Why I can't mourn Harold Ramis as my friend would like

Harold Ramis died yesterday.

At 69.

Although I am not yet 50 I feel the man largely responsible for Animal House, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Caddyshack etc. is my contemporary.

That is because like any white boy who grew up in America in the 70s, 80s or even early 90s who had any kind of socio-economic support system (money to go to the movies, time to laugh and screw around with friends with a reasonable sense of comfort and safety, IQ over say, 95, etc.), his ethos -- his relentlessly ironic stance towards the world -- taught me how to be.

I would like to say it was my father and his "Greatest Generation" that left a lasting impression, or all the screaming sports coaches, or the sincere  female public school teachers who -- had they been born 15 years later -- would have been physicians, lawyers, businesswomen, etc.

But, in fact, it was the films Ramis helped create, Animal House and so on, that shaped me and many -- if not most -- like me. And though I know I risk alienating many in saying this, that is a rather depressing fact. For all the pleasure he gave as comedic "artist" -- and he was an extraordinary one -- I simply can't give way to the overwhelming mourning, a mourning you might note, led by lots of (still) boys like me.

Don't get me wrong. Ramis was brilliant. ROLF. Roll on the floor laughing as we text to day.

Yet, again, in all honesty, it wasn't his humor per se that appealed to me as much, again, as his ethos, his critical stance. That is the problem.

For Ramis, quite literally, everything was a joke. No matter how serious the situation -- flunking out of college, inability to find a job, combat behind enemy lines, supernatural terror -- could be managed with a clever quip amongst male friends. Bill Murray mainly. The time of the day kept continually at arm's length with a laugh.


This is depressing to me now because this ironic stance, while comforting in many ways, like the food from my boyhood I still over indulge in (chips, ribs, cheeseburgers), is damaging, both to myself and those around me.

Grown men don't laugh about everything.

Not everything is a joke.

It certainly was not for my father. A Goldwater Republican, he would have stood hard and firm and formally polite against, for example, the lunacy of privatizing public education.

Yet for most like me, everything can be a Ramis like joke. That is the nirvana, the happy state we seek for when we can. Taking something seriously is a sin. It invites ridicule. Men of my age and background -- who still enjoy extraordinary privileges -- keep our Ramis like distance from the world while the remarkable country we were handed tilts backwards and sidewards in to racism, sexism, gross inequality, gross stupidity, and violence. Ugliness towards both women and children.

What seems left of white men my age when they are called to act or take something seriously is just pure anger. Without the irony: hate and fury.

At what? A world that can't be so easily laughed off?

We are utterly unequipped to confront those like us once they forego the ironic mode for a "political" passion. Only John Stewart comes close to finding some equanimity here so we cling to him like a superhero, a warrior poet, a philosopher.

Unlike our fathers and grandfathers we prefer above all else to be funny -- or try to be funny -- like the characters Ramis created in Animal House, Stripes and Ghostbusters. What we want is to be indifferent, free from care.

After 9/11 there was a call for the end of irony, and David Letterman's television manner caught a lot of heat. Ramis, however, made Letterman's popularity possible. No Animal House, no Letterman. Johnny Carson was not the progenitor here. Ramis was. Letterman was a Ramis character occupying a live TV set for us.

It is telling, I think, that the Ramis masterpiece -- Groundhog Day -- was for many years under appreciated. The film is brilliant, a piece of high seriousness, maybe one of the best films of all time, and  perhaps for Ramis a shot at redemption. I have no idea what film critics say. But there he depicts a character who has to live eternity, the same day over and over again, before simply learning to be decent. But for years it could only be understood as a Bill Murray vehicle for ironic distance -- with a weird and disturbing twist. "It isn't as funny as Animal House," I remember a friend saying.

No, it isn't. And I wish that film had had been made first. I would have been different. So, I think, would have much of the country.


As most know, in the Ramis film, Murray plays a somewhat nasty weatherman who somehow gets "stuck" in or on "Groundhog" Day, Feb. 2, in Pennsylvania. That is, he is condemned to live that same day over and over again. Murray's character panics at first, a panic that provides SNL comedy (what most Murray fans, especially back then, expect) to the first section of the movie. Then things get more interesting.

Murray gets depressed and tries multiple forms of suicide. Nothing works. He can't escape this day, this time, even through death. Gradually he uses the time given to him to improve himself -- learning French, the piano, etc. His skills provide some amusement for himself but only superficial satisfaction (he learns enough about individual women in his strange time outside time to seduce them -- but not enough to seduce the woman he actually loves).

Eventually, he gives in -- but not to despair. Rather, he gives in to time, this time, living the same day over and over again only in a fuller and richer way that involves him engaging on an intimate level every person he meets.

No irony. Just the day as it comes.

When he gives himself up and over to time which we have left to us he, in fact, finds love, sleeping with the woman he has been seeking for a seeming eternity and waking up the next morning to discover he has broken through: it is Feb. 3.

 Groundhog Day derives from the Hebrew bible, Ecclesiastes to be specific and its narrator, Koheleth, who straddles the line between pessimism and optimism that Murray's film walks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4ga_M5Zdn4

A Time for Everything

3 There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

²     a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
³     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
⁴     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
⁵     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
⁶     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
⁷     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
⁸     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

⁹ What do workers gain from their toil? ¹⁰ I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. ¹¹ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet^[a] no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. ¹² I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. ¹³ That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. ¹⁴ I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.
  
What I mean to say is Groundhog Day is a profoundly religious film that explores with perfect Murrayesque  pitch the thin line between pessimism and optimism, secular and sacred that one finds in Koholeth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NjNOAncIlI 

For Koholeth, the best we can do is embrace the day to day routine of our lives, our time. God has put eternity in us, but deep in our heart where, paradoxically, we can't fully access it -- or him. This day, this time, we never really get outside of. We don't get close to Go'd's time until we embrace the time he has given us in full. 

Ironic distance from life ala Animal House -- for all its call to party and have good time --keeps us from living in that time that is given to us.

MI Ed Reform: The Meeeechigan Option! Call it Ufer!

Don't say EAA, Lisa Lyons says, trying to expand the EAA. Say OPTIONS!!!

I can hear legendary Michigan Football broadcaster Bob Ufer in my mind's ear:

"Two tight ends and a balanced line...Ricky 'the Peach' Leach under center, [Russell] Davis close, [Harlan] Huckleby deep...Bo 'General George Patton' Schembechler pacing the sidelines...there's the snap..it is the Meeechigan option...Leach keeps...he is in for the score!!!!"

