OlsonOnline

Will Obama head off the threat of the Netanyahu/Lieberman coalition?

Uri Avnery has his doubts:

"Obama has not yet passed a real test on any issue. It is already clear that there is a marked difference between what he promised in the election campaign and what he is doing in practice. In several matters he is continuing the policies of George Bush with slight alterations. ... When Netanyahu mobilizes the full might of the pro-Israel lobby, will Obama surrender, like all preceding presidents?"

The issue is peace in Palestine, which Benjamin Netanyahu shows little interest in pursuing.  In partnership with Avigdor Lieberman, whom Avnery calls either a "an extreme nationalist racist" or "nothing but a cheat and a cynic", a just peace for Palestinian Arabs seems remote at best.

Some Israelis believe that the right-wing government, unimpeded by a viable left-wing opposition, will implode by first arousing the anger of the West (and American Jews) and  then by alienating some portion of its fragile coalition with any move to conciliate its world critics.  That's the view voiced by peace advocate Gideon Levy.

But American policy under Obama is key to that scenario playing out.  That's has to be what matters most to Israeli political leadership.  America provides the money, the muscle and the technology that enables Israel to continue its aggression against its domestic Arab enemies.  (The white phospherous bombs used in Gaza, according to Amnesty International, were American made.)

From my perspective --an Ameican leftist perspective-- it's too early to tell how Obama will react.  I'm willing to wait, to give the benefit of doubt to the new President.  As Avnery put it, "it is not certain at all" that Obama will put "irresistible pressure" on the Netanyahu/Lieberman government.

But we can always "hope that it happens."  And hope, you'll recall, was the theme of the Obama presidential campaign. 

Obama, charter schools, and the Pearl

Nancy Pelosi was a veritable jack(ie)-in-the-box during Barack Obama's speech last night to a joint session of Congress, leaping to her feet to lead an ovation anytime Obama said something inspiring.  There was one notable exception, however.  When Obama raised the issue of charter schools--

"We'll invest ... in innovative programs that are already helping schools meet high standards and close achievement gaps. And we will expand our commitment to charter schools."

--Pelosi remained seated.  In fact, the mention of charter schools was perhaps the weakest applause line of the evening.

What does that mean?  Perhaps nothing.  But it does allow me to return to the somewhat controversial issue of a new public school in Portland's Pearl District, which, as I pointed out last night, is home to a charter school with a waiting list of 125 students.  The Emerson School, like most charters, is not a viable alternative to a traditional neighborhood school.  (Nor are the other focus options in the area, which are open, theoretically, to  any student in the city.)

Two discussions about the Pearl school are on-going in local blogs.  One is hardly worth reading, filled as it is with comments from know-nothings and cynics.  The other, over on Blue Oregon, offers a slightly  more substantive conversation, not always brilliant, but much more, well, helpful (if you ignore the back-and-forth between one particular commenter and anyone who disagrees with him.) 

Another discussion is just opening over at PPS Equity.  The level of discourse there is always pretty high.  If you want to learn about Portland school politics, PPS Equity is a must read site.

Apropos

"There can be no real democracy which does not fully maintain the rights of man, as man."

--Salmon Chase, 1854, from Team of Rivals

Chase was a U.S. Senator from Ohio, an outspoken abolitionist, and one of Abraham Lincoln's rivals for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1860.  He became Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury.

President Obama, a student of Lincoln, would do well to heed those words as he crafts a new American -Israeli policy, one that will ultimately lead to peace in Palestine.

Maybe Jack's off HIS rocker

Best response to Jack B's latest rant* in which he juxtaposes two stories --the first about Portland Public Schools revenue deficit; the second about its decision to lease space for a new school in the Pearl:

"What does $300K per year beginning in 2011 in an area without an elementary school, have to do with a $10mil shortfall in 2009, spurred in part not by Portland but by a recalcitrant governor?"

Good question, joe.  But then Jack is less interested in reasoned discourse than in rousing the rabble.

