An American Disgrace: 19 Days of Madness

What a mad, magically horrifying carpet ride it’s been so far. Trump might very well be insane, is certainly showing himself to ill-prepared to lead the country, more interested in watching TV and his own “ratings” than actually helping the people who got him elected and is in the process of installing the most right-wing government in the history of the nation. What more general conclusions can we glean from the first 19 days of Trump-in-Charge?

With the Senate confirmation of Jeff Sessions (The Hill), it appears Conservative America is even more racist than it was in the 1986 and the Republicans plan to capitalize on racial animus among the white working class, and maybe middle class, to levels not fully seen since the Reagan years, if not earlier.

With the confirmation of Betsy Devos yesterday (NYT), they appear to be replacing NCLB with MCLB (many children left behind) and accelerating the insinuation of business interests and market forces into every aspect of our lives.

With the seven-nation immigration ban (Doc Cloud), they are scrapping the very heart of what America stands for - the melting pot moving toward the clam chowder pot – and fulfilling a promise to make America whiter, more Christian and less free. 

With the constant lying and ceaseless attacks on media, judges and really anyone who challenges their newfound power, including protesters in Minnesota (WP, NYT, BBC, Daily Kos), they are condemning not only the first amendment but democracy itself to the dustbin of history. As David Frum argued in the new issue of The Atlantic, the pieces are falling into place for a future American autocracy led by a reality-star billionaire whose sole interests appear to be power, wealth and popularity.

With many of his other cabinet picks, we are being pushed even beyond the radical laissez-faire governance of libertarian-leaning Tea Party apparatchik to one that is only interested in serving the interests of corporations - a further step toward a Russian-style kleptocracy (Vanity Fair). We have the potential to have a labor secretary who hates labor, an EPA head who hates the environment, an Energy secretary who doesn’t believe his department should exist, a head of HUD who knows nothing about housing or urban development and a Secretary of State who has consistently chosen his corporate interests over those of the country, to name but a few.

With the nominations of two architects of the 2008 financial crisis and recent executive order to set the stage for dismantling the Dodd-Frank financial oversight bill (Fortune), they appear to be poised to reward those who got us into that mess and set us on a path toward another financial meltdown. As a reminder, during the campaign, Trump said "I'm not going to let Wall Street get away with murder." But now, he's working to gut the very rules that prevent that from happening and, even more offensively, Trump signed a presidential memorandum last Friday that instructs the Labor Department to delay implementing an Obama-era rule that requires financial professionals who charge commissions to put their clients' best interests first when giving advice on retirement investments. God forbid!

With the sum total of the racist, sexist, Islamophobic, heteronormative, fact-challenged rhetoric and rulings of Trump and the Republican Congress, they are essentially attempting to mainstream the alt-right as a new white-nationalist movement led by the white working class, who will not benefit under this administration's policies, but can express their rage openly and violently. They are attempting to instill fear and hate as the path away from democracy and toward a permanent corporate state.

But that's not it. The Republican-led Congress are poised to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission (Tech Crunch), the very commission charged with protecting voting machines from hacking, by say Russians ... or, I don't know,  the GOP itself. They have already made corporate and individual money easier to siphon to candidates through Citizens United and facilitated voter suppression by stripping the Voting Rights Act of most of its power. Now they are saying "hack us, I dare you." With Session in charge of the Justice Department, gerrymandering set to become even more pronounced with their majority control of state governance, voter suppression on the rise and a firm commitment to avoiding a repeat of the 2012 Presidential Election, where Obama won largely by getting out the minority vote, they can continue to repeat results like 2016 – where Democrats won the majority of votes for the presidency, the Senate and Congress, but lost all three.

These are dangerous times indeed and those who voted for Trump must now answer for the choice they made, and those who didn’t vote at all, for the choice they failed to make. Yet it must be remembered in these dark times, that it was less than one in four Americans who selected these men to lead us and that many more have taken to the streets, the air waves and other channels of dissent to again have their voices heard and their will enacted. The cornerstone of a representative democracy is that the representatives in fact represent the interests of those who have chosen them to rule, a tenet lost in the current, confused maelstrom in which we find ourselves.

P.S. A few other tidbits are worth at least touching on, as they provided further insight into our Commander-and-Thief. Trump broke his own promise of less than a month ago by tweeting an attack on Nordstrom for dropping his daughter's line (NYT), right after a defense briefing he might want to pay attention to after the debacle that was his failed offensive in Yemen (Yahoo). This was a day after he called his defense secretary, of all people, at 3 a.m. to ask an economics question (on a strong versus weak dollar) one assumed he would know, given he made the argument that China has been manipulating our currency for years a centerpiece of his campaign (The Atlantic). And, finally, in maybe the most bizarre of stories within the spectacle-infused, alternate-reality world we have inhabited for 19 days, the USDA quietly took down all of its online information on animal abuse, including puppy breeders that mistreat their dogs (WP). Yeah, why should those upstanding Americans be harassed by government officials … or future dog owners have any sense of where the animals they care for came from?

