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On Getting Back to Normal

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

I’m on vacation, busy with summer for a month already, spending time outside biking, hiking, and hacking away at the woods with a chainsaw. I got a pin for 25 years of service at our last day’s assembly, which made me stop and think just a bit. How could it be that I’ve stayed with it so long? How much longer?! I told one of the other teachers that I wasn’t sure how I felt about getting that pin. When I started this job, so long ago, at age 30, I’d never done anything full time for more than a year. My teacher friend said, “Well, it must mean it’s a pretty good job.” Yeah. It has been a good job. For the most part. It certainly beats wading knee deep through slimy fish on the back deck of a commercial fishing boat, pushing wheelbarrows full of muddy topsoil around the yards of fancy houses with big windows and views of the ocean, or sleeping under a pile of empty fruit bins because I didn’t have a car to sleep in, or money to stay somewhere besides the orchard where I was working. But I’m grateful for those experiences because I gained a lot of empathy for people who don’t have many choices in life other than to work hard and hope for a break now and then.

But getting reformed over and over again has it’s downside, too, and that is getting old. We spent our last work day discussing how we might schedule two more part-time teacher aides into our already disjointed elementary program next year to help us work on “tier two interventions,” which is some new garbage that requires us to “collaborate” to help kids designated “at risk,” based on phony data generated from some mickey mouse AimsWeb “probes.” Does anyone think this is how we can make a real difference in a kid’s life? If there is such a person, they were not in the room.

It is really interesting to me that President Obama can let BP take the lead in cleaning up the disaster in the Gulf, and yet teachers have got hedge fund managers, mayors, think tank policy wonks, billionaire vulture capitalists, and no real education experts, calling the shots on public school “reform,” with Arne Duncan as department head, whose teaching experience comes from volunteering at his mom’s after school program (He actually says this, as if it means something!) mouthing a bunch of nonsense about educating our way to a better economy and making education the civil rights issue of our generation. Well, no. The economy tanked because of a monumental failure of government to regulate the financial industry, and manufacturing long ago moved out of the country. And before we can talk about civil rights, we need to straighten out some things with health care, endless war, mass incarceration, racism and immigration, and state-sponsored torture.

At the president’s press conference yesterday, Obama said that the Gulf would eventually return to normal. Really. And, given what happened, it that a good thing? In his speech to the nation this evening, he told us:

One place we’ve already begun to take action is at the agency in charge of regulating drilling and issuing permits, known as the Minerals Management Service. Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility — a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.

When Ken Salazar became my Secretary of the Interior, one of his very first acts was to clean up the worst of the corruption at this agency. But it’s now clear that the problem there ran much deeper, and the pace of reform was just too slow.

Not so fast, Mr. President, thanks to Tim Dickinson’s excellent article in Rolling Stone, we can see that, though Ken Salazar talked the talk, he didn’t really walk the reformer walk:

Though he criticized the actions of “a few rotten apples” at the agency, he left long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge. “The people that are ethically challenged are the career managers, the people who come up through the ranks,” says a marine biologist who left the agency over the way science was tampered with by top officials. “In order to get promoted at MMS, you better get invested in this pro-development oil culture.” One of the Bush-era managers whom Salazar left in place was John Goll, the agency’s director for Alaska. Shortly after, the Interior secretary announced a reorganization of MMS in the wake of the Gulf disaster, Goll called a staff meeting and served cake decorated with the words “Drill, baby, drill.”

Frank Rich and Tim Dickinson both cite figures that implicate BP in 760 citations for “egregious and willful” safety violations – those “committed with plain indifference to or intentional disregard for employee safety and health,” while the rest of the industry received only one or two. Rich adds, “No high-powered White House meetings or risk analyses were needed to discern how treacherous it was to trust BP this time. An intern could have figured it out.” And now, today, Jason Leopold reports that Alaska’s North Slope is in danger from BP’s corroding pipeline. This is not change we can believe in.

But this is. Severn Suzuki, age 12, addressing the Earth Summit in Rio Centro, Brazil, 1992:

All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions.

I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realize, neither do you! You don’t know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer. You don’t know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream. You don’t know how to bring back an animal now extinct. And you can’t bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert.

If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

And that was 18 years ago! I’m disgusted with all the talk about fixing things that aren’t really the problem. Nothing changes; all we get is more of the same. The irony of the “change candidate” promising a return to normal was too much for me.

