One part of current thinking about American school reform is seemingly simple math, so much so that we see the need to discuss it about as often as we discuss the logic of 2 + 2 =4.
Here it is: We don’t do well in science and math. We don’t do well in science in math because we don’t have enough quality science and math teachers. Without a strong showing in math and science the country will fall behind its competitors in all areas including, perhaps, national security.
Therefore, we need to adjust our administrative apparatus – including school funding mechanisms – so that we, first, increase the number of students taking degrees in math and science and, second, encourage more of them, in turn, to become teachers. This argument will be front and center in Mackinac, Michigan this week.
So: Let’s assume this is true (and most currently do) in order to complete the equation. If the math is correct, our interpretation of the equation result is also simple: to make the numbers come out differently than they already are we need to change the schools, mainly by leaning toward privatization which, as we all know, is much more effective using its resources than the public sector.
Simple enough. Problem solved, as Ross Perot used to say.
But is it possible our own math deficiency is causing us to misread the numbers, to skew the problem long before we get to the solution?
There is, at least, a built in paradox here that should give us pause: if nobody knows math in this country how do we know we don’t know math? Who is doing the calculations?
It might be useful, I think, when talking about our failure in math and science, a failure of public education tout court, we look at some numbers (other than, for example, MEAP scores). MEAP scores, as far as well can tell, tell us about, well, MEAP scores.
Here are some other numbers, then, to ponder.
According to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, the US – whose universities are still the most sought after on the planet despite the supposed massive failure of public education – produced 17.2 million degrees (not counting Phds, those that work in universities, some of them public, that both take and generate funds for public universities in part through public funding sources like the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health -- stereotypically, these are the scientists most think of when they think of scientists) in math and science fields. This is in a country of some 314 million, give or take.
Of those 17.2 million degrees in math and science – as of 2008 – 2.6 million were not in the labor force. That is, they weren’t out of work nor were they seeking work. For some perspective: at about 3 million, teachers constitute the largest labor force in the country (one reason they are so in need of management and reform). 4.8 million had jobs that related to their degree, among them a few teachers. Only 490,000 were unemployed. This is a remarkably low number, I should say, for those seeking a university major with an eye exclusively towards employment -- what Governor Snyder seems to like to call "career readiness," what many used to understand as "job training."
But here is the interesting number for school reformers who are convinced our schools need to change completely, absolutely, entirely because of abysmal waste and mismanagement. 9.9 million of those with science and math degrees hold jobs not in their field. That is, they had careers doing something else under than the math and the science that is, presumably, according to our current understanding of school reform math, going to keep America great.
I will provide a little shorthand here. Less than 40% of our math and science degree holders do (in any practical sense) math and science.
Getting accurate data on such large numbers is tricky so the National Center for Science and Engineering hesitates in explaining exactly what these folks are doing. Many, it seems, work in layers of corporate administration that supervise others who, presumably, can’t do math and science as well as their supervisors.
The latter supposition, of course, is mine, not the National Center’s (before I encourage any vote to defund the National Center). Like institutions of its sort it tends to be much more circumspect than bloggers, politicos, etc.
But as a citizen concerned like we all are with America’s greatness, my thought after looking at these numbers is this: if America does have a math and science deficit, university degree production does not show it. And in this equation, it isn’t schools that are bottling up or not yielding opportunities for math and science to bloom as they supposedly did, say, in the 1950s or 1960s.
There is a missing part of the equation somewhere.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Friday, May 9, 2014
MI Pub ed budget: Sound of Schauer Campaign Washing Down the Drain
Michigan Reporter
Dave Eggert described Mi House Democrats as reasonably content with
this year's school budget.
Indeed, it was much better than in the past two years. While I am sure they are not celebrating loudly you can also hear in the House Democrats muffled contentment the more depressing sounds of the Mark Schauer/Lisa Brown gubernatorial challenge going straight down the drain.
Having based their campaign and limited resources almost exclusively on 1 year K12 budget issues -- and ignoring entirely or endorsing the larger problems of Education "Reform" like the EAA expansion, fed overreach, teacher effectiveness via VAM, Common Core, charters, and so on -- the campaign quite simply has left itself with no where else to go.
Snyder added enough to satisfy the general population, certainly enough to limit any outrage big enough to overcome the 7 to 11 % gap between himself and Schauer; and now we have a long summer vacation with schools set to open "as normal" in the fall.
The schools and their paid lobbyists spent their political energy on this short 1 year game, and have had little convincing to say to the voting public about the larger threats to public education.
Many public ed advocates, then, have spent considerable time and energy on a campaign that fizzled before it began because the Mi Democratic party would not attend seriously to the issues of those it was supposedly supporting.
Weird.
Instead, Lon Johnson is counting on 1 million voters to come out in 2014 -- many of them African-American women -- to support Schauer and Lisa Brown as they did Barack Obama.
I wish him luck there.
Long term, the fate of public education looks bleak -- and one can not blame the Republican party or its extremists for its undoing. For Democrats, one has the hope they decide to invest time and money now in winnable races and try not to look like complete whiners on public education.
Indeed, it was much better than in the past two years. While I am sure they are not celebrating loudly you can also hear in the House Democrats muffled contentment the more depressing sounds of the Mark Schauer/Lisa Brown gubernatorial challenge going straight down the drain.
Having based their campaign and limited resources almost exclusively on 1 year K12 budget issues -- and ignoring entirely or endorsing the larger problems of Education "Reform" like the EAA expansion, fed overreach, teacher effectiveness via VAM, Common Core, charters, and so on -- the campaign quite simply has left itself with no where else to go.
