Collapse of authority breeds authoritarianism

Deformed: Authoritarian undercurrents in education, Part VI

It is ironic but understandable that in an era of the almost universal discrediting of all traditional authority the phenomenon of authoritarianism would seem to be increasing. Corporations, government, religion and media have all proved to be untrustworthy over the past 20 to 30 years. Even within the past 10 years we've seen corporate scandal and failure, from Enron and Worldcom in the early aughts to the banking and finance scandals later in the decade. Religions such as the Roman Catholic church have been shown to harbor slews of pedophiles, even moving them around to avoid detection and prosecution.

Traditional media has become corporatized and emasculated. It is no longer a challenger of power, as envisioned in the “Fourth Estate” tradition, instead succumbing to the same corporate forces that are now threatening education. Last September Gallup found that distrust of U.S. Media was at a “record high.” Maybe that's because rather than challenge politicians' fear-generating rhetoric, traditional media, with a few important exceptions, tend to echo claims of existential threats while adding their own literally mind-numbing melodrama to the mix. It's a given that the business press, again with a few exceptions, is usually nothing more than public relations spin for Wall Street.

In short, it has, or should have, become exceedingly difficult to know who to trust in today's world.

Given their authoritarian submission, this creates a problem for authoritarian followers. Who to submit to? They cope with this collapse of confidence in traditional authorities by first trying to deny the lack of trustworthiness of their authorities: they are very forgiving of them. As Altemeyer writes:

Once someone becomes a leader of the high RWAs’ in-group, he can lie with impunity about the out-groups, himself, whatever, because he knows the followers will seldom check on what he says, nor will they expose themselves to people who set the record straight. Furthermore they will not believe the truth if they somehow get exposed to it, and if the distortions become absolutely undeniable, they will rationalize it away and put it in a box. If the scoundrel’s duplicity and hypocrisy lands him on the front page of every daily in the country, the followers will still forgive him if he just says the right things.

Second, they tend to coalesce into a closed mode of existence: They have their own media, religion, schools and even business. They have constructed a way of being that severely restricts the chances that they have to seriously engage people different from themselves. This sets up the resistance to diversity that authoritarian scholars cite, and can easily morph into an us-versus-them mindset.

The authoritarian trends in education deform mirror changes in other sectors of our society. Since 9/11 the country has trended politically towards the authoritarian and militaristic. Tributes to the military are now de-rigueur at public gatherings, most prominently in entertainment and sports. No Super Bowl or Masters golf tournament would be complete without an Air Force flyover, free tickets to conspicuously placed service members, and a TV interview or two with military representatives.

Ordinary soldiers are routinely cited as heroes, and apparently cannot ever be publicly addressed without first thanking them for their “service.” This applies as much to a marine who was shot in Afghanistan as to an Air Force pilot who remotely operates drones from the safety of places like North Dakota or the Nevada desert. Only the bifurcated thinking of an authoritarian could reconcile such disparate brands of heroism, equating the act of remotely dropping bombs that kill women and children half-way around the world to the acts of a soldier in the field.

Following the attacks on 9/11 a new era of religious and cultural bigotry took hold in the US, intensifying already existing prejudices against Arabs in general and Muslims in particular. After the collapse of communism as a bogey man in the 1990s a fear of terrorism had already been put in place as a way to motivate authoritarian voters with a new existential fear of the “other.”

Scapegoating of immigrants has a long history in the US, and is getting a strong expression against undocumented workers from Mexico with racist laws being enacted across the country, particularly in Arizona. Authoritarian laws discriminating against homosexuals are wrapped in Orwellian named legislation such as the “Defense of Marriage Act.” How two gay people getting married threatens a heterosexual's marriage was never explained, as politicians of all stripes, including the liberal Paul Wellstone, voted for the act. The act demonstrated that the pull of resistance to diversity and conventionality were so strong at that moment that they could not be opposed, even by a liberal Democrat icon.

Tomorrow: Replacing democracy with authoritarianism 

Part I:  Deformed: Authoritarian undercurrents in education
Part II: The danger to education and democracy posed by authoritarianism
Part II:  School choice birthed in authoritarian racial animus and market fundamentalism
Part IV: Education deformers' achieve political success through a culture of lying, repitition, and compliance, not logic, reason and evidence
Part V: Deformed schools: Reduced diversity, authoritarian education styles, narrowed curriculum, and harming of critical thinking skills

All things bright and beautiful

How Many Gays Must God Create Before We Accept That He Wants Them Around?

Those were the words of Rep. Steve Simon on May 2nd at a Minnesota House committee hearing on the proposed gay marriage ban amendment to the Minnesota Constitution. You've probably seen the video, but just in case you haven't, here it is:




In his remarks, Rep. Simon observed that most of the objections to gay marriage lodged at the hearing were on religious grounds; he raised the question about whether that was appropriate to make law on that basis, regardless of how strongly the objectors held those beliefs.

Perhaps in other words, your truth is not necessarily my truth. Rep. Simon is right about this, but it is hard to say this to religious fundamentalists, and even harder to get it to sink in.

Rep. Simon's words stand in counterpoint to those of Katherine Kersten, delivered in her cudgel for Easter Day, that I posted about here:

[T]hey [the left and the opinion elites] don't like the idea of truth -- the idea that there is, in the nature of things, a blueprint for human flourishing. They don't like the notion of moral parameters that limit our actions on matters such as cloning, stem cell use, abortion or marriage. They believe that man can make himself: that there is no "floor" to the universe.

Kersten, and the objecters to gay marriage that Rep. Simon was addressing, are pushing the "natural law" position: laws come from God. Kersten and the people testifying to oppose gay marriage get to tell us what God really meant.

But not so fast. Can we really be sure these people, or the humans who wrote the Bible, or those who seek to interpret it now, really know the mind of God? Let's consider some other examples of people claiming to speak for the Almighty.

One of the first persons who springs to mind for me is Pope Urban II, who called for the First Crusade and its charming brother, the People's Crusade, in 1095. Urban was one of the guys in a string of cheerleaders for religious carnage in the Middle East that has taken place ever since. His osensible purpose was to "save" the eastern orthodox churches from the Muslims, but he clearly hoped that reunification would cement his status as pope numero uno in the Christian church.

Let's skip forward now to the Spanish Inquisition and the loveable Tomás de Torquemada. Torquemada was a poster child for religious belief, um, carefully applied. Ol' Tomás was the first Inquisitor General in Spain, and he laid down a mark that others have been striving to meet for centuries.

Or imagine the help that the Roman Inquisition and Pope Urban VII gave to Galileo in seeing the error of his ways, thinking that the earth was not the center of the universe, poor misguided sap.

But you say, these were the olden days; the church is much better now. Why, modern church leaders couldn't hold a candle to the feet of Torquemada! Let's see.

Clearly, the Christian church was wholly and unalterably opposed to slavery. Well, wasn't it?

