OlsonOnline

Worth reading: "Why I Am a Socialist"

From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, Chris Hedges.  Here's an excerpt:

"The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism—one that will insist on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars—or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our surveillance state."

Hedges piece is less an exposition of his socialist leanings than a critique of the American "corporatocracy", largely unregulated and left free to wreak whatever damage to the  economy that benefits the corporate bottom line.  Hedges pulls no punches in his scathing indictment of the corporate presence:

"The creation of a mercenary army, the privatization of public utilities and our disgusting for-profit health care system are all legacies of the corporate state. These corporations have no loyalty to America or the American worker. They are not tied to nation states. They are vampires."

But that's alright with me.  Reigning in the excesses of Wall Street --and rethinking corporate "personhood"-- is the sort of change I can believe in.

Happy 2009!

No Child profiteering

In a retrospective on the Bush presidency on one of the cable news shows --Hardball, as I recall-- a mainstream journalist pointed to No Child Left Behind as one of the few bright spots in the Bush legacy.

Here's a decidedly different view.

One of Project Censored's top 25 under-reported news stories of 2008 --number 12 on the list-- documented the blatant profiteering of private interests from Bush's signature education legislation, No Child Left Behind:

"The architect of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), President Bush’s first senior education advisor, Sandy Kress, has turned the program, which has consistently proven disastrous in the realm of education, into a huge success in the realm of corporate profiteering. After ushering NCLB through the US House of Representatives in 2001 with no public hearings, Kress went from lawmaker—turning on spigots of federal funds—to lobbyist, tapping into those billions of dollars in federal funds for private investors well connected to the Bush administration." ...

"The wedding of big business and education benefits not only the interests of the Business Roundtable, a consortium of over 300 CEOs, but countless Bush family loyalists. Sandy Kress, chief architect of NCLB; Harold McGraw III, textbook publisher; Bill Bennett, former Reagan education secretary; and Neil Bush, the president’s youngest brother, have all cashed in on the Roundtable’s successful national implementation of 'outcome-based education.' NCLB’s mandated system of state standards, state tests, and school sanctions has together transformed our public school system into a for-profit frenzy."

That's in keeping with the widely acknowledged politicization of other Bush administration ventures, particularly the war in Iraq, where privatization and profiteering have been routinely reported.  Not so No Child Left Behind, which stubbornly clings to its almost hallowed status among even the most progressive of our elected officials. 

Many educators, on the other hand, have derided the No Child law from the outset, notably Gerald Bracey who early on saw NCLB as the "perfect law", one which would

"...transfer hundreds of billions of dollars a year from the public sector to the private sector, reduce the size of government, and wound or kill a large Democratic power base."

Others in the alternative press and the blogosphere  joined the protest.  Here in Portland, educational activist Peter Campbell has called for the school board to introduce a resolution in opposition to NCLB.  He wants it repealed entirely. (I think.)

So do I.  Want NCLB repealed, that is.  Some time back I urged readers --repeatedly-- to sign a petiton from the Education Roundtable urging Congress to refuse re-authorization of NCLB.  I even got future school board member Ruth Adkins to sign.  And future city council member Amanda Fritz, along with many other locals.

Nationally, however, it's a different story.  And you can blame that on the mainstream media.

Worth reading: "Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago"

Kenneth Libby, the Portland teacher-in-training I mentioned in a recent post, has published a piece on CounterPunch.   It goes almost without saying that Ken's views are a must read for opponents of No Child Left Behind, proponents of real school reform, and advocates of diverting wasteful federal military spending to rebuilding the infrastructure of public education.

Here are a couple of snippets from the CounterPunch post:

"The reform proposed by the Democratic Party, echoed by Obama, and practiced for the last 8 years by Arne Duncan as CEO (yes, CEO) of Chicago Public Schools include: a neoliberal, market-based approach to improving the education system, including the outsourcing and privatizing of public schools; militarization; and a severely narrowed curriculum." ...