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Sinnerman – Nina Simone

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Where you gonna run to?

Sinnerman
Oh Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All along dem day

Well I run to the rock, please hide me
I run to the rock, please hide me
I run to the rock, please hide me, Lord
All along dem day

But the rock cried out, I can’t hide you
The rock cried out, I can’t hide you
The rock cried out, I ain’t gonna hide you guy
All along dem day

I said, Rock, what’s a matter with you rock?
Don’t you see I need you, rock?
Lord, Lord, Lord
All along dem day

So I run to the river, it was bleedin’
I run to the sea, it was bleedin’
I run to the sea, it was bleedin’
All along dem day

So I run to the river, it was boilin’
I run to the sea, it was boilin’
I run to the sea, it was boilin’
All along dem day

So I run to the Lord, please hide me Lord
Don’t you see me prayin’?
Don’t you see me down here prayin’?
But the Lord said, go to the devil
The Lord said, go to the devil
He said, go to the devil
All along dem day

So I ran to the devil, he was waitin’
I ran to the devil, he was waitin’
Ran to the devil, he was waitin’
All on that day
I cried -
POWER ….

Well I run to the river, it was boilin’
I run to the sea, it was boilin’
I run to the sea, it was boilin’
All along dem day

So I ran to the Lord
I said, Lord hide me, please hide me
Please help me
All along dem day

He said, child, where were you
When you oughta been prayin’?
I said, Lord, Lord, hear me prayin’
Lord, Lord, hear me prayin’
Lord, Lord, hear me prayin’
All along dem day

Sinnerman you oughta be prayin’
Oughta be prayin’, Sinnerman
Oughta be prayin’,
All on that day
I cried -
POWER …

from Pastel Blues
* Nina Simone – piano, vocals
* Al Schackman – guitar, harmonica
* Rudy Stevenson – guitar, flute
* Lisle Atkinson – bass
* Bobby Hamilton – drums

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Lost Offshore Oil Rig Blues

Sunday, May 30, 2010

We hear, now, there are giant plumes of oil rolling around beneath the surface of the Gulf, and that BP, not the Coast Guard, is running the show. We’ve also learned that we can expect it to get worse in the near term, despite the best efforts of BP and the Obama administration to reassure us that they’ve got a plan for dealing with the situation. It’s a shame that’s all we’ve learned, because after the Exxon Valdez, I’d have expected everyone to understand that large volumes of oil in the water is bad. Really.

How could this happen? Bad luck? Accident? Carelessness? I hate calling this crime scene a “spill,” which sounds altogether manageable and accidental, when it appears to be neither at this point. Criminal negligence seems closer to what was really going on. Hearing that it’s worse than Exxon Valdez, as this point, brings up feelings of despair and anger for me. Alaska is still not over that mess, and the lessons learned have apparently not taken root, seeing as how Alaska’s entire congressional delegation objects to the suspension of drilling permits in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

Rikki Ott, a marine biologist and environmental activist from Alaska, has started a campaign to legalize democracy, to abolish the legal doctrine of corporate personhood. The core problem is something even deeper and more pernicious than oil coming out of a hole in the ground deep under the sea. The real problem is that there are giant plumes of money floating around the economy, contaminating and subverting democratic processes. As Wendell Berry has pointed out:

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who “let their money work for them,” expecting high pay in return for causing others to work for low pay. The World Trade Organization enlarges the old idea of the corporation-as-person by giving the global economy the status of a super-government with the power to overrule nations.

And how big are these “piles of money?” Our imaginations fail us when people describe things with numbers that have too many zeros, but thanks to the L-Curve visualization, we can begin to get an idea.

Hard to believe, even after seeing it.

BP has been stacking up those dollars the past few years. According to BP’s annual report:

2009 was a successful year, with positive financial and operational momentum despite a backdrop of weaker oil and gas prices. Replacement cost profit before interest and tax was $24.8 billion – a 35% decrease compared with the record level in 2008.

2010 doesn’t look so promising at this point. And how much of that oil money trickles down to regular people? Not much, if you consider how steep that spike in the end zone of the graph is.

Woody Guthrie lived in oil country, in Oklahoma, and he saw how it worked. He talked a little bit about the economics of oil in this interview with Alan Lomax in 1940:

Alan Lomax – What’d your family do? What kind of people were they? Where’d they come from?

