Never Forget

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The report I reviewed  [“Do Our Public Schools Threaten National Security?‘] was written by a task force chaired by Joel Klein and Condaleeza Rice. I believe the report is part of a campaign to undermine public education. Public education needs constant improvement, of that there can be no doubt. But it does not need to be disparaged and demeaned as a national security threat.

As I say in the review, the real threat to our future is growing poverty and income inequality and intensifying racial isolation. The report mentions these issues but fails to offer any suggestions to reduce their negative impact on our society.

“Stop the Campaign Against Public Schools!” Diane Ravitch

It’s time to demand a new model: classrooms that eschew rote memorization and test prep; teachers with the power to implement effective and flexible teaching strategies; students who are connected to their teachers and love to learn. Policymakers will find it hard to argue with that.

‘Is this really what education is about?’ Valerie Strauss

It’s Memorial Day, and I suppose I ought to be writing something about my father, who drove a tank in WWII, and died of a heart attack in 1982. He’s buried in the National Cemetery in Houston, Texas.  It’s a very moving place and it’s exactly where he ought to be buried. He was proud of his service. I have to say, though, that even a  few days of memorializing soldiers is very depressing. It doesn’t make me feel in any way patriotic, or grateful; it makes me feel that I live in world whose history is long chain of brutal collective violence.

It also reminds me that my Dad , and many of his generation, felt that social development and education, not violence, was the only long-term solution to authoritarianism and fascism. Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, the ideology of the standardized test, deeply rooted in eugenics, has ties to the same racist nationalism that has fed so many conflicts.  Then, as now, some sought an objective proof of superiority; the shift from defining race to determining merit is mercurial at best, a supremacist slight of hand at worst.

We don’t need the standardized test or its attendant distortions of classroom practice– and wars against collective bargaining– to pursue the long-term goal that was so important to men like my father.  There are lots of alternatives, all of them related in some fashion to a projects approach of the sort outlined in “A Step-by-Step Guide to the Best Projects.”  (A petition to end the over use of standardized testing is here, too.)  A revitalized system of public education would be the best memorial to collective sacrifices.

 

 

Posted in: Autobiographical, Miscellaneous, Professional

Profiles in Courage

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I’m never on time in academia.  In fact, I think always trying to be on time– to be timely, fashionable, etc.– is one of the big problems of academic culture. Last year or the year before it was Tweeting; now that’s passed and we are on to Klout or, I suppose, Klouting….

Anyway, I was doing my usual behind the times reading this morning and found this passage by the ACTA, in defense of a blogger recently dumped by the Chronicle of Higher Education:

She argued on the basis of the Chronicle’s own descriptions of the dissertations that they were substituting political partisanship for objective research and analysis. Her piece was sharp, controversial, and sarcastic, but certainly not out of bounds.

“A Profile in Cowardice,” The American Council of College Trustees and Alumni

The ACTA is a very right-wing sort of organization in a very old-fashioned bourgeois way. It’s hard to imagine that they would support anything “sharp, controversial, and sarcastic.” That would be so gauche. So I plowed though the blog entries until I found the piece, called, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.”

It’s really a nasty little rant, half Rush Limbaugh style vitriol and half Steve Allen reading rock lyrics out loud silliness. The second is a joke that was once pretty funny but is now a half-century old cliché; the first might offend bourgeois sensibility but only in a very superficial way. Limbaugh may be crude, the proper class– or properly rich class– says, but he’s right.

So why would the ACTA bother to chastise the Chronicle for deciding to drop the author, Naomi Schaefer Riley, from its rolls? Here’s a few of her “sharp” statements. Riley, by the way, takes care to name the dissertation’s authors, too, as she mocks their titles; she hasn’t read the dissertations, but she wants to be certain that her sarcasm is as personal as possible:

“How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is?”

“The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.”

“The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?”

The ACTA, of course, wants to use the dismal of this writer as an example of the left-wing biases of higher education, subset, higher-education media. “See,” they say, “whenever we express our ideas we get shut down!” It’s a disingenuous argument at best. The problem with these statements isn’t their suggestive racism, although that’s bad enough, it’s their faked ignorance.

