A simple description of Tara Westover’s “Educated” would be that is a memoir of a childhood and young adult years in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. But it is much more than a chronological retelling of childhood memories based on contemporaneous diaries and journals saved through the years. It is a dissertation on family dysfunction, psychological damage, and the struggle for self-actualization in the face of great opposition.

Born in 1986, Tara Westover is one of seven children in a family dominated by a father with religious beliefs and a social philosophy that many would describe as fanatic. Averse to societal norms, he eked out a living salvaging scrap metal from a junkyard that he maintained on his property in the Idaho hills. He refused to send his children to school; they worked for him in the scrapyard instead, doing dangerous jobs that repeatedly resulted in severe injuries [never to be treated by the highly suspect “Medical Establishment.”]  He viewed women as secondary and required them to be subservient. Westover’s mother obeyed. She became an unlicensed, naturalist midwife and an herbal healer. Westover’s father became obsessed with the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, in which federal agents shot and killed Randy Weave’s family, and he lectured and preached to his family often about what he saw as the coming End of Days.

None of that sounds too bad—just highly unusual—until you factor in the harsh, unrelenting, physical and psychological abuse Tara suffered at the hands of her father, her loving but complicit mother, and especially her older brother, Shawn. Westover’s memoir chronicles all of it, in vivid and uncomfortable detail.

Becoming educated, as the title implies, is Westover’s way out. But that journey is extremely complicated for a young girl raised in a family that rejects public education, preaches the supremacy of scripture and Mormon doctrine over secular learning, and exerts enormous psychological pressure against Tara’s urge to learn beyond the limits imposed by her family. Her mother taught her to read, but that was the extent of her “home-schooling.” At 17, she managed to convince her family to let her enroll in Brigham Young University [a difficult process, because she had no high-school transcript and even lacked a birth certificate.] In her early classes, she discovered how far behind she was: Once, reading a passage aloud in class, she stumbled over the word “Holocaust,” and asked what it was. The professor thought she was joking and chastised her.

Her tenacity is remarkable—bordering on superhuman. Her academic intelligence impresses teachers, professors and peers, and she pursues higher studies, always opposed by her parents. Time and again, as her formal education moves from undergraduate to graduate to doctoral level, her family rejects her efforts and literally demonizes her—calling her possessed and evil. [Her parents, who never otherwise traveled, flew to England while she was studying at Cambridge, and stayed in her dorm room with her for a week, intending to “exorcise” her.]

Even as she begins to gain some geographical and psychological distance, and begins to be able to analyze and understand the dynamics of her family, she is constantly drawn back in, still craving their love, still wanting to belong, still stung by their ultimate rejection. And virtually every year, when she returns to her home in Buck’s Peak, Idaho, for Christmas, something happens that makes her want to flee, while at the same time feeling the need to stay.

“Educated” gave me an inside view of a world I knew little about, except through stereotypes of off-the-grid, fundamentalist Christian families. This memoir is not an indictment of Mormonism, survivalism, or religion in general. This is personal. Westover’s account includes many difficult memories, described in [often literally] painful detail. She is honest about her ambivalence, her academic insecurities, and her unending internal war between self-actualization and family loyalty. By the end of this engrossing memoir, she has educated herself—and more than just academically. She has paid a big price for her urge to learn. And while I sometimes had to force myself to read certain passages, and wanted to scream at her to not go home, to not get in the car with her brother, to tell someone what was happening to her, I couldn’t put it down. I just hope that Tara Westover has been able to use what she has learned to broker a peace with herself. Sharing her experiences with readers is an education itself.

The post Educated: A painful, honest memoir of family vs. self appeared first on Occasional Planet.

When you’re running for a school board position in suburban St. Louis and tweet out memes about banning Islam in America, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, you could be invited to speak at a candidates’ forum at the local mosque. And that’s how it came to be that the first words Parkway School Board candidate Jeanie Ames spoke to the assembled crowd at the mosque were, “I am not a xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Islam, anti-Semitic racist.”

In fact, Ames spent the better part of her two-minute opening statement trying to defend herself against charges of bigotry and racism that had arisen, in part, from her retweet of a graphic calling for the banning of Islam in America.

