On one side sits the "reformers." Upon hearing their self-proclaimed name, it sounds pretty good. But its ranks include Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Democrats for Education Reform, and yes, Arne Duncan. They support more standardized testing, "top-down curriculum standards and teaching mandates", rote learning, TFA, behaviorism (i.e. Arne wants to pay kids for good grades.), corporate schooling and charter schools.
Quick biography on the major players here: Joel Klein graduated from NYC's public schools in 1963, graduated from Harvard Law in 1971, worked in the White House Counsel's office and as Assistant AG in the antitrust division, in private practice and as a clerk to Justice Powell. Michelle Rhee went to private school, graduated from Cornell with a B.A. in government, and from Harvard with a Masters in Public Policy. Then she taught in Baltimore, MD with Teach for America (TFA) for three years. 97, she founded the New Teacher Project and then ten years later was appointed as Chancellor of the D.C. schools.
Arne Duncan graduated from Harvard in '87, after attending private schools as a child, with a degree in sociology, played basketball for 4 years, and then went on to direct the Ariel Education Initiative, beginning in '92. 9 years later, he was appointed CEO of Chicago's public schools.
Before Duncan, we had Spellings, who has never taught nor studied education. (Who by the way, loves Duncan.) Before that, we had Rod Paige, coach-turned-Dean-turned-Secretary of Education. His dissertation was about the reaction times of football players. (Also loves Duncan.) Before that, we had Richard Riley, politician-turned Secretary of Education. We haven't had a Secretary of Education who has worked as a teacher since the early 80s. That's insanity.
It's baffling and utterly frustrating. We continue to debate over policies and practices that research has long dismissed. We allow educational policy to be set by people who have never worked at the job they seek to control. Instead, we've had, for 20 years, an education system run and ruled by corporate CEOs and governors. All of this, the corporate schooling, the "reformers", seek to change schools from a top-down method.
I thought, of all people, that Obama would understand that this, of all things, can't be generated from the top down. How many times did we hear, "from the bottom, from the grassroots, from the people on the fronts," during the election? It's all bullshit anyway. Part of me knew, even then. Anyone who speaks of education merely as a way to stay competitive in a global market doesn't hold the same views of education as I do. But I thought....I don't know. I thought I saw a glimmer of hope when Linda Darling-Hammond was heading the transition.
What a monumental disappointment. And this isn't even the half of it. There so much more that sucks about Arne Duncan and Obama's education plan.
To be overly simplistic and overtly biased, it is a battle with people who want kids to learn on one side, and people who want kids to pass tests on the other side.
]]>"Now imagine there is no robust conceptual framework. You are sitting in front of a multimedia presentation where you are unable, because you have not had the experience of many different intellectual journeys, to evaluate what is flashing up on the screen. The most immediate reaction would be to place a premium on the most obvious feature, the immediate sensory content, the "yuk" and "wow" factor. You would be having an experience rather than learning. The sounds and sights of a fast-moving multimedia presentation displace any time for reflection, or any idiosyncratic or imaginative connections we might make as we turn the pages, and then stare at a wall to reflect upon them."I really can't get past the fact that she doesn't seem to display any understanding of just how various the ways are that people use the Internet and technology. And further back, an article from the New Statesmen, June 2005.
If this current generation is living in an avalanche of answer-rich, question-poor inputs, and if we dons are faced with everyone being "above average", faultless, yet lacking curiosity, then we are heading towards a rather bizarre disconnect between what is taught and what we need and value. Surely we should be determining how we are going to bring back a scenario where young people have the confidence to risk being wrong. They should be taught in an environment where there is no problem in seeming stupid, and asking endless questions, and where they have time to venture down intellectual cul-de-sacs, to explore unlikely possibilities, to weigh up alternatives and, above all, to work out for themselves a framework within which they view the world.I think what's most fascinating about this is that she completely misses that the Internet and technology helps open up that second scenario.
When I was a kid, as I sat in the classroom of my now-a-park elementary school, I tried to figure out the rulers on the wall. Elm Grove, the school, was really just a long hallway. Fifth graders at one end, kindergarten at the other. I made my way up from one end to the other, all the while figuring that the rulers were holding the school together.
Really, they were measuring the mine subsidence cracks. They appeared a couple of years before I started there. Turns out Montour Mine had flooded and started to cave. Insurance companies wouldn't pay, of course, because it wasn't an Act of God, but manmade. Course, I kept going in, every day for six years after they saw the first cracks. They ended up razing the old gal a couple years later. She stood for only thirty some years.
