A great deal of the debt "crisis" that afflicts us nowadays has to do with a simple question of imperial reach. Consider the simple truth: the US spends more on its armed forces on a yearly basis than the sum of what almost all of the other countries in the world put together spend. And you wonder why we have a budget deficit!
It used to be back in the days of the Vietnam War that people wondered whether we could afford guns and butter. Some razzle dazzle economic tricks let Johnson and Nixon (more or less) have both. The stagflation that followed for the end of the 70s and the start of the 80s was a direct consequence. But nowadays no one wants to talk about having to choose between imperial reach and home country welfare--and I don't mean welfare in the sense of support for the poor. Surely we are faced with precisely that question: do we want to be the hegemonic power, or do we want to have a successful economic system?
I know how I'd vote.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
Lake Woebegone as National Educational Policy
Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone is an ideal town. In it, all children are above average.
Of course, since "average" is the condition that stands as the norm between excellence and failure, a mediocre point between extremes, the world of Lake Woebegone is statistically impossible. So Lake Woebegone is a fictional town.
Still, just such a Lake Woebegone impossibility has become our national educational policy, represented as the central goal of the No Child Left Behind Act: "all students are expected to meet or exceed State standards in reading and in math within 12 years."[1]
It's not obvious why this noble goal is irrational until we understand what the phrase "State standards" means. The "Pennsylvania Academic Standards for the Arts and Humanities," parallel to other states' subject standards, says what the standards represent: "They describe the expectations for students' achievement and performance throughout their education in Pennsylvania schools."[2] Those expectations, in short, are what define the average achievement expected of students.
NCLB, then, presupposes that all children will have at least average academic achievement. The standards documents dodge that statistical impossibility by saying that the schools will "challenge and support every student to realize his or her maximum potential."[3] But we cannot assume that if a particular student has a relatively low potential, he or she would be excused from the standard. That would mean that the child is left behind, something that the mere name of the law makes impossible.
The Commonwealth conceives of and presents the standards as the average achievement of students who graduate from Pennsylvania schools. Federal law then insists that all students must meet that average.
Lake Woebegone here we come!
From a common sense point of view, it gets even worse.
We proud inhabitants of Lake Woebegone expect that our students will "Know and use the elements and principles of each art form to create works in the arts and humanities."[4]
I have three degrees, from good schools, in the humanities. I have also had some success in my academic career. But I would fail this noble goal that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania presents as the "average" that all our students should master. I couldn't write a decent poem if you guaranteed I'd win the Noble Prize in literature were I to do so.
But there's the standard: I will "use the elements and principles of each art form to create works in the arts and humanities." I suppose I'd better return my degrees, along with my high school diploma, earned these many years ago from a Pennsylvania secondary school.
The illogic of the standards leads to humorous results. For instance, President Bush's last Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, recognized that students with "special needs" may not meet the standards. But in Lake Woebegone we cannot say that such students form the "below" condition that establishes the in-betweenness of an average. Oh no. Instead, Ms. Spellings redefined what "average" means by promulgating a "policy [that] allows states to develop modified achievement standards and use assessments aligned with those modified standards for a group of students with disabilities who can make progress toward, but may not reach, grade-level achievement standards in the same time frame as other students."[5]
The double-talk obfuscates what's taking place, which is the redefinition of what "average" means so as to accommodate reality. But notice that Ms. Spellings assumes that eventually all students, "special needs" or not, will achieve the standard. There is not a teacher in the world who will fail to recognize the absurdity of that proposition. That different children will achieve at different levels is the reason we give grades from A to F, after all. I could spend the rest of my life studying the elements and principles of art, and I still would never be able to write a decent sonnet or draw more than a stick figure. It's just not in me to do it, and no force on earth—certainly not the august majesty of the "Academic Standards for the Arts and Humanities"—will make me able to do so.
Hard though it is for us, as a nation and as parents, to acknowledge it, the truth is that "average" does mean that while some students will achieve the mediocre in between condition that "average means," at the same time some students will achieve superlatively, and some will fail.
The less humorous side of the No Child Left Behind madness is when its insane premise gets applied locally, in the classroom, as the child meets the test. My wife, who teaches fourth grade, describes what happens. The poor, challenged kid looks at the test, knows immediately that he or she cannot do well, and dissolves in tears at the desk as the teacher, legally bound not to "help," looks on.
