(Another special edition from a regular Left Ed commentator known to all. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
To listen to the discussion going on right now about teacher quality one would think that most teachers were suspect, poorly trained, over paid, inefficient and in need of firing. All we need to do, the reformers cry, is the simple task of reforming America's failing education system. Of course the key to doing so rests universally with dealing with the rampant hordes of bad teachers. Bolstered by their evil teacher unions, these bad teachers have systematically taken over our schools, held local school boards hostage, and under the guise of fair wages and better working conditions looted taxpayer coffers with their outrageous salaries and benefits. Then thanks to tenure's legendary job for life benefits, they get to kick back and ruin our children's futures care free.
Sigh. The fairy tale above throws so much crap at the wall that its easy for the public to lose one's way in figuring out is what is truth or fiction. That's probably by design. It allows "reformers" to move the Overton Window on Education to the right more effectively that way because something is going to stick. For example, what were you people thinking in New Jersey when you elected this guy:
On merit pay, Christie said he wants to prohibit seniority or graduate degree attainment in fields other than math and science from influencing salary increases for teachers. The large pool of funding needed to start a merit pay program would come from the savings of firing bad teachers through tenure reform, Christie said.
In this short quote there is so much being flung at the wall that one might miss the larger arguments being made by "reformers" like Gov. Christie.
There are multiple factors behind the "bipartisan" push on "education reform". But one of them is the long-standing liberal/conservative agreement that education is a pathway to prosperity. Of course, the meaning of this belief is historically quite different to liberals than it is to conservatives. For liberals, education is a way out of poverty for the disadvantaged, in combination with broader systemic and institutional reforms. For conservatives, it's a way of reinforcing the Horatio Alger myth--that individual success through virtue, hard work and diligence is the answer to poverty, rather than any sort of social reform, no matter how modest. For neo-liberals, who have come to accept--more or less--the conservative reframing of the politically possible, the logic of the conservative arguments prevail, along with minor tinkering that's an almost private homage to ideals abandoned in fact, but still given lip-service to.
Of course education remains a pathway to better living for most individuals. But what's better for the individual isn't simply additive for society as a whole. And this reality for society as a whole can trickle down to the individual level as well. Just ask any "overeducated" job seeker in any number of fields or situations over the past 20-30 years. What's more, things mount up. The end result is that incomes for the college educated have been relatively stagnant overall for some time now (individual fortunes may still vary considerably, of course.) I made this point in my diary "Higher Education, Lower Wages" in October 2009, which included the following graph, showing the relatively stagnant incomes of the college-educated, compared to those in the top 5% and 10% of income-"earners":
This is evidence of a relatively over-supply of educated workers. There's still a premium for a higher education, but that premium is not keeping up with the more general increase in income for higher-income individuals as a whole.
But another way to see the problem is to realize that most of the future job projected with our economy does not involve a demand for people with higher education. He's a chart I just created, presenting data from the ten fastest-growing job categories listed in the Economic News Release "Table 6. The 30 occupations with the largest employment growth, 2008-18", last updated December 11, 2009:
Aggregating these jobs by the level of training required, we see that over half of them require nothing more than short-term on-the-job training, 70% require no college, and 86% require nothing beyond a 2-year associate degree:
While many muse as a culture we cannot continue "Waiting for Superman" to transform our schools, others expect our Teachers to be Supermen or Superwomen. Some say private school Educators are superior. Only the Instructors employed in public educational institutions are flawed. There seems to be agreement in our society; these Teachers cannot take the lead. The system, critics cry, out must change. Philanthropists proclaim they are here to save the day. Privatization is the only way to work through what has been a woeful failure. No, Administrators and the current Administration avow; Teachers are the problem. We must assess their performance and pay Educators accordingly.
After two diaries in a row on the emerging fascist threat, this may seem rather tame by comparison--a note on the spread of anti-federalist ideology in the realm of education. But when you recall the role that federal courts played in desegregating Southern Schools and how central that was to Civil Rights Movement, suddenly things start to get a lot clearer.
Senate candidates Ken Buck (R-CO) and Sharron Angle (R-NV) have both received significant attention for their absurd claim the federal Department of Education is unconstitutional, but because House races generally receive much less media attention than the higher-profile Senate contests, it's unclear just how common this radical position is among the GOP's full slate of candidates.