"We could also ... get rid of No Child Left Behind, provide affordable housing in urban areas instead of blowing up Iraqi and Afghani homes, build libraries instead of bombs, construct community centers instead of tanks."

Not bad for a Portland Public Schools student teacher.  Well done, Ken!

(Thanks to PPS Equity's Steve Rawley for the heads up.)

Bombs or schools?

From the New York Times, July 13, 2008:

"Since 9/11, Westerners have tried two approaches to fight terrorism in Pakistan, President Bush’s and Greg Mortenson’s.

"Mr. Bush has focused on military force and provided more than $10 billion — an extraordinary sum in the foreign-aid world — to the highly unpopular government of President Pervez Musharraf. This approach has failed: the backlash has radicalized Pakistan’s tribal areas so that they now nurture terrorists in ways that they never did before 9/11.

"Mr. Mortenson, a frumpy, genial man from Montana, takes a diametrically opposite approach, and he has spent less than one-ten-thousandth as much as the Bush administration. He builds schools in isolated parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with Muslim clerics and even praying with them at times.

"The only thing that Mr. Mortenson blows up are boulders that fall onto remote roads and block access to his schools. ...

"So a lone Montanan staying at the cheapest guest houses has done more to advance U.S. interests in the region than the entire military and foreign policy apparatus of the Bush administration."

Let me allow Greg Mortenson the last word:

“ 'Schools are a much more effective bang for the buck than missiles or chasing some Taliban around the country,' says Mr. Mortenson, who is an Army veteran."

Listen to Greg Mortenson, President-elect Obama.  Please.

Base denial

Over at PPS Equity, in an excellent discussion about eradicating poverty as a primary tool for real school reform, teacher-in-training Ken suggests

"Instead of adding 100,000 more troops (like Obama has proposed), why don’t we put more people into classrooms? A single American troop costs $201,000 a year these days (up from $78,000 in 2001) - so 100,000 more troops ends up being $200,000,000*."

Ken correctly identifies the tension between the Pentagon and public education over the allocation of public resources.  The defense budget for fiscal year 2008, with supplemental spending for Iraq and Afghanistan plus additional funding necessary to sustain the global war on terrorism, totals $716.5 billion.   Add in the budget for Veterans Affairs, and the total expenditures for the military alone consume nearly a quarter of the budget. 

Federal spending on education amounts to a mere 2% of the total budget. 

How is the money for "defense" being spent?  Well, for starters, the Pentagon has built  and maintains 761 military bases in at least 39 countries around the world --more actually. As Chalmers Johnson writes,

"The official figures omit espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude—e.g. in Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan."

The precise extent of the worldwide American military presence, then, is not public knowledge.  Suffice it to say that our military footprint is larger than the government is willing to admit.  Johnson calls the 761 acknowledged sites "a remarkable example of imperial overstretch."

You read that right --"imperial", as in empire. 

"To garrison its empire, [Johnson says] as of last December, the United States had 510,927 service personnel (including sailors afloat) deployed in 151 foreign countries. This includes some 196,600 fighting in Iraq and 25,700 in Afghanistan."

It costs a lot of money to maintain such a worldwide military presence, money that some argue could be more effectively spent to combat terror in other ways. 

David Oliver Relin, writing in today's Oregonian, suggests a better use  for taxpayer money:

"The cheapest and most effective way to fight extremism is not by military means alone, but by improving people's lives, by building schools, roads, medical facilities, clean water supplies and seeding the ground with economic opportunity."

Relin is the Portland author of Three Cups of Tea, the remarkable chronicle of an American ex-mountain climber, who does just that --builds schools for poor Pakistani children, both boys and girls, in the remote Karakoram region near the disputed border (Kashmir) with India.  It costs Greg Mortenson roughly $12,000, with volunteer help of Pakistani villagers,  to build a four room school house with desks, books and school uniforms.

I predict that one day Greg Mortenson, the ex-climber, will win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to "improve the lives" of impoverished Muslims who might otherwise succumb to the siren call of Islamic extremism. 

I also recommend --urge, in fact-- Barack Obama read Three Cups of Tea in the weeks before his inauguration.