An American Disgrace (Part 2): The Forming Corporate State

Every day it seems the circus that is the burgeoning Trump presidency has several stories that could just as easily end up on the pages of the National Enquirer as the New York Times. In my first post-election post, I looked at some of the biggest stories since the election. Going forward, at least once a week, I will be exploring the most troubling stories emerging as we move closer to the swearing in of our first billionaire Commander in Chief.

For those interested, my analysis of the election itself is available here (a three-part series).

1. Trump Attacks on the Media: while the public meeting with the New York Times has received extensive coverage (NYT), less has been written about his private meeting the day before with heads of major media outlets. According to the Daily Mail, whose stories should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, he excoriated the media for their dishonesty and lying regarding, apparently, not simply accepting his dishonesty and lying during the campaign (DM). Given the warnings levied by Conway against Democratic Senators and the general tenor of the campaign, one wonders if this will be an even more acrimonious relationship to the media than even that experienced under the Bush presidency. The early signs are troubling, including not including the press corps during most of his visits the days after the election, using twitter posts and You Tube videos over press conferences and, other than the New York Times, largely eschewing direct interaction with the media full stop. His belief, voiced during the campaign, that we should change the libel laws only further amplifies the stakes as we head into the most unpredictable and potentially dangerous transition of power in the history of the country.

2. Fear of Corporate State Intensify: There have been countless examples of Trump seemingly using his new position to enrich he and his family already. In fact, in the aforementioned New York Times interview, Trump proclaimed that, “As far as the, you know, potential conflict of interests, though, I mean I know that from the standpoint, the law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest. That’s been reported very widely. Despite that, I don’t want there to be a conflict of interest anyway. And the laws, the president can’t. And I understand why the president can’t have a conflict of interest now because everything a president does in some ways is like a conflict of interest, but I have, I’ve built a very great company and it’s a big company and it’s all over the world.”

There are in fact rules about conflicts of interest regarding the president, particularly related to receiving gifts from foreign governments, but Trump apparently believes he is above these rules, and the long tradition of putting your assets into a true “blind trust,” not one run by your children. It potentially means that our president will be making deals with foreign countries based solely on the business interests of his companies. The hope, expressed by leading Democratic Senators, is that some GOP Senators might join them in demanding that Trump follow the tradition. My sense is don’t hold your breath.

Among the examples that have emerged so far: a) During his November 9th congratulatory call with Turkish President Erdogan, Donald Trump talked up his Turkish business partner who now seems primed to be a key intermediary between the two heads of state, b) he allegedly discussed building permits during a congratulatory call from the President of Argentina (QZ), c) he admitted to discussing wind farms that he has been trying to block with Nigel Farage, a member of European Parliament (Vox). Given his stance on conflicts of interest, we can imagine this is only the beginning, with even the conservative Wall Street Journal troubled by the implications (CNN).

3. Cabinet Choices Getting Worse by the Pick: Ben Carson, who has admitted that he probably doesn’t have the experience or temperament to serve in government (even as he, of course, ran for president) appears to be the choice to lead the HUD (WSJ). Beyond his own reservations, and those of others who had hoped Trump would choose cabinet members with more experience than his lack thereof, Carson has absolutely no experience with housing or urban development. Maybe Surgeon General would have been a better choice … or maybe just sticking with his old critiques comparing Carson to a pedophile.

Some have hailed his choice of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (. However, like Trump, Pence, Bannon, Kushner and Reince Priebus, none have any foreign policy experience at all. In an increasingly dangerous world and one that Trump did his best to alienate during the campaign, one hoped he might temper his temper with some seasoned veterans who could mend fences and ensure smooth diplomacy moving forward. Guess again on that one.

The third big announcement yesterday was that billionaire Betsy DeVos would become the Education Secretary under Trump (Forbes). DeVos is a strong advocate for vouchers and charter schools (Slate), like the Koch brothers a huge contributor to the GOP cause (TPM), at least tangentially connected to the Christian Reform movement (WP) and has little relevant experience to bring to the job (Detroit Free Press). While she seems substantially less radical than some of Trump’s other picks, the real fear here is that she will march us further along the path toward privatizing public schooling in America. Both her voucher and charter school work have worked to undermine public schools and put them in the hands of corporations and private institutions she believes will more efficiently educate our children. But as Diane Ravitch among many have effectively shown (see her book The Death & Life of the Great American School System), the accountability and choice movement is run by people with no background in education who treat American children like products on an assembly line, as if they all learn the same and a certain array of inputs will always lead to the best outputs. More than this, like the general tendency on the right over the past 35 years, is the belief that market forces are innately superior to public institutions, even when extensive positive externalities exist that do not relate to the bottom line of corporate profits.