For the record, I haven't decided whether the lease is a good idea or a bad one. I'm hardly one to defend PPS or the school board, but here's the problem. The one neighborhood school anywhere near the Pearl District is the overcrowded Chapman.  The others are either focus options or a charter school (with a waiting list).   So if there really is a surfeit of kids living in the Pearl, maybe the lease isn't such a bad idea.

Then again, if PPS did the right thing by doing away with its transfer policy and ending its dalliance with school choice, the old Couch school, which now houses Metropolitan Learning Center, would make a fine neighborhood facility for the Pearl kids.

But that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. 

* (Rant is defined here as anything having to do with condos, streetcars, or developers.  Or any elected city official.  It should be pointed out that the school district and the City of Portland are separate entities.)

Obama plays it coy on Israel

When asked at a recent press conference --by Helen Thomas-- about whether any countries in the Middle East have nuclear weapons, Obama answered, perhaps with a wink and a nod:

"With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don't want to speculate."

Obama knows full well that Israel has an arsenal of nukes, but that's the way the diplomatic game is played when the topic is Israel, America's one democratic, and greatly favored, Middle East ally.

But that raises the question: Is Israel really a democracy?  I say no, despite its parliamentary style government and elections which appear to be open and largely free of corruption.  Elections aside, no country can claim the mantle of democracy without recognizing the rights of all its citizens, regardless of culture, ethnicity or religious belief.  A true democracy by definition tolerates, even encourages, diversity.  Israel, which styles itself a "Jewish state", a notion ratified in the recent election, fails that test.

What does it matter?  In and of itself, it matters little whether Israel meets the standards of American Jeffersonian democracy.  Very few countries do, perhaps not even America itself.  What does matter, however, are two issues, interrelated, and of the utmost importance for American foreign policy.

The first is the establishment of a just peace between Palestine and Israel.  With the election of an Israeli conservative coalition government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a peace agreement seems increasingly unlikely.  And make no mistake --the cause of the Palestinians is at the heart of much of the Arab unrest in the Middle East.  It has been since long before Israeli independence in 1948.

The second issue is the ongoing and unquestioned American support for Israel regardless of its actions or its policies toward the Palestinians.  Again, that support is at the heart of Arab enmity toward the United States and much of the West.  It continues under Obama.

A recent article in the Guardian questions the future of Zionism, the founding ideology of the Israeli state.  The author, Daphna Baram, claims that Zionism and the drive for "ethnic purity" are incompatible with democracy:

"It is time to stop the procrastination over the question whether Israel can be both Jewish and democratic. [Avigdor] Lieberman provided the answer loud and clear: it cannot. At this late hour, when the shadow of proto-fascism is hovering over the land, it is time to join forces with Palestinian citizens in the battle against ethnic purity, and for a true democracy."

Daphna Baram is a Jew, born in Jerusalem, a veteran of the Israeli army.  But that won't necessarily insulate her from accusations of anti-Semitism.  As Howard Jacobson wrote last week in the British Independent, 

"No, you don’t have to be an anti-Semite to criticise Israel. It just so happens that you are."

The great irony, and the great tragedy, is that Arab Palestinians and Jewish Israelis may be as closely related ethnically, or racially, as any two groups of people on earth, enemies or otherwise.

Big thinking from Chalkboard's Sue Hildick

The Chalkboard Project's Sue Hildick says that, in these perilous economic times, schools "...need to be alert for every efficiency."

What sort of efficiency?  Well, how about saving $20 million on more efficient student busing?  Sounds good, eh? 

Of course that's an efficiency --the $20 million-- for every K-12 district in the state.  When you stop to consider that in 2006-2007, according to the Chalkboard's own site, total spending on K-12 schools was $4,765,572,498 --that's 4.7 billion dollars-- then the $20 million busing efficiency seems like pretty small potatoes. 

Chump change, in fact.   According to my math (go ahead and double check it, if you must) that works out to about .4  percent of the total amount Oregon spends on K-12 schools each year.  Or to put it another way, if Hildick and other wasteful spending watchdogs found 250 such examples of inefficient school spending, kids could go to school at absolutely no taxpayer expense. 

