
Posted on Apr. 25, 2006
By Wellford Wilms
The recent news reported in The New York Times that schools are throwing out science, social studies and art to make time for drilling students in remedial math and reading is a sign of things gone terribly wrong. Former New York State Commissioner of Education Thomas Sobol told the Times that narrowing education to just math and reading would be akin to restricting violin students to playing scales day after day. “They’d lose their zest for music.” But most schools that serve poor populations, like those in Cuero, Texas, are squeezed to meet federal math and reading standards. Cuero Superintendent Henry Lind told the paper, “When you have so many hours per day and you’re behind in some area that’s being hammered on, you have to work on that.”
But by the looks of things, hammering students for higher test scores isn’t making much of a difference. Most students have already lost their zest for learning. How do we know? In Los Angeles, upwards of 50% of Latino and African American students never finish high school. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve been a professor of education at UCLA for more than 25 years and am convinced that despite the fads that come and go, nothing has put a dent in the public schools’ failure to educate inner-city children. In fact, things are getting worse. But I am also convinced that we’ve been looking in the wrong places for solutions. My own research across a wide array of organizations—corporations, trade unions, public schools, colleges, teacher unions and police agencies—suggests another way of looking at the problem and that solutions will come from a new direction.
This essay is a proposition—one that I hope will spark a lively debate among Truthdig readers and inform policy leaders. Future essays will examine Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s campaign to take over the public schools, analyze whether teacher unions can be a force for productive change, and expose promising ways to rebuild public investment in the schools.
Let’s start with Jonathan Kozol’s new book, “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.” It is a scathing indictment of American social policy that banned racial segregation in public schools in 1955 and then turned a blind eye to its implementation. Today, Kozol says, schools are more segregated than ever. But he fails to explain why resegregation has occurred. Because Kozol overlooks the root causes of the problem, his solutions—spending more money on dysfunctional schools and wishing for a social mandate to desegregate the schools—miss the point.
To be sure the problems are undeniable. Kozol examines the appalling condition of big-city schools. In school after school we see children who are brimming with potential but who are walled off from the larger society and abandoned by the schools. Most middle-class white Americans simply cannot comprehend the horrid schools that Kozol describes. Ceilings fall in, toilets are filthy, libraries, music and arts have been stripped away. Teachers in these schools, who are paid 40% less than teachers in the suburbs, are forced to teach “scripted” lessons that are written for children who are deemed incapable of learning.
It is all part of the latest reform pushed by the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind initiative, a reform aimed at the singular pursuit of increasing test scores. Learning has been stripped of its intrinsic meaning and reduced to simplistic steps—“Authentic Writing,” “Active Listening,” “Accountable Talk”—that hamper teachers in teaching anything but how to take a test. Behind it all is an attempt to impose control, much as mass production techniques were used a century ago, to standardize instruction to fit new immigrants to the system.
Meanwhile, millions of children are failing. In nearly half of the high schools in America’s 100 largest districts, fewer than 50% of students graduate in four years. Most of these students are from poor Latino and African-American families. And from 1993 to 2000 the number of failing schools has mushroomed by 75%. Mayor Villaraigosa calls Los Angeles’ high dropout rates “numbers that should put a chill down your spine.”
The reasons, Kozol argues, are lack of money and racial discrimination that produce inferior and segregated schools. No doubt this is partly true. We have tried to desegregate the schools for a half-century and failed. Middle-class white parents have voted for individual freedom with their feet, enrolling their children in private schools, leaving the public schools more segregated than ever. The same is true for middle-class black families. Gail Foster, an educator who has studied black independent schools, was quoted in 2004 in The New York Times as saying: “Many of the most empowered parents and families are removing their children. What’s left, in even working-class communities, are schools filled with the least empowered families. Families with the least parent involvement to offer, families with the least help with homework to offer. There’s been a continual outflow for at least 10 years, and it isn’t stopping now.”
More money is not the answer either. Kozol points to wide disparities in educational expenditures ranging from $11,700 per student in New York City to $22,000 in suburban Manhasset. Disturbing as that is, study after study shows that equalizing money does not necessarily equalize learning.