4. Hamilton Attacks Last Weekend Red Herrings? Trump’s short lived attack on the cast of Hamilton, for their incantation to future VP Pence to actually consider the interests of ALL the people in the U.S., seemed to be a diversionary tactic to soften the coverage of two scandals that emerged at the same time. The first, regarding the now defunct for profit Trump University, was his decision to settle that lawsuit to the tune of $25 million (NYT) – breaking yet another of his campaign promises to fight that lawsuit all the way. The second, which emerged a few days later, was that the Trump Foundation admitted to violating ban on “self dealing,” thus making the often fallacious charges levied against Hillary Clinton more true for himself than the Clinton Foundation (WP). Both of these admissions of foul play from the past, are more than a red herring for what kind of administration we might expect in the future, as exemplified by his dualistic dealings so far.

5. Popular Vote, Schmopopular Vote: as Clinton’s lead over Trump in the popular vote vaulted above two million votes (a greater than 1.5 percent advantage), we entered territory not seen since 1876. That was the year Rutherford B. Hayes was allowed to steal the election from Tilden even as he appeared to lose both the popular and electoral vote. The reason? The Democrats in the South agreed to give the presidency to the Republican candidate if he would end Reconstruction, which he quickly did upon entering office. The margin today surpasses that of Gore over Bush and further exemplifies the gulf in this country between the urban centers and rural surroundings, between the educated and uneducated and between the two coasts and the rest of the country. 

History Interruptus: Curricular Battles Continue

As racial tension continues to rise and a certain political insularity appears to be a mounting anti-democratic meme of our age, most reasonable people would argue that our schools need to educate children on the battles of the past and present to try to ameliorate those battles in the future. Those reasonable people would be wrong, of course, at least where the state of Texas is concerned. The state, arguably stuck in an ideological cave over a century in arrears, has taken their atavism to heretofore unrealized levels in recent years, ignoring the increased gun violence in America by passing open carry laws, eshewing that pesky separation of church and state whenever possible, ignoring the consensus on marriage equality and, not surprisingly, continuing to openly support racial antagonism against blacks and Latino/as.

The latest parry in the ongoing war against the war against racism comes in the form of public school curriculum, a less reported but incredibly important battleground in the cultural wars over the past 30 years. It started back in the 80s when conservatives lined the “adoption boards” that choose the list of acceptable books and textbooks for each grade at the state level. By taking over those boards in states including Texas, Florida and, to a lesser extent, California, they were able to essentially control the entire industry. Textbook makers soon realized the importance of appeasing the interests of these adoption boards and began to create books that both avoided topics that were too controversial and often supported a more conservative worldview. This is most obvious in the case of evolution versus intelligent design (aka “creationism), but exists across the curricular spectrum from the novels students read to the science they are taught to the examples used in math classes and, maybe most importantly, to the history the youth of America learn.

It is here where the conservative bias in curriculum has again shown its face with recent changes to Texas social studies books essentially erasing the long history of racism in America. The books barely touch on racial segregation, do not mention the KKK or even the Jim Crow Laws. When looking at the Civil War, they even find a way to diminish the importance of the abolishment of slavery by claiming it was caused by “sectionalism, state’s rights and [only third] slavery.” A board member who helped adopt the standards in 2010 went as far as to claim slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” and that, “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”

As just one example of this bias, students in Texas are now required to read the speech Jefferson Davis gave when he was inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America, an address that does not mention slavery. But students are not required to read a famous speech by Alexander Stephens, Davis’s vice president, in which he explained that the South’s desire to preserve slavery was the cornerstone of its new government and “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”

Given the continued violence by police against unarmed black men, the killing of nine black parishioners by a white supremacist and the general racial antagonisms that continue to animate our social, political and economic lives, it seems like reckless abandonment to have our children ignore these issues inside our schools. That is, unless we want to preserve the only real appeal the Republican party has beyond the economic elites of our country – using racism, backwards notions of “religious freedom,” and jingoistic anti-immigrant rhetoric to stir up white panic (particularly of the male variety). Of course, attempts to control knowledge are wrought with challenges at present, as much of the Internet remains above the fold of ideological control. Let’s hope it stays that way!