A questionnaire circulated by Liberty Central, the right-wing group led by Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas, sheds a great deal of light on this question - and the answer is not pretty. Of the 60 candidate questionnaires submitted by current GOP nominees for a House or Senate seat that ThinkProgress reviewed for this report, at least 49 adopt a view that would declare much - if not all - of federal education policy unconstitutional.
The Liberty Central questionnaire includes the following question:
The overwhelming majority of GOP candidates who submitted this questionnaire answered “no” to this question, a position that would drastically limit the federal government’s ability to help struggling schools, and which could also threaten Medicaid and other essential programs. Several of these candidates offered ahistorical, ideological and occasionally paranoid constitutional theories:
Of course, by "traditionally" they mean prior to Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (at the very latest), described thus:
AN ACT
For preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic therein, and for other purposes.
Sure sounds like tyranny to me, right? Federal government meddling where it was never meant to be,until the progress of human history utterly changed the nature of the world we live in, but fortunately, our Constitution had enough breadth in its founding vision and enough foresight in how it was framed to allow it to adjust, largely because of the General Welfare clause--which can be found both in the Preamble and in the powers of Congress, a sticky little "detail" that our aspiring fascist rulers are eager to bury beneath anything they can lay their hands on, as Think Progress goes on to illustrate:
Quite frankly, there is not much of a choice here: if you don't vote, you will condemn us to changes in our country that will be hard to live with and harder to overcome in the future.
For instance, Republican Senate candidates Linda McMahon in Connecticut, Rand Paul in Kentucky, John Raese in West Virginia, and Dino Rossi in Washington have all pledged to roll back or eliminate the minimum wage.
Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania have all talked about privatizing Social Security - or eliminating it altogether.
(This Sunday, Jeff's computer was down & my power was down. Michael, a regular commentator on Left Ed diaries posted this as a wonderful replacement. Now that I'm back in the swing of things, I'm promoting it to keep our education beat going. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
This is a poor substitute for one of Jeff's posts - but I was hoping to talk about this, so here goes...
So Friday night I wrap up my work and start flipping channels for some mental relief. As I'm shuffling past A&E; - not a usual stop - I hear this familiar sounding teacher telling a couple of students that they can't go to the "resource room" and that they should just "give the quiz a try" right there in the classroom. As a teacher, this triggered a professional double-take akin to jamming on the breaks while driving 50mph. Did he really just say what I think he said?!
As I sat there watching "Teach: Tony Danza" I was amazed. In less than 20 minutes I saw a person obviously passionate about education who did things that would get most first-year teachers in severe hot water - if not fired. All I could think was "Who let this guy in front of a class?"
The answer was Philidelephia's Northeast High School.
In the Fall, this year and every year, in this nation talk turns to Education. The President of the United States delivers a speech to students. Articles appear in the news. Television broadcasts beckon us to think about our Education Nation. In 2010, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, did what many thought novel. He donated $100 million dollars to Newark City Schools. Some were skeptical of his motives. More rejoiced. Certainly with abundant cash in the coffers, change would come to the nations schools, or at least to the chosen educational institutions. However, it might not.
Two new government reports illustrate the complex and troubling state of opportunity in America, but also the right way forward.
The first set of data, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that the gender pay gap is at a historic low, with women earning almost 83¢ for every dollar earned by men—compared with 76¢ a decade ago and until fairly recently. The change is due in part to young women’s progress in the workplace—they increasingly are better educated and out earn their male counterparts—but also to depressed wages and, especially, more rapid job loss by men.
On July 14th, Green Change announced the campaign for a Green New Deal, a 10-point program to create economic prosperity together with ecological sustainability.
Since then over 100 candidates for elected office at all levels have joined the Green New Deal Coalition.
The Green New Deal Coalition will cut military spending, create millions of green jobs, and revive the economy by protecting the planet we depend on.
Green Change is inviting all candidates, individuals and organizations that support a prosperous, sustainable future for America to endorse the Green New Deal.
Read the call for a Green New Deal and sign on today.
To date, 11 candidates for governor, 11 candidates for US Senate, and 33 candidates for US House of Representatives have joined the Green New Deal Coalition.