She has since claimed that the offending tweet — and  others — were misconstrued or taken out of context. Unfortunately for Ames, her personal Twitter feed makes the context of her remarks crystal clear: Her motto, MAKE PARKWAY GREAT AGAIN, may offer a clue as to who has influenced her thinking.

In her Twitter profile, she describes herself as a “Proud wife mommy – Free market Capitalist – Constitutionalist – Catholic – Confederate – Lily-wearing – Metal lovin – Grass Roots – American Badass.”

Yeah, she called herself a “confederate.”

On January 24, the St. Louis Post Dispatch ran this article with the headline, A self-described ‘Confederate’ is running for Parkway School Board. Residents are alarmed. The article called her out not only for wanting to ban Islam, but also for referring to Michelle Obama as a “giant rat.”

Ames’ attitudes had begun to alarm a lot of people. Some who spoke to the newspaper noted:

“Jeanie Ames’ record of racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and other bigotry prove beyond any doubt that she has no place on the Parkway School District’s Board of Education … All people of conscience who believe in the value and place of all children at Parkway schools should oppose Ames’ candidacy in the strongest terms.”
— Anna Baltzer of Jewish Voice for Peace

“It is quite disturbing to say the least that a person with views such as ‘banning Islam from America’ is running for the Parkway School Board.”
— Mufti Asif Umar, imam of Daar-Al-Islam Masjid a mosque situated in the school district.

What else motivates Ms. Ames? Have a look at the banner on her Twitter page.

What does Jeanie Ames really want to do for the Parkway School Board? Is she misunderstood? Have her many offensive tweets somehow been taken out of context? The people in the photo below protested outside the March 25 candidate forum because they don’t believe she’s been misunderstood. They think Jeanie Ames has made herself perfectly clear.

This is an important moment in the community. Will Ames win or lose? And what will that tell us about ourselves?

Postscript:

Many of Ames’ neighbors have yard signs for the more progressive candidates in the race. None have Ames signs. Some are coming more to the point by posting yard signs stating “Hate has no home here.”

In the end, Ames lost, getting just 12.2% of the vote.

The post “Xenophobic, anti-Islam, anti-Semitic racist.” Who, me? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

You wouldn’t think that it would be controversial for a journalism professor to come to high schools in the Midwest to discuss his reporting on current issues in science. And it wasn’t. Justin Catanoso, director of the journalism program at chair of the Wake Forest University, came to St. Louis the week of April 25. In addition to meeting with students at Washington University, he visited six high schools and one middle school to discuss his research on climate change in Peru. And it was not controversial.

This is Missouri, and contrary to myopic and outright mean memes that have been coming out of the recent session of the state legislature, this is not North Carolina or Florida where state law forbids teachers from using terms like “climate change” or “rising ocean tides.” Yet the issue of climate change is still political and many schools shy away from teaching about it.

Catanoso diplomatically discusses the issues with, as Barack Obama says, “the fierce urgency of now.” He says that we cannot shy away from the challenges and look for a Plan ‘B.’ His reasoning is straightforward: because there is no Plan ‘B.’ If the human species (as well as all others on earth) is to survive, humans need to take affirmative and significant steps to restore the climate to where it was in the 1850s, with only 225 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; not the current level of 400.

He notes in speaking with students that the United States is the only country in the world where climate change is a public issue. Every other country has come to face reality and without equivocation wants to contribute to the solution. This was very apparent at the COP21 conference in Paris that he covered in December 2015. He pointed out to students that the existence of a COP21 conference meant that there were twenty Conferences of the Parties that preceded it, and they had all failed to reach the meaningful consensus and agreement that came in Paris.

The question of why the United States has not followed the recent movement of Australia and Canada from skeptics to “accepters” is difficult to answer. But there is no denying the presence of the elephant in the room: There is one political party in the United States that seems to refuse to accept science, at least so long as the producers, distributors and financers of fossil fuels continue to pad their candidates’ campaigns.

Catanoso is not closed-minded about fossil fuels. He notes that over the past fifteen years, carbon-based fuels have played a major role in allowing three hundred million Chinese citizens to move out of poverty. These fuels propelled us into and through the industrial age. But now the damage that they do to our planet has become of far greater consequence than any economic good that can come from their continued wide-spread use. With extinction as a possible outcome of their continued use, the choice is relatively easy for most human beings.