Ah, anthracite coal. Black diamonds. Right. About 4 hours from here is where anthracite coal got started here in the states. Pottsville, Pennslyvania. Legend has it Necho Allen, a hunter, or some say a farmer, stumbled upon it. Someone else would have done it, sure, but strange to think we were might have been had that day never happened. So. Necho. Well, depending on who you ask, the story goes something like this: He did battle with a panther, and presumably won. Sat down afterward at the lull of the mountain and lit up a fire to rest and recover from the mauling he'd taken. Dozed off in his buckskins and coonskin cap. A Quaker trader from from the City of Brotherly Love had seen a glow in the distance and climbed to the camp site to wake ol' Necho, who explained he had set a campfire and "several hours later I was awakened by summer-like heat. . . . Then I saw that the solid earth all about me seemed to be afire." I think it's more likely that he woke up scared to death, but hey, that kind of stuff doesn't sit well with local legends. Pottsville, incidentally, also gave us Yuengling and the Pottsville Maroons.
20 minutes from there, underground, rests The Mammoth. That's what they call the richest known anthracite vein in the world.
And another 20 minutes from there is Centralia. Centralia is, well, the stuff movies are made of. It's got it all: disaster, heroics, death, secret societies, corporatism, conspiracy theories, outlaws. And so on.
Being from Pennsylvania, I've been regaled with stories of working in the mines and the mills for years. If the steel mills were Hell's Inferno, the mines were the Gates.
1841, guy named J. Faust built a tavern in what would become Centralia. Called it The Bull's Head. He didn't own the land, and to build the place he, "appropriated the timber without compunction." That tavern was Centralia, at that point. He sold the place about 9 years later, but the tavern ended up being part of Main Street, and the local watering hole. 1855. Guy named Alexander Rea comes into town. The first engineer from Locust Mountain colliery, he fixed himself up with an apartment above the tavern, and set about laying plans for streets and lots for the new town. In 1865, they laid rail through the town and people started to come in, looking for work in the mines. Rea stuck around and worked as superintendent of the mines.
It was a bustling little mining town in its heyday. The town was dotted with twenty saloons, five churches, a convent, and a polka dance hall, among other things. A saloon for every 200 people, the town was known for, at one point.
About three years after they laid the rail, Alexander Rea's body was found in the bushes on the road between Centralia and Mount Carmel.
Ah, but I've skipped something. Around the time of the Civil War, up through the 1870s, the Molly Maguires were at the height of their fame in the region. No one can say much with certitude about the Mollys. I've got a vivid imagination and a tendency to side with the Irish. But I'll let you decide.
3 Mollys were pegged with Rea's murder. Which mind you, wasn't the first. 6 murders in the region up to that point, all pegged on Maguireism. Damn near anyone who spoke of unions back then was pegged as a Molly. (If you have access to the historical NY Times, check out some of the old articles on it. Great stuff.)
Rough and Tumble Centralia.
Most of that died down after the 1870s. Unions were starting to form and after the big Molly executions, well...who really knows. History is nothing but a mystery anyway, no matter what we tell ourselves.
Fast forward a little less than a century.
1954. The company that owned most of Centralia's coal deeded it to the town. For one dollar.
8 years later the fire started. There's some debate over how, but basically the incineration of trash crept down into the abandoned labyrinth of mines that Centralia sat on. It spread through the vein and the nooks and crannies created by bootleg mining over the years. It's been burning ever since then. Some say it will burn for another 50, 100, 200 years. Seems anyone's guess to me. That mountain Down Under has been burning for somewhere between two to six thousand years. Steam and smoke seeps out of the ground, holes, and roads in Centralia. Roads are shredded from the fire.
Valentine's Day. 1981. I was somewhere between a twinkle in the eye of my parents and those first school days staring at those rulers, a few months from being born.
A group of men showed up in Centralia that day, and, being a small town like any small town, people noticed. Carrie called her daughter Florence who sent her 12 year old kid Todd out to see what was up. I've been sent on those types of missions before. Hell, we had one lady in our neighborhood who just stood at the window with binoculars half the day. Suburbia and small town life can do that to you, I guess. So this kid goes out to check it out, cuts through the yards, stops to check out something on the motorbike his cousin is working on, and keeps going. He saw some smoke coming from the ground and did what most curious kids would do: went to check it out. And the ground opened up and almost swallowed him. He grabbed the roots of the trees, screamed for help, and his cousin came over and pulled him out. Whole thing lasted about 45 seconds, and they stumbled through the door of the grandma's house. She figured out what had happened, and then sent the cousin to find out who the men were. Cause you know, she still didn't know.
Turns out to be the Congressman and the group of politicians and officials who had come to talk about the mine fire. Irony, eh?