All agree on the need to cut military spending, fund green public works, ban corporate personhood, pass single-payer health care, restore progressive taxation, ban usury, enact a revenue-neutral carbon tax, legalize marijuana, institute tuition-free public higher education, change trade agreements to improve labor, environmental and safety standards, and pass sweeping electoral, campaign finance and anti-corruption reforms.
These candidates represent a clean break with the failed policies of the past that have led America down the road to economic and ecological disaster.
The Green New Deal promises a brighter tomorrow for America – one that combines the New Deal’s promise of freedom from economic hardship with decisive action to protect our planet.
You can help build the movement for real change by endorsing the Green New Deal today and asking candidates for elected office to join you.
We are spending $2 Billion a week in Afghanistan. If you want to see zeros, that's $2,000,000,000.00 a week. It also means $104 Billion a year.
Meanwhile, we can't afford to keep our education budgets in functional condition. We can't reduce our National Debt. We can't bring down our operating deficit. And we are spending a fortune on foreign servicing (read China) of our debt.
It's been one helluva week on the education front, and I'm sure Jeff will have plenty to say in his Left Ed column this Sunday (new time, for those not paying quite enough attention: 1 PM, EST). It began on Monday, when Jeff noted in a quick hit that a coalition of civil rights groups had issued a document critical of Obama's education policies. Although there would be a somewhat confusing walk-back of criticism afterwards--particularly as Arne Duncan and President Obama both addressed the Urban League--it seems clear that the cat's out of the bag, and it's going to be a whole lot harder going forward for Obama and Duncan to pretend there aren't problems. On Wednesday, data was released showing in the reform showcase NYC schools, the racial and ethnic achievement has shot back up to 2002 levels. Links to a number of related stories can be found here, including one by Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzales. And speaking of Democracy Now!, today its first half-hour was devoted to a renewed look at Obama's initiative and the mounting criticisms. To start things off, here's what Jeff wrote on Monday:
"a 17-page framework for education reform being released Monday by a coalition of civil rights groups amounts to a thrashing of President Obama's education policies and it offers a prescription for how to set things right"
Excerpts from the report highlighted by Strauss . . .
on Race to the Top:
"By emphasizing competitive incentives in this economic climate, the majority of low-income and minority students will be left behind and, as a result, the United States will be left behind as a global leader."
on charter schools:
"while some charter schools can and do work for some students, they are not a universal solution for systemic change for all students, especially those with the highest needs."
on so-called reform:
""Rather than addressing inequitable access to research-proven methodologies like high-quality early childhood education and a stable supply of experienced, highly effective teachers, recent education reform proposals have favored "stop gap" quick fixes that may look new on the surface but offer no real long-term strategy for effective systemic change."
Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.
At the Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension at Cape Coast University in Southern Ghana, learning takes place not only in classrooms, but also literally in fields and farms all over the country. As part of a program to improve agricultural extension services, extension officers are working with professors to find ways to improve food production in their communities. The extensionists, who are already working with farmers, are selected by the Ministry of Agriculture and the University from all over the country to train at the University to help them better share their skills and knowledge with farmers.
The program was started in the early 1990s after the Ministry of Agriculture found that its' extension workers were not communicating well with farmers, says Dr. Okorley, a Cape Coast professor. The goal of the program, according to Okorley, is "to improve the knowledge of front line extension staff." Because the educational background of many extension workers is "limited" (many don't have the means to attend college) says Okorley, they "couldn't look at agriculture holistically."
But the university is helping change that problem. Students learn how to engage with farmers and communities by learning better communication skills. And they are trained to properly diagnose problems, as well as come up with solutions.
After attending a year of classes on campus, the students go back to their communities to implement what they've learned in Supervised Enterprise Projects (SEPs). The SEPs give the student-professionals the opportunity to learn that particular technologies, no matter how innovative they might seem in the classroom, don't always "fit" the needs of communities, says Dr. Okorley. The SEPs also help them implement some of the communication skills they've learned in their classes, allowing them to engage more effectively in the communities where they work. Instead of simply telling farmers to use a particular type of seed or a certain brand of pesticide or fertilizer, the extension workers are now learning how to listen to farmers and help them find innovations that best serve their particular needs. "One beauty of the program," according to Dr. Okorley, "is the on-the-ground research and experimentation." He says "it allows the environment to teach what should be done."