Honk! Honk! Hail to the Victors! (the horn, by the way, came from Patton's own jeep -- a gift to Ufer from Patton's nephew)

Ah, simpler days.

Michigan and Ohio State dominated the Big Ten, very often with "option" football.

Option football was an offensive scheme wherein the quarterback (Leach) would take the snap, head down either side of the line of scrimmage, and either hand to the "close" man/fullback (Davis), keep it himself and turn the corner off tackle, or pitch to a "deep' man/ tailback (Huckleby) who was running more or less parallel to him, but deeper in the back field.

Here is Ufer, hear and see for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nam4sX1i7fo

Option football went out of style -- long before the dominance of Michigan football went out of style -- mainly because it really didn't provide "options."

Defenses knew you needed one guy to play the fullback (inside linebacker), one guy to play the quarterback (defensive end), and one guy to play the pitchman/tailback (cornerback).

And, most importantly for my extra point to come about education reform discussions, if you didn't have overwhelming force on the offensive line the scheme was kind of useless. Michigan in the 70s and early 80s had overwhelming force, intellectual and physical, up front. As Ufe says, M only had "7 pounds per man" on Ohio State's Defensive line. What makes the play here is the tight end manhandling the defensive end and good offensive tackle play -- not the "Option!"

 You will note in the Ufer video the Michigan tight end (last M player lined up on left) latches on and then buries the Ohio State stand up defensive end, allowing Leach to turn in to the endzone.

 [True afficionadoes will appreciate, too, the left OT, next to tight end, takes an inside shoulder on the defensive tackle and still drives him 2.5 yards off the line. Taking the inside shoulder drew the DT away from the direction of the play. If the OT stepped to his left to wall the DT off the DT would have headed towards the play. (All World OT Mike Kenn, I believe, 6'7, 275 who played 17 NFL seasons w/out missing a game, is here the right tackle; in a regular, rather than goal line set, he would have been at left -- he actually gets a piece of the middle linebacker here and the play was probably crafted to make OSU think M was running behind Kenn, to the right, following the man in motion)]

I thought of that this morning because the new word for education -- soon to replace "choice" -- in statewide discussions of Michigan education is "Options"!

This turn to the Option! really was not an option chosen, and therefore not optimal for organizing discussions of education.

It was forced by academic and political reality  when State Superintendent Mike Flanagan -- having called for more schools to go into the EAA in December -- sent "Chancellor" ( a bit too Germanic, I prefer the more Midwestern "General George Patton" Bo) John Covington a note asking him to end the EAA's 15 year contract of exclusivity with the state (signed in 2011 at the height of Gov. Snyder's eduction reform moment) to turn around Michigan's low performing schools.

This happened during the same week House Education Chair Lisa Lyons was doing incoherent presentations to the Republican caucus trying to get them to codify the EAA to go statewide, goal line to goal line.

But after a series of stunning posts by  www.eclectablog.comshowing what most in education knew -- the EAA is a disaster -- everyone involved wants a way out and the way out is -- Options!

Flanagan and the MDE, via spokesperson Martin Ackley, don't disagree with the EAA's "academic strategies," they just suddenly want -- Options! This even though Flanagan and the MDE chose the EAA as the state's only -- Option! -- in 2011.

Governor Snyder and education reporter turned Snyder spokesperson (and is there really a difference in Michigan?) Dave Murray says we have been in support of this all along! Options! The Governor wants Options! too!

Chancellor Dr. or is it Dr. Chancellor  Covington himself sent out a letter in favor of -- you got it -- Options!

Reasonable education folks like Vicki Markavitch and David Arsen want -- Options! -- if it is way to get clear of our current Options! Markavitch actually was funny in the Free Press story about this, saying failing schools should have a "choice" about where they seek help.

The whole conversation is starting to  center around the positively goofy assumption that Superintendent Flanagan somehow just needs to be unleashed, legislatively speaking, to tap into the assorted -- Options! -- available to him to save struggling Districts and Schools.

Let Flanagan be Flanagan? Heretofore Mr. Flanagan's preferred option to help schools was to dissolve Districts.

Couple other problems here with the return of Options! football -- other than Superintendent Flanagan.

First, public education is not failing, although several Districts are bogged down with issues related mainly to poverty and huge cuts in state support since 2000. Second, the State of Michigan has never "turned around" a District in its history so I why are we acting like we have some proven plans ready to go?  Third, to the extent one can imagine good academic  -- Options! -- beyond the EAA there are none this legislature or Governor will fund. Option football, again, depended on investing in a massive, overwhelming force up front to create the "option." Fourth (punt!), and perhaps most important right now,  kids and families in Detroit's EAA have no Options! because the state forced Options on them.

One positive thing: it is nice to see so many in Governor Snyder's divided Michigan to be gathering around the Michigan Option! the way they once gathered around the Meeechigan Option as called out by Ufer. Perhaps instead of awful game playing with kids by creating chaos, obfuscation, and animosity we can try Bob Ufer's once winning formula: Simplicity, Sincerity, and Enthusiasm.

We really can't afford another fumble like the EAA at this point in the game.

"Options" the New "Choice" for MI State Superintendent: he should take the retirement option

I have been following public education issues in Michigan almost daily for the last two years.

The initial reason I started doing so was that I saw a potential threat to the education of my two young children even in my fortunate public school setting -- Bloomfield Hills, MI -- where I first noticed education reform language (kids first, choice, academy, etc.) popping up during a contentious bond issue and a subsequent school board election. One thing that concerned me was the first version of the EAA expansion bill (HB6004). This version would have allowed the state to inventory and seize unused school properties for entities like the EAA.

Remember that, pols, when considering state wide codification.

My District has had to close schools and combine elementary with middle schools, etc., not unlike Saginaw did last week.The reasons, of course, are sickeningly close. In the housing bubble of the 90s and early 2000s Bloomfield literally had priced itself out of the reach of young families and enrollment and enrollment predictions plummeted. The savvy Superintendent who saw this coming and did the closing before the housing bust was, of course, condemned.

Et in Arcadia Ego as they said in the Renaissance. Death, ugliness, and sheer stupidity come to paradise, too. I have a T-shirt that says, "My son loves his Focus School, and so do I!"

Correspondingly, I have spent considerable time watching and critiquing the words and actions of elected Republicans, both in my own area and across the state. This is because the main threat to public education in Michigan comes from Governor Snyder's acceptance of the long held beliefs of the Devos family and close political advisors Richard McClellan, Dick Posthumus, and John Engler.