[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts.

Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America

Or how about this one:

The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.

Rev. R. Furman, D.D., Baptist, of South Carolina

 And my personal favorite from the same site:

The doom of Ham has been branded on the form and features of his African descendants. The hand of fate has united his color and destiny. Man cannot separate what God hath joined. 

Africans and slavery joined happily in marriage?

The Bible was also trotted out by the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa to justify apartheid.

The history of the church has been very much bound with the politics of the Afrikaner community of South Africa. The church supported the system of apartheid, which institutionalized separation and stratification of the people of South Africa according to race. The social segregation of Black, Coloured and White people was reflected in the establishment of churches of these three groups. In the 1980s the [Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa] was expelled from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches for its support of apartheid. In 1986 the church showed its repentance by preaching for all members of all racial groups to pray under, one umbrella, thus making South African history by welcoming Black people back in the church.

Christian leaders haven't always had such great attitudes toward women, either. Of course, there is plenty of support for their positions in the Bible.

Women should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children...If a woman grows weary and, at last, dies from childbearing, it matters not. Let her die from bearing - she is there to do it. 

Martin Luther

Or how about this one:

If it were not for some [divine] power that wanted the feminine sex to exist, the birth of a woman would be just another accident, such as that of other monsters [= a dog with two heads, a calf with five legs, etc.]

Thomas Aquinas

The Christian church's profound conservatism can even be found in the Anglican hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful, the third stanza of which is:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

A splendid little shout out to feudalism, or at least the class system, isn't it? And let's not forget the divine right of kings!

And I'll cite one last example. Martin Luther King wrote his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail to the members of the clergy in Birmingham, Alabama who had urged him to go slow on civil rights.

In each and every one of the examples I've cited, there were people who thumped on their spittle-flecked Bibles and argued for subjugation or exploitation of, bigotry against, or the outright killing of people.

Kudos to Rep. Steve Simon for at least beginning to articulate the problem.

Deformed schools: Reduced diversity, authoritarian education styles, narrowed curriculum, and harming of critical thinking skills

Deformed: authoritarian undercurrents in education, Part V

Perhaps the worst authoritarian effects of corporate education reform occurs in schools themselves, which are becoming more segregated and are employing increasingly militaristic and authoritarian techniques in order to raise math and reading scores. Curriculum is being narrowed to the point of many schools not having one art teacher, while students are not learning how to critically think.

Reduced diversity

Resistance to diversity has emerged as perhaps a key component of authoritarianism. Public schools are one place where students and parents from a neighborhood are forced to encounter people of a different race or religion, or who might have different customs and ways of doing things. Researchers have shown that this kind of interaction can act as somewhat of a salve to authoritarianism. Today's education deform is blowing up our diverse system and replacing it with a pseudo diversity. Yes – there are diverse styles of charter schools, but within those schools students populations are less diverse.

Two new studies show how the implementation of school "choice" has resulted in an alarming re-segregation of America's schools. Kevin G. Welner, writing at the Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog sums up the studies: "...charter schools across the country [were found] to be substantially more racially isolated than traditional public schools." Writes Welner, author of the second study:

Our study provides a comprehensive examination of enrollment patterns in schools operated by private corporations and finds these schools to be segregated by race, family income, disabilities and English language learner status. As compared with their local public school districts, these schools operated by Education Management Organizations, or EMOs, are substantially more segregated, and the strong segregative pattern found in 2001 is virtually unchanged through 2007.

A recent study by two University of Illinois Chicago researchers into the effects of school reform in Chicago found an alarming re-segregation of schools and growing “disparities between black and white students, and between Latino and white students.” The reform has created a “two-tier” public education system, according to the two researchers. The high achieving schools cited in most reports on the Chicago Public schools turn out to be “three times whiter and three times less poor than the system as a whole” according to the study.

In 2011 the Republican-led Minnesota state legislature not only proposed removing 70 percent of funding for school integration, it went so far as to propose to remove the state's “commitment to the importance of integration in its public schools" from Minnesota regulations. The Republicans also proposed eliminating regulations requiring collection of data about segregation and requiring action to integrate racially segregated schools.

Apart from the division of charter schools into those for white and black, poor and rich, is the sheer variety of charter schools. There are Jewish, Christian, and Muslim schools. There are arts schools. There are schools that are gay friendly. There is a charter school to teach you sports management. In the Brave New World of education deform parents are free to choose schools that religiously, politically or culturally suit them. More importantly, they are free to avoid anyone who is substantially different from themselves.

Authoritarian education styles

As education deform has advanced, public schools, especially those that serve poor and minority students, have increasingly adopted authoritarian aspects of military and prison culture. Students are randomly drug tested, subjected to harsh discipline, searched, and kept under surveillance.

The most popular and influential educational style today is that of KIPP and its authoritarian brethren that exist to demonstrate one thing: That they can increase standardized reading and math scores among poor and minority children. How the test scores are raised isn't even meaningful. The leading deform advocate organizations actually brag about their disinterest in educational pedagogy or learning strategies; they are only concerned that the system be changed, in their current parlance, to represent the values of flexibility, accountability, and choice. The only metrics used to gauge success are the test scores on two subjects.

The KIPP teaching method is called SLANT, an acronym for “sit up straight, look and listen, ask and answer questions, nod to show understanding, [and] track the speaker” :

[Students] must learn that any rule infraction will bring an instant corrective response, and they must learn that the smallest misdeed will be no more tolerated than the most egregious offense. New recruits practice walking, getting off the bus, sitting in the cafeteria, and going to the bathroom the KIPP way. Students must learn that KIPP rules apply inside and outside of school. “Miscreants” must learn, for instance, that isolation and ostracism from the KIPP family is total as long as the punishment lasts, and children who talk to “miscreants” at or away from school risk the same punishment if apprehended. In fact, it becomes the duty of other students to report offenders who are associating in any way with “miscreants.” If they do not, they, too, risk the same punishment. New recruits, then, learn compliance through the exercise of coercive power and constant surveillance.

You begin to understand why KIPP targets poor and minority children: affluent whites would have nothing to do with such a stifling learning environment. KIPP's motto appropriately fits its style: “Work hard, be nice.” Non-authoritarian school mottoes sound more like, “Good Instruction Is Better Than Riches,” or “"Soaring to Greatness, Committed to Excellence.” As one education critic has written, the system seems to aim to produce “poor people lacking intellectual skills but brimming with character.”

The authoritarian culture of KIPP produces some sad results in their schools. One parent reported that children in KIPP schools refer to them as the "Kids in Prison Program."  In 2009 a scandal broke out in the Fresno, California, Unified School district over a report on KIPP Fresno’s authoritarian CEO, Chi Tschang, who was accused of

“...making children bark like a dog, taking children's eye glasses from them, making children stand out in the cold for hours, picking up children and dropping them on the floor, isolating children, screaming at children, emotionally-abusing children, making children stand in the sun for 2 hours during the summer, telling children to put their 'ugly face toward the wall', and, otherwise, going 'beyond the bounds of the law'”

KIPP Fresno was eventually closed , but the sadistic Mr Tschang is still an important figure in the deform movement. He presented a session at the 20^th Anniversary meeting of Teach For America in February 2011 titled “"Bringing the 'Joy Factor' into Your School."