In 1966, sociologist James Coleman conducted the most extensive study ever made of desegregating education and found that what mattered most in students’ learning was the economic status of their peers rather than the racial makeup of the school. He also found that school funding was not closely related to students’ achievement—their families’ economic status was far more predictive. Coleman’s findings were controversial and led to a bitter debate, but they have been replicated many times. Daniel Patrick Moynihan summed it up best when he commented shortly after Coleman’s groundbreaking study, “We should begin to see that the underlying reality is not race but social class.”
Since social class matters because money follows privilege, and since desegregation will take generations to eradicate, what can be done now? Are poor children doomed to attend grossly inadequate schools? Surely not. We must find ways to remove the influences that have crippled the schools. Money must be diverted from bloated bureaucracies that snuff out innovation. Instead it must go directly to schools where principals and teachers can influence what is taught and what children learn, and help bring parents back into the fold. Otherwise, it is going down a rat hole.
Parents have a significant role to play in their children’s education, but their voices have been largely silenced. Over the last 40 years, we have witnessed the decline of civic involvement and the growing dominance of self-interest over the greater good, a social deterioration that sociologist Robert Putnam calls “hollowing out” in his 2000 book “Bowling Alone.” One result, as the old saying goes, is that “the rich get richer” and the poor fall ever further behind in crumbling schools.
Over the last 25 years, education in general has been taken from ordinary citizens and teachers by politicians, administrators, union leaders, publishers, test makers, consultants, university professors, hardware and software developers and the media, each playing its part in keeping alive the illusion of reform. All in all, this $1-trillion industry has replaced the common interest, and no one, it seems, can muster the will to rein it in.
Local control is only a dim memory. Decisions now come from the top—from the federal and state governments, school boards and high-level administrators who have little knowledge of what goes on in the classroom. Teachers are left out of these decisions, carrying on the best they can, safe in the assumption that the newest fad, like those before it, will blow over. Parents are all but forgotten.
While command-and-control management may seem to produce results in the short run, it strips schools of the capacity to develop the stable leadership that is necessary to sustain success. Principals are besieged with demands from district offices and from the educational fads that emanate from publishers and university researchers. Many principals know that they put their careers in peril unless they do what their bosses want. One elementary school principal told me, “District directives undermine our own abilities to think for ourselves, to believe in what we see and know.” When schools discover something that works, it is rarely sustained because they lack authority or stable leadership.
In 1969 when I worked for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, I monitored the schools in impoverished Ocean Hill-Brownsville in New York City. The local school board hired a charismatic superintendent, who fired incompetent teachers and hired young and idealistic ones. The firings set the local board at odds with the huge teachers’ union, which demanded due process for the fired teachers. The superintendent, Rhody McCoy, was convinced that good teachers had to respect the children they taught. He put it in plain words: “If you’re convinced that this kid is doomed by nature or by something else to lead a shrunken and curtailed life, then you’re basically incompetent to teach that child.” The experiment worked. Observing classrooms left no doubt in my mind that students were learning. Eager first-graders sat attentively on the floor in semicircles shouting out answers to fraction problems and reading aloud. The schools buzzed with excitement as parent helpers streamed in and out of classrooms. But in a bitter power struggle the board seized authority and the experiment ended.
Years later, in 1985, Deborah Meier, a passionate educator who founded Harlem’s Central Park East Secondary School, achieved stunning successes that led the school to be celebrated as a model alternative school in Time magazine. But it could not be sustained beyond Meier’s unique leadership. Today, 10 years after Meier left, a respected children’s advocacy group, Insideschools and Advocates for Children, reports that the Harlem school “…has fallen on hard times in recent years with rapid staff turnover, low staff morale and uneven discipline.”
In risk-averse environments like public schools, few principals will stick out their necks, because they don’t want to buck the bosses downtown. Courageous and visionary principals like Rhody McCoy and Deborah Meier keep coming. But charismatic leadership is no match for heavy-handed district management, which always wins out.