This nexus has believed since the early 90s that "public" education should involve a bare bones system for those at the very bottom of the economic ladder and that privatization is the key to academic and political success. Perversely and paradoxically, they have come closest to meeting their "free market" goals by having the state reach further and further in to local Districts and by convincing almost everyone that "state" takeovers of public education are the only solution to struggling schools.

That nothing they have done has worked well is anymore relevant than the fact that this now 15 year old process runs counter to their deepest political beliefs. Detroit Public Schools has been under Emergency Management since Jon Engler and 1999.

But perhaps the most disturbing words I have heard on public education came not from Devos or Governor Snyder, but the Michigan Department Education.

Let me explain.

Last week, amidst an ongoing political debate about the state wide expansion of the Educational Achievement Authority (HB4369) that the state has been trying to pass in some form since Dec. 2012, State Superintendent Mike Flanagan seemed to end the state's relationship with this failed "experiment."

Parents and teachers in Detroit celebrated! Twitter and Facebook was buzzing much more than the EAA's preferred software: Buzz.

It quickly became clear, though, that Mr. Flanagan only was trying to facilitate the passage of HB4369 so that he would have "options" -- including the EAA -- to help troubled Districts. One blogger had to tell the state to "sober up": http://www.democracy-tree.com/eaa-gone-hydra-beast-heads/ More troubling, Mr. Flanagan never paused to say the state has YET to help a troubled District other than by closing it. That is, he simply assumes that his institution -- that is losing public trust every day -- can do something it has never done.

The line that sent me spinning, however, came from the MDE spokesperson Martin Ackley: “Now, this is in no way a statement or an indication of a lack of confidence in the EAA or its academic strategies. This is just an action that needed to be taken in order to provide flexibility and to provide options other than the EAA in which to place these most struggling schools.”http://michiganradio.org/post/how-will-michigan-help-failing-schools-without-eaa

 According to Michigan Public Radio, even regular Lansing reporters can't figure out what the hell is going on.

Parents, teachers, citizens, university faculty....everybody needs to ponder this statement from the MDE. The Michigan Department of Education, having heard everything it has heard about the EAA from teachers risking livelihoods on www.eclectablog.com,www.eclectablog.com and presumably having done some of their own investigating, supports the "academic strategies" of the EAA. Read that again: They support public education that relies on 40+ kids in a classroom working on computer modules only (w/one assigned and never tested software) staffed by TFA and and inexperienced administrators. And they not only want to still consider it as "option" to expand statewide but they want to continue it as an "experiment" in Detroit.

As brave university faculty and others have been arguing, it is simply wrong to see Detroit public school kids as lab rats. But this is virtually the policy and public relations stance of the MDE.

Why, in the world, if this is what our Michigan Department of Education wants, do we have a Michigan Department of Education?

That is, for the moment, I have stopped worrying so much about Devos, et. al., but have started worrying more about the bureaucrats who are in over their heads in this age of education "reform" and have absorbed only the language and thoughts of their masters.

I have called for State Superintendent Mike Flanagan to resign before: http://bloomfield-mi.patch.com/groups/ken-jacksons-blog/p/shame-on-mike-flanaganit-is-time-to-step-down_2225359f
If nothing else, his resignation would call greater attention to this growing statewide nightmare: the loss of public education as most have known it.

I first grew suspicious when he took over the "skunks works" debacle to help the Governor save face. But what we have here is not just incompetence, but a political willingness -- in the case of the choreographed release of the false notion that the state was closing the EAA -- to actively deceive parents and children. At best, Mr. Flanagan's gesture was the ugly sort of equivocation we expect from elected politicians. As Michigan Public Radio reports, they can't tell if the timing of the EAA was a "coincidence" or not. They can't tell how it is connected to the HB4369 legislation, but they think it must be somehow.

Perhaps Mr. Flanagan believes he is acting as a statesman, cutting some kind of deal.

Yet his job is to advocate for public education first. And he is not doing that. He is only at the moment interested in creating "options" for the state to takeover Districts. "Options", strangely, has taken the place of "choice" as the Lansing buzzword. You don't get to choose when there is no adequately funded and supported public system to choose from and you don't get an "option" for being taken over by the state.

In a digital media age with everyone watching it is way too late to save face for a bad (EAA) decision.

Public education advocates need to stop looking just at Republicans for the threat to public education, but to their own institutions, who are as dizzy with "reformee" jargon and thought as any 21 year old Teach for America catch. This is a group, folks, is not career ready for the 21st century global economy.

NYTimes Kristof needs Professor Me! But I ain't feeling the love!

I admire NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for his tireless work commenting on easily dismissed abuses around the world.

Apparently, he admires me, too.

Well, not me specifically, but my profession: he deeply admires the "wisdom found on university campuses." I am only one English Professor and an Associate Dean of one Graduate School.

Frankly, though, I am not really feeling the love.

Indeed, just as I was set to continue in a series of blogposts that try to explain the "college" or "University" in relation to education reform's incessant invocation of "Career and College Ready!" -- an incessant chatter bolstered by The NYTimes and its editorial pages -- Kristof popped up with this Sunday morning op-ed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-professors-we-need-you.html?ref=opinion

Unfortunately, like his colleague Thomas Friedman, Kristof gets almost everything wrong about universities and university faculty. This is true even though he is ostensibly asking for academic help. I don't want to be too snarky. I truly admire Kristof and believe him i part. It looks, curiously, like he wanted the title to be "Professors We Need You!" but the NYTimes, following its current editorial path, shifted to a quasi-reformee antagonism: "Smart Minds, Slim Impact." National Review anyone?

Ultimately, then, he reveals to me only that the "university" is failing to do its job -- one it needs to do every 30 years or so -- to explain its place in the world to the world.

Kristof complains that university faculty have "marginalized" themselves by fostering a "culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. This culture of exclusivity is then transmitted to the next generation through the publish or perish tenure process. Rebels are too often crushed or driven away."

Citing some of the disgruntled and "driven away" Kristof argues -- rather strangely -- that faculty have to spend too much time impressing their peers and getting tenure via competing in a scholarly world that they aren't able to take the time to communicate to the wider world until late in their careers -- if then. He seems utterly uninterested in his own logic: that it is somehow a good idea for someone to claim expertise in a field before they have expertise in a field.

Uh, Nick, I work everyday to preserve academic integrity and this really ain't helping.
 

Kristof, having seen Spielberg's Lincoln with the rest of the NYTimes op ed team, and believing the film's suggestion that you really need to include a team of "rivals" even if those rivals are non-sensical, also feels compelled to throw in a sop to the right wing.

Sociology, he says, is still too lefty. Economics has it right because they have more faculty on the right.