Though KIPP only has about 100 schools today, it plans to open an additional 100 in the next decade. It plans to grow in tandem with its sister institution, Teach For America, which recently announced that it had gained promises of an additional $100 million from a handful of philanthropies. TFA supplies 60 percent of the KIPP principals, and 30 percent of its teachers.

Perhaps you've heard of one former TFA teacher, Michelle Rhee, darling of the school reform movement and controversial former chancellor of Washington D.C. who reveled in firing teachers, exemplified
by the cover photo of her, stern-faced, standing in a classroom with a broom on the cover of Time. The only thing missing was a pile of fired teachers' bodies on the floor in front of her.

Rhee has become a prominent leader of the deform movement, starting a new advocacy organization called Students First!, with an ambitious goal of raising $1 billion. Rhee is a social dominator in the mold of the leaders of the deform movement. She was recently found to have been lying about the academic achievement of her students during her short three year career in Maryland. She told a reporter about how when she was unable to control her students during her teaching days she resorted to taping the students' mouths shut. She was actually proud of that. In an apt metaphor, Rhee drew student blood when removing the tape.

Narrowed curriculum and failure to teach critical thinking

Education reform has taken a terrible toll on the diversity of curriculum and experiences available to students, and, for charter students especially, their ability to critically think. New studies show that college students have an alarming deficit of critical thinking ability, and that charter schools, particularly those in New York City, are failing to teach complex reasoning skills.

It's not hard to see why: because of political differences over teaching standards and local control of education there has never been a national agreement about what constitutes acceptable rates of learning, or even what should be learned. The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act instructs states to develop their own standards for math and reading, which are the only two subject areas politicians could agree on. Now with efforts to imbue tests on those two subject matters with existential import, including the pay and retention of teachers, other subjects and deeper learning are neglected.

Chris Hedges aptly described the threat to higher thinking posed by the corporate takeover of our schools at Truthdig.com:

“Schools and universities, on their knees for corporate dollars and their boards dominated by hedge fund and investment managers, have deformed education into the acquisition of narrow vocational skills that serve specialized corporate interests and create classes of drone-like systems managers. They make little attempt to equip students to make moral choices, stand up for civic virtues and seek a life of meaning. These moral and ethical questions are never even asked. Humanities departments are vanishing as swiftly as the ocean’s fish stocks."

In New York City after the Gates' Foundation massive infusion of cash to create dozens of new “small” high schools, one third of all public high schools don't even have one art teacher on site.

A University of Illinois Chicago study on the school changes enacted by current Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Democratic mayor Daley found that Black and Latino students have “disproportionately experienced a string of punitive and destabilizing policies” including "drilling for standardized tests, being forced to repeat a grade, school closures and high teacher turnover.”

A new report on six charter schools done by the New York City's Department of Education (DOE) shows, according to one writer, “most of the schools are neglecting basic elements of decent education, yet in no case were they punished for this, or pressured to change their ways,” and that “critical thinking was missing from several schools.” At one Bronx school, characterized by the report as “academically successful”

“Teachers' questions asked mainly for recall of information...Students' responses were generally one or two words...Students did not discuss or share ideas...There was no evidence of analysis, evaluation, or providing students with the opportunity to create a new product or defend a point of view.”

The report concluded that “Some of the key skills necessary for college success were not observed in classrooms.” Students at one charter high school studied reported that students were never required to read novels or book-length non-fiction. The longest reports they had written were three to four pages. Though parents complained about verbally abusive discipline and high rates of detention at one of the charter schools, nothing was done about it.

Tomorrow: Collapse of authority breeds authoritarianism 

Part I:  Deformed: Authoritarian undercurrents in education
Part II: The danger to education and democracy posed by authoritarianism
Part II:  School choice birthed in authoritarian racial animus and market fundamentalism
Part IV: Education deformers' achieve political success through a culture of lying, repetition, and compliance, not logic, reason and evidence

Rep. Cornish deserves a cut

While proponents and opponents of the "Stand Your Ground" / "Shoot First" bill trade anecdotes, the debate about the bill is doing its intended work - selling guns.

This March, Minnesota set a record for the number of NICS firearm background checks, with 35,730. The first three months of 2011 have even outpaced the Obama's comin' to get my guns frenzy of early 2009. At that time, there was significant media coverage of the buying spree. Nowadays, there's not so much as a peep. The National Rifle Association is a trade association masquerading as a citizen's group. One purpose of their legislative strategy is to increase sales of guns and ammo, and they've been wildly successful here in Minnesota. Over the last decade, firearm background checks have increased 60%, from 185,100 in 2000 to 297,390 in 2010. The first three months of 2011 saw 85,502 checks, more than double the 40,074 in the first three months of 2000. Like I said, wildly successful.

The debate over HF 1467 has predictably focused on a escalating series of silly anecdotes of self-defense and reckless gunplay. The reality is that the substance of the bill is splitting hairs on an epic level. Proponents of HF 1467 are hard-pressed to produce a single example of an unjust conviction that it would have prevented. Spot's done a fine job of illustrating the absurd potential results if it were to become law, but these are largely hypothetical as well. It's a virtual replay of the 2003 debate over the "shall issue" law. In the wake of the MCPPA, violent crime has not ceased nor has there been a return to the wild, wild west. What has happened is a steady increase in gun sales after a sharp gain in 2003. (Note: While NICS background checks are not directly equivalent to gun sales, they serve as a useful proxy.)

Debate over legislation and election campaigns have caused several short-term spikes in sales. In Minnesota, there is a strong seasonality to background checks, with a bump in spring and fall.

To control for this seasonality, I took the 2000-2010 NICS background check data, created an average percentage of annual checks for each month, then looked for periods that were higher than the 10 year average. This resulted in the following spikes:

August-October 2000 | Before the Bush-Gore election (+.73, +2.53, +1.59)

September-October 2001 | After 9/11 (+2.14, +2.79)

May-July 2003 | After initial passage of the MCPPA (+.51, +1.11, +.75)

November 2008-May 2009 | After election of Obama (+1.89, +.07, +1.38, +1.23, +2.00, +2.40)

It's hard to pin down causality on changes in gun sales. While the increase in sales after the MCPPA is logically connected to a specific change in behavior (carrying), HF 1467 isn't likely to lead to a rush to acquire a new "home protector" gun. But it's another in a series of NRA bills that push gun ownership and bring free publicity and advertising for gun manufacturers.

