Resisting the Education Oligarchy

NOTE: This is no ordinary blog post. It has two action items, a provocative video, and an uplifting radio piece.

Faced with a national education regime that is increasingly hostile to teachers, students, and learning itself, a growing number of parents are pushing back. Among the recent resisters is Ricardo D. Rosa of New Bedford, Massachusetts, who is opting out of state-mandated testing. His letter to the school committee was published in the Washington Post and reads in part:

Any administrator, school committee member, or school functionary still standing before students, teachers, and families touting the virtues of high-stakes testing should be ashamed. -- Ricardo D. Rosa

He is absolutely right, of course. The "reform" movement is a well-funded, bipartisan movement to centralize public education in the United States to a level that is difficult to believe possible in a democracy.

(Note: at the time I wrote this, I do not think I realized who Dr. Rosa was. I now count him and his brother -- also Dr. Rosa -- among my friends and among the educators I admire most.)

It sounds shrill to blame "corporate interests," but it is the case that Bill Gates, the Waltons (of WalMart fame), and Pearson Publishing are both paying the piper and calling the tune. Contributing generously to media and elected officials of all political persuasions, they are creating an entirely new educational ecosystem. As I have written previously, those calling for accountability for nickels and dimes are not held accountable for millions nor billions.

Critical thinking is being removed from the airwaves as quickly as it is from the classroom.

A puff piece on the Common Core is but the latest in a growing number of examples of what generous donations can buy. Contrast the "reporting" with the responses from educators to see that NPR's usual rigor seems to have gone missing. (Within hours, comments were curtailed at a few dozen.)

An Accountability Challenge 

Fortunately, Dr. Rosa is not alone. The kind of resistance that he exhibits and challenges others to undertake is growing. On the same day that I learned of his challenge, I saw this cartoon ...

... and I learned that some educators are trying to make this teachers' fantasy a reality. In February, Bret Wooten of Lewisville, Texas began a petition to require the governor of Texas and its legislators and education officials to pass the tests that they require of students, and to publicize their scores. His effort grew slowly within Texas for a few weeks, but in the past couple of days, a growing number of petitioners from other states have signed on. If you are reading this, consider adding your name, as I have done (#116).

In Holyoke, Massachusetts, teacher Augusto Morales has recently spoken out against the humiliation and disruption caused by extreme testing in his school. It is no coincidence that the strongest resistance is emerging in low-income, urban areas. The very students who were the purported beneficiaries of No Child Left Behind are the ones most likely to be left behind by high-stakes testing, nonsensical curricula from Pearson, and inappropriate pedagogy from Bill Gates.

I read similar anguish in reports from teachers throughout the United States, many of whom report absurdly intrusive regimes of testing and test preparation. Even the bodily functions of teachers and students are increasingly likely to be regulated by local officials trying to please distant educational bureaucracies.I admire Mr. Morales for bringing that widely-felt pain directly to the attention of some of those responsible.

Higher Education Connections

I teach at the university level and my own daughter has so far attended private schools (in large part because of what NCLB has done to public schools), so I could easily ignore all of this. But I would do so at great peril. For one thing, those who are orchestrating destructive reforms in K12 are working to dis-empower university faculty through various means -- from the elimination or reduction of tenure to cryptofascist accountability regimes.

Moreover, those of us who enjoy teaching at the university level are now confronted with the first wave of students who have never known anything but NCLB levels of testing, and it shows. Just today I had students -- very bright students -- absolutely panicked about a very modest mid-term I am giving them later this week. They expect detailed reviews not only of the content but also of the exact format of the exam -- and the strongest students are fretting just as much as the weaker ones. Sadly, it is warped visions of "college
readiness" that instills approaches to learning that are not at all collegiate.

Finally, many professors are teaching future educators and some of us provide ongoing professional development to in-service teachers. If we care at all about the effectiveness of the work that our students are going to be doing, we cannot ignore policies that will prohibit many of the best practices we teach. It is for this reason that I am grateful to fellow Massachusetts academics who have prepared a detailed critique of the MCAS/PARCC/Pearson regime, and presenting it to the education policymakers in the state. I am proud to join professor Rosa (like me, he is both a father and a professor) and many others in endorsing that statement.

