OlsonOnline

Vicki Phillips' war

This will be my last post for awhile, so let me leave you with a brief discussion of the war at home.

By home I mean Portland.  By war I mean the assault on public neighborhood schools, on public school teachers, and on public school parents by Portland Public Schools Superintendent Vicki Phillips.

The Oregonian ran a fairly lame article on the Phillips' superintendency earlier this week.  Yesterday, Willamette Week countered with a much more substantive piece by Beth Slovic.  I recommend you read Slovic's article and ignore the Oregonian.

The problem with Phillips is that she is bound and determined to do what she was hired to do  --raise test scores-- with a series of rapidfire top-down mandates that have alienated both the district's teachers and community educational activists, all with the approval of a largely passive and compliant school board.

Never mind that test scores --in reading, writing, and arithmetic-- are poor measures of student learning.  And never mind that school reform experts, a category that includes neither Phillips nor any member of the current school board, all agree that change must come from within the school buildings, from the bottom up.  And that a genuine educational leader empowers employees --teachers-- to make the changes that will most effectively benefit the students they teach.  That's what Jefferson teacher Andrew Kulak believes:

"But educators like Andrew Kulak, a ninth- and 10th-grade English teacher at Jefferson, worries about the proposed changes anyway. Kulak says good decisions about running classrooms do not come from above, where administrators do not know the students' names, families or interests.

" 'The wisdom always resides in the room,' Kulak says. 'That's where effective teaching happens.' " 

A standardized, textbook-based instructional plan, developed not by teachers but by district office administrators is doomed to failure, unless, of course, the measure of academic success is narrowly defined by scores on multiple choice achievement tests.  I believe that such a narrow and inadequate definition of "learning" is Vicki Phillips' holy grail.

I could go on and on, but let me leave you with this post I wrote some time back about how useless textbooks are in the overall effort to educate students.  My conclusion?

"Schools should have the option of taking money allotted for textbook acquisition and using it better ways.  That's the kind of decentralized school-based authority I could support."

I hope to resume blogging soon. 

Iran

Here's a video montage (courtesy of A Tiny Revolution) of everday life in Iran, the likely target of the next American military assault on a Middle Eastern country.

Meanwhile, I'm off to the Sunnyside School protest march against our current war in neighboring Iraq.

Peace

The economics of war

In order to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the never-ending "global war on terror", Bush now needs another $245 billion.  His budget request for defense, nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars, will cost "$800 for every man, woman and child in the U.S."

In the meantime, some people are asking whether we can afford the costs of fighting a more important war --the effort to stop the very real and looming disaster of global warming, caused, as we learned once again Friday, by humans dumping excess carbon into the atmosphere.  Petroleum giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron have profited handsomely from creating the carbon-based fuels that drive our economy, but which also drive the earth inexorably toward catastrophic climate change.

One might wonder:  Do we have our priorites straight?

Or maybe I should ask, do our elected leaders have their priorities straight?  Bush and Cheney, who front for big oil, and many Republicans obvously do not, but what about the Democrats?  What about Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and other well-placed Democratic legislators?  Pelosi would "not rule out supporting the request."  Reid said "Democrats pledge to provide U.S. troops with 'everything they need to do their jobs... .' " 

And Nina Lowey, a Democratic member of the House Appropriations Committee, echoed Reid:

"We clearly want to make sure our troops have everything they need... ."

What happened to the power of the purse?

But it gets worse.  In the global warming debate, Democrat Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico proposed widening the loopholes for energy interests to slip through to avoid bearing the economic burden of reducing greenhouse gases:

"One bill, offered by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., would allow a 'safety valve' whereby companies could ignore the emission caps altogether if compliance gets too expensive."

Have we gone mad?  We may be willing to dump hundreds of billions of dollars down the rathole of a dead end war effort, but are apparently unwilling to confront realistically the threat of global warming. 

Bring the troops home.  Spend the money saved on programs to reduce greenhouse gases.  Forget about Iraq, and the so-called "war on terror."   

Let's get our priorities straight. 

 

Molly

So Molly Ivins lost her battle with cancer. 

There have been many tributes written about Molly's spirit, her spunk, her irrepressible need to say what needed to be said about the follies and transgressions of the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and the powerless, especially if they lived in Texas.  The language she used to characterize those follies and transgressions managed to get her fired from the staid New York Times.

The Times obituary said this about that:

"Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But her effort to use it angered the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine matters with little flair."

The sexually suggestive phrase Ivins used to describe the chicken slaughter was "gang pluck."

Before her move to the NYT, Ivins wrote for the Texas Observer, the alternative twice weekly tabloid  --"sharp reporting from the strangest state in the nation"-- which has many glowing tributes to Molly Ivins, like this one from fellow Texan Bill Moyers:

"At a PBS meeting a few years ago, she ended her talk with a joke that would have gotten anyone else arrested or excommunicated. But she was carried out on the crowd's shoulders, as right now she is being ushered into the Council of Ink-Stained Immortals, where the only religion is truth. Save some room up there, Molly: You have inspired us earthbound wretches to keep trying to live up to your legacy in the hope of joining you there one day."

I've written my own tributes to Molly Ivins, but long before her death.  My favorite is this one in which she quotes Thucydides on war:

"To think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just another attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand the question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action; fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man. ... .Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect."

This Sunday, in tribute again to Molly Ivins, I'll march with friends in the weekly Sunnyside School protest against the war in Iraq.