Snyder added enough to satisfy the general population, certainly enough to limit any outrage big enough to overcome the 7 to 11 % gap between himself and Schauer; and now we have a long summer vacation with schools set to open "as normal" in the fall.
The schools and their paid lobbyists spent their political energy on this short 1 year game, and have had little convincing to say to the voting public about the larger threats to public education.
Many public ed advocates, then, have spent considerable time and energy on a campaign that fizzled before it began because the Mi Democratic party would not attend seriously to the issues of those it was supposedly supporting.
Weird.
Instead, Lon Johnson is counting on 1 million voters to come out in 2014 -- many of them African-American women -- to support Schauer and Lisa Brown as they did Barack Obama.
I wish him luck there.
Long term, the fate of public education looks bleak -- and one can not blame the Republican party or its extremists for its undoing. For Democrats, one has the hope they decide to invest time and money now in winnable races and try not to look like complete whiners on public education.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
From the land of "Reagan Democrats" comes another wild shift in American politics
I grew up around "Reagan Democrats."
These were largely white, male, auto-workers in Macomb County Michigan whose very lives and communities had been created , in part, by unions. Their neighborhoods, schools, two cars, snowmobiles, fishing boats, kids' hockey ice-time, "cottages up north," and semi-annual trips to Florida were made possible by union pay and benefits.
Most of the kids I knew used to dress and look a lot like Kid Rock before Kid Rock was born (in northern Macomb County -- as opposed to Marshall Mathers, who grew up famously north of 8 Mile in southern Macomb County, the border to Wayne County and the city of Detroit).
You get the picture.
Traditionally, because of the unions Macomb County residents voted Democrat.
In and about 1980, however, they turned their allegiances to Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.
And they have never really looked back. The primary reason for the split at the time seemed to be an understanding of social values. For many, the Democrat party had become too left leaning.
Race mattered, too, as it always does in Detroit and metro-Detroit. Detroit was the center of Democratic politics in the state. The shift to Reagan was, in many respects, just another way for a certain demographic (mine) to say we aren't going to have anything to do with Detroit anymore.
These Macomb County voters had analogues across the country, of course; but the change was just particularly stark and visible here.
The shift of the Reagan Democrats marked a turning point in the country's politics, the advent of what we now know of as the "right wing."
It was, perhaps, the most significant shift in a voting block since southern Democrats turned against the party over civil rights some 20 years earlier.
Today, I find myself staring at another potential national voting shift that can be illustrated through Michigan politics.
Mark Schauer and Lisa Brown are running in Michigan as the candidates for public education. They are Democrats, of course, challenging Republican incumbent Rick Snyder.
Snyder's educational reforms set off a firestorm in Michigan 2012 and big parts of his plans -- erasing geographically defined Districts, creating cheap on-line learning, quasi-voucher programs, etc. -- collapsed, some in scandal.
Two "reforms" survived and look to become part of the landscape: the EAA, the state's reform District, and the state's embrace of Common Core and its VAM models of teacher effectiveness.
Curiously, these are the two reforms that are actually more distinctly Democratic than Republican reforms. The EAA was spawned by the Race to the Top initiatives of 2009 and the CC originates from The White House. These two reforms threaten more than any other effort to undermine a long tradition of local control for schools in favor of a corporate, Washington DC directive.
So: Schauer and Brown literally find themselves running against their own party and President. Indeed, Schauer's own kids' schools in affluent Oakland County would have been transformed if Republicans there had not stood against their own Governor. But they really can't say as much.
The (political) head spins.
For example, the Tea-Party is massing a critical response to the Common Core, resisting as federal overreach. While they characteristically overplay their hand, Tea-Partiers are finding very new allies amongst public school teachers and parents. They may, in fact, be the country's best chance to retain something of its neighborhood public school system.
Who knew?
Schauer and Brown, absent any particularly innovative ideas, and rather than address these complexities, have framed their campaign in 1980s terms: Dems want to spend more this year on education than Republicans. That gained some ground for them in the winter, but as the Governor has passed more money in to K12 -- or enough to satisfy general populace -- they are losing ground fast on this key issue, falling from 7 points back to 11. As everyone heads for "summertime in northern Michigan" rocking to that southern band sound, and schools seem set to open as normal in September, those numbers will drop even more.
Schauer and Brown are rather stuck. To tell a true story about public education they would have to criticize Barack Obama and Arne Duncan. But they have no local money to support them if they abandon national friends.
If, however, they side with the National Democratic Party against public education Michigan again will mark an odd and paradoxical political shift: "Public School Teachers and Parents for Republicans."
I have seen stranger things in my lifetime.
These were largely white, male, auto-workers in Macomb County Michigan whose very lives and communities had been created , in part, by unions. Their neighborhoods, schools, two cars, snowmobiles, fishing boats, kids' hockey ice-time, "cottages up north," and semi-annual trips to Florida were made possible by union pay and benefits.
Most of the kids I knew used to dress and look a lot like Kid Rock before Kid Rock was born (in northern Macomb County -- as opposed to Marshall Mathers, who grew up famously north of 8 Mile in southern Macomb County, the border to Wayne County and the city of Detroit).
You get the picture.
Traditionally, because of the unions Macomb County residents voted Democrat.
In and about 1980, however, they turned their allegiances to Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.
And they have never really looked back. The primary reason for the split at the time seemed to be an understanding of social values. For many, the Democrat party had become too left leaning.
Race mattered, too, as it always does in Detroit and metro-Detroit. Detroit was the center of Democratic politics in the state. The shift to Reagan was, in many respects, just another way for a certain demographic (mine) to say we aren't going to have anything to do with Detroit anymore.
These Macomb County voters had analogues across the country, of course; but the change was just particularly stark and visible here.
The shift of the Reagan Democrats marked a turning point in the country's politics, the advent of what we now know of as the "right wing."