Today there are about 10 residents left in Centralia. As a 2004 Harper's article put it:
In the papers, Centralians had become a stubborn breed with "stubborn offspring" who, despite a "vast," "huge," "gigantic," and "spreading" fire that had poisoned people with gases and tried to eat a child, "refused to acknowledge their impending doom." "The remaining old timers," reported the Times of London, "just laugh!"
Maybe that's just the power of home.
Couple of guys made a movie about the fire last year. Or, two years, I guess it now is. They called it The Town that Was.
But, there's a lot of towns like that around here. Towns that were. And everywhere. They've all got their stories.
This isn't where I
thought I'd end up when I started writing. I thought it might go somewhere into the havoc wrought by
mining. The many things we've done
wrong in the name of progress. It
started with me putzing around looking for abandoned buildings and ghost towns
to haunt, when I stumbled into Centralia and back to the 19th
century and met some Molly Maguires.
C'est la vie. Sometimes you
start walking and end up somewhere better than your destination.
Last night. What a
strange sight. A wide mix of emotions
and ideas and beliefs. Obama took the
stage with an almost odd lack of jubilation.
He seemed measured, heavy even.
The weight of the world is truly upon his shoulders now. The celebrations that exploded from D.C. to
Paris,
What now?
My hope is that come January, President Barack Obama will use the moment the country, and the world, has given him. To be bold. It is not the time to be measured and cautious, two qualities he displays often, and which I admire him for. We face large problems. We require large solutions.
He has promised to usher in a new way for government, with more transparency and greater involvement. Indeed, it has been the pinnacle of his candidacy - "We," rather than "I," "us," rather than "me." This should be a top priority for his first one-hundred days. Open up politics as he has opened up his campaign to allow the citizens of this country to push and work for what they believe in. The wide swath of people who have worked tirelessly for his campaign won't accept any less: they are ready to work; and to push these types of changes 2 years into the future will squander the level of excitement and activism we see at this very moment. If he can do this, he will have a greater power to push through the next bold moves he needs to take. Hard to argue with an army of protesters outside the Capitol building, demanding healthcare.
]]>The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old office worker when their characters were happily married, and killed the character. The man complained to police when he discovered that his beloved online avatar was dead.
Obama. Ayers. Annenberg. Acorn. Radical. Sound familiar?
If the debate about Obama and Ayers is whether they share any views, then this is where this is headed. The idea that some crazies have thrown around that Obama was secretly in on Brinks or some other shit like that is a nonsensical red herring.
This is what it’s really about.
From Education Week:
Back in April, Sol Stern, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, wrote this piece on Ayers' ideas on social justice teaching. It's now getting a renewed life; the piece was posted this week on the Web site realclearpolitics, a go-to site for political junkies. Stern said that no one knows whether Obama agrees with those views. The next time Obama—the candidate who purports to be our next “education president”—discusses education on the campaign trail, it would be nice to hear what he thinks of his Hyde Park neighbor’s vision for turning the nation’s schools into left-wing indoctrination centers.
And they want to start "educating" our children even earlier in their young lives, with mandatory Pre-K. The sooner they can start teaching them how oppressive their country is. Truly despicable.
And tagging Ayers as an unapologetic left-wing radical is easy. For example, his speech to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in 2006 explained the importance of education reform: “We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution” or “La educacion es revolucion!”.
“radicalize students to agitate for change”
“conduct programs to radicalize the students and politicize them. Reading, math and science achievement tests counted for little in the CAC grants, but the school’s success in preaching a radical political agenda determined how much money they got.
The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.
So. See where this is going? Let me say, I think Ayers’ activities in the 60s were, and remain, abhorrent. I don’t think a social agenda is ever best pursued through violence, in fact, I think it undermines it. Gandhi, King, and Cesar Chavez all led great movements that achieved their goals through nonviolence. As Chavez put it: "Nonviolence is not inaction. It is not for the timid or the weak. It is hard work, it is the patience to win." Personally, I find it extremely odd that Ayers was accepted into mainstream Chicago, and while native Chicagoans may find nothing unusual about it, I don’t think most Americans are in agreement with them. To that extent, defending Ayers’ activities in the 60s seems a futile exercise in my mind. That said, the educational reforms he advocates, I agree with. And let’s be clear: he was most certainly not the first person, nor the last, to discuss the ideas of social justice in education. Notable educational theorists as Dewey and Freire discussed it, Dewey as far back as 1916.