Steve Allen knew that rock lyrics weren’t poetry and I am sure that Riley isn’t as ignorant as she wants to sound either. None of the subjects she mentions– neglected non-white writing, racism in mortgage lending, or the impact of Black supreme court justices on the gains of the civil rights movement– are particularly surprising, much less new, or, more importantly, fully resolved.

There’s plenty of non-white writing yet to be found and we still don’t yet fully understand the impact of racism in the housing crisis or how conservative Black justices have shaped our legal system. These might not be particularly original subjects, but they are hardly irrelevant topics. They are, however, ways of thinking about history that the polite (or not)  right would rather not discuss.

The Chronicle did no one any favors by dumping Riley. Her dismissal will only reinforce the academic right’s persecution complex and offer another opportunity for them to repeat their “left-wing academia” mantra. (Never mind those giant, influential business schools and economic departments!) Riley, though, is just wrong and, I suspect, trying to give her brand a higher profile.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Language, Professional

My Wife Drives Two Cadillacs

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In my mostly half serious quest to found a new academic discipline called ‘corruption studies’ I’d like to draw on the study of racial intolerance and white supremacy, which distinguishes between run of the mill individual racism and institutionalize racism. A similar distinction can be made between corrupt people in academia– administrative supremacists, as it were– and institutionalized corruption. Each is in the news in Illinois this week.

The institutionalized corruption in question starts with the ongoing rise in salaries of administrators despite the ongoing funding crisis of higher education and the economic slow-down. While Rome burns, it seems, administrators are only willing to slow down their greed to a few points below inflation (“Salaries Rise for Senior Administrators but Lag Behind Inflation“).  It’s a “my wife drives two Cadillacs” sort of  class callousness.

Also corrupt is the “clout” system at the University of Illinois, now nominally ended, that facilitated the admissions of well placed students (“Relatives of lobbyists, campaign donors got lawmakers’ help to enter U. of I.“). Interestingly, the man hired to run the system in the wake of that scandal, President Hogan, has been asked to resign after his right-hand woman was caught trying to manipulate faculty opinion via faked email.

Faculty are calling for Hogan’s resignation, citing a “lack of confidence” (“UI Faculty Urge President Hogan to Resign“).  Hogan belongs in the “my wife drives two Cadillacs” file not only because he shows no sign of stepping down but also because he arranged to have the author of the email, Lisa Troyer, given a tenured faculty position (“Lisa Troyer Accepts Faculty Job with U of I“). That’s individual corruption raised to an art form.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Professional

The All Too Visible Hand, Again

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It seems to be a week for market worshipers in academia. In “To Fix Student Lending, Rethink the Concept,” it’s two very conservative economists telling us, once again, that the market  has failed and so the solution is, well, the market. Or maybe the implicit argument is that the market only failed because of government interference and if you got rid of that interference then the market will work.  Or maybe it failed due to a lack of information or….

Authors  Gillen and Vedder begin by setting aside the most basic argument in any discussion of debt, forgiveness, (not a very sexy economic word) as if it had no real place in student debt discussions.  That’s how we know that we are going to hear an argument designed to help banks and not people.  It’s not as if we don’t have the money; by some estimates, nearly 13 trillion was spent bailing out the economy, and then there’s that war…

We could forgive student debt– or some large part of it– and free up billions of economy-stimulating dollars while undoing a profound injustice in which the collective benefits of education were paid for by shifting the costs to individuals. We could also use forgiveness to reward students who have gone into poorly paying professions, like teaching. No, we have to set aside that argument in favor of reforms of the current system, rooted in private profits.

If your loans are too large, for example, Gillen and Vedder say, then you should be able to file for bankruptcy. Never mind that the Bush era (2005) bankruptcy laws are already written to benefit banks. These are just solutions at the margins, though. To really fix things, we need some “measure of quality in higher education,” so that the market can work to keep down the cost of education and, by extension, the amount of student loans.

Gillen and Vedder don’t want to talk about changing the current system, they want to rationalize (to use a favored economic term) a system of indenture. Students will be forced to pick education and learning based on– surprise!– the employment market because as human capital they would be expected to pay a portion of their income to private banks for, presumably, for all of their working lives. Isn’t that what’s already happening?

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Professional