Thanks to the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which sponsored Catanoso’s trip to St. Louis, Catanoso was able to reason with students at Crossroads College Preparatory School, Hixson Middle School, Lindbergh High School, Maplewood-Richmond Heights High School, Nerinx Hall High School, Parkway Central High School, Parkway West High School and St. Louis University High School about how the actions of humans have taken our planet out of its natural balance.

Regrettably, there are still millions of Americans who deny climate change. Fortunately, the head in the sand is less prominent among young citizens than the more elderly. But young people become old and often adopt the ways of their elders. In the case of recognizing climate change, this is not a wise risk.

We need more Justin Catanosos going to our nation’s schools and dispelling the misinformation that many teachers and parents bring to these schools. Climate change is hardly the only issue in which ignorance is bliss in many schools. Conservatives have blanketed our airwaves and suffocated many of our school districts. Most issues that progressives care about do not lend themselves to short-term solutions; they require generational change. As progressives have historically done in our colleges and universities, they need to make their presence disproportionately known in our elementary and secondary schools. To paraphrase the words attributed to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in “All the President’s Men”, “Boys, if you screw this up, nothing less than the future of the free world rests in your hands.”

The post Teaching the reality of climate change, one classroom at a time appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s always bittersweet in June when the Supreme Court issues its major rulings, because I can’t help but wish school was in session so we could talk about them in my American history class.

In our Constitution unit we’ve spent a lot of time these last couple years talking about the Equal Protection Clause, tracing it from Chinese laundry owner Yick Wo up through more recent civil rights struggles. Inevitably, we end up looking at current events and asking where the Equal Protection Clause could or should be applied next.

Eighth graders are so strident and idealistic, and listening to them talk about marriage equality (among other issues) is just one of the best parts of my job. I’m really hoping they’re watching the news today (“SEE! Remember when I told you the Constitution was a living document that affects our lives everyday??!!”), and I’m hoping they’re already thinking about what the next step in the struggle for equal rights will be.

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There is so much that the federal government could do in education. Besides taking the obvious first step of reducing student loan rates to those given by the Fed to commercial banks, it could take steps to equalize spending across the nation for public schools, use its influence to reduce the shackles of strict certification guidelines to enter the profession of teaching, and work to promote learning in liberal arts as well as STEM subjects.

However, the Bush-Obama Education Departments have fixated on standardized test scores. The basic flaw with this approach is that it focuses on measuring the unmeasurable. It is the quintessential over-reach of social science. Children are more than atoms and molecules whose actions can be measured. They are vibrant dynamic human beings who learn in many different ways and find challenges from every angle. There are really two problems with educators measuring student achievement: professionals inflate the positive scores, giving a false of merit to those who do well; and they further open the door to teachers’ worst habits – relentlessly criticizing students.

Caught between the purposeless mandates of the Education Department and the misery of the students in the complicity of the teachers, the standard practice in the 2000s is for teachers to accept the demands that they administer standardized tests after spending the prior part of the school year prepping the students for the tests, usually at the expense of crucial real learning such as critical thinking and creativity. School districts are under the gun to perform well so that they can tout their accomplishments to residents and realtors alike. Individual schools have to maintain or raise scores in order to avoid the shameful consequence of having their doors shut. Individual classroom teachers must show increased student “performance” if they are to maintain the jobs, or perhaps climb the pay-scale ladder.

Is it any surprise that under the weight of federal and state pressure to raise test scores, many district superintendents, school principals and teachers have chosen to cheat to raise test scores? After all, these educators are only exercising some of the logic that they learned as they grew up. It’s the “by any means possible” approach to achievement. If you need to get from Point ‘A’ to Point ‘B,’ take the necessary steps to get there. In the case of test scores, there is little doubt that massaging the student answers on the tests is a much easier way to raise scores than focusing entirely on the boring and unnerving task of “making” students better “learn” the restricted and disparate material that is on the test. The only thing that keeps some teachers from cheating is the moral qualm about doing something dishonest.