Language Misbehaving

Intolerance for Intolerance or Thought Police Taking over the University?

Higher education is supposed to be a space for free and independent thought, where your arguments are held up to the scrutiny of reason, logic and evidence, rather than the whims of public opinion. Tenure is supposed to protect professors from being punished or fired for their opinions alone. Classrooms are set up to be spaces for open discussion and debate. College newspapers and student groups have relatively free reign and controversial thinkers are often given the space to speak their minds. Yet serious attacks have occurred in recent years trying to undermine the most radical space for democratic deliberation left today.

In just the past week, a Nobel Laureate was forced to resign from his job at University College for a rather tepid sexist joke (WP), the University of Illinois was censured for firing a professor who criticized Israel in a tweet last summer (WP), tenure is in serious jeopardy in Wisconsin (WUWM) and the University of California at SF is eliminating all sugary drinks from campus (Inside Higher Ed). This comes as battles continue about whether warning labels should be included in syllabi for any material that could be considered a trigger to prior trauma for students (Guardian), whether campuses “liberal” bias is manipulating students (Inside Higher Ed) and whether “affirmative consent” should be the national standard (WP) in addressing the plague of sexual assault on college campuses. On top of this, we have students and professors pushing their campuses to disinvite any speakers whose views they find offensive.

The question that must be asked is whether this is a positive trend seeking to address the excesses of the university and intolerance among those protected by the university structure or overreach by thought police that are trying to colonize post-secondary education with the same absurd call for “objectivity” that has defiled the mainstream media. While few would question the idea behind “affirmative consent” or criticizing a professor for sexist comments in a public venue, should we really accept the policing of opinion that has become so pervasive today? In a world where political insularity is more ubiquitous than ever before, should heterodoxy really be held under such tight scrutiny, ensuring that no one is ever offended by what someone else said? Should we allow the thought police to stamp out all opinion not comporting with the university’s political leanings? And what would that mean for future generations, never taught to critically engage with ideas or have their own ideas and beliefs challenged?

What did Tim Hunt, the aforementioned Nobel Laureate, actually say that led to his forced resignation? “Three things happen when they are in the lab. … You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry.” Tasteless? Sure. Not terribly funny? Okay. But worthy of immediate dismissal without even a hearing? Couldn’t he just make a public apology and take the heat? And what of the elimination of tenure, a popular conservative idea that far too many moderate liberals have rallied behind, under the faulty assumption that teachers, and now professors, have too much power? What of students and faculty forcing universities to eschew controversial thinkers that disagree with their well cultivated and rarely challenged ideas? What of conservative students who, I now think rightfully, charge that they have no freedom to voice their opinions? Gilles Deleuze once argued that all learning begins with provocation. It is a lesson that we should heed, as provocation itself comes under almost constant attack!

To Those Who Claim We Live in a Post-Racial Society ...

Simple question, would we expect a teacher like this to treat black students the same as whites? Would we expect her to teach her students to be sensitive to racial difference? While probably not a bad person, this is the sort of "not so soft" bigotry that unfortunately is rampant in schools today, though rarely expressed in public. 

Education Today ...

A Teacher Resignation Letter to Remember

Teachers are increasingly speaking out against school reforms that they believe are demeaning their profession, and far too many quality ones are quitting. Below is a resignation letter from a veteran teacher, Gerald J. Conti that is worth reading in whole:

Mr. Casey Barduhn, Superintendent
Westhill Central School District
400 Walberta Park Road
Syracuse, New York 13219

Dear Mr. Barduhn and Board of Education Members:

It is with the deepest regret that I must retire at the close of this school year, ending my more than twenty-seven years of service at Westhill on June 30, under the provisions of the 2012-15 contract. I assume that I will be eligible for any local or state incentives that may be offered prior to my date of actual retirement and I trust that I may return to the high school at some point as a substitute teacher.

As with Lincoln and Springfield, I have grown from a young to an old man here; my brother died while we were both employed here; my daughter was educated here, and I have been touched by and hope that I have touched hundreds of lives in my time here. I know that I have been fortunate to work with a small core of some of the finest students and educators on the planet.

I came to teaching forty years ago this month and have been lucky enough to work at a small liberal arts college, a major university and this superior secondary school. To me, history has been so very much more than a mere job, it has truly been my life, always driving my travel, guiding all of my reading and even dictating my television and movie viewing. 

Rarely have I engaged in any of these activities without an eye to my classroom and what I might employ in a lesson, a lecture or a presentation. With regard to my profession, I have truly attempted to live John Dewey’s famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I’ve used it so very often) that “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” 

This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill.