Woody Guthrie – Well, they come in there from Texas, in the early day. My dad got to Oklahoma right after statehood; he was the first clerk of the county court in Okemah, Oklahoma after statehood. He was known as one of them old hard-hittin’ fist fightin’ Democrats, you know, that run for office down there. And they used to miscount the votes all the time, and so every time my dad went to town, it was common the first question I’d ask him when he come ridin’ in on the horse that evenin’ I’d say, Well, how many fights did you have today? And then he’d take me up on his knee and he’d proceed to tell me who he was fightin’ and why, and all about it.

AL – Where’d you live? On a farm?

WG – Well, no. I was born there in that little town. My dad built a six-room house. Cost him about seven or eight thousand dollars, and the day after he got the house built, it burned down.

AL – What kind of a place was Okemah? How big was it? When you remember it, when you were a kid?

WG – Well, in them days it was a little town about 1500, and then 2000. And a few years later it got up to about 5000. They struck some pretty rich oil pools all around there, in Garrison City, and Slick City, in Cromwell, and Seminole, and Bowlegs, and Sand Springs, and Springhill, and all up and down the whole country there they got oil. They got some pretty nice oil fields around Okemah there.

AL – Did any of the oil come in your family?

WG – Nope. Nope; we got the grease. Didn’t get no oil.

Listen to hear more of the conversation.

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I don’t know about anyone else, but it’s been hard for me to think about much else since this thing started. I’ve got a few more things to say about it, but my heart’s been in my throat. I was hoping for good news from one of these last-ditch Hail Mary efforts, and now that none of those have panned out, I don’t know what to think. Disgust and disappointment – that’s all I’ve got.

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Standing Up for Common Sense

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Every once in a while, there is good news:

Alaska opts out of Race to the Top school grants

TOO MUCH CHANGE: State leery after failures of the No Child Left Behind Act.

By Jeremy Hsieh
The Associated Press

While many states have accepted an educational reform challenge in the federal Race to the Top program, Alaska is watching from the sidelines.

Applications in a second round of bidding to the U.S. Department of Education are due June 1.

Alaska could compete for up to $75 million in grants, but Education Commissioner Larry LeDoux said the state will continue to forgo competing for the grants.

The grant structure rewards extensive education planning and policy changes. LeDoux says that means Alaska must give up some sovereignty to an inflexible program calling for too much change, too fast.

“Alaska has the right to be suspicious of an initiative where we hand over authority,” he said, especially after the state’s experience with the federal No Child Left Behind Act. That law requires states to use standardized testing to measure math and reading ability and establish consequences and improvement plans for schools that fail to meet annual, escalating testing goals. For the 2008-2009 school year, 224 of 505 Alaska schools failed to meet the goals.

It was a bad fit for Alaska because it was top-down, rigid and urban- centric, LeDoux said, characteristics he also sees in Race to the Top. Meanwhile, Alaska has its own education reforms under way.

“I don’t disagree with what they’re trying to do, it’s just how we get there,” LeDoux said.

U.S. Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, has urged Republican Gov. Sean Parnell to apply and pursue the reforms.

“Alaska must capitalize on every opportunity to bring resources to bear to produce young Alaskans fully prepared to meet the rapidly changing challenges of the global economy,” he told the state Legislature in a March address.

But just applying for Race to the Top requires a significant commitment. Bids for a grant facilitator to help with the first round of applications — winners were announced in March — came back with a $300,000 price tag. Of the 40 states that applied, only Delaware and Tennessee received awards.

Note that Mark Begich “D”-Alaska, who campaigned against NCLB, shows us just how morally bankrupt the Democrats are, and helps to snuff out any flicker of hope for progressive change to come from the Obama administration.

There is no race, and there is no top.

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Black Waves

Sunday, May 2, 2010

It’s not just beaches and birds.

VALDEZ, Alaska — The toll of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill is a sadly familiar one: 250,000 dead birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals–all victims of the oil tanker that ran over a reef late one April night and drained 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.

There are others whom almost no one talks about, although unlike the birds, most of them are still alive. They are the people who scraped oil off the beaches, skimmed it off the top of the water, hosed it off rocks. Workers who stood in the brown foam 18 hours a day, who came back to their sleeping barges with oil matted in their hair, ate sandwiches speckled with oil, steered boats through a brown hydrocarbon haze that looked like the smog from hell.