Take Foshay Learning Center in Los Angeles, for example. In 1989, Howard Lappin took over a failing middle school. With the help of teachers and an infusion of money, Lappin wrested control from the district and transformed Foshay. The school expanded into a K-12 “learning center” and became largely autonomous of the district’s bureaucratic requirements. Teachers and administrators decided who would be hired and what would be taught. Foshay succeeded, and in 2000 its high school was selected by Newsweek as one of the 100 best in America. But in 2001 Lappin retired, and his unique leadership was lost. Today Foshay is being threatened with sanctions by the district and the county because gains in students’ test scores have stalled. As the school has fallen under the district’s “one-size-fits all” bureaucratic requirements, the impact has been to undermine the once vibrant teacher leadership that made the school so enviable.
The problem with public education is not with the teachers, or with the children, but the way we organize the schools. Probably the greatest casualties are teachers themselves, who are forced to accept decisions by authorities about teaching that they know to be nonsense. One professor interviewed by Kozol said that forcing an absurdity on teachers teaches something: acquiescence. For example, in study after study, teachers report that relying on test scores as sole marks of student achievement and teaching scripted lessons destroy students’ natural love of learning. And such practices also erode teachers’ professional authority, which is fundamental to student learning.
Why is it so hard to foster the only kind of reform that really works, which is right in the schoolhouse? Because politicians, school board members and administrators are under intense pressure to produce immediate results, i.e., higher and higher test scores—a goal that is pursued through directives from districts with little input of principals, teachers and parents. Superintendents serve at the pleasure of school boards, and most board members are elected or appointed and have limited terms of office. As test scores have become the measure of educational quality, everyone is under immense pressure to show fast results or be turned out.
No wonder that school boards hire superintendents who promise to deliver quick results. But few do. Superintendents last on average only three or four years. Many are thwarted by outmoded bureaucracies that were designed a century ago using top-down control practiced in American industry to mass-produce learning. Within these organizations, power has quietly accumulated, making them all but impervious to outside influence. Sid Thompson, former superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, told me: “Trying to change the district is like trying to change the direction of a fast-moving freight train. You might knock it off course for a moment, but before you know it it’s rattling right down the tracks again.”
Frustration and suspicion about who might emerge from the shadows to sabotage their plans often lead superintendents to jealously guard their power. In 2002, Day Higuchi, then president of United Teachers Los Angeles, the Los Angeles teacher union, had high hopes for working with the school district’s new “can-do” superintendent, Roy Romer. Higuchi hoped that Romer would endorse a new union initiative called Lesson Study, a plan to help teachers work collectively to improve classroom lessons. At a breakfast meeting that I attended, Higuchi presented Romer with an invitation to work with the union to develop and spread Lesson Study across the district. When Higuchi finished, Romer flipped over his paper placemat and with a red felt pen drew a box with an S in it. “That’s me,” he said. Beneath he drew 11 boxes with smaller s’s in them, representing the 11 local superintendents, and below that, a number of small boxes with roofs, representing schools and teachers. Then, pulling his face near to Higuchi’s, he drew bold red arrows pointing downward from the top. Romer jabbed his pen in the air to accentuate each word: “You cannot usurp my authority to manage this district!” It was a dumbfounding moment, one that revealed the true underside of the use of power. Here was a chance for a new superintendent to forge a small but significant step with the union, but Romer, who recently announced his resignation, explained that he was “in a hurry.” He clearly had little time for ideas that were at odds with his own. In the end his refusal to work with the union undermined the possibility of creating a broader base of power that could transcend self-interest.
