School reform in its present incarnation has been with us for over a decade now, and it has finally stunk up just about everything at ground level. Marion Brady, in a Kappan (2000) article, “The Standards Juggernaut,” predicted it:

There is almost no dialogue about fundamental curricular issues because it seems to be widely assumed that there are no serious problems with the traditional curriculum. What should the young be taught? Without hesitation, policy makers and politicians answer, “They should be taught what those of us who are educated know.” This is the philosophical underpinning of the latest educational fad: the standards movement.

[....] Every day, across America, committees are at work embedding and reinforcing the standards fad. Sadly, because the consequences of their actions will take so long to manifest themselves, the causal link between what they’re doing and its ultimately calamitous consequences may not become apparent in time to do anything about it.

And so this is precisely where we find ourselves, engaged in ridiculous controversies about whether superheroes will save us from our own ineptitude, while a major media-supported educational fraud is in process.

William Gryder’s article in The Nation criticizes President Obama for his naive failure to play hardball with the Republicans. From our vantage point in the schools, we’ve seen Arne Duncan courting these people, without even so much as a groan from our teachers union. Gryder ends his piece with a call for Obama’s supporters to help him revive his presidency, and start building a people’s agenda.

And what might that “people’s agenda” look like? Depends on who you ask, and which “people” we’re talking about. There’s the standard, more participatory view of democracy pitted against the less participatory view, now ascendant, which has a long tradition. It was succinctly expressed by the President of the Continental Congress and first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay, who said, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” Now playing in the economy’s financial sector, and Business Roundtable locations near you.

So, where do we begin building a people’s agenda? Something that could happen as a matter of course any day for teachers, as opposed to “taking it to the streets, “ would be monkeywrenching the standards-based reform effort by following the lead of George Counts, who called on teachers to “establish an organic relation with the community, develop a realistic and comprehensive theory of welfare, fashion a compelling and challenging vision of human destiny, and become somewhat less frightened than [they are] today at the bogeys of imposition and indoctrination.”

His justification is as relevant now as it was in 1932:

We live in troublous times; we live in an age of profound change; we live in an age of revolution. Indeed, it is highly doubtful whether man ever lived in a more eventful period than the present. In order to match our epoch we would probably have to go back to the fall of ancient empires, or even to that unrecorded age when men first abandoned the simple arts of hunting and fishing and trapping and began to experiment with agriculture and the settled life. Today we are witnessing the rise of civilization quite without precedent in human history — a civilization which is founded on science, technology, and machinery, which possesses the most extraordinary power, and which is rapidly making the entire world a single great society. As a consequence of forces already released, whether in the field of economics, politics, morals, religion, or art, the old molds are being broken. And the peoples of the earth are seething with strange ideas and passions. If life were peaceful and quiet and undisturbed by great issues, we might, with some show of wisdom, center our attention on the nature of the child. But with the world as it is, we cannot afford for a single instant to remove our eyes from the social scene.
- George S. Counts, “Dare Progressive Education Be Progressive?” (1932)

In 1932, Counts delivered three speeches at national educational conferences examining the purposes of education and urging progressive educators to recognize the political nature of their work. These speeches were published in a pamphlet entitled, Dare the School Build a New Social Order? And they generated a bit of a stir.

I’m not saying that we should be indoctrinating kids or imposing our own beliefs. But I am saying that we shouldn’t tiptoe around difficult subjects or sweep aside important things that warrant a closer look. Many of these topics are considered off-limits in the classroom. Why is that? What are the roots of the authority that governs what we can talk about?

Noam Chomsky, in a short video clip, makes the case for questioning that authority:

Anarchism covers lots of different things. If there’s one leading principle which unifies them, it’s a simple one. It’s based on the assumption that any authoritarian, or any structure of authority and domination has to justify itself. None of them are self-justifying whether they’re in individual relations, or international affairs, or the workplace, or whatever. They have a burden of proof to bear, and if they can’t bear that burden – which they usually can’t – they’re illegitimate and should be dismantled, and replaced by alternative structures which are fee and participatory and not based on authoritarian systems. …. As I understand anarchism, it’s not a system of doctrines. It’s just the tendency in human society that continually raises this question, seeks to discover systems of domination and to challenge them. When you find some, you usually find others that you hadn’t noticed before. It’s kind of like mountain climbing. You climb one peak, and to your surprise there’s another one behind that you hadn’t thought about.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about those “systems of domination” and wondering about the layers of authority that are operating in school. So many things to question! We’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. And whenever I find myself in a box like this, I figure I’m better off standing in support of something I believe in, rather than contributing to something that I hate. As a starting point for answering Marion Brady’s question, “What should the young be taught?” I’m working my way through Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman. It might be more about what should NOT be taught, but that’s helpful, too.