We are brought up with the maxim that honesty is the best policy. In many regards, these are sound words by which to live. But what about situations in which an individual is societally oppressed, often for a specious reason. Were we to expect slaves to stay on their masters’ property when given a chance to get away? Do we look without forgiveness to a hungry man or woman grazing through the vegetable and fruit departments of a grocery store? When people are oppressed, they often do what is necessary to survive. As that is true for a slave or a hungry person, it also applies to an educator who is mandated to make student test scores rise.

So the recent news of eleven educators in Atlanta being convicted of racketeering because of their complicity in a cheating scandal is in many ways a case of further punishing the victim. Would some of these educators be headed to jail if the “best and the brightest” in the U.S. Department of Education and its counterparts in state capitals had not willfully set them up to resort to dishonest ways to achieve the mandated goals? Since those schools under the most pressure were in inner cities, would it not have been clear that this would have a disproportionate effect on African-American students and African-American teachers?

To this day, neither those in President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program nor President Obama’s “Race to the Top” program have acknowledged that they established and perpetuated a misguided system in which previously law-abiding citizens engaged in “criminal” behavior. There is certain similarity to the transgressions on Wall Street, where those in charge of criminal behavior walked away unscathed.

The Department of Education’s addiction to standardized testing is, in many ways, another form of Jim Crow laws. It disproportionally has a damning and painful impact on the African-American community. It has encouraged educators in impacted areas to be dishonest and to engage in cheating. It does not surprise me that the Bush Administration would do this, but frankly, I am appalled that the Obama Administration bought into it and still hasn’t backed off from it.

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Republicans are for school vouchers because they want to privatize public education, turn education into a money making venture, and use taxpayer money to fund religious schools. Some Democrats support vouchers because of a genuine desire to improve education. They want vouchers for innovative schools with alternative curriculums, creative teachers, and enhanced learning environments. Yet, the truth is, this very small number of truly wonderful innovative private schools will serve a tiny percentage of children and will do nothing to improve public education for the majority.

The answer is finding and adopting best practices within the public and private educational system, not siphoning off money and resources to the private sector. Within public and private educational systems there are plenty of outstanding schools that less successful public schools can emulate. Finding ways to disseminate and integrate those practices is one key to improving public education. Vouchers and privitization are not the answer because ninety percent of American children attend public schools. A truly progressive view aspires to improve education for all children through better public policy, not through privatization of public taxpayer money.

And it’s not like voucher schools are all that successful. Last November, NEAtoday.org reported that 150 students in Milwaukee left their voucher schools, their parents opting to return them to Milwaukee Public Schools. The voucher schools had failed to provide for kids with learning or physical disabilities, or offer after-school programs, or offer art, music and physical education classes.

Since the state legislature created Milwaukee’s school voucher program more than 30 years ago, the program has paid for thousands of city students to attend private schools, of which 85 percent are religious. More than a billion dollars has been siphoned from the public school system to pay their tuition, including more than $50 million this year alone. But studies have shown that students don’t do any better in those private schools. In fact, it’s not such a great investment for the public—or those parents.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State offers a very good list of 10 reasons why private school vouchers should be rejected. The following is an edited and reworded version of the list. I encourage you to read the entire list and the full arguments here.

1. Vouchers force taxpayers to support religion

According to the U.S. Department of Education, religious groups run 76 percent of all private schools. Over 80 percent of students attending private schools are enrolled in religious institutions, which integrate religion throughout their curriculum and often require all students to receive religious instruction and attend religious services. Thus, publicly funded vouchers are paying for these institutions’ religious activities and education.

2. Vouchers divert public money to unaccountable private schools

Under most voucher bills, private schools can take taxpayer money and still deny admission to any student they choose. They are free to discriminate against the disabled, or children from other countries. Private schools are also free to impose religious criteria on teachers and staff, and discriminate against gays, people of color, or women. In other words, a voucher system forces taxpayers to subsidize discrimination that would be illegal in a public school system.

3. Vouchers violate many state constitutional provisions

Voucher advocates say that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) that Cleveland’s voucher program did not violate the church-state provisions of the U.S. Constitution. This is true, but the Zelman case did not address state constitutional issues. Some three-dozen states have church-state provisions in their constitutions that are even stronger than the U.S. Constitution. These provisions often more explicitly bar taxpayer money from being used to fund religious schools and education. Private school vouchers would likely be unconstitutional in most states—and some state courts have already ruled that they are.

