I have now heard the same thing from three independent credible sources – the fix is in on the U.S. Department of Education’s competitive grants, in particular Race to the Top (RTTT) and Investing in Innovation (I3). Secretary Duncan needs to head this off now, by admitting that he and his team have potential conflicts of interests with regard to their roles in grant making, recognizing that those conflicts are widely perceived by potential grantees, and explaining how grant decisions will be insulated from interference by the department’s political appointees.

I saw the post in my news reader earlier in the day, and I figured Millot’s warning was yet one more reason to treat money cloaked as school reform with suspicion and cynicism. This evening I saw Kenneth Libby’s commentary on Millot’s post, and I attempted to follow the link back to the original article, only to discover it was gone. Hmmm… Too controversial, maybe? Libby drew a line from the monkey business that sank Reading First straight to Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top. Kenneth Libby pointed to additional regulatory provisions in the ARRA legislation that promote partnerships with private sector interests, adding fuel to the fire. Messy. Very messy, and not hard to believe that a conflict of interest may be in the works, considering who the players are. But who knows? It’s a blog, and Millot was just reporting what he was hearing. Scholastic’s move to bury the post by taking it down just adds to the intrigue. Millot was right; the Dept. of Education needs to deal with the charge out in the open.

Fortunately, thanks to the resilience of the internet, we have Google’s cached version, and Millot’s post [pdf] lives on.

Education Sector applauds Scholastic’s move to take down the post. But, the important thing about blogging is that we’re not all “serious” publishers.

Update(s): Link added for reference to Reading First corruption, and corrected attribution to the post at Schools Matter. Also, I found an article by Sec. Duncan at ed.gov with the ironic title, “Race to the Top – Integrity and Transparency Drive the Process,” which outlines the RttT selection process, and states:

The Department’s legal ethics team also eliminated any applicant with existing or potential conflicts of interest, including people currently employed by a state department of education or school district. In the end, we chose 58 highly qualified and distinguished peer reviewers, each of whom will receive an honorarium of about $5000 for their work. They include retired teachers, principals and superintendents, college professors and scholars, business leaders and education advocates. Their names will be kept confidential until the winners are announced so as to shield them from undue outside pressures. The education world is relatively small so it is quite possible some names will emerge, but the Department will not confirm the names of any of the peer reviewers until the first round is over.

…which is obviously not completely transparent and seems to say that it can’t be, because nobody in a decision-making position can be counted on to have any real integrity. Cynical, yeah. Like I said. That’s how it goes now.

Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, “A People’s History” was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Professor Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including “Voices of a People’s History,” a volume for young people and a graphic novel.

“A People’s History” told an openly left-wing story. Professor Zinn accused Christopher Columbus and other explorers of committing genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

A full-text HTML version of A People’s History can be found at History is a Weapon.

I’ve been listening this evening to a talk he gave at Reed College, November 20, 1995 which I found at pdxjustice, a good source for social justice-themed media productions. Zinn’s talk at Reed, You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train is laced with quite a bit of humor; it’s an entertaining exposition of his belief that a story, truly told, can not be divorced from a point of view.

The video clip below is from chapter 3 of The Corporation:

Having acquired rights of immortal persons, what kind of person is the corporation? By law, the corporation can only consider the interests of their shareholders. It is legally bound to put its bottom line before everything else, even the public good.

Watch or download the whole movie, uninterrupted, at the Internet Archives.

From The Corporation’s Wikipedia page:

Topics addressed include the Business Plot, where in 1933, the popular General Smedley Butler exposed a corporate plot against then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt; the tragedy of the commons; Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning people to beware of the rising military-industrial complex; economic externalities; suppression of an investigative news story about Bovine Growth Hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate television station; the invention of the soft drink Fanta by the Coca-Cola Company due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany; the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust); the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of Bolivia’s municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation; and in general themes of corporate social responsibility, the notion of limited liability, the corporation as a psychopath, and the corporation as a person.

Take a few moments to see what a class of 8th graders in Ontario did with the film.

Worth noting in Chapter 6, psychologist Robert D. Hare offers a diagnosis of the corporation’s psycho-social “personhood,” and finds that “The corporation is the protoypical psychopath.” (See Hare’s complete diagnosis [pdf].) According to the Personality Diagnostic Checklist, corporations exhibit:

• Callous unconcern for the feelings of others
• Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships
• Reckless disregard for the safety of others
• Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit
• Incapacity to experience guilt
• Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors

Examples are all-too common. Alaska, my home for the past 30 years, depends entirely on the oil industry to fund our state government. We are a single-client state. Our situation is typical of any community that depends on resource extraction, agriculture, tourism, or any major corporate interest for jobs and a tax base. In the end, people figure out where they stand. Riki Ott, author of Not One Drop, speaks about the oil spill:

We thought that the worst thing that could happen to us was the spill, and killing the physical environment in Prince William Sound, and killing off our fisheries. But we have learned since 1989 that really the worst thing that happened was tearing apart our community – the mental health effects on our community. And this wasn’t just with the spill; it was with the clean-up effects, with the money coming into town, the very divisive atmosphere….This has been 18 years. And there can be no closure to an emotional trauma when there is this much upheaval still being generated…

How did corporations get this big, where their values count more than the values of ordinary people and ordinary communities? We’ve got to rebalance power. And we’ve got to give power back to the people and make people’s values count. Community values count.