No word, though, about his impressions about cancer immunology.

He finishes with a now standard riff on how TED talks, social media and, of course, MOOCs can correct the medieval monk like lives of academies.

Oh boy.

Where to start. So much of this, including Kristof's passing allusion to the "Sokal Hoax" feels warmed over (1996, a vestige of critical theory culture wars with its own disturbing and historical context -- in academic terms this is like talking about Monica Lewinsky and the dress as if it matters now).

Maybe we can start with the basics and then move our way back down to TED and MOOCs, etc.

What makes universities distinct from, say, high schools, is that their primary mission is research.

For that research to be good and meaningful it needs to be vetted by experts in a field, each competing (in an international marketplace of ideas) for publication space and research grants. Generally speaking, what isn't good or useful in such a demanding market is "excluded," as sometimes, are the folks that produce non-competitive findings ("the culture of exclusivity"). Not all that research or the processes of vetting will be immediately "accessible" to even a general, educated audience. Nor should it be. Very often, what is easily understood or grasped is called an "opinion," not an empirically verified fact. Verifying facts takes time. So does making sound arguments.

You really don't want someone, again, who has not proved themselves in a particular field to be able to pontificate in a modern digital age as an "expert." That is a recipe for celebrity (Michelle Rhee comes to mind in education), not useful expertise.

But this is what Kristof seems to be advocating: celebrity. He will find many willing to jump at the chance, but they probably won't be the folks anyone with real expertise takes seriously.

That's a problem.

In short, you want your "Phd" to continue to mean something. And you want the title "Professor" to mean something. Universities are producing too many Phds for the available academic jobs -- and that is a serious issue -- but it points to the competitive nature of the culture. You don't get hired or tenured without being very good, very driven, and also -- given the numbers -- very lucky.

To their credit, the NIH and NSF are working to help universities move a dizzying backlog of very, very, very smart and talented graduate students to multiple career paths -- something really worth reporting and discussing -- particularly in light of the constant lament about American math and science skills.

Well trained folks are there in plenty if that is truly what corporate American wants.

Let me give a simple example of the competitive world of academia (a far cry from the peaceful monastic life Kristof conjures) from my relatively "accessible" field: Shakespeare. The field has been around for well over 200 years. There are hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence about the writer and his times. To say something new or even interesting about the playwright is incredibly difficult. To get a tenure-track job as a Shakespearean, then, at a research university (there are only 10 to 20 available in a given year), you have to be able to demonstrate the capacity to enter that long discussion in a noteworthy way.

Indeed, you have to be something of a "rebel" to even get noticed in this field of competition.

But not so rebellious that you have nothing persuasive to say. It depends on what you mean by "rebel." Very often, unfortunately, rebel can mean simply someone looking for an end around this difficult and challenging arena.

Despite this sociological/economic situation in Shakespeare studies, the NYTimes and other entities continue to promote nonsense like the "Shakespeare isn't Shakespeare" fantasies of gifted actors like Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi when ever they get a chance. Brave, informed souls like Columbia's James Shapiro might try to enter a popular debate but if you are trying to muster argument in the face of the will of the NYTimes...well, why bother?

Consider this: if any of the tens of thousands of qualified Shakespeareans or potential Shakespeareans could find one piece of evidence to support the conspiracy folks they would be on the road to academic success beyond their wildest dreams.

But the evidence isn't there.

It is difficult to communicate specialized knowledge to a broad audience because very often a broad audience isn't really interested in specialized knowledge.

Startling break throughs in any field are in short supply -- and you want it that way. That does not mean, however, that the long, extensive process that produces those break thoughs (the "arcane" journals, etc.) aren't valuable. On the contrary, they are needed now more than ever.

Back to the MOOCs on this point. The Stanford model of the MOOCs, for those that don't know, is this: there are only so many faculty in given fields that regularly produce meaningful content knowledge so why not use their work to "teach" one or two courses and have all these other "professors" be "facilitators" -- BINGO? University tuition drops!!!

The problem is this. While it is certainly true that only a dozen or so faculty members in a given field produce regularly valuable research they do so ONLY because so many tens of thousands of others are working so hard to make things competitive. The current MOOC model makes as much sense as saying their is only one Lionel Messi in soccer so let's watch him and shut every other soccer league down.

There, I think, is a real sop to the right wing and free market competition ideologues. Leave the Sociology Department alone.

Please, Mr. Kristof, if you want faculty expertise, all you have to do is ask.

K-12 Snowflake very different from University Snowflake -- and that tells us a lot about College Readiness, Part Two

 I now know a few extra snow cancellation days won't hurt my kids' education.

Why?

Harvard told me so.

Well, not "Harvard" as in the university issued a formal statement, but Harvard as in an Assistant Professor in the Kennedy School of Public Policy -- Professor Joshua Goodman -- told me in this study, complete with a now standard cutesy title ("Flaking Out"): http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/articles/new-study-examines-the-impact-of-snow-days-on-student-performance

I became aware of this study when my good friends at Oakland Schools "tweeted" it a few days ago.

Now, of course, I really didn't need Professor Goodman's study to tell me that a few extra snow cancellation days this year wouldn't unduly hurt my kids' education. Neither will the three days my kid missed with a cold.

But having a study "from Harvard" to buttress  my impressions doesn't hurt. Indeed, much social science research does not tell us anything we don't know. Rather, much social science research attempts to confirm or disavow standard perceptions and so, while incredibly valuable,  is subject to simple parody: "I didn't need a study to tell me that!"

Just helping you get y'all "college ready" or, in this case, I should say, "University ready."

You see, folks at the Michigan House of Representatives, Michigan State Board of Education and the Michigan Department of Education -- following the lead of education reformers nation wide -- have begun worrying that my kids won't be "college ready" (a term from the folks at ACT referring to test score data that supposedly shows how a student at the end of a jr. year will do at the end of their freshman year in college) without a few make-up days in June or even July.

But I have some serious, serious doubts about what education reformers, the Michigan State Board of Education, the Michigan Department of Education and so on know about actual colleges or universities, their function, their core values, etc.

Frankly, I have doubts about the good people at the ACT in Princeton, NJ of all places.

What is this university or college we are or are not "ready" for? We are not ready for college or university we say all the time now? But we don't spend much time talking about what a college or university actually is. Does the university have a Common Core curriculum kindergarteners can start preparing for now?

I can't get at this all in one blogpost, of course, but here is a start:

The American university system that has become the envy of the world has -- at its heart -- what could be perceived as a dirty little secret. The institution is really not about "teaching" or not teaching in the sense most understand the term via their K-12 experience (and 97 % of Americans now claim expertise in K-12 teaching!).