And the history of teaching this way, and addressing social justice, has much deeper roots than even that. It is an essential tenet of Catholic teaching. It is about celebrating humanity, a concern for the poor, and promoting critical reflection. The Jesuits see it as an essential characteristic of Jesuit education: equality of opportunity for all, the principles of distributive and social justice, and the attitude of mind that sees service of others as more self-fulfilling than success or prosperity. Much of it is based on the teachings, as recorded in the New Testament, of Jesus Christ himself.
And nevermind that the person who donated money to this grant proposed by Ayers was a man who Reagan gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to, nevermind that his wife is touted as a McCain endorsement...
But don’t you see? What Obama and Ayers are trying to do is turn your kids into a bunch of bomb-throwing terrorists. Right?
Here’s what this boils down to. I go to a Jesuit graduate school, and am pursuing a master's in elementary education. It is undoubtedly the most remarkable educational institution I have had the pleasure of attending. We speak of complex and important issues. We consider how to remove our own biases, as much as we can, from what we teach. We consider the experiences the students bring to the classroom. We cherish the diversity, and see it as an rich resource, rather than a barrier. We value not just math and literacy, but science, and history, and the arts, and music, and dance, and culture, and humanitarianism. Teaching for social justice has nothing to do with indoctrinating students. It's about giving them the tools to make the world a better place, and deciding for themselves where to use those tools. If you’d like a better picture of what teaching for social justice looks like? Well, let me show you.
It’s juniors learning about the United Farm Workers. Seventh and eighth graders advocating for peace. 14-year-olds celebrating the anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights by exploring rights and abuses in the world. 7-year-olds marching to honor the contribution of MLK and
collecting food to feed those in need. It’s students working to understand how our democracy works. It’s fifth-graders registering voters, when they're not yet old enough to vote themselves. Elementary students raising money to send care
packages to the troops. 13-year-olds writing letters to advocate against child labor. It's kids raising money, one penny at a time, to help build
schools in rural areas of Pakistan
and Afghanistan. Fourth graders studying how to help with water conservation. Fifth graders writing letters to our soldiers overseas to thank them.
It's Logan Williams fifth grade class . They call themselves, the "Mill Run Poets for Peace." 149 young children, who through the power of their written word, expressed a better understanding of a situation in a far-off place, better than many adults could. 149 children, whose words are working to build schools for children their own age, in a place over 6,000 miles from them. So. Indoctrination? Tell it to the Poets for Peace. Tell it to the kids who think they can change the world now.
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I don’t like it anymore. Maybe it was inevitable. During the primary, all our passions and angers and emotions were directed somewhere. We fought, over whether Hillary was the devil or a fighter, over whether Obama was different or a just another politician. We fought over the importance of their gaffes, their speeches, their wins. Maybe now, all that has nowhere to go but bounce around the walls of the Café, randomly striking whatever poster lies in its path.
Now, friends are foes, one-time good natured arguments have taken on a whole new level or ire. We used to be able to get into it. The only “sides” we came down on were Hillary or Obama. What now? Us vs. them. Which side of TPM do you sit on?
No sane person would expect a group of people to get together, outside of TPM or within its virtual walls, and all get along. It would be a sociological phenomenon if it happened. The community here is subject to the same characteristics of any human community of any time. There are friends, there are enemies. There are people we like, and people we don’t. There are people who feel like outsiders, and people who don’t see that at all. There are rude people, polite people, funny people, sad people, confident people, shy people, thoughtful people, intelligent people, serious and silly people. Just people. We stick around, for the most part. Something always brings us back, even when we tire of it for awhile.
I’m tired now. The only thing that seems to ignite anything these days are the so-called meta-posts, which descend into chaos faster than most.
And meanwhile. Meanwhile, the food banks are empty. More people are on food stamps than have been in years. We’ve got soldiers, young kids – fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters. Friends. Fighting in a place most of us can’t imagine. Over 4100 people dead. Mostly young people. My peers. Lives cut short, too short, for anyone to accept. People, waiting in lines outside banks, hoping to get their money for fear of losing their house, their lifeline…their families.
And still we fight. But about the right things? Perhaps because we are in agreement about so much, our predilection toward dispute becomes misaimed. I came here for a fight, goddamnit, and I’m going to get one!
What to guide us then? TPM policies? Our own moral compasses? Ah, the sweet nature of anonymity. It relieves us of our inhibitions. This can be a good thing. It can open us up to say things we might not say outside of here, to try new things. To be brave, and open. But also, perhaps less constrained by what some might call social modicum. TPM tells us to use the same language we’d use in a Coffee House, perhaps in a debate with friends. Of course, this is rather vague, and subject to each person’s own personality and characteristics. Quite frankly, I’d probably be more likely to cuss or say something like, “That’s the goddamn dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” were I in the company of my friends in a coffee house. People I’ve known for years. Sometimes you can really get into it with the people you know are still going to like you at the end of the day. And the opposite is true too, in a way. Here, without the politics of friendships and relationships, we might be able to say something we couldn’t say to friends. For whatever reason.
