Another dud from the Deputy

Poking around the Revisor of Statutes website is often illuminating and well, just plain fun! Instead of boring old budget stuff, you can read about some of the truly amazing and bizarre things that legislators believe. Like, for example, Rep. Kurt Bills yearning to return to the days of the gold standard. Last year, you could read about then Rep. Tom Emmer’s Tenth Amendment shenanigans like the Minnesota Incandescent Light Bulb Freedom Act, or his plan to let the legislature void any federal law it wanted to. (The current Speaker of the Minnesota House, Kurt Zellers, is on board with a similar idea, too, by the way.)

But let’s highlight another dud from the Deputy (Geoff Michel) this session, SF380, the subject of which is the right to engage in an occupation. (Astonishingly, there are other chief authors of the bill, including DFLers Ann Rest and Linda Scheid.) In the House, the bill was dropped in the hopper by Rep. Keith Downey, HF779. This is an all-Edina proposal!

According to the bill, and I am not making this up – you can look it up, as Yogi Berra said – if you are charged with say, the unauthorized practice of law or medicine, all you have to do is say, “Gee, your rule that I go to law school or medical school is burdensome to me, prove why it’s necessary.”

“I beg your pardon?” replies the Board of Medical or Law Examiners.

But then the Board must prove it, and it has the burden of showing – by "clear and convincing evidence" – that the licensure is necessary to protect against “present and recognizable harm to the public health and safety, and the regulation is the least restrictive means for furthering that compelling governmental interest.”

It may comes as a surprise to Michel – and it almost certainly does to Downey – that the scope of the practice of law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, the sale of insurance or real estate, barbering, cosmetology, or any other licensed occupation can already challenged both administratively and judicially. As with all legislative and administrative rules, however, the presumption is that the legislature or the administrative authority intended to and did act lawfully.

The idea, however, that it is up to the licensing board to prove to every guy who decides to set up shop to pull teeth in his garage that it is really necessary to license dentists is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Michel and Downey are both mad as hatters.

If you look at the legislative history, you will see that this stinker was removed from the agenda by the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety. If a bill could die from embarrassment, this one did.

But it stands as an avatar for the quality of thinking of the legislative delegation from Edina.

I don't know where the photo came from originally, but I got it here.

Authoritarianism on the march

Deformed: Authoritarian undercurrents in education, Part IX

The attempt by plutocrats to take over American primary and secondary education isn't taking place in a vacuum. The past 30 years have seen the infiltration of corporatism and plutocracy into nearly every aspect of life. Education, “The big enchilada” of privatization, as the uber-captialists told Harper's Jonathan Kozol, is one of the final sectors to feel their sting. In such an historical narrative, the hidden payload of increased authoritarianism carried by education deform bears a special danger to democracy. According to political scientist Walter Dean Burnham American politics and social thought is dominated by an "hegemony of market theology."

Even Democrats are prone to exploiting and practicing authoritarianism, as Paul Rosenberg recently wrote at DirtyHippies.org, though President Obama is viewed as a liberal, he has governed in an authoritarian manner, either hoodwinking liberals or pulling them in with an appeal to their own authoritarian tendencies:

“The big picture take-away here is that authoritarianism has gained such a pervasive foothold among the American ruling class that it is no longer even possible for a substantively non-authoritarian political position, actor, organization or movement to be recognized as such. Non- (or even anti-) authoritarian spoofs, set-pieces and fantasies by authoritarian actors of one stripe or another have completely taken over the roles of their authentically anti-authoritarian counterparts, and this is every bit as true of Obama as it is of the Tea Party, however much they may differ from one another in any number of other ways.”

The loss of a populace able to think critically, who have been held in existential fear by social dominators and the learned helplessness inculcated by authoritarian parenting and teaching methods, makes the nation less able to return to a path of rational discourse and behavior.

Now the people most able to lead us out of fear-driven thinking are under pressure like never before. Experienced public primary and secondary
teachers are under a ferocious attack from both political parties and the establishment, and are resigning in droves. Teachers are under an unwarranted and libelous attack from the practitioners of education discourse. President Obama himself recently applauded the laying off of all the teachers at Central Falls High School, Rhode Island, for not meeting NCLB rules. It just so happens that Central Falls is also the poorest city in Rhode Island.

The unanimity of the anti-teacher sentiment is breathtaking. Even the leader of the nation's largest teacher union, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, made it clear she would do nothing about the mass teacher firings. The president has said he wants to close 5,000 “low performing” schools across the country; In early March Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned that fully 82 percent of the nation's primary and secondary schools could be technically defined as failing under No Child Left Behind next year, subject to their destruction.