4. Americans do not support vouchers

Americans have repeatedly expressed opposition to vouchers in public opinion polls. More tellingly, when people are given an opportunity to vote directly on vouchers through ballot referenda, they always reject the concept—usually by wide margins. Since 1967, voters in 23 states have rejected vouchers and other forms of tax aid to religious schools at the ballot box.

5. Vouchers do not improve student academic performance

According to multiple studies of the District of Columbia, Milwaukee and Cleveland school voucher programs, the targeted population does not perform better in reading and math than students in public schools. The U.S. Department of Education studies of the D.C. program show that the students using vouchers to attend private schools do not believe that their voucher school is better or safer than the public school they left.

The study also showed that over a period of four years, there was no statistically significant difference between students who were offered a voucher and those who were not in their aspirations for future schooling, engagement in extracurricular activities, frequency of doing homework, attendance at school, reading for enjoyment or tardiness rates. Likewise, there was no significant difference in the student-teacher ratios in their classrooms or the availability of before-and after-school programs in their schools.

6. Vouchers do not improve opportunities for children from low-income families

Vouchers do little to help the poor. The payments often do not cover the entire cost of tuition or other mandatory fees for private schools. Thus, only families with the money to cover the cost of the rest of the tuition, uniforms, transportation, books and other supplies can use the vouchers.

7. Vouchers do not save taxpayer money

Vouchers do not decrease education costs. Instead, tax money that would ordinarily go to public schools now pays for vouchers, thus harming public schools. A 1999 study of Cleveland’s program showed that the public schools from which students left for private voucher schools were spread throughout the district. The loss of a few students at a school does not reduce fixed costs such as teacher salaries, textbooks and supplies and utilities and maintenance costs. Public schools run the risk of losing state funding to pay for vouchers without being able to cut their overall operating costs. In addition, voucher programs cost the state money to administer.

8. Vouchers do not increase education choice

Voucher programs do not increase “choice” for parents because it’s the private schools that will ultimately decide whether to admit a student. These institutions are not required to give parents the information necessary to determine whether the school is meeting their children’s needs. Under voucher programs, private schools are often not required to test students, publish curriculum or meet many other standards. Even when legislatures have attempted to mandate accountability standards in voucher programs, private schools have not done what was required of them.

9. Vouchers lead to private schools of questionable quality

In Milwaukee and Cleveland, the availability of vouchers led con artists to create fly-by-night schools in order to bilk the public purse. In Cleveland, one school operated out of a dilapidated building with inadequate heat and no fire alarms. Another school “educated” children by having them watch videos all day. Fundamentalist Christian academies, which are on the rise, offer education far outside the mainstream. They teach creationism in lieu of evolution, offer a discredited “Christian nation” approach to American history and put forth controversial ideas about other religions, the role of women in society, gay rights and other issues. Taxpayers should not be expected to pay for this.

10. Vouchers distract from the real issue of reform

Voucher plans usually allow a small percentage of children to leave public schools for enrollment in private schools. This does nothing for the large percentage of youngsters left behind. Most public schools do a very good job; those that don’t should be fixed, not abandoned.

The post 10 reasons why school vouchers should be rejected appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Like so many other institutions in this, our neoliberal land of opportunity, universities have become infested with rent extracting parasites. Were I to say “We call those parasites administrators,” that would be wrong; surely there are administrators who are caring, competent, necessary, and neither over-paid nor corrupt. That said, university administrators are not, by definition, central to any university’s mission: Teaching and research, performed by professors, are. Therefore, it seems odd, or not, that we don’t look to the university administrative layer for budget savings first. But that’s what we’re doing. We’re feeding the tapeworm instead of freeing the host from infestation. The protests against budget cuts at the University of Southern Maine (USM, in Portland, ME) provide an excellent case study.  —Lambert Strether

On March 27, Aljazeera reported that the students and faculty at the University of Southern Maine (USM) were entering a second week of protests over the school’s decision to lay off up to 50 faculty and staff and eliminate various liberal arts programs in the name of fiscal austerity. USM, a public university, is one of seven University of Maine institutions with plans to dismiss a total of 165 faculty and staff in 2014. USM President Theodora Kalikow insisted that a transformation of the University system was necessary to deal with a structural gap in expenses and revenue.