I’m not here to tell you to be nicer to each other, to appreciate each other’s points of views, to call out anyone for being mean to me, or praise anyone for being nice to me. That’s not what this is about. And you don’t have to recommend, or comment. I just hope you read it.
Really, it’s more my au revoir. I’m going outside now. To enjoy my flowers, and the way the sunshine hits my toddler’s sunny curls. The feel of the sun on the back of my neck, and the remaining days where I can enjoy the sweet, humid embrace of summer.
I can’t say I won’t be back. I’ll be around, as I can’t help it now. I’ve made friends, and I surely won’t be able to help myself when someone really does say the dumbest thing ever. Just not for awhile.
But for now, well…I’ve got to go see a man about a horse.
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As the legend grows, story lines merge and evolve with the times, but in most of them, one commonality remains: the point of view. Almost all of the various attempts at recreating the Arthurian legend are the story of man. King Arthur. The Knights of the Round Table. Lancelot. Galahad. Merlin. Marion Zimmer Bradley retells the story from a new perspective: that of the women in the tale. Her brilliant rendition of the long-told saga is revolutionary in its ability to recapture the essence of the story from a completely different angle. The women who were once portrayed as the antagonists become protagonists, women who were once portrayed as the essence of virgin-like good become the tale of a weak-minded woman, and she masterfully captures the struggle over divinity as masculine or feminine.
The story of Morgan le Fay, in all its revisions and incarnations, embodies all that women have been perceived as at various points in history: sister, lover, wise, foolish, enchanting, deceiving, warrior, peacemaker, healer, witch, goddess, nymph, mother, mistress, old, young, beautiful, ugly, good, evil.
"For this is the thing the priests do not know, with their One God and One Truth: that there is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you, and whether, at the end, you arrive in the Holy Isle of Eternity or among the priests with their bells and their death and their Satan and Hell and damnation." (Morgan le Fay in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon)
And so it is with the legend of woman. The truth of her story, and of the female legend, exists only as a reflection of an era's perception of women and spirituality and power and sexuality. As is the case with most legends, the story becomes one of circumstances and eras, and less of an impression of the original truth.
Just as Morgan le Fay has represented the many faces of women, so has Hillary Clinton. How is it that so many people can have so many different impressions of these women?
What fascinates me is the fascination with everything Clinton that has existed long before her candidacy began and I suspect will long outlast this election, so long as she is a presence on the national scene. Every great story has female characters that represent the good and the bad. Perhaps this is why the story between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton seemed to garner so much attention and passion. She is the hero and the villain.
I wonder, 1000 years from now, what the story of Morgan le Fay will look like. If it will have collected any of the perceptions of now, any of the circumstances of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Will they know the truth of it all? Or will they recognize the many truths of it all?
I have no answers. Only questions. So I open to you…
]]>Some brand damage remains, as does the downward pull of the president's approval ratings.Indeed it does. Thanks to you, the Republican brand invokes images of corruption, lies, fear-mongering, and incompetence. So successful were you in creating that brand, it, and with it, your legacy, is likely to outlast the coming elections and perhaps, many years beyond.
The question is this: Have white Democrats soured on Obama? Apparently not. Although his unfavorable rating from the group is up five percentage points since last summer in polls conducted by The New York Times and CBS News, his favorable rating is up just as much.
On the other hand, black Democrats’ opinion of Hillary Clinton has deteriorated substantially (her favorable rating among them is down 36 percentage points over the same period).
While a favorable opinion doesn’t necessarily translate into a vote, this should still give the Clintons (and the superdelegates) pause. Electability cuts both ways.
And from Giordano:
So, to sum up: Look at the damn graphs. You can see that Clinton is in a staggering free-fall among African-American voters, her favorability is down 36 points while 17 percent view her more negatively than before, while Obama’s favorable and negative ratings among whites have paired at five point increases. You can even see the small dip - about two percentage points - in his popularity among whites that can be attributed to the news cycles about his ex-pastor, and see that it has leveled out and is now on a straight horizontal line (meanwhile, Clinton’s numbers among blacks continue on an extreme downward precipice). The greater context is that even including Obama’s slight dip, he’s more popular today among white voters than he ever was prior to February.
Not since Ronald Reagan has an American presidential candidate withstood such an assault in the media and seen his popularity not hurt by it, but, rather, galvanized by it. That’s what is meant, in politics, by the term “Teflon.”