A Voice Of Clarity On Education Reform

In an epic thread populated by some intelligent, some self-important and some cool-headed folks, this:

Tom Conry Says:

I am concerned that the real context of this faux “teacher accountability” movement is rarely if ever acknowledged by its enthusiasts, including the author of this insultingly condescending and adolescent post.

It is no secret that there has been a sustained effort on the part of the right to devalorize and destabilize public education as part of the program toward eventual privatization. This is part of the neoliberal agenda, that there must be nothing that is not-the-market; in Margaret Thatcher’s words, there is no such thing as society, only individuals.

Ever since Milton Friedman’s essay on school choice, the right has been hammering away at these themes, the better to get at the last big piece of virgin public territory left in the American economy. When Lehman Bros. was still a going concern, they had held a yearly conference for at least eleven years on how to profit from the privatization of public schools.

The “blame the teacher” movement is an essential part of that strategy. It is about getting rid of the union, about subverting solidarity, about recapturing control of the shop floor. It is about the necessary Taylorization of learning (more than it is now), of its final re-packaging as a commodity and the transformation of students into consumers.

Teachers are all who stand in the breach between a humanistic classroom and the student-as-product. If history is any guide, teachers aren’t the type to be handed a script and reliably recite it. They claim a special relationship to the student that supersedes their obligation to a test bubble. They claim that their training and expertise and continued presence in the classroom gives them better tools to understand growth and ability than does a battery of standardized tests. They are right.

Do you want to help students learn, really? Are you actually concerned “for the children?”

Honestly, reading many of the posts here over the past months, that is hard to believe. But, let’s say I’m wrong about motivation. Let’s say everyone’s motives are pure.

Then make an equal society. Make a society where my students have the same number of books in their home as do the rich children. Make a society where my undocumented students are not looking over their shoulder. Make a society where my students have not experienced years of racial bigotry. Make a society where my students come to my classroom having had adequate medical care. Make a society where my students do not read in the paper that the school across town is adding Arabic, and their school is cutting French. Make a society where my students have adequate nutrition. Make a society where my students’ parents are employed at wages equal the students on the other side of town. Make a society where my students come to my class knowing the same vocabulary, having the same cultural capital as the kids across town.

Do you want to help? Get to it.

And get off the backs of the teachers, unless you’re there to help out.

The Vienna Declaration On HIV And International Drug Prohibition

This seems important, especially for all my influential friends who should sign it!!

In response to the health and social harms of illegal drugs, a large international drug prohibition regime has been developed under the umbrella of the United Nations. Decades of research provide a comprehensive assessment of the impacts of the global “War on Drugs” and, as thousands of individuals gather in Vienna at the XVIII International AIDS Conference, the international scientific community calls for an acknowledgement of the limits and harms of drug prohibition, and for drug policy reform to remove barriers to effective HIV prevention, treatment and care.

The evidence that law enforcement has failed to prevent the availability of illegal drugs, in communities where there is demand, is now unambiguous.2, 3Over the last several decades, national and international drug surveillance systems have demonstrated a general pattern of falling drug prices and increasing drug purity—despite massive investments in drug law enforcement.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that increasing the ferocity of law enforcement meaningfully reduces the prevalence of drug use.5 The data also clearly demonstrate that the number of countries in which people inject illegal drugs is growing, with women and children becoming increasingly affected.6 Outside of sub-Saharan Africa, injection drug use accounts for approximately one in three new cases of HIV.7, 8 In some areas where HIV is spreading most rapidly, such as Eastern Europe and Central Asia, HIV prevalence can be as high as 70% among people who inject drugs, and in some areas more than 80% of all HIV cases are among this group.

In the context of overwhelming evidence that drug law enforcement has failed to achieve its stated objectives, it is important that its harmful consequences be acknowledged and addressed. These consequences include but are not limited to:

-HIV epidemics fuelled by the criminalisation of people who use illicit drugs and by prohibitions on the provision of sterile needles and opioid substitution treatment.

-HIV outbreaks among incarcerated and institutionalised drug users as a result of punitive laws and policies and a lack of HIV prevention services in these settings.

-The undermining of public health systems when law enforcement drives drug users away from prevention and care services and into environments where the risk of infectious disease transmission (e.g., HIV, hepatitis C & B, and tuberculosis) and other harms is increased.

-A crisis in criminal justice systems as a result of record incarceration rates in a number of nations. This has negatively affected the social functioning of entire communities. While racial disparities in incarceration rates for drug offences are evident in countries all over the world, the impact has been particularly severe in the US, where approximately one in nine African-American males in the age group 20 to 34 is incarcerated on any given day, primarily as a result of drug law enforcement.

-Stigma towards people who use illicit drugs, which reinforces the political popularity of criminalising drug users and undermines HIV prevention and other health promotion efforts.

-Severe human rights violations, including torture, forced labour, inhuman and degrading treatment, and execution of drug offenders in a number of countries.

-A massive illicit market worth an estimated annual value of US$320 billion.4 These profits remain entirely outside the control of government. They fuel crime, violence and corruption in countless urban communities and have destabilised entire countries, such as Colombia, Mexico and Afghanistan.

-Billions of tax dollars wasted on a “War on Drugs” approach to drug control that does not achieve its stated objectives and, instead, directly or indirectly contributes to the above harms.