It was, perhaps, the most significant shift in a voting block since southern Democrats turned against the party over civil rights some 20 years earlier.
Today, I find myself staring at another potential national voting shift that can be illustrated through Michigan politics.
Mark Schauer and Lisa Brown are running in Michigan as the candidates for public education. They are Democrats, of course, challenging Republican incumbent Rick Snyder.
Snyder's educational reforms set off a firestorm in Michigan 2012 and big parts of his plans -- erasing geographically defined Districts, creating cheap on-line learning, quasi-voucher programs, etc. -- collapsed, some in scandal.
Two "reforms" survived and look to become part of the landscape: the EAA, the state's reform District, and the state's embrace of Common Core and its VAM models of teacher effectiveness.
Curiously, these are the two reforms that are actually more distinctly Democratic than Republican reforms. The EAA was spawned by the Race to the Top initiatives of 2009 and the CC originates from The White House. These two reforms threaten more than any other effort to undermine a long tradition of local control for schools in favor of a corporate, Washington DC directive.
So: Schauer and Brown literally find themselves running against their own party and President. Indeed, Schauer's own kids' schools in affluent Oakland County would have been transformed if Republicans there had not stood against their own Governor. But they really can't say as much.
The (political) head spins.
For example, the Tea-Party is massing a critical response to the Common Core, resisting as federal overreach. While they characteristically overplay their hand, Tea-Partiers are finding very new allies amongst public school teachers and parents. They may, in fact, be the country's best chance to retain something of its neighborhood public school system.
Who knew?
Schauer and Brown, absent any particularly innovative ideas, and rather than address these complexities, have framed their campaign in 1980s terms: Dems want to spend more this year on education than Republicans. That gained some ground for them in the winter, but as the Governor has passed more money in to K12 -- or enough to satisfy general populace -- they are losing ground fast on this key issue, falling from 7 points back to 11. As everyone heads for "summertime in northern Michigan" rocking to that southern band sound, and schools seem set to open as normal in September, those numbers will drop even more.
Schauer and Brown are rather stuck. To tell a true story about public education they would have to criticize Barack Obama and Arne Duncan. But they have no local money to support them if they abandon national friends.
If, however, they side with the National Democratic Party against public education Michigan again will mark an odd and paradoxical political shift: "Public School Teachers and Parents for Republicans."
I have seen stranger things in my lifetime.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Mi Democrats Opposition to EAA and school "Reform" doesn't cut it -- looks more and more like a simple act of bad faith.
This week the EAA state wide codification issue will either be approved by the Republican controlled Senate -- meaning the Governor successfully has traded votes for a very, bad and unpopular albeit well funded idea -- or it will disappear for a time, perhaps until the November elections have decided things.
Or may be in the summer.
Given this has been such a legislative debacle, the Michigan Democrats have seized on the EAA as a winner for them, of course.
Senators Hopgood and Johnson have fought this issue for some time. Bravo.
The state's most popular political blogger, Eclectablog, brilliantly generated a series of posts www.eclectablog.com that exposed serious problems with the EAA.
And God Bless Ellen Lipton for intelligence, decency, sanity, and superhuman work habits. The whole of the state owes her a thank you.
But if the Mi Democrats seek to make this particular issue a mark against Republicans and Gov. Snyder (and it is) they should spend some time reflecting on how they themselves got us here.
1) There is no EAA without President Obama's Race to the Top intrusion in to local control.
2) There is no EAA without Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's praise on their advertisementshttp://icansoar.org/ (although he not yet appeared on their late night TV 20 commercials, promising to teach children "twice as much" in the way car dealerships sell cars to Detroiters promising that credit reports don't matter). The Democrats have two full years to go with Secretary Duncan who has the President's unwavering support.
3) There is no EAA withou Chelsea Clinton, perhaps the next Secretary of Education (now that we completely have foregone credentials and experience for the post), promising her soon to be born child to the EAA for education.
4) There is no EAA without Jennifer Granholm who was all in in 2009.
5) There is no EAA without the Broad Family Foundation (lifelong Democrats and now full time education "reformers").
6) There is no EAA without the Teach for America organization, stuffed with "liberal" Democrats.
7) There is no EAA with out two slightly crazy House Democrats, Santana and Olumba, turning their back on their party to talk about "keeping it real in the hood."
8) There is no EAA without the quietism of the Eastern Michigan University faculty (mostly Democrats, I wager) who refused to back en masse their brave education faculty in challenging the University's Governor appointed Board of Regents. That situation marks, perhaps, a wider national disconnect between education faculty and the universities that house them.
9) There is no EAA without State School Board President John Austin (an Ann Arbor Democrat if there ever was one) supporting it on national websites.
10) And there is no EAA without the MDE and State Superintendent, himself an example of the public education "Peter principle" on high, a system that promotes leaders based on gender, cronyism, and how well they approximate the look and manner of a 1960s high school boys' basketball coach. Mr. Flanagan, we need to remember, told everyone in December 2013 they should be ashamed of themselves for opposing the EAA.
So: Until the Democratic Party decides where it stands on education "reform" they are acting on "bad faith" here and elsewhere, trying to act as champions of public education.
They served that role for some years, of course. But the Michigan Democratic Party needs to decide where they stand now.
Or may be in the summer.
Given this has been such a legislative debacle, the Michigan Democrats have seized on the EAA as a winner for them, of course.
Senators Hopgood and Johnson have fought this issue for some time. Bravo.
The state's most popular political blogger, Eclectablog, brilliantly generated a series of posts www.eclectablog.com that exposed serious problems with the EAA.
And God Bless Ellen Lipton for intelligence, decency, sanity, and superhuman work habits. The whole of the state owes her a thank you.