And that's the dangerous aspect of this whole charade. Higher rates of gun ownership correlate with higher rates of suicide, especially among teenagers. Teasing out the many strands of causality and correlation between guns and crime is extraordinarily difficult, all political bombast to the contrary. But I believe that the notion that we are more safe when there are more guns is false. And that's why I think HF 1467 is bad policy, not because it will change the outcome of one criminal case in a generation.

Follow me on Twitter @aaronklemz

Education deformers achieve political success through a culture of lying, repetition, and compliance, not logic, reason and evidence

Deformed: authoritarian undercurrents in education, Part IV

Authoritarian leaders do not favor open and fair debate, followed by democratic action. Social dominators prefer to shape a narrative and then construct political arguments around the desired outcome. It doesn't matter if arguments used are logical or even true. What matters is if they can be useful in achieving the desired ends. In such a confused environment it can be difficult for real social scientists to sort out the facts, let alone convince a corrupted traditional media of what the real world looks like.

In this sense corporate education reformers have shown themselves to act in the manner of social dominators, attempting to force their vision of the structure of education through campaigns filled with distortions and outright lies. When caught, the deformers have merely shifted their justifications to new lies or distortions, or merely shouted them louder. Reformers distinctly do NOT use logic and reason to make their case. Instead they instill fear by citing misleading statistics then attributing the failures of our society to be the responsibility of teachers and schools.

The lies began with the Reagan administration's flawed and misleading Nation At Risk (NAR) report, in the early 1980s. Nation At Risk had turned statistics on their heads. For example, NAR stated that SAT scores had been dropping. But it failed to note they were dropping because more students - from lower echelons of high school attainment - were now taking the test, and bringing the mean down. If researchers controlled for high school attainment the drop in scores disappeared, yet echos of the NAR conclusions still ring in today's media.

The dishonest discourse continued with the censoring of a 1991 report from Sandia National Lab, which found that the US education system was performing quite admirably, both in terms of increasing attainment by students and by workforce preparedness. It was withheld by the Bush I administration, possibly because it presciently warned that continuing attacks on teachers and schools were a real threat to the education success pointed to in the Sandia report. When the report was finally published in an obscure educational journal it was ignored by traditional media, landing it number three on Project Censored's list of the most censored stories for 1993.

Until eventually proven wrong by social science researchers, the deformers originally claimed, without any proof, that poor and minority students would do better academically in private voucher schools, and that the competition would cause students in nearby regular public schools to also score higher on standardized tests.

The failure of the Milwaukee school voucher experiment, still in existence to this day, put a stake in the heart of those two lies.  Deformers still claim, despite proof to the contrary, that students do better academically in choice schools, i.e. charter schools, but they no longer make the claim that nearby regular public schools will magically improve from the competition.

Even today there is a tremendous amount of denial involved in the education deformers' position. They talk about “high performing” charter schools, as if all charters could be exceptional, when the reality is that a student is twice as likely to be do academically worse at a charter school than at a regular public school. Incredibly there is denial that de-facto segregated schools are antithetical to democracy.

That denial is dwarfed by the illogical thinking that places the blame for low poor and minority test scores on teachers, relentlessly seeks their accountability, yet aims to replace them with less-qualified temporaries like those from Teach For America (TFA). Advocacy campaigns to ease teacher training rules call for “new paths for great teachers,” when in reality TFA teachers have much less training than their professionally schooled peers.

Peer-reviewed research shows unequivocally that no matter a teacher's talent, his or her first two years will be the least effective of their careers. Ironically 50 percent of TFA teachers leave the profession after two years, and 80 percent are gone by the end of their third years. We are literally getting the worst career years of their lives.

Authoritarians are the kind of people who can strongly believe in two completely opposing ideas, as Altemeyer writes (emphasis added):

...research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and -- to top it all off -- a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic.

The lies and distortions of the corporate education reformers do not rest merely in the past. The most recent affront to honest education discourse was the propagandistic, misleading and outright dishonest movie Waiting for Superman, which received widespread praise from politicians and leading media lights, including President Obama and Oprah Winfrey. From mis-interpretation of the results of academic achievement tests to giving false impressions about the efficacy of charter schools Waiting for Superman paints a libelous and distorted picture of American education.

As but one example the film blames teachers and their unions for problems in American primary and secondary education, while admiring the educational achievement of Finland, without mentioning that the Nordic country has an almost completely unionized workforce, does very little standardized testing, and has a population with a poverty rate one-seventh of that in the U.S. While the film endlessly lauds charter schools, it never mentions that the largest meta-study ever done of charter schools in the U.S. found that twice as many students do worse in charter schools than in regular public schools.

One new group, called 50Can, is a great example of the dishonest tactics and discourse practiced by the education deform movement. 50Can is a low-cost, high-impact political aggregator and agitator, funded and controlled by plutocrats, that presents itself as a common-sense grass roots education advocate. 50Can grew out of a Connecticut corporate deform group call ConnCan. It hopes to be a service organization to "Can" type organizations in all 50 states. Besides Connecticut it already has operations in Minnesota, Rhode Island and Maryland.

The Can's technique includes approval for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status while having a stated goal of organizing political campaigns aimed at three terrible ideas: loosening teacher standards, creating more charter schools, and evaluating teachers by their students' test scores. Normally creating a tax-exempt organization with explicit political aims would be considered cheating, but in American non-profit tax law it is apparently acceptable behavior even though non-profits are not supposed to be involved in political activity.

The prospectus for the group's Minnesota offshoot called MinnCan, for example, declared its goals of creating the "political will" and "the right political climate" to "reform education by changing state policy" "through both legislative and administrative action."

One look at ConnCan's board of directors and advisers show's who's really calling the shots here, and what the true agenda is. The board of directors is comprised of 12 people, all of them are from the financial and investment industries. Not one of the board members comes from any sector relevant to public education. These are the people who, on deep background, we're supposed to let "redefine" education in America.  Given the corruption and incompetence shown by the finance industry over the past decade, one can only hope they are better at education than investing, although there is no evidence to suggest they might be.

Likewise MinnCan is quick to distort facts and tell outright lies in its prospectus. For example, it states that "Minnesota's African-American and Hispanic children...have made zero progress over the past 10 years." This is clearly false as demonstrated by the most respected national tests, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

In math Black children in Minnesota in grade four scores have increased from 193 in 1992 to 222 in 2007.  In 2000 the scores averaged 208.  By grade eight Black scores increased from 236 in 1990 to 260 in 2007, showing steady gains over the period. While it's true there has been little gain in Black reading scores from 1992 to 2007, where scores increased from 189 to 198, there was a similar stagnation in white scores which grew to 231 from 223 for the period.  Black reading scores show more gains at grade eight - growing from 231 in 1998 to 245 in 2007.  That same period showed only a four point gain for white students.

So while Black reading scores showed only small gains in the NAEP tests, they matched white gains for the period. And in math tests Blacks made healthy, steady gains over the studied period, a reality far different than the MinnCan claims of "zero progress over the past 10 years."