Nor are the unions exempt from self-interest. A few years ago I helped establish a national group of union presidents called TURN (Teacher Union Reform Network) who were dedicated to remaking their unions as forces to improve education. One way was to cooperate with administrators and encourage teachers to use their classroom know-how to redesign teaching at the schoolhouse. But hostility and mistrust run deep. The union leaders became nervous, fearing that fellow unionists would attack them for “collaborating” with the enemy and that if the effort to collaborate failed they would share the blame. Don Watley, president of the New Mexico Federation of Educational Employees, commented: “It’s like the Normandy landing. We’ve got the best troops in the world. We’ve got the best officers in the world. And we’ve got the best equipment in the world. But at 0800 when we hit the beach half of us are going to get killed!” Sadly, in the years to come, the ingrained mistrust, and the unpredictable dance of union politics, prevented these unionists from becoming a positive force in educational reform. Instead, they have been reduced to stockpiling power, much as the Soviets and Americans stockpiled nuclear weapons during the Cold War, to oppose any hostile moves the other side might make.
So what can be done to break the standoff between teacher unions and districts? How can teachers’ professional authority be restored? How can parents be awakened and brought back into the fold? Experience shows that it can be done. Schools such as Harlem’s Central Park East Secondary, Los Angeles’ Foshay Learning Center, those in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, and many others attest to the fact that schools can be made into safe places where children learn. Sustaining them is the hard part.
There is little doubt that trying to build good schools with command-and-control management doesn’t work. School boards, superintendents and union officials need to clear the obstacles—unnecessary bureaucratic requirements and outmoded work rules—to make innovation at the schoolhouse possible. These top-level educational leaders also must make resources available to support new ways of teaching. Jonathan Kozol has it right. Teaching is the only reform that counts and it can be done only at the schoolhouse by teachers, principals, parents and students working together.
Turning school districts upside down will also mean turning a century of top-down management on its head. But where is such bold leadership to be found? One promising place is among big-city mayors. But they must resist trying to take over the schools, as they did in New York, Chicago and Boston with mixed results at best. Instead, popular mayors could use their influence and visibility to tell the truth about the condition of education and to build a popular consensus about how change must occur.
In the next essay I am going to examine what mayors can do. Waiting for the schools to be saved by someone else is nonsense. Only concerted local action offers a chance. Doubters should recall Margaret Mead’s observation: “Never doubt that a small group of concerned people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
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光，20130808
光，在面向著未來的方向時出現，
感覺是要我向前走
而我也只是好奇
在那光底下到底有什麼？
The light, Aug. 8th, 2013.
I saw the light and I faced it.
I thought I should move toward it.
Maybe, I was just curious about what is there?
Please feel free to leave comments and subscribe on my FB page:
mercenary mech contract bounded, payment will be completed at the end of the task, no refunds.
later today you'll see the debut of the Mframe prototype mech.
on a side note: Go buy nexo knights, lets keep this theme alive! it is super awesome
Stagecoach Cumbria & North Lancashire Volvo Olympian/Alexander RL 16670 (S904 JHG) is pictured inside Carlisle's WIllowholme depot posing in the sun.
From this September, Stagecoach Cumbria's dedicated school fleet for Cumbria County contracts will be seen in this new outfit. Repainted red with small school runner vinyls, there will be four Dennis Trident/ALX400, four Volvo B10M/Alexander PS, one Northern Counties bodied Volvo Olympian and up to four or five Alexander bodied Volvo Olympians painted like this.
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Contract 2CL Arriving from Newcastle & Paris Charles de Gaulle at 06:40.
FedEx [ASL Ireland]
ATR 72-202 Freighter
EI-FXJ
Glasgow Airport, Scotland
22nd August 2019
Caught through the window on the Ipswich Buses 94A sevice departing Hadleigh. Beestons Volvo Jonckheere KJZ 606 is on a School contract working.( thanks to Patrick for the info)
twitter.com/keltruck/status/1168266623603675136
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#TomPrichardContracting #TomPrichard #Llantrisant #Wales #SouthWales #Cymru #CF72 prichardholdings.co.uk #ScaniaTough
Spec & order your new #Scania at keltruckscania.com/sales
And today a different contract for me .Today i was back on a contract that i did at Harry Shaw way back in 2004 and it was the contract for Warwicjshire College at MOrton Morrell .A 1hr 45 min run starting at Atherstone at 07.30hrs arriving at the College at 09.15. The return leaves the College at 16.30hrs and because of Traffic ( rush Hour ) it takes a bit longer finishing at Atherstone around 18.30hrs.When i last did it it started at Kingsbury at 06.30 .Before the afternoon run the coach runs a WCC contract from Aylesford school .The 460 service takes 9 minutes end to end.TUI4740 is seen at Aylesford school showing off the offside of our new livery. Photo taken 19/04/16
A new contract for Fastrack B was awarded to Arriva Kent Thameside from Sunday 4th August 2019 which required new (or rather newer) vehicles. Therefore fourteen Enviro 200 MMC's have been transferred from Gillingham to Northfleet with a same number of the Wrightbus StreetLines passing in the other direction to Arriva Kent & Surrey.