Scapegoating teachers serves four purposes for the authoritarian plutocrats. First, it outrageously blames school teachers for the ills of society, primarily poverty, diverting attention away from their own culpability in the nation's unequal distribution of wealth, and the effects of that disparity. Second, it reduces organized labor's political power by reducing the ranks of teachers' unions, whose members overwhelmingly belong to the Democratic Party. Third it replaces professional, unionized teachers with partially trained, inexperienced youngsters which hampers the critical thinking skills of students. Finally, it diverts enormous amounts of public money spent on education into the plutocrats' hands.

As state after state closes neighborhood public schools and lays off teachers, billionaires like Bill Gates start yet another group, funded with tens of millions of dollars, to covertly advocate for policies which unfairly scapegoat teachers. A few months ago the Gates, Walton and Bradley foundations created a new organization called Mediabullpen.org, to catalog and rate media coverage of education reform, from their own perspective, of course.

Every new charter school adds to authoritarianism, even if it is a progressively administered school staffed by liberal secular humanists who teach acceptance and tolerance for all. The ghettoization of caring parents and high achieving students into their own charter schools deprives the left-behind schools and students of their positive influence. School choice causes a segregation of students along myriad lines. Likewise the funneling of poor and minority students into authoritarian schools like those run by KIPP both deprives those students of a well rounded education and habituates them to authoritarian modes of behavior. Children who should be getting extra attention instead are getting discipline. The schools and teachers in high poverty areas should be supported not demonized. The answer to low test scores in low income families should not be to close down their neighborhood schools, further fracturing their communities.

Bought and paid for education deformers claim their goal is a “great school” for everyone, but the tenets of their free-market ideology require competition and, more importantly, failure. How many children and schools should be sacrificed in order to fatten plutocrats' wallets? In order to pretend that the process of educating children is like any other industrial process? If “No Child Left Behind” meant what it said talk of free markets would not be part of education discourse.

In the end the destruction of community, evisceration of public schools, de-professionalization of teachers, narrowing of curriculum, perversion of education discourse, and authoritarian pedagogy have the potential to devastate democracy itself. According to scholar Henry Giroux education represents a clear path out of our civilizational downward spiral:

“...education, while being one of the many sites that disseminates the discourses of imperialism, nationalism, militarism, and violence, has the potential—and indeed, it is the solution—to identify, challenge, and destroy these unethical ideologies that threaten human freedom, peace, and democracy in America and around the world.”

With the collapse of almost all traditional authority in America, including the news media, citizens more than ever require critical thinking skills to help them cut through all the noise and static. Therein lies the most invidious aspect of the current education reform movement because, in the final analysis, it is not just individual schools and students that are placed at risk by the authoritarian impulse and faddish classroom experiments, it is our democracy itself.

Note: This is the final installment of this series on education reform and authoritarianism. Below are links to the first eight installments. Thanks for reading, and I welcome your feedback.

_rob_levine


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
Part V: Deformed schools: Reduced diversity, authoritarian education styles, narrowed curriculum, and harming of critical thinking skills
Part VI: Collapse of authority breeds authoritarianism
Part VII: Replacing democracy with authoritarianism
Part VIII: The authoritarian journalism of education reform

More GOP solutions: mint Minnesota money

All that's old is new again

That $5.1 billion budget deficit? Don't worry, it's just fiat currency. That stuff is practically worthless anyway.

Friday, GOP freshman Rep. Kurt Bills introduced HF 1664 that would make gold and silver coin legal tender for debts, eliminate all state taxes on the sale of gold or silver, and create a commission to study the creation of an alternative currency for the state of Minnesota. Bills, an economics teacher at Rosemount High School, appears to be Minnesota's agent in a strategy of pushing "constitutional tender" bills at the state level to challenge the Federal Reserve bank.

Proponents of these bills argue that gold and silver are the only constitutional forms of payment, that gold and silver have inherent value lacking in fiat currency like Federal Reserve notes, and that the dollar is heading for an inevitable hyper-inflationary death spiral.

Of course, the purpose of Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution was to prevent multiple state currencies. The "inherent value" of gold and silver is even more volatile than the value of Federal Reserve notes. And the purpose of these bills seems to be explicitly deflationary, crippling the ability to borrow and lend.