After that summer, some found oil traces in their lungs, in their blood cells, in the fatty tissue of their buttocks. They got treated for headaches, nausea, chemical burns and breathing problems, and went home. But some never got well. Steve Cruikshank of Wasilla, Alaska, has headaches that go on for days. Two years ago, he was hospitalized when his lungs nearly stopped working. “The doctor said, ‘I’m going to give you the strongest antibiotic known to man, and you’re either going to survive or not survive. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.’ What’s wrong is, I haven’t felt right since that oil spill.”
[read more]

From The Black Wave:

The legacy of the Exxon Valdez

Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, marine biologist Riki Ott and the fishers in the town of Cordova, Alaska remind us that the biggest environmental catastrophe in North American history is still with us. …. Toward the end of their judicial saga, Riki Ott and the fishers of Cordova ask if corporate values have trumped human rights and community values in the United States today.

Is there any question about this any more?

“Stick Your Damn Hand In It!” the man said.

The reporters looked, but didn’t see it, because it was three inches under their feet, under the shingle rock of the icy beach. Gail pulled out her hand and now the whole place smelled like a gas station. The network crews wanted to puke. And now, with their eyes open, they saw the oil, the vile feces-colored smear across the glaciated ridge faces, the poisonous “bathtub ring” that ran for miles and miles at the high tide level.

The real clean-up needs to happen in the courts and corporate boardrooms. How many more ‘big ones’ can we endure?

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Heartbreaking

Saturday, May 1, 2010

This brings back some painful memories.

Yesterday, AKMuckracker wrote about the problem of accounting for the true price of oil, and published some information about the drill rig that exploded and sank in The Gulf. It was regarded as “state of the art.”

The rig belongs to Transocean, the world’s biggest offshore drilling contractor. The rig was originally contracted through the year 2013 to BP and was working on BP’s Macondo exploration well when the fire broke out. The rig costs about $500,000 per day to contract. The full drilling spread, with helicopters and support vessels and other services, will cost closer to $1,000,000 per day to operate in the course of drilling for oil and gas. The rig cost about $350,000,000 to build in 2001 and would cost at least double that to replace today.

The rig represents the cutting edge of drilling technology. It is a floating rig, capable of working in up to 10,000 ft water depth. The rig is not moored; It does not use anchors because it would be too costly and too heavy to suspend this mooring load from the floating structure. Rather, a triply-redundant computer system uses satellite positioning to control powerful thrusters that keep the rig on station within a few feet of its intended location, at all times. This is called Dynamic Positioning. (Also available here, where you can read the whole thing, and see more photos.)

I don’t understand the ending of this piece, where the author (unknown) concludes, “It’s a sad day when something like this happens to any rig, but even more so when it happens to something on the cutting edge of our capabilities.” I say it’s a sad day when something like this happens to our planet, but even more so when we should know better than to trust our “cutting edge capabilities” with the potential for devastation that we all so clearly, and repeatedly, have seen. And now it appears that the contractor may have modified the blow out protector:

These modifications were discovered by remote operated vehicles, whose pictures transmitted to engineers trying to establish why the BPO didn’t activate, showed the part had been altered.

Yesterday, top BP executives met with Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and the U.S. Coast Guard and told them about the tampered BOP and the fact that BP had no knowledge the device had been altered.

Federal officials talk about “cleaning” it up:

As you know, yesterday BP began a controlled burn designed to remove large quantities of oil from the open water in an effort to protect shoreline and marine and other wildlife. The trapped oil was consumed in about 28 minutes. BP continues to use chemical dispersants, which, along with natural dispersions of oil, will address a large portion of the slick.

Who, but the news media, believes that “dispersants” remove anything from the water?

Alaskan author, Bill Sherwonit, has a guest post on Mudflats this morning, The Heartbreak of an Early Spring Day:

I’m outraged by what seems to be the casual response, the apparent indifference, shown by both the government and media in the days following the blowout. After the initial shock and media coverage of the explosion and loss of human life, it seemed the dangers to the gulf itself and neighboring coastline were underreported, underplayed. For several days the story was relegated to the inside pages of our own Anchorage Daily News, which would seem to have a great and natural interest in reporting such a disaster, given Alaska’s own history. Perhaps convinced by industry “experts” that the spread of oil was not an immediate threat to the Gulf Coast, the federal government too seemed to hold back, rather than do everything in its power to stop or at least slow the oil’s spread through the gulf and eventually toward land. Residents of Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states have good reason to again feel betrayed by their government, by those who are supposed to be watchdogs and regulators and responders.