But if the Mi Democrats seek to make this particular issue a mark against Republicans and Gov. Snyder (and it is) they should spend some time reflecting on how they themselves got us here.
1) There is no EAA without President Obama's Race to the Top intrusion in to local control.
2) There is no EAA without Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's praise on their advertisementshttp://icansoar.org/ (although he not yet appeared on their late night TV 20 commercials, promising to teach children "twice as much" in the way car dealerships sell cars to Detroiters promising that credit reports don't matter). The Democrats have two full years to go with Secretary Duncan who has the President's unwavering support.
3) There is no EAA withou Chelsea Clinton, perhaps the next Secretary of Education (now that we completely have foregone credentials and experience for the post), promising her soon to be born child to the EAA for education.
4) There is no EAA without Jennifer Granholm who was all in in 2009.
5) There is no EAA without the Broad Family Foundation (lifelong Democrats and now full time education "reformers").
6) There is no EAA without the Teach for America organization, stuffed with "liberal" Democrats.
7) There is no EAA with out two slightly crazy House Democrats, Santana and Olumba, turning their back on their party to talk about "keeping it real in the hood."
8) There is no EAA without the quietism of the Eastern Michigan University faculty (mostly Democrats, I wager) who refused to back en masse their brave education faculty in challenging the University's Governor appointed Board of Regents. That situation marks, perhaps, a wider national disconnect between education faculty and the universities that house them.
9) There is no EAA without State School Board President John Austin (an Ann Arbor Democrat if there ever was one) supporting it on national websites.
10) And there is no EAA without the MDE and State Superintendent, himself an example of the public education "Peter principle" on high, a system that promotes leaders based on gender, cronyism, and how well they approximate the look and manner of a 1960s high school boys' basketball coach. Mr. Flanagan, we need to remember, told everyone in December 2013 they should be ashamed of themselves for opposing the EAA.
So: Until the Democratic Party decides where it stands on education "reform" they are acting on "bad faith" here and elsewhere, trying to act as champions of public education.
They served that role for some years, of course. But the Michigan Democratic Party needs to decide where they stand now.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Mitt Romney's old MI school District keeps its buses, but orders lunch out, not knowing what else to do.
It is
now considered a "best practice" for School Districts to review
outsourcing services (transportation, food, custodial work, etc.). Some 60% of Districts in Michigan have
gone that route.
My own affluent district in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan -- once home to Mitt Romney -- just finished their latest due diligence, deciding to keep their superb in-house transportation service and, with some tweaks, their custodial and grounds team. They did decide to "outsource" their food services program to a giant provider.
The bus question was not too hard. The District has a perfect record going on 21 years and the savings for privatizing would have been $6,000.
$6,000.
In Bloomfield Hills, 6k is called a Wednesday night out.
Still, the language of austerity and privatization has been thoroughly naturalized even by the decent and well meaning.
"We have to cut somewhere," said one board member, repeating the language and logic of board members across the country for the last 15 years. "We have to protect the classroom."
Here's what's weird. Privatization has not worked. Not at all. Not a lick. Not only are public school systems not saving anything they are losing money.
Indeed, every school District in Michigan is worse off financially and in terms of services provided since this "best practice" became adopted some 15 years ago.
As I approach 50 I do find myself quoting Republicans more so let's ask the Ronald Reagan question to public school Districts: "Are you better off now than you were 15 years ago?"
The answer would be a resounding no.
Here is what is weirder. We keep trying this, saying the same things, making the same arguments, and, to top it all off, calling this "innovative" and "outside the box" thinking.
Did I mention my District also has started a "foundation" so that private donors can supplement the District which is limited in how much it can call for taxes? How is that for "outside the box" thinking? Heard that one before, too? How's that working out for ya?
But my point is this: It is not really known how outsourcing became a "best practice." Considering outsourcing was not a "data-driven" process as we say today. That is, there was no systematic study to see if it would work. The push began before big data. It was purely ideological. It was an act of quasi-religious faith in free markets
Let's keep getting weird as this is, after all, also where Jimmy Hoffa was last seen.
While nobody every determined this "best practice" through systematic study we now have to show -- through "data" and an assortment of consultants -- that the in-house systems work better than the free market systems that have never worked.
I don't fault my school board members.
They are serious, thoughtful people who serve the District in very strange times, often taking extraordinary abuse from Tea-Party types (yes, even in Bloomfield, et ego Arcadia or something like that). I know some personally, and helped them get elected. I don't have the luxury, in short, of imagining them politically demonic forces "other" than me, either on the left or the right. They are neither, in our outsized political rhetoric, "fascists" or "whacky socialists." They are experienced in both schools and business, decent and well meaning, remarkably civil when civility is in short supply.
But they, like all of us, are utterly bereft of political and economic imagination right now. They are crying to "think out side the box," when thinking outside the box only means what it has only meant since its insipid inception in to the lexicon. It means privatize, even privatizing has been a disaster.
We may be demanding our children perform so miraculously, achieve flexibility and creativity in a globalized, 21st century world because we have so little imagination left of our own to give.
We here in metro-Detroit are perhaps more prone to this than some, having lived with the "boom and bust" of the auto industry for decades. There is nothing more natural, no more characteristic gesture of fiduciary responsibility than to tighten up in lean times and save for the future.
Here's the weirdest thing though. The ur-Weird. The Weird that is so weird we can't even think it.
There is no imaginable public education future to save for if your only thought to save public education is privatization. These cuts are now, literally, for the sake of cutting, not for saving. The cuts are transformative only in the sense that they render what they were supposed to preserve as unrecognizable.
As one board member said, "The state is never going to give us more money so we have to cut somewhere."