Others who have more stamina than me might watch Glenn Beck, follow Ron Paul, and be more aware of the thoughts of the gold bugs. But it's hard for me to take it so seriously, since it is just more of the same apocalyptic thinking as the May 21st folks, survivalists, the Y2K people, etc. There is a powerful psychological pull in the belief you are in a select group of people who see the truth, while the rest of world is blithely ignorant of impending disaster. Unfortunately, it's also a terrible basis for setting monetary policy.

There's a more practical side to these bills. It would provide a huge windfall for holders of gold who would otherwise be subject to capital gains taxes on the sale of gold. Minnesota taxes capital gains as regular income, which means that HF1664 would represent a big tax break for holders of gold. And in a bizarre turn of legislative language, HF1664 would hold any agent of the state personally liable for damage equal to 100 times the amount of tax that was collected.

If you didn't notice the series of Star Tribune articles about the gold coin industry that ran over the weekend, you should check them out. Turns out the industry is full of ex-cons who have a terrible record of ripping off investors. Imagine how HF1664 would supercharge this unregulated industry by allowing them to promise favorable tax treatment. Even if it didn't abet the shady grey market of gold coin dealers, bills like this favor the very wealthy who hold significant amounts of precious metals as a hedge. HF1664 represents an attempt to protect the wealth of the rich in case of the economic rapture. The rest of us in the cash economy will be left behind.

This is a very old debate. I couldn't help but go back and re-read William Jennings Bryan's classic "Cross of Gold" speech. In 1896, the debate at the Democratic National Convention was between populists like Bryan who sought a resolution in favor of "bimetallism" and banking interests who argued for the gold standard. Here's a section that is as relevant today as it was 115 years ago:

Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between the idle holders of idle capital and the struggling masses who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country; and my friends, it is simply a question that we shall decide upon which side shall the Democratic Party fight. Upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital, or upon the side of the struggling masses? That is the question that the party must answer first; and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic Party, as described by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses, who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic Party.

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

I think we know which idea Rep. Bills favors.

Follow me on Twitter @aaronklemz

(Image: TYPICAL GOLD BUGS, published in Harpers Weekly, July 11, 1896)

The Scarlet Dollar

If a kid in Albert Lea gets behind on his lunch money account, here's what happens, according to MPR:

Some districts provide little to no assistance when a child's account runs out of money. Albert Lea Area Schools allow students to "charge" up to three lunches. If the parents still haven't paid, the district provides a bread and butter sandwich and milk for three more days. After that, the district stops providing any food. Lunchroom workers stamp elementary students' hands with a red dollar sign to remind their parents to pay.

A stamp on the hand? Why not put that sucker right on the child's forehead? It'd be much more obvious.

We shouldn't single out Albert Lea; according to the article, a number of school districts have similar -- sometimes, but now always, more discreet -- policies.

Kids who don't eat lunch have trouble learning and are a disruption to their classes:

Teachers said the policies have a clear impact on the ability of children to learn in the classroom. Anne Krafthefer, a fifth-grade teacher in Duluth, said it's common for children to start fights or act up in class when they haven't eaten.

 Krafthefer also teaches GED classes for adults who dropped out of school. She said many of those students share childhood stories of feeling neglected by both their parents and their school. "Feeding a child is a way of saying, 'We care about you,'" she said. "If there's warm food there, that's one more reason for kids who are living in poverty to get to school and participate."

There are free and reduced-fee lunch programs with uneven effort made to get eligible kids enrolled.

Rob has been writing about influences on student learning that are beyond and overwhelm the efforts of a classroom teacher. This is but one example.

The authoritarian journalism of education reform

Deformed: Authoritarian undercurrents in education, part VIII

Traditional media have failed in their coverage of education reform, acting as cheerleaders for privatization and bashing teachers rather than shedding light on what is actually happening to our schools. In Michael Moore's famous words “We live in a fictitious time,” and nothing could better exemplify that than traditional media education discourse. Instead of looking into the ultimate goals of the deformers, their motivations, or the effects of their actions, traditional media locks onto each new meme the deformers produce. It's been that way for decades.

Today plutocrats set the education agenda then pass the message on down the line. By the time information gets to the traditional media the deformers have controlled discussion to the point that repeating their claims amounts to mouthing a manufactured conventional wisdom, which newspaper reporters and TV talking heads are only to willing to do. Rather than challenge that conventionality media merely adds its owns melodrama and approval to the narrative. Journalism used to be a profession that lived by the saying “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Today there is more of the kind of authoritarian journalism that one used to see in Eastern Bloc countries.