A Better Way

I need to end this post with something positive, and I am fortunate that my favorite librarian -- with whom I discuss these issues often -- today shared this story of a very different kind of higher education. This is eleven minutes of delightful audio about Quest University in Canada. Just listening to this positive report about education is something every teacher should do as a treat to the self. The report is at once an eloquent description of what has gone wrong in education and a glimpse into what happens when teachers and learners are enabled to flourish.

Coffee for Chemists

By a cosmic coffee coincidence, Javatrekker and aspiring comic Dean Cycon released this video just as I was preparing to address the annual meeting of the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers, which was hosted by our BSU chemists last week. I had not worked with this group before, but rightly surmised that this would be a good way to open my presentation. I post it here for the benefit of those NEACT participants who might wish to share it, along some of the other resources I presented that evening.

(Prior to the talk on coffee, I mentioned two other resources that might be of interest to anybody involved in education in New England, especially southern New England. These are the Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History, which can put together an educational program on any subject and our own EarthView outreach program.)

As Dean points out in the video itself, of course, the pesticides associated with "conventional coffee" are in reality no laughing matter. Many chemicals we have banned in the United States are routinely used on the coffee -- and other products we import from around the world. In real life, Dean sets an extraordinary example, and I was able to offer the teachers a choice of his No CO2 and Decaf Chiapas coffees. Each of these single-origin selections gave us a chance to discuss some environmental chemistry, related to carbon offsets and caffeine removal, respectively. The byproduct of decaf coffee, by the way, is now marketed as "green coffee extract" by Starbucks -- coffee without the coffee flavor. Gadzooks.

Never mind the debates about whether traces of these nasties make their way into our cups: there is no denying that the barrage of chemicals sprayed on the coffee, sugar, flowers, oranges, and countless other tropical crops have profound effects on the ecosystems and communities from which we extract these bounties. As much fun as I have with coffee as a beverage and teaching tool, I remember that life-and-death questions really do surround its production.

Because the theme of this year's NEACT meeting was green chemistry, I put together an eclectic talk entitled "Greening Coffee: From Red to Green to Brown." That is, I provided a sampling of environmental choices at various stages of coffee production, from the growth of the plant (red berries) through the in-country processing (green coffee) to its roasting and brewing (brown beans or beverage).

This required a very brief overview of the roughly 50 steps from field to cup, which I summarized with the names that are typically used to describe coffee in Nicaragua. On the tree, the fruit is a cherry. Once picked, it is a grape. When peeled, the slimy seed is honey. When dried, it is parchment. When green, it is gold (because it can earn money). When roasted, it is a bean. When brewed, it is coffee.

I also mentioned the parts of the cherry that are separated at various stages, and an online quiz that I created for those who wish to learn these parts. A more advanced quiz teaches the geography of processing -- the locations in which each part of the coffee is typically removed through processing.

I discussed the geographic parameters that determine where coffee can be effectively grown, and I mentioned Coffee & Conservation, a marvelous resource on the relationship between coffee ecology and the habitat of migratory birds. Then, as an antidote to Dean's Mad Scientist, I shared the best example I know of coffee being produced in harmony with its surrounding ecology -- the biodynamic production of my friend Byron, the Poet of Coffee.This video also provides a nice transition from the coffee grower to the importer and roaster, who also have the opportunity to make important decisions about the environmental impacts of the coffee.



An interesting development at the roasting stage is the growing interest in solar roasting, a growing field in which Solar Roast Coffee of Colorado seems to be a leader. As roasting coffee on our campus continues to be an elusive goal, we might actually have an opportunity to do some relevant roof-top research.

I talked about brewing not in terms of environmental impact so much as flavor impact. Flavor is important, however, as brewing coffee properly honors the work of those who have put tremendous care into producing it. Moreover, the more consumers learn to appreciate good coffee, the more likely are farmers to be fairly compensated for their work and talent. Rather than discuss my approach to brewing in detail, I mentioned one brewing method that is favored by industry experts and was invented by a chemist in Springfield, Massachuetts: the Chemex coffeemaker.

And even though most of the audience members were (I presume) going to be spending the night away from their romantic partners, I ended the presentation with Ella Fitzgerald's rendition of the sultry song Black Coffee and reference to the work of Lavazza and others on a different kind of coffee chemistry that is explored in some depth on my (PG-13) Coffee & Tea Romance page.

Fly Brazil

Despite its recent economic woes, the prevailing self-image in the United States is that it is -- and will remain -- very advanced relative to any and all countries of the tropics. While we have been busy congratulating ourselves and enjoying the fruits of hard work and ingenuity of the past, those traits have been taking hold in places that may surprise many of my North American compatriots.