The American university is first and foremost about research and faculty. Universities thrive by hiring top faculty to conduct research in assorted fields or disciplines and, as part of that research process, disseminate that information to undergraduate and graduate students. That dissemination of information process in the course of conducting research is what aligns best with what most think of as "teaching." But the real job, you can see, is to conduct research to change and improve the world, a holdover notion from the Humanists of the 16th century. Correspondingly, most university faculty have little training in pedagogy (teaching). They get hired based on their research abilities, and they get tenure and promotion and raises (either through grants or in house funding) based on their research production. Some Professors are certainly better at engaging undergraduates in ongoing research than others, just as some Professors are ultimately more productive researchers than colleagues. There used to be a myth that high end researchers weren't good in the classroom. Certainly there are some cases like that. Overall, however, faculty who are good at the main part of the job are very good, too, at other parts.

Teaching? Or what we tend to call teaching? Students are welcome and encouraged to learn by participating in that world shaping process. 

Readers might have some sense of this difference in "teaching" if they recall their own Professors at University. Taking classes was a quite different experience than K-12, no?

 There is a reason for that.

Let's try to get at this, perhaps, by going back to Professor Joshua Goodman of the snow study (perhaps I already have moved too far away from "snow day" discussions to hold any parents' interest!).

Here are some bits from  his already impressive academic cv, available as are most academic cvs on the University website.

I have bolded the part that an academic or academic administrator would look at first if reviewing him for a potential hire and I have italicized one interesting piece of info -- he spent two years as a math teacher in Watertown, MA that would come up, perhaps, over lunch during a campus interview:

Ph.D., Economics, Columbia University, honors, 2004-2009
M. Phil., Education, Cambridge University, 2000-2001
B.A., Physics, Harvard University, magna cum laude, 2000
Professional Experience:
Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, 2009-present
Math Teacher, Watertown High School (Watertown, MA), 2001-2003
Academic Affiliations:
Program in Education Policy and Governance, Harvard Kennedy School
Inequality and Social Policy Group, Harvard Kennedy School
Center for Education Policy and Research, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Teaching and Research Fields:
Labor Economics, Public Economics, Education Policy
Research Grants:
U.S. Department of Education, “Doubling Up: the Impact of Remedial Algebra on Students' Long-run Outcomes,” $291,164, Principal Investigator, 2012-2014.
Honors, Scholarships and Fellowships:
2008-2009
Dissertation Fellowship
Columbia University
2008
Best Graduate TA, Undergraduate Elective
Columbia Economics
2007-2008
Lewis A. Sanders Fellowship
Columbia University
2007
Vickrey Prize, Best 3rd Year Paper, Runner-Up
Columbia Economics
2006-2007 Ralph Erdman Holben Fellowship Columbia University
2004-2006 Faculty Fellowship Columbia University
2000-2001 Harvard-Cambridge Scholarship Harvard University
2000 Phi Beta Kappa Harvard University
1997-1999 Derek Bok Awards for Excellence in Teaching Harvard University
Publications:
“A Double Dose of Algebra.” Education Next 13, no. 1, with Kalena Cortes and Takako
Nomi, 2013.
“Parental Socioeconomic Status, Child Health, and Human Capital.” International
Encyclopedia of Education 2: 253-259, with Janet Currie, 2010.
“Skills, Schools, and Credit Constraints: Evidence from Massachusetts.” Education Finance
and Policy 5, no. 1: 36-53, 2010.
“Who Merits Financial Aid?: Massachusetts' Adams Scholarship.” Journal of Public
Economics 92, no. 10: 2121-2131, 2008.
Working Papers:
“Intensive Math Instruction and Educational Attainment: Long-Run Impacts of Double- Dose
Algebra.” HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP13-009, with Kalena Cortes
and Takako Nomi, 2013.
“Merit Aid, College Quality and College Completion: Massachusetts’ Adams Scholarship as
an In-Kind Subsidy.” HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP13-005, with Sarah
Cohodes, 2013.
“Bankruptcy Law and The Cost of Credit: The Impact of Cramdown on Mortgage Interest
Rates.” HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP12-037, with Adam Levitin,
2012.
“Gold Standards?: State Standards Reform and Student Achievement.” HKS Faculty
Research Working Paper Series RWP12-031, 2012.
“The Labor of Division: Returns to Compulsory Math Coursework.” HKS Faculty Research
Working Paper Series RWP12-032, 2012.
“The Wages of Sinistrality: Handedness, Brain Structure and Human Capital Accumulation.”
HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP12-002, 2012.

Professor Goodman has what could be termed a  pure academic pedigree, pure as a freshly fallen snowflake.

From his cv one notes immediately: He made it to Harvard as an undergrad in a STEM field (physics), looks to have taken a year abroad at Cambridge for teaching degree (Homerton College?), then taught high school for two years before powering through Grad School at Columbia in 5 years. Along the way he has garnered his real academic credentials: grant money and published articles in what look to be respected journals in an established and growing field.

Moms, as bright as Professor Goodman is, though, he might not get to stay at Harvard! Harvard, like other top schools, tends not to tenure its Assistant Professors (although I haven't taken the time to look up the Kennedy School process in particular). Generally speaking, though, to get tenure at Harvard you have to have a major, international reputation. And that is hard to do in six or seven years even if you move fast like Professor Goodman.

Consequently, Professor Goodman might have to move on to another university -- perhaps here in Michigan -- and Harvard will hire a senior person. Who knows? May be he doesn't want to pursue an academic job. I am just reading the cv as another academic would.

Nasty, competitive business academia, in a global marketplace. Professor Goodman isn't just competing against Phds from all across the country, he is competing against Phds from across the world. It is this kind of competition -- really something the business market place struggles to match -- that produces knowledge at such a rapid rate.

Some distance from Watertown, MA and high school math, right? But in that Professor Goodman -- by contrast to most university academics -- has a profound connection with K-12 education.

That, and his work on snow days. More to come as the weather continues.

How a University Professor and Parent stopped worrying about Ed Reform and came to love Snow Day talks, Part One

As a university professor and father of two in public schools I have been worrying almost incessantly for the past few years about the damage being done by education "reform." And, frankly, because I feel so passionately about this I have been trying to make other people -- both at my university (Wayne State in Detroit) and public school parents -- worry, too.

But it seems what people really want to talk about is the weather and, in particular, snow days and snow day cancellation. I am reminded of my mother's cry in the old days when the weather news only was available for 5 minutes or so on the evening newscasts. "The weather!" she would shriek, trying to stop us from changing the channel (by hand).