Here, No Child Left Behind is not simply absurd. It is child abuse.
Illogical as No Child Left Behind is, how in the name of good sense was it passed into law? It's not a pretty story. It begins with a lie, and ends with another sort of lie, the logical nonsense of Lake Woebegone as national educational policy.
The lie involves the "Texas Miracle," as it was called when President Bush named Rod Paige to be his first Secretary of Education. Before then, Paige was superintendent of the Houston school system, and under his authority students in the school district made incredible academic progress. As with No Child Left Behind, progress was determined by data-driven "facts" based on "standards" developed under Mr. Paige's guidance. Most impressively, the drop out rate in the Houston schools had been lowered to 1.5%, and the achievement gap between white and minority children had been lowered significantly.[6]
The No Child Left Behind Act was justified by the success Mr. Paige had produced via the rigorous application of "standards" in the Houston schools. Mr. Paige impregnated Washington with the Houston Miracle, and Congress gave birth to the irrationality of No Child Left Behind.
As one might expect, the sleep of reason bred a monster.
The monstrosity begins with the fact that the incredibly low drop out rate in the Houston schools was completely illusory—a lie based on "cooking the books." The teachers on the front lines and the local school administrators who had to contend with real live students "put Houston’s true dropout rate somewhere between 25 and 50 percent."[7] The narrowing of the educational gap between white and minority students was also illusory. And the illusion was abetted, at least, by Mr. Paige himself.[8]
So now here we are, living with a chimera, an illusion engendered by an irrationality fathered by a lie—but with dire and painful consequences for all of our children. It's not simply that the less capable student will become demoralized as she sits in front of her test, although on those grounds alone No Child Left Behind ought to be repealed immediately. Just as bad is the destructive effect that the law has on education itself.
Children are being trained to take standardized tests in order to demonstrate that they achieve the average defined in the standards set by the states. Perhaps our perspective has been so vitiated by the promulgation of No Child Left Behind that we cannot even hear what's wrong with that statement.
Training is appropriate for dogs who salivate on cue when the bell rings. But training is not the same thing as education. Teachers now will tell you that they are teaching to the test, that they are coaching students on how to take the test, that they are drilling students on questions that are like the ones that appear on the test. What is really happening is not the statistical impossibility of making everyone above average. Instead, we are lowering our expectations of education and what it should accomplish in order to incubate Mr. Paige's monster.
Across the board, what Spellings recommended as redefined standards for "special needs" students has become the norm of educational policy. Education has become the stale and dead recitation of facts that would shame even Dickens's Mr. Gradgrind.
It is time we returned this monstrosity to the realm of fantasy so we can listen to stories from Lake Woebegone and laugh instead of shudder in fear.
[1] Rod Paige, "Key Letter Signed by the Education Secretary or Deputy Secretary, July 24, 2002," US Department of Education, http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/guid/secletter/020724.html.
[2] "Academic Standards for the Arts and Humanities," Pennsylvania State Board of Education, http://www.pacode.com/secure/data/022/chapter4/s4.83.html, p. 2.
[3] Every specific standard in every standards document for every discipline begins with such language.
[4] "Academic Standards for the Arts and Humanities," Pennsylvania State Board of Education, http://www.pacode.com/secure/data/022/chapter4/s4.83.html, p. 3.
[5] Margaret Spellings, "Key Policy Letters Signed by the Education Secretary or Deputy Secretary, December 14, 2005," US Department of Education, http://www.ed.gov/policy/speced/guid/secletter/051214.html.
[6] "Rod Paiges's Houston Miracle," The Carpetbagger Report, September 4, 2003, http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/592.html.
[7] "The Texas Miracle," 60 Minutes II, August 25, 2004, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/06/60II/main591676.shtml
[8] Susan Ohanian, "Houston Recounting Paige's Record," Susan Ohanian.Org, http://www.susanohanian.org/atrocity_fetch.php?id=825.
There they go again, trying to convert an economic emergency into an opportunity to get their political agenda passed into law. Who? If you're asking that question, you must be (a) not American or (b) not breathing. Republicans have been jawing about a balanced budget amendment for as long as I can remember. The idea has been rejected over and over and over again. But now, of course, they've got the whole country over a barrel and think that they can get such an amendment if they only hold firm against raising the debt ceiling. Analogies are never exact, but this is pretty close: the guy with the gun says, give me your money and I won't shoot you in the head. That's the Republican position.