Still, seeing the need for an example of what taking a political stand in the classroom might look like, Jame’s Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers” comes to mind:

I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence – the moral and political evidence – one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them – I would try to make them know – that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that he is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect. That it is up to him to change these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the popular culture – as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies – is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must be aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is – and that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger – and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything.

Duty calls.

It should be obvious to everyone by now, except the corporate media, that progressive education reforms will not be coming out of any currently operational policy mills. George Wood pretty much summarized the direction my own train of thought has taken over the course of the last two years:

After the election of 2008, I thought the stars were aligning for some serious changes in the way the federal government treated public schools.

Gone were the architects of No Child Left Behind. A president who had repeatedly said we should not judge schools or children on the basis of one test was elected to office. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was up for reauthorization, and I was hopeful things would change.

He concludes that the Department of Education should be dissolved and reconstituted under it’s old umbrella agency, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Sounds radical – and not likely. In the meantime, I think Glen Ford has the right idea:

We can only hope that the Republicans are so consumed with destroy-Obama fervor that they reject his entreaties to bipartisan collaboration. The people’s interests would best be served with the GOP charging ahead with their own Neanderthal agenda, forcing Obama to respond with vetoes, if necessary. The people have no champion in the White House or the Congress. The best we can hope for is that the two evils cancel each other out. Let there be gridlock.

I don’t know if it’s the “end of the age of Obama.” If this is a new age, I’ve never seen Obama carrying the banner for it. We need to get over the idea that “leaders” will save us from the evils of the world, and find ways to make changes closer to home on our own.

This post was updated from a previous one, published prematurely.

US schools (and Democrats, too, after their midterm “shellacking”) should take note of our favorite corporate titan’s response to a report warning of immanent and catastrophic failure:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Internal “F” ratings of pipeline sections operated by BP PLC in Alaska’s North Slope show the company’s corrosion monitoring program is succeeding, not failing, a company spokesman said Thursday.

Spokesman Steve Rinehart was responding to a report by the independent investigative news organization ProPublica that said the rating means the pipeline walls are 80 percent corroded and could rupture.

[....]

ProPublica says it obtained an internal BP maintenance report generated in early October that noted at least 148 pipelines received the most critical “F” rating. But Rinehart said as of Wednesday, 151 locations – not entire pipes – had the rating among more than 1,600 miles of pipelines.

“Most of these are small areas that are identified through a big and continuing inspection program,” he said.

This is the deal; the system is working, see? So it’s good. It means they’ll fix it. But, they don’t, see.

Years of Internal BP Probes Warned That Neglect Could Lead to Accidents

Published on Tuesday, June 8, 2010 by Pro Publica by Abrahm Lustgarten and Ryan Knutson:

A series of internal investigations over the past decade warned senior BP managers that the company repeatedly disregarded safety and environmental rules and risked a serious accident if it did not change its ways.

A series of internal investigations over the past decade warned senior BP managers that the company repeatedly disregarded safety and environmental rules and risked a serious accident if it did not change its ways.

The confidential inquiries, which have not previously been made public, focused on a rash of problems at BP’s Alaska oil-drilling unit that undermined the company’s publicly proclaimed commitment to safe operations. They described instances in which management flouted safety by neglecting aging equipment, pressured or harassed employees not to report problems, and cut short or delayed inspections in order to reduce production costs. Executives were not held accountable for the failures, and some were promoted despite them.

Similar themes about BP operations elsewhere were sounded in interviews with former employees, in lawsuits and little-noticed state inquiries, and in e-mails obtained by ProPublica. Taken together, these documents portray a company that systemically ignored its own safety policies across its North American operations – from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico to California and Texas.

I really hope someone remembers this when the bipartisanship kicks in.