Unfortunately, evidence of the failure of drug prohibition to achieve its stated goals, as well as the severe negative consequences of these policies, is often denied by those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo.25This has created confusion among the public and has cost countless lives. Governments and international organisations have ethical and legal obligations to respond to this crisis and must seek to enact alternative evidence-based strategies that can effectively reduce the harms of drugs without creating harms of their own. We, the undersigned, call on governments and international organisations, including the United Nations, to:

-Undertake a transparent review of the effectiveness of current drug policies.

-Implement and evaluate a science-based public health approach to address the individual and community harms stemming from illicit drug use.

-Decriminalise drug users, scale up evidence-based drug dependence treatment options and abolish ineffective compulsory drug treatment centres that violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

-Unequivocally endorse and scale up funding for the implementation of the comprehensive package of HIV interventions spelled out in the WHO, UNODC and UNAIDS Target Setting Guide.

-Meaningfully involve members of the affected community in developing, monitoring and implementing services and policies that affect their lives.

We further call upon the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, to urgently implement measures to ensure that the United Nations system—including the International Narcotics Control Board—speaks with one voice to support the decriminalisation of drug users and the implementation of evidence-based approaches to drug control.28

Basing drug policies on scientific evidence will not eliminate drug use or the problems stemming from drug injecting. However, reorienting drug policies towards evidence-based approaches that respect, protect and fulfil human rights has the potential to reduce harms deriving from current policies and would allow for the redirection of the vast financial resources towards where they are needed most: implementing and evaluating evidence-based prevention, regulatory, treatment and harm reduction interventions.

Michael Chabon On Childhood (What's Left Of It!)

Michael Chabon writes real good. I think this piece hits on some rather important issues regarding our over-protective, site-limiting, dream-crushing, blinder-fixing treatment of children. Here is a snippet:

There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness. This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of abductions by strangers in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their children's lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.

The endangerment of children—that persistent theme of our lives, arts, and literature over the past twenty years—resonates so strongly because, as parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife and radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children's imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it—nowhere that I was willing to let her go. Should I send my children out to play?

Somethings Happening Here, And We Don't Know What It Is

My favorite philosopher, williamyard:

williamyard said:

And to follow on what butchie wrote ("And if you're in the market, low prices are a good thing."), allow me to paraphrase Shawshank: "Either get in the market, or get busy dying."

We're always in the market, every market, for everything and anything. Everyone has his or her price--see Terry Southern's "The Magic Christian." Holy Goddess, if I had a few bucks I'd be scooping up foreclosed homes by the bushel. My own home is underwater, but I'm only 57 and plan to keep working for another 15 years if I possibly can, so I don't give a hoot (I love work; if you don't, all the money in the world won't make you happy at your job.) Same goes for my 401K--does everybody realize how cheap stocks are?? I'm buying--every paycheck. Who cares if they'll go down more? They'll be even cheaper, which means I can afford more of them. I mean, this downturn is less than a couple years old and likely to last less than a couple more years. That's nothing in the grand scheme of things. A pittance. It's a shakeout. Momma's putting the leftovers in the fridge, and the cheapskates who only came for the free meal are hitting the road.

Of course publically traded corporations are moaning and groaning: they live by the quarter and die by the quarter. When their numbers suck they get beat up by shareholders in would/coulda/shoulda mode. Nobody likes to get beat up. Tough titty; it comes with the territory.

Mom and pops that have been around forever are going belly-up. To which I say, you had a great run; be grateful, 90% of small businesses fail in the first five years.

Businesses pimping consumer goods paid for by irrational home equity are dying; automakers who've been building dinosaurs for decades are on the edge. You're telling me this is a bad thing? And Wall Street? Throw the moneychangers out of the temple and fumigate the damn place, sez I, or learn to live with cockroaches, like most of the planet.

Yeah, we're in a downward spiral/doldrums at the moment. Some people are hurting; we can easily muster what's needed to help them out ("OMG! That means we'll run deficits for several more years!" Put a cork in it.). Then await the economy's return, which should be interesting given the opportunities that are popping up like the spring weeds that decorate the hills around my home. Speaking of which, the aquifer that feeds my well is plumb tuckered out. I don't want sunshine. I want rain.

And recall that the sum of the squares of the two sides adjacent to the right angle still equals the square of the hypotenuse. Which will be true long after the Sun has turned into a red giant and charbroiled the Earth, i.e., truth has little to do with current events. (That's what's REALLY bugging a lot of people: something is happening here, but they don't know what it is, do they? We're all Mr. Jones.) Stick to what we might discern as universal truths--e.g., compassion, honesty, patience, industry, thrift, generosity, humility, integrity, courtesy, courage, the Pythagorean theorum--and everything else will take care of itself.

And get a couple chickens. They basically eat bugs and a little grain, so their eggs are nearly free, then they die and you eat them, too. Put the savings in a fund indexed on the S&P 500--or Treasuries, if you're really paranoid. You'll thank me.

And use condoms.

And COPE, goddamn it.

And be of goddamn good cheer. A close family friend recently blew out his bowel, came down with a nasty infection, lost most of his marbles in the process and now doesn't recognize his wife. His prognosis is bad and getting worse. That's a crisis.

This financial downturn--a "crisis"? Please.