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.

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.

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)

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.

Weiner:

The publicity for Ravitch’s book has certainly put her incisive critique of the reforms (privatizing education; using standardized tests to measure everything; looking to “choice” and charter schools drive improvement) in the news…..

Still, it’s important to note what she gets wrong and why. In the book she explains being “caught up” in the widespread “enthusiasm” for market reforms. She will not, however, name this as the neoliberal project. By the political yardstick she uses in the book, the American Enterprise Institute is a “well-respected conservative think tank.” Someone whose first job in New York was at the New Leader, where she learned all about left sectarian politics and met Max Shachtman, (as she noted in our exchange before the panel), knows enough to name capitalism’s latest iteration.

Ravitch won’t name neoliberalism as the problem because it would force her to confront facts she’d rather ignore. Like the fact that 70% of the new jobs being created only require a minimal education. Or the fact that her idea of a great education is the Houston schools of her youth, a school system that was racially segregated.

Ravitch’s very unpersuasive agenda to beat back the neoliberal assault is a return to the post WW2 welfare state, pre-Brown versus education and those messy social movements that created the culture wars. She wants a kinder, gentler neoconservative restoration, one shorn of neoliberalism’s savagery. Her solutions include having parents (meaning minority parents) teach their kids how to behave right and read to them at home.

Weiner refers to a panel discussion at New York University that she and Ravitch spoke at. Ravitch spoke first, and then had to leave because of another commitment. Lois Weiner’s response covers approximately 15 minutes of the video, which runs for over an hour total. I’ve transcribed her remarks, here, because I believe they add significantly to what Ravitch had to say, and the video is long. (Unfortunately, so is this post, but it should nonetheless take less time to read it than to watch the video.) If you’re not familiar with what Ravitch has to say about her book, do listen to what she says at the panel discussion. Weiner insists that “to halt this juggernaut, we have to see the “international dimension of the project.” I’ve also linked to some of the source material she references.

Diane Ravitch: [wrapping up] This is my last thought. It’s about the Democratic agenda and the Republican agenda. You gotta keep this in mind, and Lois may or may not agree with me about this. Since 1965, the Democratic Party has had an agenda that consisted of two words, equity and professionalism. I don’t think they went far enough with the professionalism agenda; I would go even farther. But with the equity agenda, it was very clear that the Democratic Party believed in funding districts that had the greatest needs. Funding districts that had the greatest number of children that were in poverty.

The Republican agenda, because of the Republicans’ closeness to the business community, was accountability and choice. Now we’re in a period where the Democratic agenda, announced by the president, is accountability and choice. And my question is, “Where did the Democratic agenda go?” Where did it get lost? It’s not there anymore. They’re kind of trying to say, “Well we still do that, too, but our reform agenda is accountability and choice.”

And it sure looks a lot like NCLB to me. Thanks so much. [applause]

Lois Weiner: I want to first commend Diane for her intellectual integrity and her courage in revisiting her role as an architect of the program she now views, correctly, I think, as destroying public education.

Diane Ravitch: I was not an architect of No Child Left Behind.

Lois Weiner: No, but listen to what I say, Diane. Where we’re going to disagree – and I want to also state what we agree about – I agree with everything that Diane just said. Every single thing. She laid out in such a way that I don’t have to repeat it, the effects of this disastrous educational policy for the last 10 years. She laid it out. I’m not going to repeat what she said, and I have no criticism with what she said.

And I want to point out that Diane and I, in her recent book, Diane and I agree with the need to defend democratic civic purposes of education, the need for teacher unions, the need for educational equality, and education’s role in promoting social mobility. Those are things that Diane talks about in her book, and I absolutely agree with her 100%, about those aims. What I’m going to suggest, though, is that Diane’s analysis about how we got to this point is flawed. And that if we are going to defend public education, we need to have a very different analysis. And so the analysis that I’m going to offer tonight, I think, takes two sets of blinders off – that we have to take off.

The first set of blinders separates educational reform from what’s going on in the economy. The other set of blinders says that we can look at education in this country separately from what goes on in the rest of the world. Because what I’m going to lay out tonight for you is a perspective that says NCLB, all these policies that Diane just described, are neoliberalism coming home. They are policies that were imposed for the first time under Pinochet – under Pinochet. Next in Argentina. Next in Uruguay. Throughout all of Latin America and Central America. And when I spoke about this at a conference in London about a year and a half ago, I said, “Every country in the world has enacted these policies.”

Stephen Ball, who wrote a great report on privatization globally for the Education International, corrected me. Very politely in private. And he said, “Lois, it’s not every country in the world – It’s not Finland or North Korea.”

So let us understand that this is a global project that began 40 years ago, was tested, refined – if you want to use that word – imposed on Africa, Asia, and Latin America by the World Bank. Why? Because developing countries wanted aid. If they wanted aid, they had to undergo economic restructuring AND educational reform.

So what were the contours of that – what were the contours – what were the contours of that neoliberal project? And I’m going to talk in a minute about what neoliberalism is. Because I think that in her book, Diane grapples with this concept, but she doesn’t face it head on. And I think that we need to understand what the project is and where it comes from.

What’s the project? Here are the contours: Privatization, fragmentation of oversight and regulation and creation of individual schools, standardized testing, and assault on teachers’ unions. Those are the 4 pillars of this project.