I’ve not studied anarchism as a political theory or philosophy before, nor the history of anarchism, so I’ve been reading up on it. And I find that anarchists are a fairly diverse group. Good thing, because there may be new opportunities for anarcho-educationists opening up soon, with all the teacher bashing that’s been happening in the media lately. I’ve been torn between keeping my head down or telling the bean counters to measure THIS, and let me get back to work.

Today the Dept. of Education issued an edict condemning bullying: “Bullying fosters a climate of fear and disrespect that can seriously impair the physical and psychological health of its victims and create conditions that negatively affect learning, thereby undermining the ability of students to achieve their full potential.”

Interesting, considering their support for mass firings of teachers, “rigorous interventions”, termination of teacher tenure rights, public humiliation of teachers in LA (via Larry Ferlazzo), and recommending hurricanes over public deliberation when you want to tear down a community’s schools. They should clean up their own house before they start pointing fingers. But that is a problem they seem to have more broadly than just with education policy as the Obama administration copes with trying to keep the government’s criminal conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan secret, but for that pesky Juian Assange.

They don’t want to “improve” anything. If you want to sell something, first introduce the idea of quality so you can build one thing up while you tear something else down. Hence, non-unionized, corporate-run charter schools are being promoted.

From Noam Chomsky – Class War: The Attack on Working People:

Fact is, that to an extraordinary sense, by comparative standards, the United States is a business-run society, which means that human rights are subordinated to the overwhelming overriding need of profit for investors. Decisions are placed in the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies, which means that if formal democratic practices exist as they do, they’re of peripheral significance.

The government, in fact, is as John Dewey called it 50 or 60 years ago, the shadow cast by business over society so that modifications in the shadow are not going to change the substance. These were truisms throughout most of American history, including American working class history, until quite recently – until the 1950′s in fact. And it also means that social policy is geared to the transfer of wealth and power to those who already have it. And deliberately so.

Now, in more democratic societies, and by that I mean where democratic forms function more, there are countervailing forces that enable the public to enter the arena of policy and decision. That’s only true to a very limited extent – a remarkably limited extent – in the United States, despite quite impressive democratic forms. The country was founded on the principle that James Madison explained in the Constitutional Convention: That the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority. And so it remains, to a remarkable extent.

One of the most effective democratizing forces has always been the labor movement, the labor unions. The history on that has been completely clear. In countries that have a strong labor movement, there is also a very strong tendency or a strong correlation with a real, live, functioning social contract that includes not only rights for working people, but for people who need help and protection – for the defenseless, for children, for women, for families, for people in need of assistance generally. For the general public, in fact. And there’s also a culture that goes along with it – a culture of solidarity, and sympathy, and mutual aid and support.

In countries where unions are weak, like ours, we tend to find what’s called Tough Love, as they call it these days. Which means love for the privileged, and tough for everybody else.

Alan Moore, author of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (Superman has gone missing, you know.) has this to say about anarchism and capitalism: “[W]hen you mention the idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how I see contemporary society.” [My bold]

Here, I join Paul Goodman in Raising the Black Flag of Anarchism:

Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response of individuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented by the historical environment. It claims that in most human affairs, whether political, economic, military, religious, moral, pedagogic, or cultural, more harm than good results from coercion, top-down direction, central authority, bureaucracy, jails, conscription, states, pre-ordained standardization, excessive planning, etc. 

Anarchists want to increase intrinsic functioning and diminish extrinsic power. This is a social-psychological hypothesis with obvious political implications. Depending on varying historical conditions that present various threats to the anarchist principle, anarchists have laid their emphasis in varying places: sometimes agrarian, sometimes free city and guild-oriented; sometimes technological, sometimes anti technological; sometimes Communist, sometimes affirming property; sometimes individualist, sometimes collective; sometimes speaking of Liberty as almost an absolute good, sometimes relying on custom and “nature.” 

[....]

There cannot be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state of things called “anarchist.” It is always a continual coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite, as free enterprise turned into wage-slavery and monopoly capitalism, or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly of courts, cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems.

I don’t know where any of this is headed. But I’m comforted by the fact that nobody else does, either. Stephen Downes points us in a really nice direction today, with his principles of democratic schooling: autonomy, diversity, openness, and interactivity. Doable, it seems to me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.