But if there is truly no future -- and I don't disagree with this -- why in the world and what in the world are public school systems saving for? And if at this the case we need to drop the 20st century cut and save, outsource mentality fast and do what we tell our kids to do: think critically.
My own affluent district in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan -- once home to Mitt Romney -- just finished their latest due diligence, deciding to keep their superb in-house transportation service and, with some tweaks, their custodial and grounds team. They did decide to "outsource" their food services program to a giant provider.
The bus question was not too hard. The District has a perfect record going on 21 years and the savings for privatizing would have been $6,000.
$6,000.
In Bloomfield Hills, 6k is called a Wednesday night out.
Still, the language of austerity and privatization has been thoroughly naturalized even by the decent and well meaning.
"We have to cut somewhere," said one board member, repeating the language and logic of board members across the country for the last 15 years. "We have to protect the classroom."
Here's what's weird. Privatization has not worked. Not at all. Not a lick. Not only are public school systems not saving anything they are losing money.
Indeed, every school District in Michigan is worse off financially and in terms of services provided since this "best practice" became adopted some 15 years ago.
As I approach 50 I do find myself quoting Republicans more so let's ask the Ronald Reagan question to public school Districts: "Are you better off now than you were 15 years ago?"
The answer would be a resounding no.
Here is what is weirder. We keep trying this, saying the same things, making the same arguments, and, to top it all off, calling this "innovative" and "outside the box" thinking.
Did I mention my District also has started a "foundation" so that private donors can supplement the District which is limited in how much it can call for taxes? How is that for "outside the box" thinking? Heard that one before, too? How's that working out for ya?
But my point is this: It is not really known how outsourcing became a "best practice." Considering outsourcing was not a "data-driven" process as we say today. That is, there was no systematic study to see if it would work. The push began before big data. It was purely ideological. It was an act of quasi-religious faith in free markets
Let's keep getting weird as this is, after all, also where Jimmy Hoffa was last seen.
While nobody every determined this "best practice" through systematic study we now have to show -- through "data" and an assortment of consultants -- that the in-house systems work better than the free market systems that have never worked.
I don't fault my school board members.
They are serious, thoughtful people who serve the District in very strange times, often taking extraordinary abuse from Tea-Party types (yes, even in Bloomfield, et ego Arcadia or something like that). I know some personally, and helped them get elected. I don't have the luxury, in short, of imagining them politically demonic forces "other" than me, either on the left or the right. They are neither, in our outsized political rhetoric, "fascists" or "whacky socialists." They are experienced in both schools and business, decent and well meaning, remarkably civil when civility is in short supply.
But they, like all of us, are utterly bereft of political and economic imagination right now. They are crying to "think out side the box," when thinking outside the box only means what it has only meant since its insipid inception in to the lexicon. It means privatize, even privatizing has been a disaster.
We may be demanding our children perform so miraculously, achieve flexibility and creativity in a globalized, 21st century world because we have so little imagination left of our own to give.
We here in metro-Detroit are perhaps more prone to this than some, having lived with the "boom and bust" of the auto industry for decades. There is nothing more natural, no more characteristic gesture of fiduciary responsibility than to tighten up in lean times and save for the future.
Here's the weirdest thing though. The ur-Weird. The Weird that is so weird we can't even think it.
There is no imaginable public education future to save for if your only thought to save public education is privatization. These cuts are now, literally, for the sake of cutting, not for saving. The cuts are transformative only in the sense that they render what they were supposed to preserve as unrecognizable.
As one board member said, "The state is never going to give us more money so we have to cut somewhere."
But if there is truly no future -- and I don't disagree with this -- why in the world and what in the world are public school systems saving for? And if at this the case we need to drop the 20st century cut and save, outsource mentality fast and do what we tell our kids to do: think critically.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Amber Arellano? Public Education bully? Mean girl? Obama/Gates representative?
Who could possibly be big enough to bully both Republicans and Democrats in Lansing when it comes to education reform?
Amber Arellano, former Detroit News reporter rewarded for her solid work "reporting" education "reform" with the job of Director of the Education Trust-Midwest, an organization funded by the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Waltons, and solidly backed by The White House.
Apparently, she sent an email insisting that the state had to decide "today" (well, yesterday now) about teacher effectiveness bills or lose their waiver from President Obama on education reform.
Both party reps balked and actually stood up to Amber -- at least in their remarks to reporter Brian Smith.
http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2014/04/michigan_teacher_evaluation_bi.html
Given Amber's heavy weight backers, however, it is difficult to see how either party can stand firm very long.
Arellano's threats and bullying came following last week's move by President Obama to pull a Race to the Top waiver from the state of Washington and return them to the bizarro standards of No Child Left Behind.
According to those 2001 laws, all schools must be "proficient" by 2014.
They aren't. Some of the children are still, as always, average, below average, and above average.
Correspondingly, then, President Obama's gesture labelled all schools in Washington "unperforming" and Michigan is next on the chopping block. The state stands to lose fed money if it doesn't institute teacher effectiveness laws and guarantee a Common Core test (the Smarter Balance test) be put in place for all schools.
It is entirely possible, I think, that Amber Arellano, a political operative paid only to say schools are failing to realize the Common Core dream of Bill Gates and Barack Obama, actually may unify Michigan legislative reps on education issues.
Amber Arellano, former Detroit News reporter rewarded for her solid work "reporting" education "reform" with the job of Director of the Education Trust-Midwest, an organization funded by the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Waltons, and solidly backed by The White House.
Apparently, she sent an email insisting that the state had to decide "today" (well, yesterday now) about teacher effectiveness bills or lose their waiver from President Obama on education reform.