But more than anything I’m saddened. We Americans – like people everywhere, I suppose – have such short memories. Didn’t the Exxon Valdez clearly show it only takes one spill to do incredible, long-lasting damage? But we forget and so Americans in recent years have grown more supportive of increased oil exploration, both onshore and off. Many of us “naysayers” to such exploration and development have argued that it’s only a matter of time before another “accident” occurs. But of course we’re shouted down as unpatriotic alarmists and obstructionists.

If this was an accident, then we should also talk about an emerging disaster called “school reform.”

What kind of world are we leaving our kids?!

This John Prine/Steve Goodman performance of Souvenirs (sadly) hits the right note for me today.

Stick around, and listen to Steve Goodman sing You’re the Girl I Love toward the end of the video.

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Rethinking School Reading

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

With a little over 2 weeks of school left, we are finalizing things, making ready for the grand summer release. Today I asked my sixth graders to reflect on their growth as readers, and to write about what they’d learned (if anything) about themselves or books, based on what they read in school this year. This was the second year I made a firm commitment to carving out a 30-40 minute period each day for free reading.

The kids all said, every single one of them, that they now see themselves as better readers, or as readers, period, where they weren’t especially interested in books before they came to my class. They said they’re reading longer, more complex books, and they’ve learned to recognize what they like. This last thing, the what they like business was significant. I believe we should redefine guided reading to include guiding students in the choices they make for what they read, as well as focusing on how they read. At some point this year I realized that when students are always told what to read, they never have a chance to develop a sense of their own taste in reading material. What a shame! Ask them what music they like to listen to, and see if they don’t know.

Even with this good stuff happening, I’m not satisfied that I’m doing as much as I’d like to provoke their awareness of the world beyond the classroom. I’m always looking for ways to get the job done better, and as part of my own learning process, I want to explore ways of exposing students to a broader menu of books, authors, and ideas next year. This is the great thing about having a job that starts over again and again; it offers repeated opportunities for revision. Help with thinking about this was not far off today, as it turns out. In my mailbox in the school office, somebody left an article from the April 2010 issue of Kappan, What Should Students Read? by Steven Wolk.

Wolk surveyed students, asking them “What does school have you read?” with predictable results. Same old, same old. He recommends that, “What students read should be determined by why they read in school.”

If we want to nurture lifelong readers and thinkers, to cultivate social responsibility, to make reading relevant to the 21st century, and to bring joy to reading, then the status quo will not suffice. The status quo will only continue to teach kids to hate reading and to see education as irrelevant.

OK. I’m on board with that. However, he locates one of my guilty misgivings about my own practice when he talks about textbooks, which he says, “are the single biggest source of reading students do in school, especially in science and social studies.” My experience with using them is that “informational” or “content reading” instruction that is heavily reliant on textbooks does a lousy job of helping the kids with both reading and subject area knowledge.

Elizabeth Moje has the right idea here. In Foregrounding the Disciplines she says that teachers working in disciplinary-oriented literacy programs should take advantage of new media and social networking practices to expand the types of texts that are made available to students, and that students should learn to emulate reading practices that are valued by practitioners of the disciplines. Moje has a podcast that is worth listening to.

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Wolk reinforces Moje’s message, reminding us that “textbooks are reference books, like encyclopedias,” and “should not be read from cover to cover.” So true.

I am especially happy to see Wolk’s emphasis on the personal and social value in school reading, beyond the simple utilitarian value literacy may have in the workplace. “Much of what students read in school,” he says, “should be interesting, global, provocative, critical, relevant, diverse, creative, emotional, and imaginative.” Reading should encourage students to, “question their assumptions and open their minds to stimulating ideas.”

And so as not to leave us with a lot of pious admonitions and recommendations, he provides an extensive list of authors and titles, organized around various types of texts, such as graphic novels, newspapers, magazines, research reports, and songs. He also has recommendations for science and social studies reading.

But it doesn’t end there. I looked for other things Wolk has published online, and I found an aricle in Educational Leadership (July 2009) entitled Revisiting Social Responsibility: Reading for the World, in which he has posted a very long list of Books for Teaching Social Responsibility. Go forth to copy and paste!

Just to be thorough here, Wolk also has an article in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (May, 2009) Reading For a Better World: Teaching Social Responsibility with Young Adult Literature which offers an overview of a variety of social issues students might be interested in, and makes recommendations for readings to use as anchor texts within an inquiry framework. The article requires payment for access, though.