Twenty years after the spill, Exxon has still not made things right.

Wendell Berry, in The Idea of a Local Economy offers some thoughts on rebuilding communities, seeing that we’ve mostly given away our ability to feed, clothe, shelter, care for, entertain, and educate ourselves because we’ve delegated these cultural practices to others. Berry sees that as people begin to take back portions of their economic responsibility, they discover that “the ‘environmental crisis’ is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens.”

The idea of the global “free market” is merely capitalism’s so-far-successful attempt to enlarge the geographic scope of its greed, and moreover to give to its greed the status of a “right” within its presumptive territory. The global “free market” is free to the corporations precisely because it dissolves the boundaries of the old national colonialisms, and replaces them with a new colonialism without restraints or boundaries. It is pretty much as if all the rabbits have now been forbidden to have holes, thereby “freeing” the hounds.

The loss of the idea of vocation is a critical cost of the globalized economy, says Berry. As economic determinism replaces vocation, people are encouraged to mold themselves into whatever form is called for according to current economic conditions rather than each of us being given the opportunity to work at the task for which we are best suited and inclined. Contrary to what Arne Duncan says, education for “economic security” is not the “civil rights issue of our generation.” The issue is a human rights issue, and it hinges on each person being given the freedom to explore who they are, and what they might wish to become. When we honor human freedom and dignity in our schools, in our workplaces, and throughout our communities, then corporations might find their rightful place in our service, not the other way around.

Of interest to me is a partner site that functions as a library for The Public School; AAAARG.ORG is a goldmine of academic texts – hundreds of them. I’ve been subscribed to the RSS feed for a few weeks, following what is posted, and I’ve watched the site grow steadily. Topics generally concern philosophy, politics, media theory, economics, sociology, art and architecture, and… more.

Sean Dockery runs the site and also serves as one of the Directors at Telic Arts Exchange. He says that AAAARG used to be more discursive, but now he sees that reciprocity in sharing texts is, in itself, a form of discussion, and he claims that “there is still a discussion happening, but it’s not really in the words.” OK; whatever. Everything is a conversation now. He also says that people use the site as a library, which is how I see it – way cool, with loads of great stuff to read. There’s not a search function, though, as far as I can see. You can browse the index or search with Google.

And yes, the stuff is mostly copyrighted. Janneke Adema, who is doing research on Open Access Academic Publishing for the OAPEN project has some things to say about academic text sharing in an article that serves as an introduction to a budding movement, Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing. Adema looks at a few examples and offers some reasons why publishers are not more upset about these kinds of websites. She challenges the idea that there is harm done to “producers (scholars) and their publishers (in Humanities and Social Sciences mainly Not-For-Profit University Presses),” and she also says:

Still, it is not only the lack of fear of possible retaliations that is feeding the upsurge of text sharing communities. There is a strong ideological commitment to the inherent good of these developments, and a moral and political strive towards institutional and societal change when it comes to knowledge production and dissemination.

I just figure that a bunch of anti-corporate left-wing radicals would not want to gripe about copyright.

I’ve been reading a lot there, lately, and I’ll probably link to it from time to time. So, for starters, I want to mention an article by Paulo Freire on critical reading called, The Act of Study. I found this after Mike Klonsky and Stephen Downes both linked to an article about Freire, written by Henry Giroux, Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom. After I read it, I wondered if there was anything by Freire on AAAARG, and there it was.

The Act of Study is really a primer on how to read critically. Freire made his case against what he called “banking education,” the view of teaching and learning as a function of depositing information into the minds of students, which they are then expected to store for later retrieval or personal enrichment. Freire maintained that this form of learning kills our creativity and our curiosity, since the point is memorization, as opposed to comprehension.

Rather than seeing ourselves as “vessels to be filled” Freire recommended that we become “subjects of the act” and attempt to recreate the text for ourselves. He saw critical reading as the expression of an attitude toward the world, and not just a relationship to a book or an article. “To study,” he said, “is not to consume ideas, but to create and to re-create them.”

As an example, Clay Burell’s recent post touched on this very problem. He wrote about the challenge of teaching history, noting that his students understood the text without understanding the issues. He says:

And the issue, to put it in a nutshell, is this: Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all you’ve done is learn it. You seem to think that we’re teaching you Western Civilization because gee, it’s a great civilization.

It’s not. Like all civilizations, it has its strengths and it has its flaws. Just because it’s part of the dominant culture today doesn’t make it good. Maybe the dominant culture today would be much better if certain aspects of Western Civilization were different — or even non-existent.