I can't really get anyone's attention about the wholesale elimination of teacher training, a teacher shortage, ridiculous tests, "edtech" corruption bilking public funds, attempts to create two-tiered education systems that have people talking in terms of "apartheid, etc." or the longstanding aim of the most powerful political family in the state (Devos, of Amway fame) to end public education entirely and move to a privatized system.

Nor can I get anyone's attention about how this ultimately will alter the country's most precious of resources: its university system. And that is because our university system remains so strangely disconnected from K-12 education.

Yet, a snow day cancellation decision inspires Shakespearean (my area of expertise, and more on that to follow...) passion!

The weather!

So: I am going to stop worrying and talk about the weather, too. Promise. Let's talk snow days! Snow, snow, and more snow.

It has been bad, the winter.

As Shakespeare's Richard III might say, this has been the winter of our discontent.

In Michigan, most School Districts -- a geographical organizational structure of public education called for in the 1963 State Constitution that most of us accept have come to accept as eternal -- have gone over the number of days they can cancel before scheduling either whole days of replacement instruction in the early summer or added minutes throughout the regular school year.

The Michigan Department of Education and its Superintendent, Mike Flanagan, in conjunction with the State Board of Education, and its President, John Austin, have issued this statement on the matter:
"The State Board of Education believes, and strongly encourages school districts to, replace additional lost days with full days of student instruction, not by adding on minutes to the existing days remaining in the school year."

Now, what is striking about this snow day statement -- outside of its otherworldly grammatical structure -- is that Mr. Flanagan has been busy for two years advocating schools and whole districts close -- not stay open. He has helped close two: Saginaw Buena Vista and Inkster and would have closed Pontiac, but was stopped by Oakland County Republicans (yay Republicans!). But when it comes to snow day cancellations he wants FULL DAYS OF INSTRUCTION.

Not replacing full school days, the elected and Democrat controlled State Board of Education says, could cost your kids' career and your community. Really. They said this. Here is their over the top, off the charts, we think in "reformee" language: "Full replacement days offer every student the full extent of quality instruction that they missed when the school was closed. This method allows teachers to complete their full lesson plans with integrity and provide students with the appropriate depth of instruction they need to meet their instructional goals for every class. This is the better strategy to ensure that students will be ready for career, college, and community."

Who talks like this? The extra day for many -- the privileged at least -- will simply mean more pizza and cupcakes.

This is the Board that rather than take up new funding options for Michigan schools  delayed their efforts until after the November 2014 elections.

In short, they can't take the risk of suggesting ways to adequately fund schools to keep them open -- not through inclement weather but for good -- but they can proclaim in this kind of robust rhetoric that a loss of a day will hamper kids' career, college, and community readiness!

Please. Basta. Stop. Let's talk like grown-ups, not Devos managed automatons.

More to come: I am just getting warmed up from the snow!

Will we ever Welcome Back Mr. Kotter? Or will we wait for Chelsea?

Wikipedia fun fact: For the first season of Gabe Kaplan's 1976 hit TV series Welcome Back Kotter -- about a high school teacher returning to his old, struggling NYC neighborhood to work with a relatively small and diverse group of "unteachable" kids -- the teachers' union insisted a representative be on set so that Mr. Kaplan would not demean the profession.

For those that recall the show, hold that image in your head for a moment. You will need a steady grip on your thoughts to do so, given the current nature of education "reform" talk in our country.

If you are of a certain age, of course, you will have powerful memories of Kotter. These were the days of Network Television (3 channels kids!), when every elementary and middle school kid (and their parents) watched the same show on a given week night and returned to school the next morning to talk about said -- fresh with borrowed lines and modes of behavior.

"Up your nose with a rubber hose!"

Amongst other things, Kotter introduced America to Vinnie Barbarino -- played by John Travolta -- who -- before the show would end after its fourth season -- had starred in Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Bigger than US Steel, to borrow another line from that era.

For all its popularity and power, however, the show never seem to do well in syndication or have a strange cable/digital after life like some of its contemporaries: Happy Days, Mash, and so on. Maybe it was Travolta's contract.

 I do now hear John Sebastian's #1 hit theme song song on Channel 7 of my Sirius radio.

Welcome back
Your dreams were your ticket out
Welcome back
To that same old place that you laughed about
Well the names have all changed since you hung around
But those dreams have remained and they've turned around
Who'd have thought they'd lead ya
(who'd have thought they'd lead ya)
Back here where we need ya
(back here where we need ya)
Yeah, we tease him a lot 'cause we got him on the spot
Welcome back
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6o0Cah5kQU

Perhaps the reason Kotter has disappeared from our cultural memory is embedded in these lyrics which, again, express the premise of the show and an increasingly distant part of American culture.

The idea, for example, that teaching was a profession that could move one up in the world ("your dreams were your ticket out") has been largely lost. Teach for America is -- along with other entities like the Department of Education, the New York Times, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the White House -- is refashioning teaching as a sort of charity position that one from privileged class does for a short time before moving on.

Because of the longstanding commitment of teachers' unions to the Democratic Party, this won't fully dawn on all until -- in a few years -- Chelsea Clinton acting as a reporter for EducationNation interviews Malia Obama, fresh from Harvard with a BA in Sociology ( like Arne *STEM is for other people's kids* Duncan), about her first year in a Rhee-covering DC classroom as a TFA student.

The corresponding idea, too, that a teacher who understands a particular neighborhood and culture will be best suited to teach kids is being systematically demolished. New teacher tests in my home state, Michigan, for example, pretty much guarantee that no kid from a Detroit neighborhood or inner ring suburb will be able to go "back to the same old place that they laughed about."http://bridgemi.com/2014/01/how-michigans-colleges-and-universities-rank-on-tough-new-teacher-certification-tests/ There will be jobs for a few Emergency Managers and Chancellors because, politically and symbolically, corporate reform will need a Kotter like face ..... but Mr. Kotter won't be in the classroom. He simply didn't come from a place that could prepare him for those tests.

Let's go back to Mr. Kotter, Gabe Kaplan himself, being supervised by the union rep.

Valiant public educators today would be thrilled -- not suspicious --  to see a figure like Kotter (funny, charismatic, engaged, innovative) teaching a small group of "sweathogs." But you won't see that kind of movie anymore (Dead Poets' Society, Mr. Chips, and so on).

Education has failed so much since the glory days of America, we have been told, that we need to "disrupt" to improve it. And the Kotteresque idea of teaching needs to be disrupted, too. As far as we can tell, neither President Obama nor Arne Duncan had a particularly inspiring teacher in their life. They are both like the proverbial turtles sitting on top of 6 foot poles saying, "I got here myself! By doing well on tests!"