My first visit to Brazil was in 1996, when I spent three months in Rondônia. I was primarily interested in deforestation and had chosen the location of some of the most severe and notorious forest clearing on the planet at the time. Among the many surprises in store for me was the widespread commitment to learning, exemplified most poignantly by this computer school in Porto Velho -- an area considered "unexplored" even by many in Brazil.

The contrasts between perception and reality, in fact, eventually led to the publication of our small book Olhares, which I describe on my Rondônia page and which we hope to update soon.

I have had the good fortune to return to Brazil a half-dozen times, always meeting avid learners -- people pursuing two degrees at the same time, or working full time while also studying English or Spanish, for example. it is no surprise, then, that during my acquaintance with Brazil, it has climbed the ladder of largest economies, from about 12th place then to 6th place today.

Some in the United States who are aware of this growth -- through programs such as Brazil's Rising Star, a 60 Minutes profile of Brazil's immediate past president that I consider required viewing for anyone interested in understanding the future of this hemisphere. But even those who have noted the growth might be surprised at the sophistication exhibited in We Are Embraer.

If you have flown on American Eagle, chances are you have been on aircraft manufactured by this Brazilian company. The last leg of my long return from the Amazon in 1996, in fact, was on just such a plane!

Not only is Embraer competing with U.S. aviation companies, it is moving quickly ahead in some areas of critical importance to the industry. As illustrated in the Clarissa segment of Discovery Channel's Brazil Revealed, aviation is a career path of growing importance for young Brazilians.

Fortunately, opportunities are available and increasing for U.S. students and scholars to study in Brazil or with Brazilians who are studying in the United States. And although a growing number of Brazilian professionals speak English, learning the Portuguese language is an increasingly wise career-development strategy.

Online campaign demanding government agreements to curtail deforestation.
The difference between 1992 and 2012 is that such demands increasingly
arise within Brazil itself.

I do not wish to romanticize Brazil's achievements. Its economy is growing, education is becoming more widely available, and its income gap -- one of the most severe in the world -- is narrowing. But although Brazil is a leader in many aspects of renewable energy development, its financial strength does remain inordinately dependent on the exploitation of natural resources. Deforestation remains a vital concern both globally and within the country, where the United Nations Rio+20 conference is fostering debate and innovative public art. From my point of view, two decades have seen a growing sophistication in Brazil's environmental movements.

Giant fish made from plastic bottles eye Sugarloaf as world leaders
gather at the 20th anniversary of the Rio Summit.
The Atlantic published a stunning photo essay that includes
this and many other creative expressions of environmental concern.

NOTE: Many thanks to my student Andres for the Embraer video and my friend Viviane for the Rio+20 image.

A Whole 'Nother Country

Writing for Slate, Gail Collins offers an entertaining if somewhat frightening essay about my former home state. As she describes it, Texas is "a fast-growing, increasingly urban place whose citizens have nevertheless managed to maintain the conviction that they’re living in the wide open spaces."


In Everything's Bigger in Texas, she writes about the contradictions rampant in a state that is equally likely to draw the rest of the country into its orbit, or to cut ties and become its own country. Again. It is, after all, the only state to have had six national flags (those of Spain, France, Mexico, Texas, the United States, and the Confederacy).

Texas counties I have visited

Fitting to Work

As unemployment remains remarkably high in the United States -- over 8 percent officially and 14 percent if we use the measures that were in place before President Reagan changed the measuring stick in order to get better-looking measurements -- Renee Montagne's interview with David Wessel is especially timely. Even though he is an economist, and a Wall Street Journal economist at that, Wessel offers some very interesting insights into the problems facing job seekers.

The full interview is well worth a listen, as it examines unemployment in terms of factors that are more nuanced than the broad considerations of macroeconomic factors and business confidence. Of a handful of hypotheses he explores, I find two particularly interesting.

First, it appears that software is a big part of the problem. Wessel describes both anecdotal and experimmental evidence that potentially qualified applicants cannot make it through the filters commonly used in many hiring departments. In one extreme case, a human-resources executive found that his own resume would not have made it through the filters to get hired for his own job. Wessel does not connect this to recent waves of downsizing, but of course the reliance on software has increased at the expense of human resources officers who were, well, human.

