Manufacturing Poverty

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Here’s an exercise in connecting the dots.  First, the U.S. government released a report that summarized the impact of the recession: “The financial crisis wiped out 18 years of gains for the median U.S. household net worth, with a 38.8 percent plunge from 2007 to 2010 that was led by the collapse in home prices, a Federal Reserve study showed” ( Jeff Kearns, “Fed Says U.S. Wealth Fell 38.8% In 2007-2010“).

Here’s the second thing: “(Reuters) – Louisiana is embarking on the nation’s boldest experiment in privatizing public education, with the state preparing to shift tens of millions in tax dollars out of the public schools to pay private industry, businesses owners and church pastors to educate children” (Stephanie Simon,”Louisiana’s bold bid to privatize schools”).

First they deregulated the financial sector, and I didn’t speak out because… then they deregulated the pubic schools and…

Simon provides a few descriptions of some of the schools that are getting this money; it turns out that, not surprisingly, the best school have few openings for new students. The schools that will accept students are not so good:

The school willing to accept the most voucher students — 314 — is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.

The Upperroom Bible Church Academy in New Orleans, a bunker-like building with no windows or playground, also has plenty of slots open. It seeks to bring in 214 voucher students, worth up to $1.8 million in state funding.

Over the last 30 years or so– since the election of 1980– the right has used an ideology of the market– a religion, in many ways– to engineer a massive shift of wealth away from middle and working class people and into the hands of the rich. Oddly, the very people being robbed support the robbery. It’s class hidden by geography.

The top 20 poorest states include  just 4 states that reliably vote Republican:  Alaska, Virginia, Utah and Wyoming. Two more, Colorado and Nevada, are toss ups. The bottom 20 has just 4 that reliably vote Democratic: West Virginia, New Mexico, Michigan and Maine.  Ohio and Florida are toss ups. Poverty is partisan.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

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

Imagine

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For some time now, the general trend on our nation’s campuses has pointed toward the elimination of traditional core courses in the history and culture of Western civilization, in favor of alternative canons or no requirements at all.

Fortunately, there are exceptions to the rule, and the past few years have seen commendable efforts by professors who have set up programs in the study of Western civilization at their institutions. The American Freedom Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonpolitical organization in California, which, according to its mission, “promotes, defends and upholds Western values and ideals,” has awarded its annual Heroes of Conscience Award to five such courageous professors…

ACTA, “Congratulations to the five Heroes of Conscience!”

Imagine dredged up some half baked Romantic notions and presented a vision of a world free of conflict. Attached to an ethereal melody it seem to float in a sea of mysticism, painting a picture of a utopia that most Communist leaders in the 1970s would have recognized.

Avi Davis, “What John Lennon Failed to Imagine” (“This Week’s Editorial” from the American Freedom Alliance)

I’m not certain that we can know someone well by knowing their friends, but I find this pairing interesting and, perhaps, symptomatic, as we used to say. On the face of it, this notion of “saving the study of Western Civilization” seems a little loopy. It’s a little like saying that we need to make sure that there are white people on television.

The real problem, of course, isn’t that “the study of Western Civilization” is fading away, it’s that certain things that were once very important to a certain segment of academia, now fading into retirement– Shakespeare is the perennial and tedious example– are not as important to many contemporary academics. Among other things it’s what was once called a “generation gap.”

It’s in this vein that the ACTA fancies itself a guardian of  “Western Civilization”– as long as “Western Civilization” means William Shakespeare more than Toni Morrison.  “Western Civilization” is often (polite) right-wing short hand for “White dominated American culture.”   ACTA prefers the language of the former– the politely coded and euphemistic right– rather than the latter.

They  apparently feel real kinship with the less-than-polite right,  though, including Avi Davis, who believes that we have to recognize the link between today’s peace movement and John Lennon’s song,  which “naïvely” endorses  “the notion that we can embrace those sworn to our destruction in a ‘brotherhood of man.’”  That’s communism, not “Western Civilization.”

Lennon’s ideal, of course, is Biblical (aka “the second great commandment“), an irony that he could not have missed, even if it escapes Davis, and linked to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among other half-bakers.  Davis, whom the ACTA suggest–sans irony, one supposes– is a “hero of conscious,” calls it  “a chimera reflecting nothing more than an irresponsible failure of imagination.”

Posted in: Language, 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