• Privatization: Commodification, marketization of education, Diane describes that.
• Fragmentation: Elimination of the regulatory mechanisms. So that now we have fragmentation, regulation devolves to an individual school; that’s charter schools. In the UK they’re called ‘academies.’ In Sweden they’re called ‘charter schools.’ All over the world, except for Finland and North Korea – China included – China has charter schools. China has charter schools.
• Standardized testing: You eliminate a regulatory framework, how do you gauge “accountability?” Standardized tests. Standardized tests are, for the most part, created by for-profit companies who market the textbooks and who market professional development. Do you see how it’s a web? Everybody see how it’s a web? Standardized tests, well if that’s the only accountability measure, that means teachers are measured by standardized tests. Merit pay. Well, if you have merit pay, you don’t need to have teachers who have a lot of education or a lot of experience because the only thing that you pay them by is the kids’ test scores.
• And finally, what is THE greatest barrier? THE greatest barrier. Most potentially, most powerful, an existing barrier to this program? Teachers’ unions. And now we have to understand that’s the reason, every day in the paper, we read about bad teachers and how the unions defend them. That is the reason. Because teacher unions globally are standing in the way of this project.

And I can only say I have so much to say about this, I edited a book of essays. And I really hope you’ll read it. You will read teachers’ stories from all over the world describing this project, and the resistance to it.

OK. So let me get back to this issue of the neoliberalism, which Diane doesn’t talk about. And I hope that she will. And I hope that she will think about it because in the book, Diane says a couple of really very interesting things. She says she and others were, quote, “…caught up in the wave of enthusiasm for market reforms.” That’s on page 127. And she says that this was a “new thinking” on page 9. But you see, when that occurred it wasn’t new. It had already been implemented for 20 years. Already been implemented globally.

And in fact, the Merrill Lynch report – see this was all in the business pages. If you wanted to know what was going on in education you had to read the business pages and prospectus. Because Merrill Lynch report April 9, 1999 [“The Book of Knowledge: Investing in the Growing Education and Training Industry”] said, “A new mindset is necessary, one that views families as customers, schools as, quote, ‘retail outlets’ where educational services are received, and the school board as a customer service department that hears and addresses parental concerns. As a near monopoly, schools escape the strongest incentives to respond to their customers. And what is the strongest incentive? The discipline of the market.” That’s 1999. And Diane was in the administration that was caught up in a wave of enthusiasm about the market reforms.

So, now I want to unpack – I want to unpack for you this neoliberal ideology. And if you really want to understand it, you can’t listen to what’s being said in this country. You have to go to the way that the World Bank talks about it. Because in the World Bank documents, they present it in it’s unvarnished form. So I’m gonna quote for you from something called – I’m gonna explain what’s in this chilling World Bank document, The World Development Report 2002. And, of course they don’t use this exact language, but this is the analysis.

The analysis is the following: The market is the best regulator of all services, and the state, the welfare state causes problems by intruding on free choice. Next, the global economy requires that workers from every country compete with others for jobs. And since most people will be competing with workers in other countries for jobs requiring little formal education, money spent on a highly educated workforce is wasted. In other words, most jobs are in Walmarts. You know that. You know that; that’s the level of education – seventh or eighth grade. And the plan is – they say this in this document – we’re all going to be competing for these jobs that require a seventh or eighth grade education. Not all of us, of course. Some people are not. Therefore, money spent on education is wasted. It should be spent on other things: on dams, on roads, on health care. Of course they don’t spend it on dams, or roads, or health care. But that’s what they say in this report.

And think about this, because we don’t need a highly educated workforce, we don’t need highly educated teachers. Therefore, we can have a teaching force that’s a revolving door. Teachers will use standardized scripts. Kids will be educated to a seventh or an eighth grade level. And that’s OK! That’s OK! In fact, not only is it OK; that’s what we should be doing. And then in this report, it says, What’s the biggest barrier to carrying out this program? Well, with their political power, teachers and doctors capture governments and protect their incomes when there is pressure for budget cuts.

So understand that the de-professionalization of teaching that Diane talks about is NOT an accident. It is planned. It is planned to replace us. It is planned to limit access to higher education. That’s what this is all about. And you only have to look at the record in the rest of the world, and you see what is planned for us.

You know these firings in Rhode Island? You know these firings in Rhode Island? That Bush and Obama and Duncan have supported? The World Development Report 2002 applauds the firings in Benin and Senegal of the teachers. They applaud it. And they say that’s what’s gonna happen. That’s what we want. So, we all really need to understand that the neoliberal agenda has come home to us. It is a project; some people would say that it’s a conspiracy. I wouldn’t say it’s a conspiracy. You know why? Because conspiracies are secret. This isn’t secret! This isn’t secret.

The final thing I want to talk about is Democrats for Education Reform, and I’m sorry Diane isn’t here to hear me say this. Democrats for Education Reform now hosts, on tour, Rick Hess from the American Enterprise Institute. It’s now on their website. We all need to understand that Obama’s education policy comes from Democrats for Education Reform. There’s no difference. That means that the Obama education policy is lifted, from whole cloth, from what used to be called a far-right think tank. I think Diane flatters them, or fools herself by calling them a conservative think tank. You know. But now, they’re in the Democratic Party! They’re the leadership of the Democratic Party when it comes to education policy. Listen, we are in deep doo doo. We are in real deep doo doo.

And I’m just gonna say that in Diane’s book, and I’m really sorry she’s not here to hear this. In Diane’s book, she has this quote from her book, The Revisionists Revised, and she says she’s still right, she argued that, “The public schools had not been devised by scheming capitalists to impose social control on an unwilling proletariat to reproduce social inequality. The schools were never an instrument of cultural repression, as the radical critics maintain.” That’s what Diane says in The Revisionists Revised.

Well, you know what? Maybe we can argue about 150 years ago when the public schools were created, but there is no argument now; that is the agenda.