Both party reps balked and actually stood up to Amber -- at least in their remarks to reporter Brian Smith.
http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2014/04/michigan_teacher_evaluation_bi.html
Given Amber's heavy weight backers, however, it is difficult to see how either party can stand firm very long.
Arellano's threats and bullying came following last week's move by President Obama to pull a Race to the Top waiver from the state of Washington and return them to the bizarro standards of No Child Left Behind.
According to those 2001 laws, all schools must be "proficient" by 2014.
They aren't. Some of the children are still, as always, average, below average, and above average.
Correspondingly, then, President Obama's gesture labelled all schools in Washington "unperforming" and Michigan is next on the chopping block. The state stands to lose fed money if it doesn't institute teacher effectiveness laws and guarantee a Common Core test (the Smarter Balance test) be put in place for all schools.
It is entirely possible, I think, that Amber Arellano, a political operative paid only to say schools are failing to realize the Common Core dream of Bill Gates and Barack Obama, actually may unify Michigan legislative reps on education issues.
Me and Mrs. Brown: Head spinning politics of public education in Michigan
When it comes to the politics of public education in Michigan the head of the Democratic candidate for Lt. Governor, Lisa Brown, must be spinning.
I know mine is.
Our kids go to public schools threatened by the market based corporate "reforms" that have appeared here and elsewhere and you would think we (her more than me, of course) would vote for the party of public education: the Democrats.
Indeed, Democratic challenger Mark Schauer is running as the champion of public education and, in fact, to the surprise of many, has made a race out of virtually nothing (if you want to call a 7% gap in the polls and a 4.5 million gap in available spending a race).
Schauer's early ads, for example, challenged Snyder's supposed "1 billion" dollar spending cuts in public education and bolstered by parent groups, teachers, and remnants of the Democratic Party post "right-to-work" made at least a bit of a name for himself even on the east side of the state.
Here's the ugly rub of the new economic and political reality though.
Lisa Brown's kids, like mine, go to Bloomfield Hills Schools in L. Brooks Patterson's Oakland County. The public schools are fantastic. And while Gov. Snyder's ALEC based reforms threatened my schools over the last few years I ultimately owe their continued existence in familiar form to Oakland County Republicans.
When legislation designed to "unbundle" geographically defined Districts called for in the 1963 state constitution only made it through Lansing "piecemeal"-- and in significantly degraded form -- Governor Snyder turned to the MDE and Superintendent Mike Flanagan to "dissolve and consolidate" Districts instead.
Different language, different methodology, but same ultimate goal. Superintendent Flanagan dissolved Saginaw Buena Vista and Inkster and had Pontiac (a community that borders mine) lined up.
Enter the backroom boys. Oakland County Republicans cut a special, "unprecedented" deal 10 year finance deal to keep Pontiac open. For Lisa Brown and I, whewwww.
Here is the ugly part: if Pontiac closed its 11,000 students, its teachers, and its buildings would be the responsibility of surrounding Districts. I wager my home that 50% of Bloomfield Hills parents would have fled the public schools in the first year alone. Amongst other things, the District had just consolidated high schools and was wrestling with all sorts of logistical issues. This move will never be popular or even possible but it certainly wasn't in the spring of 2013. Parents also would have withdrawn political support for such things as "Hold Harmless" millages, the lynchpin of Proposal A that allows certain districts to ask taxpayers for more money to supplement the state's standard per-pupil allowance. Many Democrats won't even say HOLD HARMLESS or think it a perk of some kind. Bridge Magazine recently called it a "quirk."
And, while many would still want to buy mansions, of course, the property values of Bloomfield and its surrounding suburbs are inextricably tied to the public school system.
Public schools: can't live with em, can't live without em.
So if Lisa Brown is every bit the beneficiary of Oakland County Republicans as I am, what do we do?
At any rate, if it is entirely unclear to me how to vote, may be she has some secret similar reservations.
Who is the party of public education in Michigan (and elsewhere) right now? Who will talk in the open about these "third rail" type issues? Mrs. Brown, the state of Michigan, is not shy about having difficult public conversations.
Here's some more ugly for Democrats: The "unbundling" legislation of Gov. Snyder was made possible by President Obama's "Race to the Top" funding in 2009. So was the EAA.
In a few days, the Democratic President may declare -- as he did with Washington state -- all schools in Michigan "underperforming" because they have not sorted out a testing system to rank schools and teachers. President Obama's good friend and Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, seems determined to privatize all schools and then condemn teacher ed programs in all across the country, too.
The way things are looking, the next Secretary of Education might be Education Nation's Chelsea Clinton who promised her child's education to DPS emergency manager Roy Roberts and the EAA's John Covington.
Talk about tough choices.
If President Obama tells me BHSD is failing in a few days do I believe him? Or do I vote to move that kind of fed intrusion out of my life?
Candidate Brown, how do I vote? Do you and I get to keep our excellent School Districts?
Isn't it time to say, at least, President Obama is just plain wrong about education? You might close that 7 point gap just by talking to a few neighbors in Oakland County. And you could really solidify your reputation for blunt courage.
I know mine is.
Our kids go to public schools threatened by the market based corporate "reforms" that have appeared here and elsewhere and you would think we (her more than me, of course) would vote for the party of public education: the Democrats.
Indeed, Democratic challenger Mark Schauer is running as the champion of public education and, in fact, to the surprise of many, has made a race out of virtually nothing (if you want to call a 7% gap in the polls and a 4.5 million gap in available spending a race).
Schauer's early ads, for example, challenged Snyder's supposed "1 billion" dollar spending cuts in public education and bolstered by parent groups, teachers, and remnants of the Democratic Party post "right-to-work" made at least a bit of a name for himself even on the east side of the state.