Most of your essays saddened me because they were so full of cheer-leading for the West. Civilizations, Western or Eastern, Northern or Southern, don’t need cheerleaders. They need critics.

Agreed. Read well. The main idea is yours.

News from the outside world never stops, though, and thanks to the internet I can now read about the big Climate Summit in Copenhagen where nothing changed, and the watered-down health care legislation that nobody really wants, the contractor “surge” in Afghanistan, and the good-for-nothing shock doctrine education reforms, all of which seem to fit my solstice-inspired musings. It’s like what digby said:

One thing the old political hands may not realize is that in this era of 24/7 cable and the internet this is the first time most people have watched a big piece of legislation enacted in such close-up detail. And what they are seeing is shocking and disturbing — the obvious corruption of the process by wealthy corporate interests. There’s a lot of populist resentment out here and it’s coming down on the heads of the Democrats who are now ironically seen to be funneling taxpayer dollars to rapacious corporations which have been making people’s lives miserable, insurance companies being among the worst of them. This health care debate has reinforced that perception.

I’m thinking about the importance of maintaining optimism as we work to compensate for chronic neglect and institutional abuses, looking for sustainable ways of living. Teachers who see the standards and accountability movement in education as a toxic substitute for real democratic reforms can take a lesson from activists in Copenhagen. They gave Monsanto an award. When criticism doesn’t work, we can always give ridicule and mockery a try.

The Angry Mermaid Award has been set up to recognise the perverse role of corporate lobbyists, and highlight those business groups and companies that have made the greatest effort to sabotage the climate talks, and other climate measures, while promoting, often profitable, false solutions.

Hey, I’m thinking, we could use an award like that to give away, too! We could call it….

The Happy Stripy Leech Award

Nominations are open. Deserving contenders would include test-making companies, neoliberal think tanks, corporate charter school management organizations, Eli Broad and Bill Gates, and anyone who feels inspired listening to Arne Duncan.

It is becoming very clear that education reform – the official version – has never been about teaching or learning. Without addressing education specifically, Glenn Greenwald explains why the Obama administration policies look so much like the Bush administration’s:

Whether you call it “a government takeover of the private sector” or a “private sector takeover of government,” it’s the same thing: a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else’s expense.

But there are rays of hope. Climate activists announce, “We’re not finished yet,” and they point out that the reform model is, itself, a failure:

Klein, meanwhile, highlighted what she saw as the “successes” of the last two weeks. “The rich world can no longer claim not to know (what) failing to act (entails). The voices of the South, the cost of millions of lives, the disappearance of countries and cultures – all that has landed on the agenda,” she said.

Paul Rosenberg did a post featuring many formerly unheard voices from the global South that he gathered from various sources over the past couple of weeks. And he ended with a Gary Snyder poem that I want to leave here, too.

Revolution in the Revolution in the Revolution
by Gary Snyder

The country surrounds the city
The back country surrounds the country

“From the masses to the masses” the most
Revolutionary consciousness is to be found
Among the most ruthlessly exploited classes:
Animals, trees, water, air, grasses

We must pass through the stage of the
“Dictatorship of the Unconscious” before we can
Hope for the withering-away of the states
And finally arrive at true Communionism.

If the capitalists and imperialists
are the exploiters, the masses are the workers.
and the party
is the communist.

If civilization
is the exploiter, the masses is nature.
and the party
is the poets.

If the abstract rational intellect
is the exploiter, the masses is the unconscious.
and the party
is the yogins.

& POWER
comes out of the seed-syllables of mantras.

(from Regarding Wave. New Directions. New York. 1970.)

While I’m thinking about Gary Snyder, here’s a little story he shared in an article called Writers and the War Against Nature:

One time in Alaska a young Koyukon Indian college student asked me, “If we humans have made such good use of animals, eating them, singing about them, drawing them, riding them, and dreaming about them, what do they get back from us?” I thought it an excellent question, directly on the point of etiquette and propriety, and putting it from the animals’ side. I told her, “The Ainu say that the deer, salmon, and bear like our music and are fascinated by our languages. So we sing to the fish or the game, speak words to them, say grace. We do ceremonies and rituals. Performance is currency in the deep world’s gift economy.” The “deep world” is of course the thousand million-year-old world of rock, soil, water, air, and all living beings, all acting through their roles. “Currency” is what you pay your debt with. We all receive, every day, the gifts of the Deep World, from the air we breathe to the food we eat. How do we repay that gift? Performance. “A song for your supper.”

I went on to tell her that I felt that non-human nature is basically well-inclined toward humanity and only wishes modern people were more reciprocal, not so bloody. The animals are drawn to us, they see us as good musicians, and they think we have cute ears. The human contribution to the planetary ecology might be our entertaining eccentricity, our skills as musicians and performers, our awe-inspiring dignity as ritualists and solemn ceremonialists—because that is what seems to delight the watching wild world.

Happy solstice. And singing, too.

Photo: by Laurie Pink