Webb Machinery

Second, because of decreasing employee loyalty -- which of course results from post-Reagan erosion of employer loyalty -- employers are reluctant to train new hires. Where someone 90 percent capable of doing a job in the past would have received that last measure of training on the job, employers are now hoping to find people ready to walk through the door with exactly the right skills to do the job.

Wessel suggests that they increasingly expect schools to do this training work and unfortunately, some political leaders are all-too eager  to accommodate these unrealistic and unsustainable demands. The demands are unrealistic because they confuse training (which is specific) with education (which is more general). Even fairly specialized education does not and should not emphasize particular tools, systems, or software versions. Shifting too much of the training burden to schools is also not sustainable, as anti-government activists push politicians to limit support for education at all levels, and so-called education reformers dilute the actual education with rote test preparation.

As Wessel does suggest in the interview, employers and government -- and potential employees -- can use this information to close the apparent gap between what employers demand and what employees have to offer.

The Worth of Children

Mike Thompson, Detroit Free Press

Mike Thompson's incisive cartoon about the contradictions between pro-child and anti-teacher rhetoric arrives just as the two sides are coming to a showdown in an unthinkably bitter recall election in Wisconsin.

Locally, teachers in the town of Abington recently decided to curtail voluntary activities after all other efforts to negotiate a contract had failed. I know from my own limited experience with this kind of "work to rule" action that it is difficult for most educators to limit themselves to the work for which they are actually paid. The intent, of course, is to help administrators to see just how much is done on a voluntary basis, with the hope that this will result in more reasonable offers for the work that is done for pay.

I recall a discussion as we considered such an action a number of years ago on my own campus. (We are almost always without settled contracts in Massachusetts, as disregarding higher-education seems to be a bipartisan sport of long standing, but we only take action in especially egregious circumstances.) As we discussed whether or not to skip graduation ceremonies, a colleague argued that we should do our best to shield students from our conflict with the Board of Higher Education.

In that moment, my own thinking on the question shifted. I had seen students as potential victims in the crossfire between faculty and our governing body, but I realized that the opposite was true. When schools and teachers are underfunded or treated with disrespect by state and local governments, they are caught in the crossfire between politicians and students.

And then I remembered something I heard years ago from a scholar who had recently returned from a research trip to Scandinavia. She reported realizing that the United States is really a country that hates children (and young adults, too, it seems). Our rhetoric, of course, is pro-child, and as individuals we would do anything for our children. Even anti-government nihilist Grover Norquist is indulgent with his own daughters.

Our collective deeds, however, all too often reflect a distaste for the children of others. We are indeed fortunate that teaching, social work, and child care continue to attract those who hold children and youth in higher esteem than the value implied by the typical pay for these professions.

Through my EarthView program and other activities, I work with enough teachers to know that there are some exceptions -- teachers who really should not be working with children. But in my experience these are rare. Most teachers I meet do amazing work with children (or youth or adults), despite the incredible barriers to teaching that are imposed by politicians, and despite pay rates below those of their non-teaching peers.

No Place for Meaning

The United States is entering the final stages of a presidential race that -- in my view -- will be a referendum on the value of work. Quite honestly, I fear that racism may provide the margin of victory for a vision of labor that will forever diminish the lives of workers of all races and all but the most rarefied economic classes.

The View from Lazy Point -- Carl Safina's sweeping exploration of the gap between our conventional ways of thinking about the world and the challenges we face as a human race -- includes the following passage about how we have come to value work. One presidential candidate has built his fortune on a much different view, but the following really captures my own view of what business can and should be. This passage bears careful reading, for its examination of the unraveling of work, family, commerce, democracy, and thought itself.

In my town, the Sou'wester Bookstore is no more, Rudy the druggist and his wife are holding on by their fingernails, and the youngish couple who've bought the hardware store are clearly worried. These are true men and women in the best sense of the word "business." they are enterprising threads in the fabric of our community, not just commuters who drive away in the morning and appear only behind their lawn mower and their trash cans. When I enter a local store and the bell above the door rings, I know I will be welcomed by name and the shopkeeper and I will trade something valuable.