The first quote is from Lambert Strether’s recent post at Naked Capitalism. You can read his entire article here. In it, he answers questions about why colleges and universities around the country are so strapped for cash, why students are being asked to pay higher tuition, why tenured professors are being laid off and humanities departments closed. He points out that at the same time colleges and universities are enforcing “austerity” measures on students and faculty, they have triple A bond ratings and are building new facilities like crazy. So what’s going on?

You can gather from Strether’s sarcastic comments that the budget cuts and the “restructuring” of colleges and universities are not being carried out in good faith. What he describes are colleges and universities that have become a microcosm of the society at large, where the 1%, in this case the “administrators,” suck up the lion’s share of the resources that should be going to students and faculty. The misallocation of resources at the national level, where the elite take more and more wealth for themselves, has “trickled down” to our institutions of higher learning. The greed and corruption of the corporate and finance sector, aided and abetted by all three branches of government, has moved into the university, where neoliberal, corporate ideas increasingly dominate what used to be considered institutions of higher learning.

For a working definition of “neoliberalism,” we turn to Wikipedia:

Neoliberalism is a political philosophy whose advocates support economic liberalizations, free trade and open markets, privatization, deregulation, and enhancing the role of the private sector in modern society.

Reflecting the neoliberal approach, which is to seek individualistic, free-market solutions to every social and economic problem, the administration at the University of Southern Maine now refers to students as “customers” as if the university was a “mall” where they “purchase” knowledge in different “profit centers” formally known as educational departments.  Strether quotes one of the student leaders of the protest (which is being carried out in solidarity with faculty):

And we want to look at the way money is being spent in the administration throughout the University of Maine system. I think we really see this whole supposed financial crisis as part of a nationwide trend of the corporatization of public higher education and the corporate war on public higher education. And so we’re interested in talking about it in those terms.

And what I see happening is people being told that they can no longer have a humanities education here, they can no longer have a thriving social sciences department. I think that this is what we’re moving towards . . .

And how is that money spent?   Lambert quotes a faculty member of USM who shows how money is being siphoned off to high-paying non-teaching jobs and bloated administrative departments that often provide cushy work for the well-connected. This is in contrast to the slave wages paid adjunct faculty.

The University of Maine System office in Bangor—where no one teaches anybody anything—spends $20 million a year, almost 10 percent of the state’s higher education appropriation.

Just take a look at the budget. The $20 million the system office spends not teaching exceeds the $14.95 million spent annually by the three smallest University of Maine campuses (at Fort Kent, Machias and Presque Isle). If it doesn’t teach, doesn’t grade, doesn’t create assignments or even talk with the faculty who do all these things, how does the system blow through 20 million bucks a year?

There are 291 people employed at the University of Maine System office, of whom 87 (30 percent) are administrators. One of the most senior, and expensive, positions in the system is that of the vice chancellor for academic affairs. That’s a provost, and there’s a provost on each campus. The system has a chief student affairs officer, as does each campus.

… Any claim that the system is in financial trouble, or that it’s broke, is absurd. If anything’s broken it’s the system’s priorities. The system devotes a mere 27 percent of total expenses to the core academic mission. Every year for the last five years the share of expenses devoted to education has declined while the share sucked up by the administration has increased.

Strether stresses that the corporatization of higher education is not unique to the University of Maine system. The starving of educational resources and the bloating of administrative functions is a feature in universities an colleges nationwide. He quotes a Johns Hopkins University professor, Benjamin Ginsburg who wrote The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters. Ginsburg says, “US campuses have seen far more significant rises in administrators (85 percent) and professional staff (240 percent) than faculty (51 percent) between 1975 and 2005.”

A professor for over 40 years, Ginsburg argues that such data are commensurate with a calculated effort in college administrations to achieve neoliberal, profit-based goals such as erasing tenure tracks, reducing political speech, and increasing focus on student job placement rather than encouraging knowledge and critical thinking.

Ginsburg says “deanlets”—administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience—are setting the educational agenda. Consequently, students are denied a more enriching educational experience—one defined by intellectual rigor. 

My hope is that the student/faculty protest at the University of Southern Maine sparks a new national student movement, one that challenges tuition hikes and also ties the unfair austerity measures to the deeper issue of the neoliberal takeover of education, government, and society at large, and the silencing of political dissent.  If we’re lucky, students will take over where Occupy Wall Street left off.

