While we teachers were sitting on our butts hour after hour being professionally developed, I thought about my personal summer accomplishments, and the benefits of personal development in general, which I suspect might contribute as much or more to my professional practice as any number of mandatory meetings. I was also reminded of the agony that kids go through when we require them to sit quietly at desks, “working” all day.

On the personal development front, as a point of reference, this summer I became a runner. I’ve never liked running before because it hurt my knees and I am slow, but I started with it (for maybe the dozenth time) because it’s an efficient way to burn calories. I lost a LOT of weight from running, biking, and eating less. Gradually, after running day after day, it started to feel good, almost fun. This was a first. Also, from where I live, I can take off from my house and run on logging roads away from traffic and neighbors. I take my iPod and for an hour or so, early, before it gets hot, I’m gone. Now and then, there’s a moose or a fox, or something different, and mostly it’s a peaceful time. The daily practice pays off when we go on family hikes since I don’t come home sore and demoralized from trying to keep up with my kids.

Seeing, I suppose, that I might have some potential, my sixteen year-old daughter suggested that we enter the Granite Tors trail run together. I didn’t do too bad, and finished the 15 miles in 3 hours. The guy who recorded our times took a picture of the muddy, bloody knee I got after my foot got grabbed by a root. I was kind of proud of the knee after that. I’m not a competitive runner, and I don’t plan on entering any more races. This one was just an experiment and a chance to try something with one of my kids. But it was also a confidence builder, which will be helpful the next time I have to do something hard.

And that leads me back to the planning we’re doing for this school year. Our school did not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) on the State tests, and we’ve landed on Level 4, which calls for “corrective action.” As of now, this appears to mean that we will document everything and make some curriculum adjustments. So far, no personnel are being replaced, and no outside consultants are being brought in. The district as a whole is going forward with a Big Push for RTI, which requires collaborative team planning and programmatic “interventions” which may all contribute to what we need to do as a school on account of this AYP thing. Collaboration is good – if we get some latitude on goal setting.

At this point it looks like a major teacher research project to me. I volunteered to be on the Data Team, and I plan to write about as much of it as I can. We actually planned for this eventuality several months ago, knowing that the AYP targets keep rising each year and that by 2014, when we’re supposed to be at 100% proficient, nearly every school in the country will fail. Our downfall this year was that too few of our learning disabled students passed the language section of the tests. Shocking! Eh? The law has to change. It’s absurd to give a test that everyone is expected to pass since that would be, practically speaking, not a good test.

Our new superintendent told us, “AYP is one measure; if we solely focus on that one measure, we will have lost the battle. This is about the whole child.” [Applause].

I am especially glad that Alaska is not Racing to the Top, and that the only hills I have to climb are the real ones I can actually run on. By any sane standard, it is the NCLB law that has failed, not our school. But that isn’t to say there isn’t room for improvement. Curriculum is meant to be tested – every day.

I’m looking forward to this year.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.