Such is the corruption of traditional media that when the head of MinnCan wrote an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune telling a litany of lies, repeated by two other op-eds, not one letter writer, op-ed columnist or editorialist spoke up for the truth.

Without the deformers' denial and illogic education discourse would not be focused on eradicating teacher unions, replacing local control of schools with corporate control, increasing high-stakes testing, and creating ever more failed charter schools. Corporate-style reformers know that if enough people from enough different authorities make it merely “conventional” to believe in their vision of education reform, authoritarians will follow them to the ends of the earth, regardless of facts and reason.

It is ironic and sad that public discourse on such an important issue as education would veer so far from the tools of knowledge including evidence and reason, and that top political and media leaders would openly embrace such sophistry and misdirection. As the nation's foremost educational historian Diane Ravitch told public radio's Terry Gross, without exaggeration, "We are destroying our education system, blowing it up by these stupid policies."

Tomorrow: Deformed schools: Reduced diversity, authoritarian education styles, narrowed curriculum, and harming of critical thinking skills 

Part I:  Deformed: Authoritarian undercurrents in education
Part II: The danger to education and democracy posed by authoritarianism
Part II:  School choice birthed in authoritarian racial animus and market fundamentalism
 

School choice birthed in authoritarian racial animus and market fundamentalism

Deformed: authoritarian undercurrents in education, Part III

School Choice, the bedrock of modern education reform, was born as an educational strategy in 1954, after the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal black and white public schools were unconstitutional. The order to desegregate public education motivated Southern racist authoritarians to search for new ways to maintain their dominance and racial apartheid. After first trying pupil-assignment schemes to maintain segregation they eventually implemented educational "freedom of choice" and public support for private whites-only schools as a way to get around the court's order, a notion immediately endorsed by free-market evangelist Milton Friedman.

"Southern states and school districts," wrote James E. Ryan in the Virginia Law Review in 2004, "relied on school choice as one tool in their strategy of massive resistance" to the school integration orders delivered by the US Supreme Court in its landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education.

"Freedom-of-choice plans, along with other resistance strategies, largely succeeded in thwarting desegregation" wrote Ryan. Following enactment of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 that virtually outlawed school-assignment schemes Southern states rapidly created new private, white-only schools called "segregation academies" that received significant state financial and other support.  "From 1964 to 1969...enrollment in private schools in the South grew ten-fold," writes Ryan.

Directly after after Brown v. Board of Education Southern states attempted to maintain their system of educational racial apartheid  by the use of "pupil-assignment laws and other legal subterfuges," according to Helen Hershkoff and Adam S. Cohen, writing in the Yale Law & Policy Review in 1992. But when that system became untenable due to subsequent Supreme Court decisions and congressional action, "a network of all-white private schools was established in the large cities and small towns of the South that continues to this day[ 1992]":

"The segregation academy movement was a school choice plan in that the government made its resources available to help parents to choose schools other than their child's assigned school. This governmental assistance took many forms. During this era, seven states enacted tuition-grant laws that made government money available to pay tuition at the academies.

In addition many governmental entities throughout the South provided buildings, donated educational supplies and gave other such support."

Eventually the courts and congress outlawed deliberate racial discrimination, even in private schools, but that has not solved the problem of segregated schools,
as Protestants and minorities who had resisted segregation gradually came to support school choice for other reasons. Protestants joined the movement partially in response to court decisions that outlawed religious practices at public schools, along with the political ascendance of the religious right. Racial minorities joined seeking increased academic performance and to try and escape the disinvestment in education that followed legal and de-facto segregated schools.

The flight of elite whites from public schools in the South not only re-created segregated schools, but just as importantly significantly reduced support for public education in general.

One irony of the authoritarians' resistance to court-ordered school busing to achieve racial integration in the late 20th century is that they had practiced busing themselves prior to 1954 for the exact opposite reason: to racially segregate their schools. Today, as I will show below, thanks to the school choice inheritors of those Southern whites schools across the country are again being re-segregated.

More modern education reformers have instigated an equally cynical strategy that has actually capitalized on the white Protestant majority's history of racism and disinvestment in inner cities to entice Blacks to school choice schemes.

Corporate educational  reformers of the late 20th century first offered school choice to poor Black children in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of the most racially segregated cities in the nation. Milwaukee is also home to the premiere right wing philanthropy in the country, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has been fighting for public school privatization for decades. It was there that the nation's first school voucher experiment took shape, under the close tutelage and legal defense of the foundation in the mid-1990s. Bradley was able to co-opt local Black politicians, in large measure because the inner city Black schools had been so neglected that people were willing to try anything.

But the cooperation between Blacks and the Bradley Foundation represented in some sense a deal with the devil, given that the foundation was known for its covert racism. The Allen-Bradley company, whose sale provided the foundation with its endowment, was known to closely associate with the John Birch Society, which Harry Bradley helped found. The foundation funded and supported Charles Murray, author of the notorious book The Bell Curve, which purported to scientifically show that Blacks are genetically intellectually inferior to other races.

Despite its racist reputation the Bradley Foundation and its allies slowly brought on board Black politicians, as well as paid Black political activists and scholars, who would help make their case. Gradually even liberals joined the movement.

The results of these new political and educational alliances have not lived up to the promises made at their outset. Studies have consistently shown over the past decade that although charter schools were at first touted as a way to relieve racial segregation, the reality has been just the opposite, and that "the incidence of racial isolation in [charter] schools is strikingly higher than in traditional public schools," and that students in Milwaukee's voucher schools do no better academically than their peers in regular public schools.

Ideology of education deform movement rooted in market fundamentalism

Educational discourse in the U.S. has historically been focused on its purpose and methods. Should students be taught classics and high-minded culture, or should they be prepared for the working world? Is centralization of academic administration preferable to a de-centralized power structure? Today those discussions have been displaced by a focus on market-fundamentalist ideology: Education deformers argue schools should be made to function more like business, churning out products, measuring “value-added” processes, and instilling competition. They believe ideology, not a focus on pedagogy and process, will somehow automatically improve educational outcomes.

Traditionally American education did not function according to market rules. Primary and secondary education in the US has been under the control of local elected officials. Though the system has had its problems, it at least in theory allowed for popular control. If people in a school district didn't like how their schools were run, they could change that by electing new school boards. No longer. Now, with the proliferation of privately run charter schools that displace local neighborhood schools citizens no longer control the education of their children.

Just as pernicious has been the “strong mayor” form of school governance popular with the deformers, which resembles nothing so much as the structure of a modern corporation with a tough CEO and a rubber stamp board of directors. Mayors of both Chicago and New York were given this power from their respective state legislatures, essentially vesting in one elected official the power formerly held by elected school boards. Bill Gates told the New York Post in 2009 that “The cities where our foundation has put the most money is where there is a single person responsible.”