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski has a better idea --teachers teaching for free.  If teachers were willing to teach without pay for an entire year, Oregon's educational budget could be slashed by 60 or 70 percent.

That's a helluva lot better than .4 percent.

But then there's this whole problem of economic stimulus, which President Obama says happens when the government spends money.  Not paying bus drivers --or teachers-- sounds like a great idea until you factor in the stimulus effect. 

I mean, how much can you goose the economy if you have no money to spend? 

But ... I too am a Francophile

Apparently one of the two women proposing a new French immersion program, either as a focus option attached to an existing neighborhood school, or perhaps as another charter school, is a Francophile --a lover of all things French. 

Well, so am I, at least to a degree.  I love most things French --the food, the health care, the five week vacations in August or thereabouts, the literature, the vineyards, the really professional waiters, Le Tour de France.

But I'm not enthused about a new French language program as part of Portland's public school system.  As I wrote earlier, it's a question of equity.  All these niche special programs, including language immersion, tend to stratify Portland's schools.  And that's not something a public school system should encourage.

Options may be good for the few, but they tend to be bad for the many. 

Here's something I do agree with:

"... instilling language – any language – in ...children ...to enrich their cognitive development."

Any language.  So why not Spanish, which already is taught, immersion style, in several Portland elementary schools?  I think that's the best chance for PPS, especially at this time, to equalize enrollment between rich and poor schools, and thereby turn the tide of the growing disparity in educational opportunity within the district. 

But that would require money the district and the state don't have, so Spanish in every school in unlikely to happen anytime soon.  Adding French as another option would only complicate district finances further.

One last thing.  I said in my earlier post that immersion programs tend to be elitist.  In the Trib piece, Marie-Pierre Wolfe, the founder of Eugene's French immersion program*, said that the program was "...labeled elitist because the students came from educated families... ."

Her defense against the charge was remembering "...one student who didn’t come from the ‘rich’ hill where all the other students lived."  He even had to take "two buses" to get to the Fox Hollow School where the French program was located.

Ms Wolfe makes the case for me.  One poor kid among the many who aren't is hardly the definition of diversity.  

*(The school's No child Left Behind report card seems to indicate that the number of minority and special needs students is too few to measure with the required tests.  The enrollment at the school appears to be overwhelmingly white and wealthy.)

Duin slaps PPS 'upside the head' on school choice, transfer policy

In a rare front page commentary about the large crowd* that showed up to cheer on the winless Roosevelt High School girls' basketball team in their final season home game, O columnist Steve Duin, speaking bluntly, let Portland Public Schools know what he thinks of its transfer policy:

"Maintaining that sense of community at Roosevelt is not helped by the Portland School District's open enrollment policy. When 575 students who live in the shadow of the school drift off for an education at Cleveland, Wilson or Grant, it's hard to rally the neighborhood around the neighborhood high school."

He points out that Roosevelt, a facility built for 2000 students, now enrolls a mere 700, 80% of whom meet the district's free and reduced lunch poverty standard.

Well done, Steve Duin.

(The Lady Roughriders lost again, by the way, but it was a nail biter -- 31 - 29.) 

Meanwhile, over on the O's editorial page, Leslie Spencer was inveighing vociferously against public schools and the Oregon Education Association, and praising ...school choice!  Spencer cited a libertarian poll that supposedly showed that hardly anyone, Democrat or Republican, wants to send their kids to public schools.

According to Spencer, the major obstacle to choice (and education nirvana) is, of course, the teachers' union, which uses its members dues "...to fight any type of school reform that threatens its monopoly on power."

Well, perhaps.  But Spencer fails to mention that the political arm of the OEA,  People for the Improvement of Education, the ones who democratically determine union endorsements, is funded with voluntary donations, not by members' dues.

Leslie Spencer has a long history of bashing teachers' unions and espousing libertarian causes.  But here's the corker:

In 1994, Spencer married Lewis and Clark law professor, James Huffman, Federalist Society member and ardent defender of property rights.   Now there's a libertarian match made in heaven.