From this English Professor's position, the position of a literary historian, what we need to do is disrupt the current narrative, rather than the profession.

We could start with simple things like recalling the fact that Mr. Kotter himself was the original "sweathog" at New Utrecht High -- in the sixties!!

The character wasn't imagined, then, to be someone who came from a golden age to help a generation that had fallen (Kotter appeared many years before A Nation at Risk/1983). Rather, he was imagined -- based on Kaplan's own experience -- as part of the complex, messy, always, trans-historical difficulty and thrill of public education since its inception.

Let's, then, put out the welcome mat for Mr. Kotter. We have teased him enough. And we need him.

The EAA only looks like another "Emergency" in Detroit -- it changes everything for everyone.

If the EAA or Educational Achievement Authority is codified this week in state legislature it will fundamentally change public education in Michigan for years to come.

The statute will not only create a statewide District for the "lowest 5%" of schools, it will utterly redefine legally and philosophically what public education means -- for all.

Despite all the troubles of public education in Michigan and elsewhere the governing idea for a publicly funded school  is still, fortunately, the same as it has been for decades: a locally controlled institution that provides comprehensive education -- including gym, art, music, recess -- with trained teachers and a set of governing rules that makes the school accountable to the public and parents.

EAA codification changes that completely, and redefines at a fundamental level ("bottom" as in fundament) the "school" as 40 or 50 to a classroom using computer modules without trained teachers and without public oversight. That change won't hit affluent Districts immediately, of course, but it will over the next 3 to 4 years. You can't have a public school system with two fundamentally different ideas or models of what "school" means.

A state -- or educational system -- divided against itself can not stand.

This fundamental change has been difficult to grasp -- even for parents and advocates like myself -- because the EAA seemed when it first appeared (2011) simply another iteration of the string of "emergency managers" in Detroit Public Schools that began in 1999. John Covington, the Broad Foundation trained "Chancellor" of the EAA, seemed to fit in line with the DPS emergency managers: Frank Burnley, Robert Bobb, etc.

From outside Detroit, all these folks started to look more or less, as they say, a like.

There is, in short, to use what is probably a perverse oxymoron, a form of "indifferent or dispassionate racism" allowing this process of "reforming" education to take hold in Michigan via Detroit.

Indeed, in the fall of 2012 when a number of pieces of legislation came up that would have -- in long time anti-public education Republican advisor Richard McClellan's words -- changed public education as we know it, the EAA (HB6004) seemed to many (including me) the least of our concerns.

Many were all too ready to bite on the notion that "things aren't going well in Detroit anyway so we might as well try..."

When some Bloomfield parents met with Senator John Pappageorge ostensibly to talk about concerns related to their schools we were a bit surprised when he wanted to talk only about what he had done to limit the EAA expansion (capped at 50 schools, etc., could no longer seize available property.). We didn't quite see the connection or the significance of the EAA.

Why did this seem so important to him I remember thinking.

After the sweeping education legislative package scripted by the Oxford Foundation  was defeated in lame duck 2012, then, it came as a surprise at the well attended (500+) Bridge Magazine education conference in Winter 2013 that Snyder spokesperson Bill Rustem pounded the table ONLY about the EAA to start things off -- and then left for the day.

Weird, I thought -- and then let it go.

Ok, many seemed to think.  The EAA was still a marginal issue. Needless to say, this wasn't a Detroit heavy crowd.

Similarly, in March, when the House approved a refurbished EAA bill nobody really blinked. Oakland County seemed willing to deal on almost anything to keep Pontiac open.

But then things came gradually in to focus. The skunks works scandal broke in April and it became clear the Governor and McClellan were committed to some kind of public system that would cost only 5k a student, a bare minimum system they could sell as "public education." Something like the EAA just in case they could not get the EAA. This has been the dream of the Devos/Engler/Posthumus nexus since the early 90s.

This stalled the EAA a bit, as did Rep. Lipton and Senator Hopgood's heroic attempts to get information. The state started closing Districts, Saginaw Buena Vista and Inkster,

After all this bad press, though, the Governor insisted on bringing the EAA back! Why? What was so critical about it that he would risk losing votes in an election? Devos gives more money than Broad.

But now I get it. What is so critical is that the EAA redefines public education for the next 30 years. This not another Emergency Manager. When you build something you start at the foundation, the bottom, the fundamentals. This fundamental change, changes everything, for everyone. Get the EAA in to statute and it is game over.

How the State Codification of the EAA will really change our educational reality.

We tend to make a regular distinction between the "real" and the "ideal." The former is what is, and the latter is what we think ought to be.

Indeed, we tend to separate the two in our everyday thoughts and our speech.

"Be real," we might insist to someone who we think is naive, pressing for an unattainable goal. The "ideal" thus gets implicitly defined as "non-being," something -- although that is of course not the right word -- that doesn't exist.

But the ideal is not synonymous with non-existence. We do well to attend to this distinction, rather than the supposed distinction between the real and the ideal.

On the contrary, the "ideal" impinges on what we call "real" every minute of every day -- and in that sense the ideal matters, and it matters very much. What we long for, what we imagine, what we hope for ..... is very much a matter of our existence, our reality. The ideal guides us, draws us, haunts us.

When we change our ideals, then, we change what we tend to call "reality" and we change that reality quite drastically.

Over the next few days, perhaps as early as next week, the Michigan state legislature will return to the issue of HB4369, the state codification of the EAA, the "Educational Achievement Authority" and in so doing they are poised to make an enormous change to our long held ideals about public education.

The EAA codification, by statute, removes from the state the long held ideal that public education for all was possible. It literally divides the state in half between those who have the political power and financial capital to pursue a full, comprehensive education with music, art, recess, devoted and trained teachers and those who will be left at some point soon with a room of up to 50 classmates and computer modules, staffed by just graduated college students looking to add something about "social commitment" to their CV before moving on to their "real" career.www.eclectablog.com

Now, of course, the (public) argument for removing this ideal by statute is that we are already divided in two, that poor, largely minority School Districts already lack what more affluent and predominantly white Districts have.

That is the reality we are told. Be real. And it is perhaps impossible to argue the point. As the white father of two in Bloomfield Hills I am certainly not interested in trying.

But I do quite passionately -- and this is the difficult part to explain -- believe that part of our current reality with all its divides still encompasses the ideal that we can all somehow have the same great public education.