An article in Dissent magazine earlier this year reported on how two foundations – Gates and Eli Broad – have created a “pipeline” to place their own people into the political and management structure overseeing education:

“[Secretary of Education Arne] Duncan’s first chief of staff, Margot Rogers, came from Gates; her replacement as of June 2010, Joanne Weiss, came from a major Gates grantee, the New Schools Venture Fund; Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali has worked at Broad, LA Unified School District and the Gates-funded Education Trust; general counsel Charles P. Rose was a founding board member of another major Gates grantee, Advance Illinois; and Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement James Shelton has worked at both Gates and the New Schools Venture Fund. Duncan himself served on the board of directors of Broad’s education division until February 2009 (as did former treasury secretary Larry Summers).

The community is weakened by wrecking and undervaluing the long-lived neighborhood schools in exchange for new and sometimes temporary charter schools. Furthermore, the underlying notion of public education - preparing citizens to take part in their own democracy - has been replaced – especially in schools comprised of poor and minority students - with preparing children to take reading and math tests.

The notion of choice itself had never entered the public discourse for primary and secondary education until the deformers appeared, for good reason: The economics just don't make sense. Schools need to be a certain size to be able to offer a quality, varied education, complete with things like art classes, advanced placement, and extracurricular activities like band and athletics. There aren't enough students in most neighborhoods to justify schools that exist only to give parents a “choice.”

The fact that there was, and is no “market” for primary and secondary schools wasn't viewed as a barrier: The plutocrats would take care of that by supplying choice schools even if it meant paying for them by themselves. The Gates foundation, for example, spent more than $100 million in New York City creating new schools so parents would have a choice, an experiment that even the Gates Foundation now admits was a failure, and has since been abandoned.

Still in most of the country there can be no “choice”: Eighty five percent of students still attend regular public schools, while only two and a half percent attend charter schools. In Minnesota, the birthplace of charter schools, there are still only about 150 charter schools, compared to 2,500 regular public schools. The experience of Minnesota shows what happens when market ideology replaces logic and common sense in education policy. Despite media reports touting “high performing” charter schools in Minnesota, the reality has been quite the opposite, with dismal results, especially for children of poverty and color.

A 2010 report by the Minnesota Department of Education cited the 32 lowest performing schools in the state. Of those, 11 were charters. That means 11 of 154 charter schools were failing, a rate of seven percent. Twenty one of the failing 32 were regular public schools, giving a failure rate of less than one percent. So by the Minnesota DOE's own numbers, charter schools in Minnesota are failing at a rate seven times greater than regular public schools. Despite these outrageous results not one media organization in the state reported the amazing contrast in failure rates between regular public schools and charters.

Even when nearly forced to choose alternative schools for their children parents rarely choose anything but their neighborhood schools. For example, under the NCLB act, after a school fails to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals for four years parents are given the option of removing their children from the neighborhood school and enrolling them in other, presumably more successful schools. Contrary to the ideology of choice, however, studies have shown that almost no parents moved their children from such schools. After the fifth year of not meeting AYP those supposedly failing schools are basically destroyed, which has angered parents nationwide, many of whom have had to put their kids in schools many miles from home, many without the advantages that were provided by their large neighborhood school.

In their zeal to apply the rules of business to education, corporate-style reformers have transformed the purpose of testing from a diagnostic tool to a basis for policy, resulting in the corruption of the entire process. Instead of being used to help students learn, testing is now used to judge the effectiveness of teachers and schools. This focus on measurable outcomes has escalated to the point that there is a growing call to judge and compensate teachers based on the reading and math test scores of their students, something called a “value added assessment,” another concept borrowed from business that has already been discredited in the educational context.

Even if the valued added measures could be trusted they would be meaningless for the current fad of Teach For America (TFA) teachers since there is no baseline for a particular teacher until he or she has taught for a few years, after which most TFA teachers leave the profession.

Other research has shown that 60 to 70 percent of student achievement can be linked back to the student and his family life. Only 30 to 40 percent of student achievement is even linked to the entire education establishment. Of that 30 to 40 percent, half is due to the school itself, and the other half – 15 to 20 percent of the actual total – can be linked to the classroom. How much of that remaining 15 to 20 percent can be linked to the actual teacher? Even if you assumed all of it was due to the teacher, that would still leave 80 percent of the student's performance dependent on factors outside the teacher's control.

Contrary to the deformers' concepts, children are not “products” to be produced, like so many widgets in a factory. They are unique human beings who bring all the successes and failures of the larger society to school with them. Yet because these methods are prevalent in American business, and the plutocrats who control that business are now controlling education discourse, these changes will intensify and spread.

In the conclusion of their Yale Law Review article Hershkoff and Cohen wonder if market- and competition-based educational strategies could ever work at providing a high quality education for every American student. They presciently cited realities such as "unequal access to preferred schools," "impoverishment of less-favored schools,"  "stigmatization and demoralization" of public schools and their students, and the exit of societal elites, which the authors called an "increasingly widespread phenomenon in American society" - and that was back in 1992. Rather than ameliorate racial and class differences in American society, Hershkoff and Cohen conclude "experience shows that the introduction of increased market choice often does little more than exacerbate 'a growing inequality in basic social community services.'" Given how modern educational reform was birthed in authoritarian racial animus and worship of market fundamentalism it isn't much of a surprise that it has failed to increase educational attainment.

Editorial cartoon by Avidor

Tomorrow: Education deformers' achieve political success through a strategy of repetition, marketing and compliance, not logic, reason and evidence

Part I:  Deformed: Authoritarian undercurrents in education
Part II: The danger to education and democracy posed by authoritarianism

The government created at least one job in May

May I have the envelope, please . . .

And the winner is: Craig Westover! The Cap'n is now the official mouthpiece for the MNGOP. Fresh off of his gigs as the mouthpiece for the successful Pat Anderson campaigns, first for governor, and then for state auditor -- well, not really successful, of course -- the Cap'n was undoubtedly looking for something to do -- now that he's done sandbagging, of course. (The post by Rachael Stassen Berger says that Captain Fishsticks has a libertarian "bent." And Ayatollah Khomeini had an Islamic "bent.")

No need to blush, Craig, you're still in the private sector, unlike these employees of the MNGOP caucus sheltered workshop: Michael Brodkorb, Chas Anderson, David Strom, and Margaret Martin. But there really isn't any doubt that Cap'n Fishsticks has his job because of the state government, just like all of the lobbyists, journalists, pundits and other courtiers who ply their trade at the Capitol. Without a democracy to mess with, the RPM wouldn't need Westover.

The Cap'n would undoubtedly disagree on theoretical and technical grounds. But he's always fulminating about numbers, sometimes famously, like the time he increased the top marginal tax rate in Minnesota from 7.85% to 32.88% to make a point.

The Cap'n is probably guilty of some economic displacement, though. Word is that Tony Sutton, the chair of the Republican Party was looking for a paying gig with the party, too. Apparently, the Cap'n got it.