In any case, this gives me some things to think about over the summer.

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It’s the News Media, Stupid (again)

Monday, April 26, 2010

When I first heard Glenn Beck on the truck radio (following Barack Obama’s election) I thought I was listening to a ridiculous caricature of a revolutionary. Here was this obviously white, pin-headed fear monger, using a national broadcast medium to pretend that he was a threatened underdog. Part comedy, part horror show. And now, since the Tea Party has gained so much attention over the past several months, I still think he’s ridiculous, but the attention also makes him dangerous.

The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913, following the murder of Leo Frank. “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all”

The brutal murder of Leo Frank did not occur in a vacuum. As the 20th century dawned, anti-Semitism was rampant in an American society where resorts commonly advertised, “No dogs! No Jews!” and magazines featured “humorous” caricatures of Jewish people.

It was in this atmosphere that the Anti-Defamation League was established in 1913 by a lawyer and fearless visionary by the name of Sigmund Livingston. [link to study guide]

The ADL has taken notice of the Tea Party movement, observing:

While most people attending Tea Party events claim they harbor no extreme views, many of the ideas they promote fall outside the mainstream, especially the more conspiratorial ones. Angry protesters have frequently made claims ranging from proclaiming Obama’s “socialist” intentions to making explicit Nazi comparisons to suggesting that the President is defying or even subverting the Constitution.

They give credit to the news media, and Glenn Beck in particular, for “drawing people further out of the mainstream, making them more receptive to the more extreme notions and conspiracy theories.”

Yesterday, I ran across a thought experiment by Tim Wise, Imagine: Protest, Insurgency and the Workings of White Privilege, that pegs this “protest” movement for what it is. His conclusion:

Imagine that black protesters at a large political rally were walking around with signs calling for the lynching of their congressional enemies. Because that’s what white conservatives did last year, in reference to Democratic party leaders in Congress.

In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?

To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary, common Americans stood up for their rights: a statement that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, not to mention women in the fight for suffrage and equality, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBT folks as they struggle to be treated as full and equal human beings.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

Game Over.

Read the whole thing at Red Room. Or read it at Alternet. And check out that ADL study guide. It’s a good one.

Hate groups are making a stand. Everyone else needs to stand, as well. We could start with a boycott of Fox News, and anyone who advertises there. A list would be useful.

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Unfinished Business – A Pedagogy for the Planet

Thursday, April 22, 2010

It’s still Earth Day here along the the northern rim of the planet, near the eastern edge of the international date line. Spring is here at last; it is brown and muddy and beautiful without any snow. This was my 30th winter in Alaska, and I still look forward to the regular changes, no matter the season.

But there are other changes that don’t feel right. We haven’t gotten much snow for many winters now. Summers are drier. We choke on smoke from far-off fires, and fires that are not so far off. Some of the coastal communities have big erosion problems due to storm damage. With less sea ice, waves pound harder on the beaches and carry the land out from under houses and roads. Tara Kyle, blogger at Change.org, reminds us, “On Earth Day, it’s vital that we remember that one of the great injustices of climate change is that the first places impacted are in many cases communities already at the margins of societies.”

I’ve been listening all week to Democracy Now broadcasting from the World People’s Summit on Climate Change in Bolivia, where the President, Evo Morales, called for an end to capitalism:

We are here because in Copenhagen the so-called developed countries failed in their obligation to provide substantial commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. We have two paths: either Pachamama or death. We have two paths: either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies. Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to capitalism!

As an Alaskan, living in a state that is completely dependent on tax revenues from oil extraction, it’s hard to jump on board an anti-capitalist bandwagon. But, that doesn’t mean we have to accept the status quo. The planet, and all that lives on it, is suffering. And this can’t continue for much longer before everything that belongs together starts to come apart. For starters, it would be good if we had more say in where and how resource development proceeded. So, maybe the wish for change to our economic infrastructure is not that far-fetched. Grace Lee Boggs, (again, on Democracy Now) the other day suggested that the path ahead will require us to redefine democracy, moving away from elected representative governance and building relationships rooted in community, caring for one another.

This sounds all abstract and idealistic until I remember that in the classroom this is what I aim for. Just that. It isn’t easy, but it is possible as long as the administration and the policy people don’t make too many irrelevant demands. The challenge is to maintain a righteous focus, to look critically at what I’m doing, and to be kind – especially that.