The deformers have created a discourse that today is outwardly concerned with decreasing gaps in educational achievement between children of the poor and minorities on one hand and middle class whites on the other. Their narrative has conspicuously ignored the influence of poverty on student achievement or the harmful effects created by using a market-based paradigm for education reform. Given that the largest share of educational outcomes are determined by student and home life, you might think public policy would be focused on that rich vein for improvement.

Instead nearly all the solutions being proposed today revolve around teachers, who control only 10 to 15 percent of outcomes. Of course, no one is saying that teachers don't matter, it's just that there is not much fertile ground for educational improvement by focusing on such a small input.

Attacks on teachers only make sense as a way to shrink the unionized work force and defund the political party that supports them, the Democrats. The ludicrous notion that de-professionalizing teaching would somehow help education demonstrates the level of cognitive dissonance and stupidity the deformers have so successfully fostered and nurtured.

As a result the teaching profession is under pressure as never before. All over the country teachers are being laid off and replaced by poorly trained Teach For America recruits. Schools are being closed as a
result of NCLB's relentless testing regimen, along with competition from charters. Teachers are threatened with decreased salaries, the loss of tenure, and collective bargaining rights.

In the classroom, teacher's salaries are now being partly determined by their student's scores. Complex formulas are devised to evaluate teachers as if students were a cog in an industrial process and the amount of knowledge conveyed to them could be reduced to a number.

Charter schools have proven to be a failed experiment, yet the public holds them in high regard as a savior for primary and secondary education. New laws are being passed by legislatures all over the country to open more charter schools and to weaken teaching standards.

The Gates Foundation alone spent $2 billion between 2000 and 2008 to set up 2,602 schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia. The idea was that children might have higher educational achievement in smaller schools. Gates didn't have any evidence for his theories; if he had looked he would have seen that there is a body of research on this question. For high schools it seems the optimal number of students is between 500 and 700. Fewer than that and there isn't enough mass to justify myriad types of curriculum enriching experience. In high schools of more than 700 students start to get alienated and lose individual attention.

Gates spent more than $100 million in New York City alone to open dozens of new, small high schools. In Denver the foundation sponsored a project that took one large high school and split it into three separate schools, each operating on a separate floor of the original school. The result in Denver was a disaster. In New York City the new charters didn't improve test scores, but they did result in destruction of dozens of local high schools, and the funneling of children into schools that didn't have the benefits of their former larger schools, and probably were not in their neighborhoods. The small school project was a bust, an outcome Gates should have known from the outset.

After the “small schools” failure Gates refused to acknowledge his role, instead refocusing his philanthropy's energy and money on school teachers. The Gates foundation proceeded to allocate tens of millions of dollars in an effort to root out “bad teachers.” The new project is intent on figuring out, using business-type metrics, which teachers are “under performing” so they can be fired. Of course school districts already had methods for ferreting out poorly performing teachers. But that wasn't good enough for Gates – he wanted metrics. So he and his philanthropy set out to create just such a system where teachers could be reduced to numbers, like so many inputs to a computer program.

To kick off his teacher bashing campaign Gates invited leading education deform activists to his house in 2008 for a meeting. It wasn't long after that traditional media opened its attacks on school teachers. A number of new memes appeared, including the notion that there are many bad teachers who are responsible for poorly performing students, and that if only the “lowest performing” 10 percent of teachers could be replaced every student in the country would emerge with a “world class” education.

Other projects aimed to shrink the teaching profession by claiming it was hard to fire teachers, that tenure protected “bad” teachers, that advanced degrees didn't make someone a better teacher, and that school district policies controlling teacher layoffs needed to be changed to allow the firing of more experienced teachers when districts faced budget deficits. Some of the ways these ideas designed to create a “free market” in school teachers are turned into traditional media reports would be comical if they weren't so harmful to education.

Nevertheless, these are the overwhelmingly predominant narratives of education discourse today, and as a result teachers are becoming increasingly demoralized, demonized and marginalized. It is depressing to think about how a small an amount of action perpetrated by a handful of billionaires can radically alter the nation's education discourse and practice.

Tomorrow: Authoritarianism on the march 

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
Part V: Deformed schools: Reduced diversity, authoritarian education styles, narrowed curriculum, and harming of critical thinking skills
Part VI: Collapse of authority breeds authoritarianism
Part VII: Replacing democracy with authoritarianism
 

Replacing democracy with authoritarianism

Deformed: Authoritarian undercurrents in education, Part VII

Chris Hedges has identified the propaganda campaign waged by Wall Street bankers to get the US into World War I as the starting point for mass-media generated existential hysteria that has destroyed the liberal class. Instilling fear into the US population was the only way the bankers could motivate the country to war in 1917. The bankers knew the country wouldn't be roused just to protect the loans they had made to the European allies, which wouldn't be repaid if Germany won the war. The successful campaign to demonize Germany to involve the US in World War I became the modern model for financial and corporate elites to control the polity through authoritarian distraction.