Once the fourteen Enviro 200 MMCs had been repainted into Fastrack colours attention turned to repainting the StreetLites into corporate colours and here we see 4308 GN15 CXE shortly after its turn in the paint shop on Vicarage Lane between Hoo St Werburgh and Hoo Marina whilst working route 191. Thursday 31st October 2019.
Wrightbus Micro Hybrid StreetLite DF 11.5m MAX
DSC_3509 - 19847 - LX12 CZA - Alexander Dennis E40D/Alexander Dennis Enviro400 - Stagecoach London - Stratford, Bus Station 23/07/20
Be careful what you sign....
We're Here: World of Disturbia
288/365
Inspired by Mr X's recent series of still lives.
Headless horse courtesy of Moriarty.
Depicted here in her Rebirth outfit, from when she teamed up with Deathstroke without the heavily implied pedophilia!
As you can maybe tell, I have...complicated...feelings about Terra. I think the animated series did her and the Judas Contract arc as well as anyone could, and am genuinely surprised that the comics don't pull from that version of Terra more often. It's about time someone reclaim the character and work to define her beyond her wildly creepy history. Maybe her and Geo-Force should take care of that at the same time?
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La Seine ~ Urban Chronicles ~ Paris ~ MjYj
Please don't use this image on websites, blogs or other
media without my explicit permission.
MjYj© PC142766 All rights reserved
Thanks everyone, thanks for all the votes,comments,
visits, support, critics, invites, awards, etc ..
Stagecoach in South Wales continues to outshop its remaining Alexander Dennis Pointer-bodied Darts in the revised corporate livery incorporating a whiter front.
34750 is a recent transfer from Merthyr Tydfil depot to Blackwood, and was operating the Free Bus contract for the town's Asda Store in mid January 2019 as she was leaving High Street to start the climb to the Bus Station.
This contract was of course once the home of Alexander PS-bodied Volvo B10M 20697, which carried an all-over green livery, before giving way to Transbus Pointer-bodied Dart 34555.
This is one of my original lawn contracts. I've been maintaining this lawn since the mid 90's. We just power raked and top seeded this lawn three weeks ago so it will be a few more weeks until it's in it's best condition. I'll be fertilizing these lawns next week too. No photo editing on these photos either. I'm just really happy with how they are taking shape. 😃
I hope everyone has a great weekend as well.
Aerial photograph showing the Orbital ATK Antares rocket, with the Cygnus spacecraft onboard, on launch Pad-0A, Monday, Oct. 17, 2016 at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Orbital ATK’s sixth contracted cargo resupply mission with NASA to the International Space Station will deliver over 5,100 pounds of science and research, crew supplies and vehicle hardware to the orbital laboratory and its crew. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
by Light Painting & LightArt- Photography Master JanLeonardo
Carl Zeiss Lens , Manfrotto Carbon 057 & Gearhead 405, Led Lenser X21R.2,2 x V24, M7RX, X7R, 2 x P7QC
Thank you very much PW and my brother Ralf, my friends/ assistents Werner Heisenberg (sorry Werner „grin“-Emoticon ) & Barney Flashlight for the great help!
Only photography and painting with light and p-tech, no level work or composing.
Cheers JanLeonardo
#JanLeonardo #LedLenser #LightPainting #Light #Torch #lightart #lightartphotography #lightgraff #lightdraw #canon #carlzeiss #manfrotto #Lenovo #LenovoIn