They have plans to scale up and improve the program by developing a "technology village" that will allow students to try out different technologies or practices before taking them back to their villages. And they hope to engage women in the program-currently, there are no female professors or students in the program. In addition, they're hoping to incorporate a value chain approach in the curriculum, helping extension workers and farmers alike find innovative ways to add value to and improve the quality of crops.
Listen below to Professor Festus Annor-Frempong discuss how the University is helping improve agriculture in Ghana and to Peter Omega, a former student, talk about his work with farmers in his community.
Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.
At the Rural Development Foundation's (RDF) primary school in Kalleda, a small village in the Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh, India, students carry gardening tools, along with their notebooks and pencils.
All of the students work in the school's garden, cultivating and harvesting rice, lentils, corn, and cotton that is used to make the daily meals or sold to the village and to other schools. Students also take turns tending a field of marigolds and selling them in Kalleda. All of the profit goes back to the school.
And the students carry another important tool-a camera.
Cameras were provided by Bridges to Understanding (Bridges), a Seattle-based non-profit that uses digital technology to empower and connect children around the world. Students participating in the Bridges curriculum are taught to use cameras and editing software to develop stories about their community and culture. These videos, comprised of a photo slide show with a running narration, are then shared with the Bridges online community which is made up of schools in seven countries: Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Guatemala, India, Peru, South Africa, and the U.S.
For many students, it's the first time they have ever even held a camera. "When I first asked my students if they thought they could ever design, shoot and edit their own film they just shook their heads and said, 'there's no way," said Elizabeth Sewell, Bridges program coordinator at the RDF school in Kalleda.
But not only did her students successfully develop a concept for, shoot and edit a video about local water pollution, they are also participating in an online discussion about their school garden with another group of students at the Aki Kurose school in Seattle. Students at Aki Kurose are learning to grow corn, squash, and beans using traditional Native American practices. And they volunteer at a local food bank, a completely new concept to the students at Kalleda. "Thank you for your post about your school garden and information about your food bank," wrote Sewell's students. "We had never heard of a food bank before your post. We like the idea of a place where people can get free food."
Sewell explains that having a conversation about farming with students in Seattle helps students at Kelleda "realize what makes their community unique but also that there are other kids out there dealing with similar issues, providing a model or inspiration for alternatives and creating a global sense of solidarity in facing these problems."
And, according to Sewell, the Bridges video project gives students a concrete and achievable goal to strive towards as they grapple with larger questions about their role as "agents of change" in their community and the world.
"At first, the prospect of designing, shooting and editing a movie seems insurmountable but then they produce these beautiful films," says Sewell. "And then you knock down that barrier, you show them what they are capable of doing. And then they can start to approach other, larger and more institutional, problems the same way. Suddenly, in their own eyes, there are no limits to what they can achieve."
To read more about the use of storytelling and digital technology to connect and educate farmers, see: Acting it out for Advocacy and Messages from One Rice Farmer to Another.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoy our diary every day we invite you to get involved: 1. Comment on our daily posts-we check comments everyday and look forward to a regular ongoing discussion with you. 2. Receive weekly updates-Sign up for our "Nourishing the Planet" weekly newsletter at the blog by clicking here and receive regular blog and travel updates.
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about the state of affairs in America. His assessment was as follows: America never goes too far one way or too far the other. It’s like a sine wave; sometimes one side is up for a little while and the other side is down, then they switch. Despite this yo-yo phenomenon, overall he felt like things were improving.
As comforting as the sentiment was meant to be, I found myself troubled by the succinctness of my friend’s evaluation. He made it sound as though we, the people, can more or less take our hands off the wheel and America will steer itself in the right direction – or that the politicians will, perhaps. To me, that was akin to saying that even without the Civil Rights and Women’s Suffrage movements, that America would pretty much be where it is today.