Here's the ugly rub of the new economic and political reality though.
Lisa Brown's kids, like mine, go to Bloomfield Hills Schools in L. Brooks Patterson's Oakland County. The public schools are fantastic. And while Gov. Snyder's ALEC based reforms threatened my schools over the last few years I ultimately owe their continued existence in familiar form to Oakland County Republicans.
When legislation designed to "unbundle" geographically defined Districts called for in the 1963 state constitution only made it through Lansing "piecemeal"-- and in significantly degraded form -- Governor Snyder turned to the MDE and Superintendent Mike Flanagan to "dissolve and consolidate" Districts instead.
Different language, different methodology, but same ultimate goal. Superintendent Flanagan dissolved Saginaw Buena Vista and Inkster and had Pontiac (a community that borders mine) lined up.
Enter the backroom boys. Oakland County Republicans cut a special, "unprecedented" deal 10 year finance deal to keep Pontiac open. For Lisa Brown and I, whewwww.
Here is the ugly part: if Pontiac closed its 11,000 students, its teachers, and its buildings would be the responsibility of surrounding Districts. I wager my home that 50% of Bloomfield Hills parents would have fled the public schools in the first year alone. Amongst other things, the District had just consolidated high schools and was wrestling with all sorts of logistical issues. This move will never be popular or even possible but it certainly wasn't in the spring of 2013. Parents also would have withdrawn political support for such things as "Hold Harmless" millages, the lynchpin of Proposal A that allows certain districts to ask taxpayers for more money to supplement the state's standard per-pupil allowance. Many Democrats won't even say HOLD HARMLESS or think it a perk of some kind. Bridge Magazine recently called it a "quirk."
And, while many would still want to buy mansions, of course, the property values of Bloomfield and its surrounding suburbs are inextricably tied to the public school system.
Public schools: can't live with em, can't live without em.
So if Lisa Brown is every bit the beneficiary of Oakland County Republicans as I am, what do we do?
At any rate, if it is entirely unclear to me how to vote, may be she has some secret similar reservations.
Who is the party of public education in Michigan (and elsewhere) right now? Who will talk in the open about these "third rail" type issues? Mrs. Brown, the state of Michigan, is not shy about having difficult public conversations.
Here's some more ugly for Democrats: The "unbundling" legislation of Gov. Snyder was made possible by President Obama's "Race to the Top" funding in 2009. So was the EAA.
In a few days, the Democratic President may declare -- as he did with Washington state -- all schools in Michigan "underperforming" because they have not sorted out a testing system to rank schools and teachers. President Obama's good friend and Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, seems determined to privatize all schools and then condemn teacher ed programs in all across the country, too.
The way things are looking, the next Secretary of Education might be Education Nation's Chelsea Clinton who promised her child's education to DPS emergency manager Roy Roberts and the EAA's John Covington.
Talk about tough choices.
If President Obama tells me BHSD is failing in a few days do I believe him? Or do I vote to move that kind of fed intrusion out of my life?
Candidate Brown, how do I vote? Do you and I get to keep our excellent School Districts?
Isn't it time to say, at least, President Obama is just plain wrong about education? You might close that 7 point gap just by talking to a few neighbors in Oakland County. And you could really solidify your reputation for blunt courage.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Whither (education) Spring in Michigan?
Whither spring?
Public education advocates in Michigan, like public education advocates across the country, are looking towards a public education "spring" -- even if the spring seems perpetually delayed.
Today is, I think, the last snow day and the Michigan legislature is taking the opportunity to try a vote again on the EAA...something that first past the House in March -- of 2013.
So, in an age of climate change, when March looks like December, what will this "spring" look like when it finally comes?
Surely it is coming in some form: After 15 to 20 years of more or less accepting the status quo -- that is, operating with the now culture wide premise that public education is "failing" and only can be saved by more "competition," "choice," "charters," "standardized tests" and "vouchers" -- parents, teachers, some university faculty and assorted communities are starting to truly resist, even if they don't have a handle on what is a really, really weird political/education weather pattern.
This resistance delightfully has taken unfamiliar forms -- at least in terms of classical resistance images.
There are no young men in the streets here (yet!),
but instead women in their 70s or approaching 70s have led the resistance.
Nationally, of course, Diane Ravitch, the former Bush advisor, has repented on earlier acceptance of the "schools are failing" mantra and has galvanized a movement that turned in to the NPC conference at the University of Texas.http://dianeravitch.net/category/network-for-public-education/
Young education professors seem more interested in getting a post on Ravitch's blog than a publication in a refereed journal.
To take a more local example, Vicki Markavitch of Oakland Schools has been fighting relentlessly and, with the help of many, came up with a special deal for Pontiac Public Schools to keep them open for the near future.
This was a very big deal for me and many in Oakland County Michigan as the closure of Pontiac would have fundamentally changed the structure of many, many Districts -- including my extraordinarily wealthy and high functioning District, Bloomfield Hills. Had Pontiac closed -- and many in Lansing really, really wanted it to close after nabbing Saginaw Buena Vista and Inkster -- surrounding Districts would have had to take on teachers, students, and buildings.
The deal was without precedent http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140122/SCHOOLS/301220066 and clearly irritated State Superintendent Mike Flanagan who has returned to the issue at every possible opportunity.
You see, while keeping a public school District open certainly must be considered a "victory" for public education advocates, there are few clean heroes in all out war.
Pontiac is open simply because of the raw, political and still Republican power of Oakland County. When assorted reps in this area -- Jim Marleau, Mike Kowall, John Pappageorge, Mike McCready -- realized Governor Snyder and Mike Flanagan's efforts to close Districts was going to hurt them while...
Well, this group of middle to aging white guys quietly put their collective feet down and said, simply, no.