So in codifying the EAA -- as the legislature seems poised to do -- I see that we are not changing reality  in the sense that we are mitigating these divides but in that we will jettison the ideal that still guides us, that has guided us for sometime, the idea that great public education for all is possible

 And that loss truly will change reality. I would not want to be the deciding vote for that change. I really can't imagine that any Michigan legislative Rep has that much confidence in the EAA to risk the loss.

Pres. Obama may give MI Democrats a chance Friday to start over, not "come back"

When President Obama comes to East Lansing Friday he may just give his party in Michigan a chance -- not to "come back" -- but to start over in their 2014 bid to make any dent whatsoever in Republican control over the state.http://statenews.com/article/2014/02/obama-plans-east-lansing-visit-few-details-available

Unfortunately, it won't be his inspiring and soaring oratory about hope and justice, etc., something that now seems like a distant memory, a TV show we used to enjoy.

It will be the depressing and stark fact that if he says anything meaningful about Michigan at all what he says will sound like a Governor Snyder campaign commercial: the "comeback" of Detroit through bankruptcy, the "comeback" of the auto industry, and the successes of education reform with a need, now, to reform higher education. Enjoy, though, the banter about Tom Izzo and MSU basketball.

To start over, one very often has to hit rock bottom and the President might just force this reality on state Democratic leadership.

Perhaps this visit --  that surely will provide fodder for future Gov. Snyder commercials (5 million more dollars worth at least!) -- will make it clear to Michigan Democrats that they, in fact, have to start over almost before they have begun rather than follow the lead of a President who assumes their loyalty.

Governor Snyder is vulnerable primarily on one issue in Michigan: education. In 2011, he set out to circumvent the Michigan Constitution and "unbundle" geographically defined school districts under the guise of education reform. He met with massive resistance from a coalition of teachers, parent advocates, and even fellow Republicans who did not want their schools or school districts destroyed, eliminated for the sake of indulging the idea that the "market" through "creative disruption" would improve schools.

Despite the resistance, he has never backed away from that effort and only put in abeyance -- until November 2014 -- the things he couldn't complete. What he has done already has set a course for slow, painful erosion of schools: 1) District unbundling 2) EAA expansion 3) de-professionalizing of teaching, etc.

November 2014 is thus about whether we should have public education as we know it or not. 

I have been working on this for sometime and I don't know a serious, informed person who is not literally calculating the time public education has left, making personal and professional plans based on its ultimate demise in 4 or 5 years.

And my kids go to school in Bloomfield Hills.

But when the time came Michigan Democrats turned this critical and potentially energizing issue into a familiar debate about them begging for yearly funds and Republican stinginess. Business as usual. We spent on education; they don't. Here is this morning's offering: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140204/OPINION01/302040002/Column-Michigan-s-surplus-civics-lesson?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|s

Did they notice Gov. Snyder swatted away their whole campaign in January with a 1 year minimal investment in public education?

Public education is not just underfunded this year. It is being systematically destroyed. President Obama supports this effort. The values inscribed in public education are being dissipated.

That is the issue for Michigan Democrats. Listen to the President Friday, then, and get ready to start over.

Scapegoating and Sacrifices: GOP giving up Agema -- what will MI Dems do to win?

To scapegoat someone or something – that is, to put blame on one in order to mask the guilt of others – certainly has become a pejorative and, as such, suggests a simplistic process.

But scapegoating is ancient and complex, a matter implied in the name itself. The word derives from the habit of spiking, literally, a “goat’s” head as a symbol, a demonstration of a group’s “sacrifice” to the God’s (or later, to God) to procure some favor. As many scholars have taught us, including the controversial but always interesting Rene Girard, selection of the “goat” as sacrificial animal itself is even more complex than we first must think.

The goat was chosen because it was a domesticated animal – like a chicken – kept closer to the home and family than other animals.

Indeed, kids on a farm have to learn quickly that those animals are not pets.

Think Jodie Foster as a child, suddenly introduced to the ranch in The Silence of the Lambs.

The sacrificial thing has to be close enough to the group in form and affection for it to seem a real sacrifice. Historically, for example, people don’t sacrifice rats.

Before people sacrificed domestic animals they sacrificed other people – but not just any old person of little value (vagrants, criminals, etc.). For sacrificial victims to be true sacrificial victims they had to appear to be close enough to the group to suggest a real loss – but yet somehow, too, apart from the group.

Children were useful. They were part of the community – yet not part of the community. Virgins, at times, were seen as ideal. Young females who had not yet fully become participants in their community.

So scapegoating really is no simple matter. In the case of Michigan Republicans, for example, Betsy Devos has chosen wisely to sacrifice Dave Agema for the 2014 elections and Terry Lynn Land and Nolan Finley and others are following suit in the tribal process. Agema is certainly close to the anger that fueled a 2010 victory, but his willingness to continue to express openly and violently the homophobia and Islamaphobia that underlies much of the Republican movement makes him a perfect choice.

This sacrifice at least tries to purchase votes and positive energy.

Question: what sacrifices are the Michigan Democrats willing to make to win?

Their one winning issue – preserving public education – has been twisted by a party President who actually backs the education reform strategies of Governor Snyder and Republicans. It is time, I think, in this difficult era, to do a bit of scapegoating and sacrificing of President Obama and Arne Duncan.

Lame ducks make fine sacrifices.

People in Michigan overwhelmingly support good, local public education.  They don’t want their schools destroyed for good. They don’t want TFA. They don’t want vouchers  and are now, having seen the effects of schools of choice, are skeptical of “choice.”  They don’t particularly care for charters. And they don’t want the Broads running their schoolboards. They believe other schools have problems, but like their own.

But the voters don’t yet grasp their schools are on the chopping block for President Obama and Gov. Snyder in part because Democrats are telling them a familiar story: this is all about about funding. Voters  won’t get excited about what the Democrats are seeming to create: just another Republican v. Democrat debate on how much to spend on public education.

The argument is now about whether public education should exist and Democrats need to make that clear to energize their base and even take a few swing voters. The voters are available in plenty even in Republican strongholds like Oakland County, as evidenced by Ryan Fishman’s – candidate for the 13 District Senate seat – switch from the Republican party to the Democratic party.

But Michigan Democrats will have to sacrifice something to win: 1) the reliance on old formulas Democrats spend v. Republican stinginess and 2) an evangelical like faith in all things President Obama.

If you watched the state of the union it is now clear the latter is more than willing to scapegoat public education and even higher education to satisfy Bill Gates and others.

Be, then, the party that will sacrifice to save public education in toto – Agema will look like what he is in comparison: a puny little rat, about to be eradicated.