The post Will the protests at the University of Southern Maine spark a national student movement? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

When it comes to cheating in our schools, don’t just blame the teachers. While we’re at it, let’s give the students a break as well. As the great philosopher Michael Jackson said, “We need to look at the man in the mirror.”

What adult amongst us can say that he or she never put pressure on schools to perform better; never demanded more of a student when he or she had given just about everything he or she could? In many ways, our schools are very democratic; they carry out the will of the people. And you know what, that will of the people is in many ways a very ugly sight, pocked with pressure from all directions to do better and to do more. The moral compass is terribly skewed as millions of adults who have cheated in numerous ways on numerous occasions are deploring teachers and school administrators for in many ways acting both in ways that the public wants and the public behaves.

Education is a very curious issue for progressives because we love it, honor it, and support it in many ways. At the same time we seem to view it through the cloudy lens of amnesia. Most adults, including progressives, don’t remember well what it was like to be a student. We took the tests, wrote the long papers about books we didn’t read, and wished for our peers to perform poorly. Those cannot be pleasant memories, but rather than trying to put fewer excessive demands on today’s students we choose to buy into the misguided pedagogy of our parents’ generation and inflict more of the same on today’s students.

It’s time that we back off of that. Our concern should not be focused on cheating in Atlanta or dictatorial rule in Washington, DC under Michelle Rhee, but rather how we can humanize education and make it relevant and meaningful to students, teachers, and parents alike.

Below is a chart of our “race to nowhere,” as we go around generation after generation changing the cosmetics of our schools but keeping the same values in place, including cheating. Fortunately it’s not all a monolith as there are some schools that focus on learning without pressure. Some retain their spirit of compassion, innovation, and meaningful education. However the path ahead can be a treacherous one as parents, particularly those who are upwardly mobile, can easily fall prey to mistaking image for substance. The glamour of image is very tantalizing to students, and too often they move away from the principles of that school. Improving our school requires constant compassion, innovation, and vigilance for the early steps of moving away from being child-centered and instead become bragging rights for parents, teachers, and administrators.

RACE TO NOWHERE

For more on working to minimize the standardized nature of our schools, you may find it of interest to read the author’s book, Standardized Education – Moving America to the Right.

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The ever-insightful and knowledgeable Yves Smith, writing at Naked Capitalism, points to a potential trigger for the next economic crisis—the bursting of the massive student loan debt bubble. According to Smith, student loan debt is so large “it’s trumping credit cards as a spending driver.” While other forms of debt have decreased during the Great Recession, spending on student loans has been steadily increasing.

Good jobs that pay a decent salary—i.e. one you could actually live on—are scarce. So people have been going into to debt to pay for training or degrees in hopes of landing one of those elusive jobs. Student loans are more available, s0 people of all ages have been going back to school—a dubious choice given that there is no sign that a robust economy with good paying jobs is in our future.

Other reasons for the massive growth in student loans? The growing for-profit higher education industry is one of the big drivers of the student loan debt bubble. Many people have been aggressively recruited and pressured by these institutions to take out loans and train for career opportunities that, in reality, do not exist. For more information on the corporate/Wall Street hand in the growth of student loan debt, watch the excellent Frontline movie, College, Inc.

Before we get to the bursting part, lets take a closer look at the size of the bubble. Here are some facts from a February 2013 report on student debt published by the New York Fed:

•  The total burden of student debt is approaching $1 trillion

•  Student loan debt has almost tripled between 2004 and 2012.

•  The number of student loan borrowers has almost tripled between 2004 and 2012

In her article, Smith quotes progressive economist Warren Mosler who compares the student loan bubble (otherwise known as a “credit expansion”) to the many bubbles before it that have propped up our perennially dysfunctional economy—the savings and loan bubble of the Reagan era, the dot com bubble of the Clinton years, and the sub prime mortgage bubble of the Bush administration. He points out the obvious: when the student loan bubble bursts, its support of the economy will end. And what leads Smith and Mosler to think it will burst? Have a look at these charts from the NY fed report (Click on each chart to see a larger version):

Smith ends with these thoughts:

. . . student loans are not only looking bubbly, but the level of borrower stress is saying something has got to give. One sign is that law school enrollment has fallen 15% since 2010. Students are correctly worried about borrowing heavily in a weak job market. But so far, enough people believe in the value of education as a workplace credential that the student loans outstanding are still rising. It’s hard to discern how this plays out, but the endgame might not be that far off.