*(One hundred thousand additional troops, according to Ken's figures, would actually cost $20 billion, not $200 million.)

 

Let it snow!

For those of you getting down about the 'frightful' weather, well, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.  Nothing you can do about it anyway.



Then raise you holiday spirits with the the one, the only, the incomparable Brenda Lee



Happy Holidays!

Arne Duncan's charter schools

Obama's Secretary of Education designate built his reputation in Chicago on the success of his so-called "turnaround schools." Turnaround schools are "low performing" schools (kids with lousy test scores) which are shut down and then replaced with "different" schools, many of them charters. 

Under Arne Duncan, many of the new charter schools were handed over to private management firms, not necessarily a bad move if they served ALL kids in Chicago Public Schools equally.  Problem is, they don't.

In a letter to the chair of the House Committee on Education and labor, Julie Woestehoff of the Chicago school activist group, Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE), cautioned Rep, George Miller that charter schools with high test scores, in this case the Dodge Renaissance Academy, have an unfair advantage:

"The new school is essentially serving a completely different student body. It simply does not operate on a level playing field with other schools, and its results should be considered in that context."

At a Chicago School Board meeting honoring Arne Duncan as Obama's pick for Education Secretary, unhappy parents and teachers registered their complaints:

"Jesse Sharkey, a Senn High union delegate, said that after a fight at a charter school in March, 19 kids showed up at Senn with letters saying they had been 'dis-enrolled' from the school. Charters 'are allowed to kick people off the island,' Sharkey said. 'We're supposed to take all children. How is that fair?' "

Fair or not, in Chicago, "charters are allowed to create and enforce their own disciplinary code", thereby justifying a process that rids the schools of hard to educate students.

In a post to the PURE website, Julie Woestehoff writes that, essentially charter schools in Chicago are manipulating their enrollments  to improve their test scores.  The smaller the enrollment and the fewer the number of low income students, the better the scores.

Same goes for New York's high flying public charters.  EduWonkette claims that successful choice schools like the

"...Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics isn't serving a population typical of the South Bronx: only 18% qualified for free lunch, 0% were in full-time special education, .9% were in part-time special education, .9% were English Language Learners... ."

 ****************************

Closer to home, here's anecdotal evidence that Portland's charter schools are not above excluding students that they believe may be too difficult to educate.  It arrived as a comment to one of my earlier posts. 

Here are the salient remarks:

"My son [a child with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder] went to Trillium Charter School for 5th grade the first year it opened... .  It was a difficult year and by the end they simply said they couldn't serve him anymore at Trillium, so we enrolled him at Beaumont Middle School for 6th grade, which was also a disaster in many
ways... . ...

"[After a couple of years at local area private schools,we] applied again at Trillium for 9th grade." ...

"The week before school started we received a letter from the director of Trillium that stated that our son could not be admitted because he was on an IEP (he was not!) and because he had attended so many different schools since his time at Trillium.  Basically, the director of Trillium was saying that they didn't want him, didn't want to deal with his OCD, and they came up with an excuse."...

"I'm very offended.  The charter is just like a private school where the director gets to decide who is enrolled or not based on their whim, and they are accountable to no one."

Take that for what it's worth.  I have no way of verifying the accuracy of the account. 

But the fact remains that charter schools in Portland serve far fewer poor and special needs students than traditional public neighborhood schools. 

Hopefully Barack Obama will keep that in mind as he and Arne Duncan forge a new public schools policy for the 21st Century, one based on equitable and truly democratic principles. 

Obama's compromise

The consensus of opinion on Barack Obama's choice for Secretary of Education, Chicago's Arne Duncan, is that Duncan splits the difference between those who abhor No Child Left Behind and those who want to continue it's test-heavy school accountability mandates.

Obama could have picked a reactionary like Michelle Rhee or Joel Klein rather than Duncan.  In other words, it could have been worse.  Duncan is the ultimate compromise. 