These are revolutionary times, no doubt. John Bellamy Foster is a writer whose work I’ve recently discovered. In an excerpt from his latest book, he says:

The goal of ecological revolution, as I shall present it here, has as its initial premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the web of life of the entire planet is threatened and with it the future of civilization.

What could be more serious? The recommended response, Foster’s “ecological-social revolution,” he tells us, would be

[O]rganized democratically from below, “community by community … region by region.” It must put the provision of basic human needs—clean air, unpolluted water, safe food, adequate sanitation, social transport, and universal health care and education, all of which require a sustainable relation to the earth—ahead of all other needs and wants. “An ecological dialectic” along these lines, Morrison insists, “rejects not struggle but the endless slaughter of industrial negation” in the interest of unlimited profits.[30]

Such a revolutionary turn in human affairs may seem improbable. But the continuation of the present capitalist system for any length of time will prove impossible—if human civilization and the web of life as we know it are to be sustained.

As it happens, this closely resembles the ideas of Richard Kahn, who has been writing about the need for a pedagogy that honors the rights of both human and non-human life forms. Two chapters of his book are online in pdf format. Chapter one takes us on a history lesson, going all the way back to ancient Athens, to look at the origins of democracy, which Kahn problematizes. For example:

In what sense, then, are we to analyze and make conclusions concerning the potentials left within paideia, when it has been the vehicle by which billions of people have become (relative to history) highly literate and immersed in the spoils of human culture, even as it has continued to leave billions beyond the realization of the same? Even if we accept the neoliberal leadership of the Bush administration at its word and believe that the full extension of American-led, corporate business and education into the “less cultured” regions of the globe represents a sort of final Alexandrian attempt at mass civilization, how are we to judge the results of this project if it comes at the cost of the irrational devastation of the natural planet?

Chapter three focuses on the work of Paulo Freire, and Ivan Illich who have much to say about contemporary society.

A quote by Freire was featured at the top of one of Kahn’s articles, Towards Ecopedagogy, that lead me to some excerpted material from Freire’s book, Pedagogy of Indignation. These essays by Freire were good to read – uplifting and hopeful at a time that often seems full of disappointment and discouragement for teachers. He emphatically insists on maintaining a positive outlook as a teacher, since the work of education is essentially ethical and idealistic. He writes, putting a thumb in the eye of the case-hardened “realists” who criticize his stance:

Our testimony, on the contrary, if we re progressive, if we dream of a less aggressive, less unjust, less violent, more human society, must be that of saying “no” to any impossibility determined the the “facts” and that of defending a human being’s capacity for evaluating, comparing, choosing, deciding, and finally intervening in the world.

It’s good stuff. Here’s the quote from Kahn’s article that drew me in:

It is urgent that we assume the duty of fighting for the fundamental ethical principles, like respect for the life of human beings, the life of other animals, the life of birds, the life of rivers and forests. I do not believe in love between men and women, between human beings, if we are not able to love the world. Ecology takes on fundamental importance at the end of the century. It has to be present in any radical critical or liberationist educational practice. For this reason, it seems to me a lamentable contradiction to engage in progressive, revolutionary discourse and have a practice which negates life. A practice which pollutes the sea, the water, the fields, devastates the forests, destroys the trees, threatens the birds and animals, does violence to the mountains, the cities, to our cultural and historical memories. – Paulo Freire

(note: url revised 4/23)

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Capitalism : Bottled Water : : Democrats : Education Reform

Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Obama administration’s education reform policy is a scam, just like bottled water – a capitalist scheme to manufacture markets through the privatization of public wealth.

Race to the Top and the ESEA Blueprint are education “reform” mechanisms that use test scores to label schools as failing, thereby creating incentives for states to relax charter school regulations, establish common standards, set up expensive data tracking systems to determine which teachers get merit pay, and which get the harsh reform measures – while doing nothing to improve curriculum and instruction, teacher preparation, or physical conditions in the schools themselves.

It’s like water bottling companies who exploit people’s misgivings about impure drinking water – water that may have been degraded through corporate negligence – so they can package and sell an alternative which is often just tap water, the very same water they’ve convinced people they should avoid.

How do they get away with this? According to Annie Leonard, it’s simple. “Scaring us, seducing us, and misleading us – these strategies are all core parts of manufacturing demand.”

It’s all here, in The Story of Bottled Water:

I don’t see any other way to look at what’s going on in schools now. We shouldn’t buy it.

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