Last Sunday, in his weekly "Left Ed" diary, "Left Ed: Where Are the Journalists?" jeffbinnc gave the Washington Post his "Duncehat Award" for its editorial "High-scoring school reforms". The next day, Matt Yglesias in effect answered the question Jeff asked in his diary title with a big fat, "Not here, dude!" No journalism for Yglesias, no-siree! Facts? Uh-uh. Context? You gotta be kidding! Yglesias often writes tight, cogent little posts. Not this time, though. This time, he went with something worthy of a "Chatty Cathies" nomination. So much so that, despite the fact that Jeff himself called attention to it in quick hit that same day ("Matt Yglesias Doesn't Agree With Me"), I felt it necessary to to examine the incident in a full-blown diary.
You see, not only did Matt deliberately ignore the actual content of Jeff's diary to take aim at "teacher-bashing" phrase, he was actually proud of his disdainful refusal to even consider what Jeff was saying. Here's the very first sentence in Matt's post:
One tic I really don't understand is the practice of referring to performance pay plans for K-12 teachers as "teacher-bashing".
Well, one tic I really don't understand is the practice of saying that you don't understand something as a way of proving your superiority. Since when is being dumb and incurious something for would-be progressives to be proud of? The same pattern was in evidence when Jamelle Bouie criticize me while substituting for Matt a couple of weeks back. That piece started off in a strikingly similar manner:
I need help understanding how OpenLeft's Paul Rosenberg can credibly argue that Barack Obama has manically embraced "discredited conservative ideas" and "helped enormously in extended the hegemonic continuity of [the] Nixon-Reagan Eara. [Emphasis his]"
What's more, both pieces proceeded by making no attempt whatsoever to understand--or even look into--that which they claimed to find puzzling. Instead, they simply regurgitated whatever self-validating glop they could find. They're giving intellectual laziness a bad name. How hard would it have been, really, to make intellectual laziness look normal? All they would have had to do was phrase things a tiny bit differently. Matt could have written:
One tic I really don't understandthat really bothers me is the practice of referring to performance pay plans for K-12 teachers as "teacher-bashing".
And Jamelle could have written:
I need help understanding howI'm really surprised that OpenLeft's Paul Rosenberg can credibly argue that Barack Obama has manically embraced "discredited conservative ideas" and "helped enormously in extended the hegemonic continuity of [the] Nixon-Reagan Eara. [Emphasis his]"
Both their diaries would still have been utterly lame. But they wouldn't quite have been calling attention to their own intellectual laziness as a matter of pride. It may seem like a small thing, but this sort of snobbery is just par-for-the-course trickle-down from Obama's "new tone" in Versailles. It's an attitudinal "tell" that a neoliberal apologist has nothing but junk in their hands--and they know it in their guts, even if their beautiful minds are otherwise engaged in fooling themselves as well as everyone else in sight.
Turning from tell-all tone to content, the bottom line here is fairly simple: Jeff called out an egregious example of mindless Versailles teacher-bashing--which has pretty much always been a staple of the decades-long corporate/conservative hegemonic war on public education. And Yglesias, unable to defend it, played dumb.
It needs to be stressed here that Yglesias was being blithely indifferent to one of the most basic strands in conservative hegemonic warfare--so basic, in fact, that it constitutes the textbook example for explaining the Overton Window, the example that Overton himself introduced: privatizing education is the prime exemplar in defining the functioning of conservative think-tanks in hegemonic struggle. (See, for example, my discussion in "Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future-Pt. 4" in the section titled "Think Tanks".)
In Overton's view, privatizing education was the libertarian conservative agenda on education. The desired end-state was "No government involvement in education." That was it, period. What's more, to push his ideas, Overton--in typically delusional libertarian fashion--falsely designated the opposite educational policy extreme that libertarians were doing battle with as "Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries"--a position promoted by no one outside of the paranoid fantasies of libertarian crazies. This is the decades-long political reality that Yglesias simply ignored in order to take a mindless star turn in puerile Versailles-style sophistry. And that sort of sophistry is precisely what conservatives are counting on to keep winning their battles, even when they're losing elections.
A blow-by-blow look at what Jeff said and how Yglesias bungled it on the flip.
At the Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension at Cape Coast University in Southern Ghana, learning takes place not only in classrooms, but also literally in fields and farms all over the country. As part of a program to improve agricultural extension services, extension officers are working with professors to find ways to improve food production in their communities. The extensionists, who are already working with farmers, are selected by the Ministry of Agriculture and the University from all over the country to train at the University to help them better share their skills and knowledge with farmers.
At the 