Balanced budget amendment, balancing budgets at the expense of the well being of the economy--all those kinds of things are justified on the basis of analogies, usually to family finances. Those analogies are just so far off the mark that they're not worth thinking about. A nation is not a family. A government is not a father. A national debt is not a credit card balance.
Those who would argue on the basis of such false analogies, and in doing so would endanger the well being of every single solitary citizen of this country, not to mention the rest of the world--such people are traitors.
Balanced budget amendment, balancing budgets at the expense of the well being of the economy--all those kinds of things are justified on the basis of analogies, usually to family finances. Those analogies are just so far off the mark that they're not worth thinking about. A nation is not a family. A government is not a father. A national debt is not a credit card balance.
Those who would argue on the basis of such false analogies, and in doing so would endanger the well being of every single solitary citizen of this country, not to mention the rest of the world--such people are traitors.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
American Culture
Wynton Marsalis was on The PBS News Hour tonight, and expressed his dismay at the loss of knowledge about American culture among kids--among us all. Several times during the interview, he doubled back on what he said, paying special attention to ignorance about African American culture as well as about American culture. And I agree absolutely when Marsalis says that most people are so ignorant about African American culture that they don't even know that there's something to be known. Profoundly sad. At the same time, however, I want to think about the distinction between American and African American culture. My idea here is pretty simple: without the African, there really is no such thing as an American culture.
Obviously that's not to say that all American artists are African Americans. But it is to say that what distinguishes American culture from the culture of a European nation--what makes it specifically American, in other words--is the encounter of those European cultures with the African. There are other cultural components to the encounter, of course, most notably Native American. And the multiple encounters give depth and texture to American culture. But the intersection of Africa and Europe is so sustained and so central to the American experience that it is the essential element of what makes America American.
Some of what I mean is straightforwardly economic. The wealth of the North as much as of the South depends on the fact of slavery, either the Triangular Trade in slaves that made millionaires of northerners or the agricultural employment of those slaves that did the same for southerners. Without that wealth it would have taken a great deal longer for the US to become what it became. Indeed, the transformation of the colonies into a great nation might never have happened without Africans.
But by "culture" I suspect that Marsalis means something other than economics. I do, at any rate. And when it comes to the expression of the human soul associated with the arts, there is no doubt at all that without Africans, there would be no specifically American cultural expression. I read Edward Taylor's poetry and I think I'm reading an English poet, not an American one.
Obviously that's not to say that all American artists are African Americans. But it is to say that what distinguishes American culture from the culture of a European nation--what makes it specifically American, in other words--is the encounter of those European cultures with the African. There are other cultural components to the encounter, of course, most notably Native American. And the multiple encounters give depth and texture to American culture. But the intersection of Africa and Europe is so sustained and so central to the American experience that it is the essential element of what makes America American.
Some of what I mean is straightforwardly economic. The wealth of the North as much as of the South depends on the fact of slavery, either the Triangular Trade in slaves that made millionaires of northerners or the agricultural employment of those slaves that did the same for southerners. Without that wealth it would have taken a great deal longer for the US to become what it became. Indeed, the transformation of the colonies into a great nation might never have happened without Africans.
But by "culture" I suspect that Marsalis means something other than economics. I do, at any rate. And when it comes to the expression of the human soul associated with the arts, there is no doubt at all that without Africans, there would be no specifically American cultural expression. I read Edward Taylor's poetry and I think I'm reading an English poet, not an American one.
No taxes--America becomes a banana republic
So here come the tax cut arguments from "conservative" Republicans. What are they conserving, exactly? Well, consider what happens as a consequence of tax cuts at the state level. In Pennsylvania, our wonderful new Governor, Tom Corbett, has decided that the current economic mess makes it impossible to levy taxes on "job creators" in order to balance the state budget. So he has decided to cut and cut and cut the state budget. His original proposal included a 50% cut to state colleges and universities, and a 19% cut to public schools. Mercifully the legislature reduced those cuts significantly, albeit at the price of state moneys for social service supports of all sorts.