That's why for their sakes and mine, I do my shopping on this side of the tracks when I can. This gets increasingly difficult as the mall-and-chain drags real businesses and real people to exhaustion. By so dreadfully shrinking opportunities for people to go into business for themselves, the chains keep people acting as their stockboys and salesgirls well beyond the time they should have taken their place as adults in our communities. The middle-aged workers in the big-box stores seem like elderly teenagers, deprived of authority, creativity, responsibility, and pride. Mostly, they're nice people with a desire to be helpful. What could they have accomplished if given a chance? They may never understand who they are; they'll certainly never know who they might have been. Open on holidays, the chains undermine tehir employees' time for family. (Why anyone is actually shopping for TVs and washing machines on Thanksgiving is a question so large its answer eludes the wide, wide net of even my own cynicism.) Thus the chain stores threaten family more than any same-sex marriage, threaten Sunday more than Darwin ever could. Seeing my island in chans has driven me to the fringes, made me a castaway on my own native shores, a refugee inside my homeland. And for that I thank them. In that banal way, they helped me understand, at least, who I am not.

Though the shopping mall has largely driven Main Street out of business by usurping its commercial intercourse, it rejects Main Street's civic discourse. A friend reports tha in his nearby megamall, people handing out anti-war leaflets were arrested. Free speech has no place on "private property"; it could distract those in the consumer caste from tehir main task and sole worth. Just keep the lite jazz playin'. A generation or so ago -- one tends to forget -- those same people were citizens in a democracy. (Safina, 306-307)

I would quickly add that the poverty of opportunity Safina identifies is a loss of meaningful work not only for the potential owners of small businesses, but also those who could contribute so much more to their communities as employees of local business than they can as employees of distant investors and speculators.

Sadly, educational institutions often contribute to the growth of McJobs described above, as they outsource much of the employment that is available on their campuses. As I explain in my Guru, Inc. post, this is partly the result of ever-shrinking public support for public education. In such circumstances, creative thinking is required if we are to provide education by both word and example, and to have critical thinking removed even from the seats of learning.

Photo: Zohaa Basra

The busy coffee shop shown above is at at Stetson University. It is not an ideal situation -- the workers are employed by Sodexo rather than by the university itself. But they are employed, and they work in an environment that is varied and interesting and that -- most importantly -- allows them to participate meaningfully with the students and faculty at that university.

Vending machines humming along 24/7 in a space between a state-of-the
art bottle filler and a vacant space that could employ actual people
to serve food. Some sort of cafe will eventually be in place for peak hours,
but those vending machines are proving VERY difficult to remove.

Meanwhile, at my own university, a proposal to create an even more dynamic work place languishes. A space designated for a cafe remains empty, but the space immediately behind it already "employs" vending machines -- a reserve army of mechanized food service that stands ready to disemploy human labor, even as it consumes enormous amounts of electricity and plastic packaging. 

The vending machines remind me of the looms that were the targets of the original Luddite movement two hundred years ago, but with added environmental demerits. Given the confluence of environmental destruction and rampant unemployment in this Luddite bicentennial year, people are re-examining the relationships among technology, labor, and the environment. 

Many of the original Luddites were executed -- some for crimes against other humans, but more for their crimes against machines. Yes, even in the early decades of the industrial revolution, the state sided with capital, and quickly made the destruction of a loom a hanging offense.


It is easy to dismiss those who try to defend the interests of labor over capital, tagging them as "Luddites" opposed to progress. But just as the original Chipko tree-huggers were loggers who resisted the pace and scope of logging in India, modern critics of "creative destruction" call into question the pace of disemployment and the breach of social contracts. When official unemployment is 8 percent, real unemployment 14 percent, and youth unemployment closer to 75 percent, it is time to take a serious look at the choices we make, both as individuals and as institutions.

My Wonderful World

The United States has a greater need for geographic literacy than any other country, and yet its people -- young and old -- lack this fundamental area of knowledge to an alarming degree.

As my colleague Harm de Blij has said, geographic ignorance is a national-security problem, with U.S. citizens all-too willing to commit lives and treasure to conflicts in places they do not understand. As many are discovering in 2008, geographic ignorance is also a serious economic handicap. Prices change rapidly on commodities from near and far, and many people have little idea what those connections are or what factors might influence the price of things they use every day.

People who set education policy have been slow to recognize the importance of geographic education, after decades of experimentation with the amorphous catch-all of "social studies" all but eliminated it from the curriculum. This is where MyWonderfulWorld.org comes in! Sponsored by National Geographic, MyWonderfulWorld is a multi-pronged approach to promoting geographic education at all levels.

Please have a look, sign up for updates, and help us build momentum for geographic education. Nothing less than the future of our nation -- and the world -- is at stake!