The danger to education and democracy posed by authoritarianism

Deformed: Authoritarian undercurrents in education, Part II

Many people are perhaps not familiar with the concepts of authoritarianism and right wing authoritarianism. It is a 50 year old social science discipline that grew out of attempts to understand

The 2004 Bush campaign for president was a perfect example of authoritarian social dominators leading submissive and agressive authoritarian followers activated by fear, as expressed in this mashup of the 2004 Republican national convention. As one critic noted, the campaign was composed of "fear, slander and God."

what allowed the Germans in World War II to be so calculatingly brutal. The science took three tacks, one, understanding the personalities of the leaders, two the personalities of the followers, and three understanding the underlying psychological dynamic that allowed a society to veer so far off the tracks of humanity.

Research summed up by Bob Altemeyer in his book, The Authoritarians (free pdf), focused on three main attributes of authoritarians: authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionality. Later other researchers cited resistance to diversity as a fourth characteristic of authoritarians.

These concepts may seem innocuous on the surface, but in reality they add up to big trouble, especially in a democracy. One need look no further than the Bush administration, particularly after 911, to see the way Bush governed in the pattern of a social dominator - someone who leads authoritarians by whatever methods are available, including generating mass hysteria and fear, and lying and making things up out of whole cloth.

George Bush's political adviser Karl Rove went so far as to tell journalist Ron Suskind in 2004 that reporters would always misunderstand Republican politics because they lived in a "fact-based" world, while the Bush Administration "created their own reality." They pushed the limits of ethics and law to the point of what they could get away with without regards to norms of human decency. These are hallmarks of social dominators.

As Altemeyer points out, as dangerous as social dominators are, it is the followers of their leadership who enable authoritarianism through their authoritarian submission and aggression. They are the real threat. When authoritarian aggression is activated by fear racism and violence can be released.

This is significant because America is now one giant fear-generator. It could be argued that the country has been held in various degrees of existential panic since the onset of World War I. Reasons for the panic have varied, but the two big themes have been, first, fear of "Communism," which began after WWI and continued into the 1990s, and the fear of Terrorism since then. Things got so bad that by 2004, George W. Bush, according to scholar Henry Giroux, was able to wage and win a presidential campaign based on "fear, slander, and God."

One theory posits that the authoritarian culture of the slavery pre-civil war south, partially re-instituted after reconstruction, continues in a different form to this very day. Another theory fingers the "poisonous pedagogy" that views child-rearing as a contest of wills, where children are often subject to personal violence then forced to express their "love" for the abuser. This is a common child rearing strategy used by evangelical (fundamentalist) christian religions that make up the political religious right.

Southern whites turned to the Democratic Party after the civil war in response to the Republican Lincoln's fighting of the civil war and freeing the slaves. This antipathy to the Republicans lasted until the 1950s, when national Democrats passed civil rights laws that began to loosen the Southern whites' grip on power.

As others have written, particularly Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad in their book The Politics of Denial, the authoritarian culture of the South was derived from the culture of slavery, and those forces have been passed from generation to generation. From the post-reconstruction era, roughly 1890, through the mid 1960s Blacks in the American South were subject to white authoritarian rule, represented in the deprivation of their civil rights, including the right to vote, systematic terrorism and violence, and legalized discrimination. Hatred of government in the South derived from the intervention of the federal government into its affairs following the civil war. Today the Southern states, despite being the biggest recipients of federal dollars, are hotbeds of anti-government sentiment.

Prior to the modern civil rights era southern Democrats were the authoritarians who enabled whites to control the Southern polity and society. As the national Democrats opened to civil rights and principles of diversity Southern whites inevitably shifted to the Republicans, who started appealing to their racism and bigotry in the 1960s with Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan's so-called "southern strategy." So complete is the authoritarians' party switching that among congressional districts in the Deep South, there is only one white-majority district that has a Democratic Representative. John Dean famously described the authoritarians who now control the Republican Party as "Conservatives Without Conscience." Studies have shown authoritarianism to be strongest in the American South and within the Republican Party. In a time of diminished democracy and the hegemony of money in politics the last thing America needs is the extra dose of authoritarianism delivered with education reform.

Tomorrow: School choice birthed in authoritarian racial animus and market fundamentalism


Yesterday: Part I: Deformed: Authoritarian undercurrents in education

Deformed: Authoritarian undercurrents in education

When education scholar Harold Berlak paid a visit to a Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter school in San Francisco he was shocked. Berlak, an education reform skeptic, found a school that reminded him of a “humane, low security prison or something resembling a locked down drug rehab program for adolescents run on reward and punishments...” Berlak reported that the KIPP school resembled the scene out of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, in which students “...who resisted the rules or were slackers wore a large sign pinned to their clothes labeled 'miscreant.'" Other researchers have noted the authoritarian nature of a KIPP education. Instead of fostering a life-long love of learning the KIPP model promotes an atmosphere of compliance, conformity and reverence.

KIPP, a chain of about 100 charter schools, and its affiliated Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) are emblematic of the authoritarianism embodied in today's education reform movement. These schools embrace two main philosophies. The first is that they almost exclusively, serve poor, minority children, in effect creating segregated charter schools. The second is that KIPP employs an authoritarian approach to education, coercing students to bend to the pinched vision and “psychological sterilization” of the charter school manager's methods.

While scholars and commentators argue about the educational efficacy of KIPP's methods, the underlying authoritarianism floats just below the surface, like the unseen mass of an iceberg. What we can see above the surface – the corporatization, commercialization and privatization of the education process – masks a much larger effect lurking beneath: A creeping authoritarianism overtaking our public education system and simultaneously creating a populace less able to critically think in ways that might blunt the damage being done to democracy. Victories by education reformers in areas such as the implementation of high-stakes testing, replacement of regular public schools with charters, mayoral control of school districts, and attacking school teachers, are causing reverberations of increased authoritarianism that are more dangerous than the overt market-fundamentalist changes.

While KIPP and its cohorts can't be described as typical charter schools – there are too many of them of various styles – they are representative of the nature of the larger movement and its future. The authoritarianism found in schools like KIPP permeates nearly every aspect of the education reform movement – or perhaps more accurately, “deform movement,” including its genesis, theory, advocacy, promotion, implementation, and effects. It is a lose-lose proposition, destroying a functioning, if imperfect, educational system and replacing it with a worse one, while simultaneously shaping a populace less able to critically think all the while slowly removing local control of public schools.

The movement is a full-fledged attempt by plutocrats to subject public education to the kind of control and profit extraction that they enjoy over Wall Street and Washington. The methods and the effects of their efforts enhance authoritarianism and add a jolt of potency to conservative political tactics. Jonathan Kozol described the capitalists' excitement over the prospect of taking over public primary and secondary education in Harpers' magazine in August 2007:

Some years ago, a friend who works on Wall Street handed me a stock-market prospectus in which a group of analysts at an investment-banking firm known as Montgomery Securities~described the financial benefits to be derived from privatizing our public schools. "The education industry", according to these analysts, "represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control" that "have either voluntarily opened" or, they note in pointed terms, have "been forced" to open up to private enterprise. Indeed, they write, "the education industry represents the largest market opportunity" since health-care services were privatized during the 1970s.