So what are the results of the cuts? For those who depend on state social services, the result is a further fall in their socio-economic condition. Poor? How about hyper-poor? But the result for education in the state is equally abysmal for the poor. Almost without exception, the state budget cuts have led to crises at the level of the local school districts. Those districts have one of two options: they can cut educational services and opportunities, or they can set about raising property taxes, which fund the schools. In poor districts raising property taxes is a vain effort to raise funds. One reason that the poor districts are poor is because the property values are so low. And of course low property values produce low tax revenue for the local school district. So the poorer the school district, the less likely that raising property taxes is a possible solution to the budget crises. The only option is to cut services.
So we wave goodbye to the services that high need students require in order to have the ghost of a chance to succeed. Everything from counselors to classroom aides are gone gone gone. That may not sound so terrible to the comfortably middle class person who graduated from high school in the 60s or 70s. I graduated from high school in 1970, and have to say that I never had a class with a classroom aide at hand. But that was then, this is now. A single adult in a classroom with 35 or 40 students, a fair number of whom have emotional and/or educational problems simply cannot do much with the students. And then comes the NCLB punishment for those schools that "fail" to have adequate yearly progress. The price? Further cuts in budget.
What a wonderful way simply to sideline the poor!
Governor Corbett's budget cuts affect the more affluent districts very differently. In the first place, such districts are far less dependent on state subsidies precisely because they are affluent. Property values being high, the real estate tax provides a sufficient ground for the educational services that the districts extend to their communities. Affluence helps such school districts in a different way as well. This past tax-setting season here in Pennsylvania saw school board meetings in which citizens asked their school board members to raise taxes so that the children would not be short changed in their schools. Parents in affluent communities can afford such raises without much sweat, and would rather pay the higher tax than have their children lose a counselor or a classroom aide or a language program.
So what is the net effect of the Governor's "disciplined" approach to the budget? The poor get poorer and the rich get . . . what they "deserve." In the not too long run, then, what the no-tax Republicans are in train to produce is a social system that parallels the economic system we now have in which the upper X percent of the population owns almost all of the wealth of the nation. The technical term for such an economic system is "banana republic." Our social system is going in the direction of the banana republic as well.
Maybe that result will stop illegal immigration as well. After all, what's the point of coming up to El Norte when El Norte is identical to Guatemala?
So what are the results of the cuts? For those who depend on state social services, the result is a further fall in their socio-economic condition. Poor? How about hyper-poor? But the result for education in the state is equally abysmal for the poor. Almost without exception, the state budget cuts have led to crises at the level of the local school districts. Those districts have one of two options: they can cut educational services and opportunities, or they can set about raising property taxes, which fund the schools. In poor districts raising property taxes is a vain effort to raise funds. One reason that the poor districts are poor is because the property values are so low. And of course low property values produce low tax revenue for the local school district. So the poorer the school district, the less likely that raising property taxes is a possible solution to the budget crises. The only option is to cut services.
So we wave goodbye to the services that high need students require in order to have the ghost of a chance to succeed. Everything from counselors to classroom aides are gone gone gone. That may not sound so terrible to the comfortably middle class person who graduated from high school in the 60s or 70s. I graduated from high school in 1970, and have to say that I never had a class with a classroom aide at hand. But that was then, this is now. A single adult in a classroom with 35 or 40 students, a fair number of whom have emotional and/or educational problems simply cannot do much with the students. And then comes the NCLB punishment for those schools that "fail" to have adequate yearly progress. The price? Further cuts in budget.
What a wonderful way simply to sideline the poor!
Governor Corbett's budget cuts affect the more affluent districts very differently. In the first place, such districts are far less dependent on state subsidies precisely because they are affluent. Property values being high, the real estate tax provides a sufficient ground for the educational services that the districts extend to their communities. Affluence helps such school districts in a different way as well. This past tax-setting season here in Pennsylvania saw school board meetings in which citizens asked their school board members to raise taxes so that the children would not be short changed in their schools. Parents in affluent communities can afford such raises without much sweat, and would rather pay the higher tax than have their children lose a counselor or a classroom aide or a language program.
So what is the net effect of the Governor's "disciplined" approach to the budget? The poor get poorer and the rich get . . . what they "deserve." In the not too long run, then, what the no-tax Republicans are in train to produce is a social system that parallels the economic system we now have in which the upper X percent of the population owns almost all of the wealth of the nation. The technical term for such an economic system is "banana republic." Our social system is going in the direction of the banana republic as well.
Maybe that result will stop illegal immigration as well. After all, what's the point of coming up to El Norte when El Norte is identical to Guatemala?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)