A long train of failures has brought us to this unfortunate pass. In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education. The New York State United 

Teachers union has let down its membership by failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against this same costly and dangerous debacle. Finally, it is with sad reluctance that I say our own administration has been both uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian. This situation has been exacerbated by other actions of the administration, in either refusing to call open forum meetings to discuss these pressing issues, or by so constraining the time limits of such meetings that little more than a conveying of information could take place. This lack of leadership at every level has only served to produce confusion, a loss of confidence and a dramatic and rapid decaying of morale. The repercussions of these ill-conceived policies will be telling and shall resound to the detriment of education for years to come. The analogy that this process is like building the airplane while we are flying would strike terror in the heart of anyone should it be applied to an actual airplane flight, a medical procedure, or even a home repair. Why should it be acceptable in our careers and in the education of our children?

My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic “assessments”) or grade their own students’ examinations. The development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom. Teacher planning time has also now been so greatly eroded by a constant need to “prove up” our worth to the tyranny of APPR (through the submission of plans, materials and “artifacts” from our teaching) that there is little time for us to carefully critique student work, engage in informal intellectual discussions with our students and colleagues, or conduct research and seek personal improvement through independent study. We have become increasingly evaluation and not knowledge driven. Process has become our most important product, to twist a phrase from corporate America, which seems doubly appropriate to this case.

After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.

For the last decade or so, I have had two signs hanging above the blackboard at the front of my classroom, they read, “Words Matter” and “Ideas Matter”. While I still believe these simple statements to be true, I don’t feel that those currently driving public education have any inkling of what they mean.

Sincerely and with regret,

Gerald J. Conti
Social Studies Department Leader
Cc: Doreen Bronchetti, Lee Roscoe
My little Zu.

Ideology & Curriculum

Jails Outnumber Colleges in America Today

Many know that America has more individuals in prison, and more prisoners per capita, than anywhere else in the world, though the numbers are stark. As of the 2010 Census, there are 2.3 million prisoners and 707 per 100,000 residents (WP). But even more surprising, and troubling, might be the fact that we now have more prisons than colleges in the U.S. The sad reality is 1,800 state and federal correction facilities and 3,200 local and county jails, combine for slightly more than the approximately 4,600 degree-granting institutions in the U.S. (NCES). In many parts of the country, in fact, there are more people living in prisons than on college campuses (particularly in the South).

Maybe this would be necessary if there had been a dramatic increase in the crime rate, but crime has been going steadily down for the past 40 years (Murder Rates; Overall Crime), at the same time the prison population has ballooned from 216,000 in 1974 to its current rate (DOJ). So what has changed? As I’ve written in previous posts, mandatory minimum sentences for even minor drug offenses (meted out predominantly to male youth of color) and the privatization of prisons in the 90s (meaning an increased demand for “clients”) both pushed the trend. Looking at the map here, we find the real commitment of our justice system today – to reinforce a society that serves the power elite and throws away the lives of far too many young men. Yet is it that surprising as the number of quality, well-paid jobs decline just as more young people consider higher education as a viable option? 

Elizabeth Warren Has a Long Mountain to Climb

Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton looked like a lock for the Democratic Presidential nomination. After eight years of Bush, it also looked likely she might have a relatively smooth route to the White House, though any Clinton would be wary of taking anything for granted. But then an upstart Senator from Illinois came along and stole her thunder and chance at history; while making some of his own along the way.

So almost a decade later Hillary finds herself back in the same position more or less, with a strong hold on the nomination and a strong chance of beating out anyone the GOP can muster – though Jeb Bush might give her pause. But many progressives remember Clinton's support for the Iraq War, her positions to the right of her husband (who himself disappointed us on a host of issues from media consolidation and banking deregulation to welfare reform and the criminalization of drug use (aka being a black or brown youth)) and can’t help but notice that she would be one of the eldest Presidents entering office in history. And so enter Elizabeth Warren, a Senator who is one of the few truly progressive voice left in a body that was established to check the will of the people whenever they pushed the elites too hard for rights or equality.

Warren speaks the language of progressives but in a manner that generally quashes the elitism and firebrand populism of the past and includes a measured and intellectual quality that far too many progressives lack (at least since the passing of Wellstone). And so some progressives want her to challenge Clinton for the nomination, at minimum pushing her to the left as Nader did with Gore in 2000. But does she have a chance to win the nomination against such a popular brand? Will her intelligence and liberalism get in the way of a message that far more people in the country agree with than the mainstream media leads many to believe? Early polls seem to indicate the answer is no (TNR), though I think she would certainly have a chance to beat Clinton if she went after her aggressively (and indirectly). We shall have to wait and see …