It is not democracy for a handful of plutocrats, who describe the size of profits to be gained from the privatization of public education as "The Big Enchilda," to decide how we educate our children. Though cloaked in concern for the education of poor and minority children, the end game goal is far more malign: a shrunken public sector and increased corporate profits. Which raises the question: what educational good can come from a system that is rigged for private financial gain?

How to tell big lies: Social dominators and authoritarian followers

The education deformers are very rich and very smart people. They know that to argue that public primary and secondary education should be operated in the interests of Wall Street would be political death, even in today's warped media and political environments. This necessitates a giant subterfuge on their part, a mass-hypnosis they perform on the public where their true aims must be concealed, to be masked by humanitarian arguments implying a motivation of compassion, not profit. The mask of compassion has the advantage of imbuing the movement's followers with a righteous certainty in their actions, inoculating them against the reality of the policies' effects.

People who lead authoritarian followers, called social dominators, are uniquely qualified to orchestrate the movement. They have no compunctions against telling big lies if they think it will advantage them. The audacious strategy is to pretend to care about those they had oppressed in the past. Cloaked in compassion for the disadvantaged, the deformers cleverly push their overarching strategies of de-unionization and privatization of public education as solutions to the admittedly poor academic achievement of some poor, minority, and inner-city children.

Since the movement is not actually rooted in education, but purports to be, the longer it persists the more intense the denial of its effects must become. By now studies have shown the deleterious effects of education deform yet it only picks up steam. Some resistance is now being formed, but the deform movement has already done desperate damage, setting education back decades.

Those authoritarianism and anti-democratic attitudes present at the top of the deform movement radiate through its every facet. Democratically local elected school boards are giving way to the authoritarian governance of private corporations. Discourse surrounding education reform is warped by deceitful advocates, politicians and scholars and their paid chorus. Schools are increasingly using models more appropriate to military or prison systems.

Wrapped in its lie, education reform is bringing other aspects of authoritarianism, such as resistance to diversity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the re-segregation of American schools taking place under the banner of school choice. Other changes may be more subtle but just as damaging in their cumulative effects, such as the competition that is replacing collaboration in the classroom. Curriculum has been narrowed and teaching the art of critical thinking has been reduced. Trained, professional, unionized teachers are being replaced by disposable Teach for America recruits.

In this nine-part series I will examine the authoritarian undercurrents present in the genesis, advocacy, theory, promotion, implementation, and effects of the education reform movement, and how that authoritarianism represents a fundamental threat to democracy itself.

Editorial cartoon by Avidor

Tomorrow: The danger to education and democracy posed by authoritarianism

Feel free to shoot first IV

Rodney got his gun

Update: The companion bill in the Senate is SF1357. It appears to be word-for-word the same as the House bill discussed here. There is much more in the bill to make Minnesota more "gun friendly;" I have just focused on the Shoot First provision of the bill.

In the previous post, it was established that the "castle doctrine" already exists in Minnesota. The question that concluded Feel free to shot first III was:

Well, crikey, you say, what's the big deal then?

A clue to the difference is found in Rodney Peairs' shooting of Yoshihiro Hattori on Peair's front lawn. The shooting, which took place in the fall of 1992, involved a couple of high school kids -- one an exchange student from Japan, the victim -- who were going to a Halloween party in Baton Rouge. Hattori was dressed up like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever; he wasn't wearing a mask, nor was his companion, a local high school boy that Hattori was staying with.

The boys got confused about the location of the party and stopped at a house with Halloween decorations and a similar address. They went to the front door and rang the bell. There was no answer, but they were observed by Peairs' wife, who actually did say, "Rodney, get your gun."


The boys were walking back to their car to leave when Peairs came out of a side door, apparently confronting the boys and shouting "Freeze!" The record is conflicted at this point, but Peairs (a 6' 2" heavily-armed man) says that the 130 pound Japanese teenager came at him, and that he was "scared to death." Peairs reported there was nothing he could do except gun down the menacing intruder.


The police agreed with him. But wouldn't you know it, the governor of Louisiana and the Japanese Consul made a stink, and Peairs was charged with manslaughter (not murder). He was acquitted, but Peairs was found liable in a civil trial and a judgment of about $600,000 was entered against him. His homeowner's insurance paid $100,000, and the rest of the judgment remains, apparently, unsatisfied.


Was this a "castle doctrine" case, or not? The Baton Rouge police apparently believed it was, and it was presented to the jury that way by the defense. But it seems pretty aggressive to me, and to a lot of other people, too. Moreover, the shooting did not take place in Peairs' dwelling, or even as Hattori and his companion were trying to enter it. This fact would probably have been a problem for Peairs if he had been tried in Minnesota.


Enter Tony Cornish and Shoot First. Recall that one of the circumstances in Cornish's bill where deadly force is authorized is: "to resist or prevent the commission of a felony in the individual's dwelling." Classic statement of the "castle doctrine," right? But not when this is your "castle":

"Dwelling" means a building defined under section 609.556, subdivision 3, an overnight stopping accommodation of any kind, or a place of abode, that an individual temporarily or permanently is occupying or intending to occupy as a habitation or home.
 A dwelling may include, but is not limited to, a building or conveyance and that building's or conveyance's curtilage and any attached or adjacent deck, porch, appurtenance, or other structure, whether the building or conveyance is used temporarily or permanently for these purposes, is mobile or immobile, or is a motor vehicle, watercraft, motor home, tent, or the equivalent.

"Curtilage" is law French for "yard" or "lawn." So when Clint Eastwood said,"Get off my curtilage!" in Gran Torino, that's what he meant. Note especially, too, a motor vehicle -- mobile or immobile! -- can also be a dwelling. This is Cornish's shout out to homeless people.


Let's say you have a little place on Mud Lake where you like to go on weekends and motor around, looking for carp in the shallows to shoot with your .22. You wake up some Saturday night, and you see someone standing on your dock. You think he might be stealing your Evinrude twenty horse, and the half-full can of gas, too. Can you get out that .22 and shoot him?


Why yes, yes you can! If Tony has his way. You don't even have to warn him. As in earlier examples of the operation of Tony's Law -- I think that's what we ought to call it -- if it's a good shooting under the law, you'd be "immunized" from any criminal responsibility, and you'd be "immunized" from any civil liability for killing the guy out in the lake doing a little night fishing for walleyes, too. Just like Rodney would have been civilly immunized for blowing away the Japanese teenager.


Tony's Law is an NRA wet dream.


Update: Once again I neglected to thank MNO for assistance in researching and preparing the series.