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For kids, a typical school day is about six to eight hours. Not so for teachers, whose work load includes additional hours for grading tests and papers, preparing lessons, gathering materials, making classroom displays, and meeting with students, parents and administrators. [And I’m probably leaving out a lot of other things, like contorting learning opportunities into preparation for standardized tests, and attending classes for the extra credits that earn higher pay.] So, how much is all of this effort worth in salary dollars? The answer depends a great deal on geography. States may fund schools, but local districts generally determine salaries, and they vary widely from state to state, and even within states.

At a helpful website called Teacher Salary Info, you can click on a state and find out salary ranges, plus information about median household income and home prices [to help prospective teachers get a handle on how well or poorly one might live on an educator’s income in that state], and state expenditures per pupil. Created by a teacher for other teachers, the website offers, on each state’s page, an extended description of the ins and outs of the state’s educational structure and funding, and other tips about the overall teaching environment. The website also includes graphs depicting, state by state: average teacher salary compared to median house price; and average teacher salary compared to median household income.

Designed to help both new and experienced teachers make informed decisions about where to work, Teacher Salary Info clearly believes in the value and satisfaction of teaching, but it presents a realistic picture of the world in which teachers work.

“Teachers… love to teach, but hate how little [they] are paid.” That’s both the opening and the bottom line of Teacher Salary Info. By way of explanation, the site says:

A 2006 study done by the National Education Association [found that] 50% of teachers leave the profession within five years because of poor working conditions and low salaries. Yet, according to the 2006 General Social Survey, teaching ranks among the Top 10 most gratifying jobs with 69% of teachers reporting they were very satisfied with their jobs.

So, would you be satisfied to teach if your salary range fell into one of the categories in the chart? Just asking. And, by the way, study this chart carefully, because if you live in almost any US state, there may be a test on this information later.

Teachers’ Salary Ranges by State

State	From	To
Alabama	$33, 737	$56,774
Alaska	$24,100	$70,704
Arizona	$33, 152	$70,875
Arkansas	$20,416	$69,021
California	$44,337	$102,348
Colorado	$31,675	$73,437
Connecticut	$40,973	$90,998
Delaware	$31,978	$54,646
District of Columbia	$42,370	$68,396
Florida	$32,870	$59,138
Georgia	$29,918	$68,700
Hawaii	$43,157	$79,170
Idaho	$31,000	$64,442
Illinois	$22,079	$118,963
Indiana	$31,095	$65,858
Iowa	$29,414	$61,152
Kansas	$33,580	$50,395
Kentucky	$32,981	$62,171
Louisiana	$33,665	$60,729
Maine	$31,152	$63,861
Maryland	$36,500	$74,134
Massachusetts	$41,385	$69,076
Michigan	$38,297	$71,046
Minnesota	$20,141	$68,612
Mississippi	$35,020	$44,840
Missouri	$34,345	$76,349
Montana	$28,546	$60,064
Nebraska	$32,487	$52,400
Nevada	$30,905	$64,805
New Hampshire	$25,600	$76,097
New Jersey	$44,450	$93,412
New Mexico	$23,528	$58,289
New York	$43,362	$95, 285
North Carolina	$29,750	$64,160
North Dakota	$26,800	$51,912
Ohio	$24,051	$60,800
Oklahoma	$31,600	$47,135
Oregon	$27,764	$62,534
Pennsylvania	$38,751	$71,234
Rhode Island	$35,563	$70,190
South Carolina	$26,975	$68,817
South Dakota	$26,750	$42,470
Tennessee	$22,645	$55,710
Texas	$40,800	$66,231
Utah	$31,604	$63,770
Vermont	$36,548	$65,654
Virginia	$32,303	$74,883
Washington	$32,746	$61,720
West Virginia	$25,832	$54,632
Wisconsin	$32,364	$70,948
Wyoming	$42,000	$79,000

[Originally posted Aug. 24, 2010 on Occasional Planet]

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