*(Duin himself was largely responsible for the turnout.)

"Unions Are Not the Problem"

Why union bashing by critics of pubic education is misguided.  The thoughts of educational historian Diane Ravitch:

"On the subject of the teachers' unions, I must confess that I have always been puzzled by people who insist that the unions are the cause of everything that is wrong with education. If we only could get rid of the union, they say, then we could raise performance. ...

"The unions don't seem to cause low performance in the wealthy suburban districts that surround our city. ... If getting rid of the unions was the solution to the problem of low performance, then why... do the southern states—where unions are weak or non-existent—continue to perform worse than states with strong unions? ...

"It actually doesn't seem to be all that hard to get rid of incompetent teachers. It appears that 40 percent of all those who enter teaching are gone within five years, according to research that I have seen. ...teachers do not gain due process rights for three years (in some places, it takes five). During those three to five years, their supervisors have plenty of time and opportunity to evaluate them and tell them to leave teaching. ...

(A point I've made many times.)

"I can't blame teachers for wanting protection from arbitrary administrators, especially now, when there are quite a few high-profile superintendents who like to grab headlines by threatening to fire teachers. ...

(That's undoubtedly a reference to DC Schools superintendent Michelle Rhee, easily the most "high-profile superintendent" in the country.)

"The right to form and join a union is one of the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 23)."

Teachers' unions have been instrumental in providing teachers with a living wage.  It wasn't always that way.  I remember seeing my senior social studies teacher working after school on the loading dock of the downtown Portland Meier and Frank.

Unions aren't perfect.  They have at times been obstacles to needed school reform, like negotiating contracts ensuring that experienced teachers would never have to work in low income schools against their wishes. 

But critics of "tenure" and seniority can't have it both ways.  When they argue that low income schools have far fewer experienced teachers that wealthier schools, they tacitly admit that teachers with seniority are better --or more effective-- than the newcomers.

So much for the argument that teacher performance, not seniority, should be the standard for determining which teachers are laid off in an economic downturn.

Economic downturn provides opportunity ... to bust teachers' unions!

The logic is impeccable.  Assuming that the economic downturn results in the loss of 574,000 state funded jobs, many of them teachers (in Oregon, the state provides 70% of school operating money), it stands to reason that any proposal to ameliorate such a catastrophic job loss would be welcome. 

Enter the Center on Reinventing Public Education.  It recently issued a report concluding that teacher layoffs based on seniority, something that's in every union contract, would force a reduction in staff of 14.3%.  But

"...if [a] district followed a seniority-neutral layoff policy—say by a standard of employee effectiveness—only 10 percent of the workforce would lose their jobs."

So there we have it.  Throw out the union rules, and lose fewer teachers, especially "effective" teachers rather than the burned-out relics who have been teaching for 20 years.

Who can resist such an argument?

Well, I can.  I'm always suspicious of proposals relying on the notion of measurable teacher "effectiveness".  Sure, some teachers are clearly better than others, but if it were a simple matter to come up with standards of teacher efficacy, standards which are neither arbitrary --the school principal doesn't like you, for example-- nor based on standardized student test scores, it would already have been done.  The seniority system, although imperfect, implies some level of pedagogical competence.  Other proposed systems are problematic at best.

Now don't get me wrong.  The Center on Reinventing Public Education, located at the University of Washington, appears to be a legit operation, not some knee-jerk right-wing think tank bent on ridding the nation of "government" schools. 

But its list of funders gives me pause.  They include

• The Gates Foundation (of course)
• The Broad Foundation
• The Business Roundtable
• NACSA (National Association of Charter School Authorizers)
• National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
• The Fordham Foundation
• The Walton Family Foundation

Moreover, one of the Center's lead researchers on school choice and charters, Paul Hill, is also a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a decidedly right-wing think tank.  And no friend of teachers' unions.

So.  I read the recommendations of the Center on Reinventing Public Education with, shall we say, a healthy dosel of skepticism.