Public education advocates in Michigan, like public education advocates across the country, are looking towards a public education "spring" -- even if the spring seems perpetually delayed.
Today is, I think, the last snow day and the Michigan legislature is taking the opportunity to try a vote again on the EAA...something that first past the House in March -- of 2013.
So, in an age of climate change, when March looks like December, what will this "spring" look like when it finally comes?
Surely it is coming in some form: After 15 to 20 years of more or less accepting the status quo -- that is, operating with the now culture wide premise that public education is "failing" and only can be saved by more "competition," "choice," "charters," "standardized tests" and "vouchers" -- parents, teachers, some university faculty and assorted communities are starting to truly resist, even if they don't have a handle on what is a really, really weird political/education weather pattern.
This resistance delightfully has taken unfamiliar forms -- at least in terms of classical resistance images.
There are no young men in the streets here (yet!),
Nationally, of course, Diane Ravitch, the former Bush advisor, has repented on earlier acceptance of the "schools are failing" mantra and has galvanized a movement that turned in to the NPC conference at the University of Texas.http://dianeravitch.net/category/network-for-public-education/
Young education professors seem more interested in getting a post on Ravitch's blog than a publication in a refereed journal.
To take a more local example, Vicki Markavitch of Oakland Schools has been fighting relentlessly and, with the help of many, came up with a special deal for Pontiac Public Schools to keep them open for the near future.
The deal was without precedent http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140122/SCHOOLS/301220066 and clearly irritated State Superintendent Mike Flanagan who has returned to the issue at every possible opportunity.
You see, while keeping a public school District open certainly must be considered a "victory" for public education advocates, there are few clean heroes in all out war.
Pontiac is open simply because of the raw, political and still Republican power of Oakland County. When assorted reps in this area -- Jim Marleau, Mike Kowall, John Pappageorge, Mike McCready -- realized Governor Snyder and Mike Flanagan's efforts to close Districts was going to hurt them while...
Well, this group of middle to aging white guys quietly put their collective feet down and said, simply, no.
This really isn't what public education advocacy and resistance looks like -- traditionally speaking.
But welcome to a new political climate.
Whither spring?
Public School teachers, for example, can't get their heads around the fact that Arne Duncan -- who is leading a nationwide effort to privatize schools and demonize them and parents -- works for and is a dear friend of President Obama who is, still, for many, the "messiah." Nor, in Michigan, can they seem to get their heads around the fact that their "own" institution -- the MDE -- is something of a political cesspool.
In Detroit, the big debate has been about the EAA (the Educational Achievement Authority). Resisters and public education advocates thought they had scored another surprising victory a month or so ago when State Superintendent Mike Flanagan (surely the State Superintendent must be an advocate for public schools!) ended the "exclusivity" agreement with the state's potential "turnaround" District.http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2014/02/state_education_department_end.html
Twitter was a "buzz" at the seeming end of "Buzz"!
What everyone forgot, of course, was that Flanagan only ended the exclusivity agreement to try to cut a deal to get HB4369 through conference.
That legislation, passed through the Senate (20-18) in December 201 would allow any number of entities -- including the EAA! but not naming specifically the EAA! -- to take over Districts like Pontiac who don't have fellas like L. Brooks Patterson and John Pappageorge standing in the way.
Flanagan, fast becoming something of a cartoon, had just told the whole state in December that anyone who opposed the EAA should be "ashamed" of themselves.
But the public education community -- as is, unfortunately, its habit -- circled the wagons around Mr. Flanagan's crass and clumsy flip flopping on the EAA.
"Mike was okay an okay guy as a regional superintendent" is the logic so he should be allowed to throw MI public education down the toilet to preserve his dignity as he moves in to retirement.
Got it.
To be fair, though, none of this new political climate seems to make sense. Republicans are bad for education right? Democrats good? So why is President Obama leading this charge to close schools? And why are folks like John Pappageorge stopping it, keeping whole Districts open? Why is Mike Flanagan trying to weasel the EAA state codification through legislation while reps from Oakland and Macomb County are joining a true Democratic hero Ellen Lipton? Why is John Austin -- an Ann Arbor proto-type politician if there ever was one -- supporting the EAA, too?
In March, in a blizzard, things just get blurry.
State Superintendents should want schools to stay open, right? But Michigan's Supe wants them closed. Or, at least he wants them consolidated. He wants District administrators concentrating on education, not "burgers and buses" he says.
And if Districts consolidated that would be the case. Yet Superintendents all over the state have had to become political activists, leaders in their own right, spending time on far more than burgers and buses.
Here is Livonia' Randy Liepa spending more time in Lansing than changing the oil of the school bus:http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140227/POLITICS02/302270103
And thank God he is! His "classrooms" budget just might help. I have been dazzled by the intelligence and courage of any number of Superintendents across the state suddenly engaged in a war they probably never imagined having to fight. Rod Rock? Rob Glass? Britten? That is just off the top of my head.
But where is Mike "Burgers and Buses" Flanagan?
In terms of education, the "mitten" state is starting to look more like a Donut. There is a big whole in the middle in terms of leadership but plenty of growth and tantalizing bits around the edges. Or is that the wagons protecting the feeble in the empty middle?
I just don't know. Spring is on the way, I am sure. I just don't know exactly what it will look like. It does look like the EAA will blossom and grow, though, in this strange new environment where bad is good, up is down, right is left, and Mike Flanagan is just a swell guy.
Monday, February 24, 2014
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
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.
At 69.
Although I am not yet 50 I feel the man largely responsible for Animal House, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Caddyshack etc. is my contemporary.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
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.
Friday, February 21, 2014
"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.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, February 14, 2014
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.
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.
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