The Great Depression interrupted the plutocrat's authoritarian march, but the mindset was restored first by World War II, then by the invention of nuclear weapons, followed, importantly, by the creation of the Rand Corporation, a think tank intended to help the military understand the strategic implications of nuclear weapons. Rand, dubbed The Academy of Science and Death by Pravda, has had a profound effect on the American psyche and polity.

You need only consider two things to understand the damage done to humanity by Rand: First, the lead character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, is a composite derived in part from Rand think tanker Herman Kahn, known for his cold-blooded evaluations of nuclear war. Kahn was a strong advocate of preventive nuclear war, who argued, according to Alex Abella in his book Soldiers of Reason, that “Moral and humane considerations should never interfere with policy analysis.”

Second, Rand, with its theories of rational expectations and game theory removed altruism, empathy and compassion from calculations about human behavior, a “discovery” of huge import. The Randians attempt to reduce human behavior to numbers, if true, would have “destroyed the academic validity of most kinds of social compact,” according to Abella.

Alas, eventually Rand would “...ruefully acknowledge the futility of trying to reduce human behavior to numbers.” Nevertheless reliance on numbers to judge people is perhaps more in vogue today than ever. One need look no further than the outsized value placed on students' standardized test scores to see how Rand fallacies live on despite their acknowledged failures.

Authoritarian theory tells us that levels of Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) fluctuate both within the population as a whole and within individuals, and that it is particularly activated by fear. The attacks of 9/11 exaggerated authoritarianism to a level where the country was unable to resist lies told by social dominators to make war abroad and to obliterate privacy and human rights at home guaranteed by our constitution and international treaties.

The democracy obliterating authoritarianism ushered in by the 9/11 attacks have cost the US dearly. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are projected to cost more than $3 trillion – more than all of the spending of the federal government per year prior to 911.

Only authoritarianism explains the factually wrong views held by large segments of the US population over the past 10 years. Authoritarian social dominators in government, in an unholy alliance with traditional media, led a large part of the population, gripped in authoritarian submission by ginned up fear into authoritarian aggression against two countries half way across the globe and against Muslims and liberals at home. Polls taken by the Program on International Policy Issues (PIPA) showed that in the run-up to the Iraq war, and for many months afterward

a significant portion of the American public has held a number of misperceptions that have played a key role in generating and maintaining approval for the decision to go to war...”

In other words, the social dominators in the White House and traditional media told stories they knew not to be true to stoke existential fear for reasons of political expedience. The Bush administration was able to convince enough Americans of factually false information – information that citizens believed long after it had been discredited – to carry out its aims unhindered.

That kind of obeisance to authority and resistance to logic and facts is explained by authoritarian theory. Though it may seem that this streak of authoritarianism has diminished in the years since 9/11, a recent poll shows that slightly over half of all Americans believe “torture is justified in some cases to thwart terrorist attacks,” and another poll, this one by PIPA in 2009, found that “only” 39 percent approved of “physical torture.” In a country of 310 million people that is a lot of authoritarian aggression just waiting to be tapped. As might be expected, “Republicans, conservatives, males, and those with low levels of education are most likely to support the use of torture.”

This is the way that authoritarianism explodes the bounds of rational discourse necessary in a democracy. One way out of this quagmire would be to educate students in critical thinking and get them to question conventional ways of knowing. Corporate education reform is doing the exact opposite: teaching of critical thinking is diminishing and more students are being taught in authoritarian constructs emphasizing rote recitation of answers rather than creative and critical thinking. Another study recently found that

“An unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn't learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education.”

It's bad news when even college graduates don't learn “critical thinking” and “complex reasoning.” Though this deficiency can't be pinned entirely on the education deformers, they're not helping things any. The study noted that

“Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event...The students, for example, couldn't determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin.”

Other studies have noticed, like the one of six charter schools in Brooklyn, that “critical thinking was missing,” particularly at schools labeled as successful by district administrators. Schools might also cut into this growing authoritarianism by better integrating schools by race and class, forcing students to come into contact with people who are different from themselves. But as new studies of charter schools show, “school choice” has had just the opposite effect of re-segregating schools.

Tomorrow: The authoritarian journalism of education reform 

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
Part VI: Collapse of authority breeds authoritarianism

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