On the other hand, if you can judge a man by his friends, it's not at all reassuring to read that Duncan's appointment is celebrated by the likes of the current Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings.  Or by the Business Roundtable.  Worse yet, the ulitmate educational back-to-basics movement, the Hooked on Phonics crowd, appears to be absolutely thrilled by Duncan:

"America's schools are struggling, and Arne Duncan is an A+ choice to reform our education programs in schools...and at home."

That's from Judy Harris, CEO of the company that publishes Hooked on Phonics.  Phonics has become an article of faith in No Child Left Behind's push for Reading First's scripted curricular materials.  Unfortunately, Reading First has utterly failed to improve students' ability to actually understand what they read.

So educational luddites and CEO's applaud Arne Duncan.  How is that compromise? Duncan's critics don't see it that way at all.

Take the editorial board of Chicago's Substance News.  It presents a quite different view of Duncan:

"For the past six years, we’ve watched while Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan lied repeatedly to the public about how and why he was closing dozens of public schools. Duncan was not trying to improve public schools in Chicago for all children, but was in command of a ruthless privatization plan that is designed to undermine traditional notions of public education for urban children and replace them with a crackpot version of “market choice” that exists only for the wealthy and the powerful."

Some people really dislike Arne Duncan.  Alfie Kohn is another:

"Just as the test-crazy nightmare of Paige's Houston served as a national model (when it should have been a cautionary tale) in 2001, so Duncan would bring to Washington an agenda based on Renaissance 2010, which Chicago education activist Michael Klonsky describes as a blend of 'more standardized testing, closing neighborhood schools, militarization, and the privatization of school management.' "

(Here's a report on Renaissance 2010 which Duncan helped to implement in Chicago.)

Others are more circumspect.  The aforementioned Michael Klonsky thinks that Arne Duncan will make a good Secretary of Education despite some misgivings (see above.)  Neither the "positives" nor the "setbacks" for Chicago's schools, he says, are "owned exclusively by Duncan." 

Like I said, Obama could have done worse.  A lot worse.

The missing music in Portland's schools

My last post started me thinking about the importance of music in people's lives.  It also raised once again this question:

What's happened to the music in Portland's public schools?

I've asked the question before, but after watching The Trail Band perform Friday night at the Aladdin, it seemed time to ask it again.  The founder of The Trail Band, you see, is Marv Ross, of Quarterflash and Seafood Mama fame, and most recently the composer of the original musical, The Ghosts of Celilo. 

Marv also happens to be a graduate of Portland's Madison High School.  Back in those days, Madison, like all Portland high schools, had comprehensive choral and instrumental music programs.

Today it's a far different story.  Here's a rundown on what's offered musically in the poorest of Portland's high schools:

• Roosevelt --no music [see correction below] is offered in any of its three small academies.

• Same for Jefferson --no music, except choir --and piano-- as an after school program.  (Just a few short years ago, Jefferson's gospel choir was good enough to perform on Pink Martini's third CD.)

• Marshall --offers one beginning choral course in its Arts Academy (enrollment 294.)

• Benson --music offered only as a before or after school program.

And at Marv Ross' alma mater --Madison?  One teacher covers both instrumental and choral music. 

Now I don' know that Marv Ross was involved in the school's band or its choir.  But I do know from my own experience that exposure to music in school greatly enhanced my appreciation of music in its myriad forms.  I expect that's true for any student who either performed  or merely listened to others perform at the many school assemblies dedicated to vocal and instrumental music.  

How could it be otherwise?

The district's five larger high schools, the ones for Portland's more affluent families, all have a full array of choral and instrumental offerings.  All, that is, except for the city's wealthiest and most academically prestigious high school, Lincoln.

Lincoln, for some odd reason, has no school choir and no listed courses exposing students to vocal music.

CORRECTION:  One of Roosevelt's three small academies --ACT (enrollment 225)-- offers a beginning band course and a course in jazz and another in music production.  I don't know if students not enrolled in ACT are eligible to participate. 

Stand by Me

Proof positive that music --not math-- is the universal language:

I first came across Playing for Change on --where else-- the incomparable Bill Moyers Journal.