Bin Laden's Justice, and Ours

“Justice has been done,” President Obama declared, as he announced that US forces in Pakistan had killed Osama bin Laden. Yes, it has, but as Americans wave flags and chant “USA”, blast the bagpipes, and sing the Star Spangled Banner, let’s not forget that this is retributive justice, volatile stuff. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The same kind of justice that inspires young men to rise up and smash airplanes into skyscrapers in retribution for perceived insults to their honor.

In the news reports I’ve read so far, the only explicit mention of honor is in a quote from bin Laden. Speaking to Americans via ABC news in the late 1990s, he said “This is my message to the American people: to look for a serious government that looks out for their interests and does not attack others, their lands, or their honor”. Pretty good advice, actually, if you disregard the anti-Semitic diatribe that precedes it, and the advice that we hold our government to account for our real interests is not far from what progressive liberals like Paul Krugman are asking for. The mention of honor, though, takes us out of post-Enlightenment liberal politics into terrain much older, and murkier, and problematic.

President Obama, in his announcement to the nation, made no direct mention of honor. He spoke of family (the empty chairs around the dinner table), of pluralism (let this not divide our country), of professionalism (“work” came up over and over as he spoke of the military), of human dignity. These are comfortable modern ideals, in distinct contrast to the ideals that motivated the Greeks to sack Troy, motivated the Romans to sack Europe, the Crusaders to sack Constantinople, and so forth, right up to us and Al Qaeda. Eventually, Obama tied bin Laden’s death to the story of American Exceptionalism (we can do anything we set out to do), and tied that story to “liberty and justice for all”. Wise rhetorical choices, since these are ideals that – if they really did motivate all of us, at the voting booth as well as when we listen to lofty speeches – might lead to a different sort of justice. The sort of justice that recognizes the plight of the weak, that contests privilege and greed, that demands equal treatment under the law, that demands honesty and professionalism of politicians and bankers, that supports peace.

The justice done to bin Laden is not that sort of justice.

I’m not saying that bin Laden shouldn’t have been killed, or that retributive justice is inappropriate in this circumstance. Rather, that we should keep our kinds of justice straight. The honor of the United States has been restored, and Americans are relieved. But when you restore your own honor at someone else’s expense (which is inevitably how, once your honor has been slighted, you have to restore it – that’s how avenging one’s honor works), the framework remains “might makes right”, which is also the logic that supports street gangs, honor killings of girls and women, and international terrorism. Retribution doesn’t relieve us from danger. Only redefining what’s truly honorable – from the death of our enemies to a different kind of justice – will do that.

Come on down to 4Profit U!

We've covered the University of Phoenix and its amazingly low graduation rate in other posts, but nothing gets the message across about for-profit universities as effectively as the following cartoon:

Check out Tom the Dancing Bug's page for a full-size version.

Education and Income

It is a matter of faith in our society that more education equals a higher standard of later living—high school graduates earn more than high school dropouts, but not as much as two-year-college graduates, who do not earn as much as four-year college graduates, etc., on up the educational ladder. Of course, the issue is more complicated than this, with gender, race, ethnicity, SES of birth family and neighborhood playing a part (to name just a few of the usual suspects). Additionally, of course, once we move to the ranks of the college graduates and holders of graduate degrees, the degree of status and exclusivity of the college or university matters: the kind of social access attained with the degree varies from school to school.

However, it seems a grievous category error to extrapolate from the extent to which more education equals greater earnings for individuals, to the cumulative loss to the national economy, although this is a category error we consistently and pervasively make. A recent study (http://www.all4ed.org/publication_material/EconStates) reported in Education Week (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/03/24/26mct_gadropouts.h30.html) is a clear example of this tendency and an opportunity to consider why such analysis is both inaccurate and harmful.

Imagine a perfect educational system in which all students receive a perfect education, whatever that might mean. Every student graduates from high school knowing everything that high school graduates are supposed to know. Every high school graduate goes on to the very best college and graduates knowing everything that college graduates are supposed to know. Carry this process on as far as you like. At the end of the day, with all this perfect education, would the supply of perfectly educated workers elevate the salary of the greeter at Wal-Mart or the counter-worker at McDonalds, or reduce the ranks of the unemployed?

My point is that when we look to educational attainment to explain economic inequality, we are engaging a blame-the-victim game, in which the poor are blamed for their poverty: if they had only stayed in school, they would not be poor today. This is obviously a comforting notion to those of us on the right side of the economic divide, just as it helps those on the wrong side accept their deprivations as justified. It conceals from both groups the fact that unemployment in a capitalist economy is both structural and designed in. Unemployment is the result of a shortage of jobs and a surplus of labor, not a lack of educated workers. Again, think of Wal-Mart: given the surplus labor pool, why would they pay more than they do? Obviously they would not. The problem of poverty is structural, not personal inadequacy.

This is not to deny that educational attainment serves to distribute poverty, but that is as very different point. In a society that had the sort of universally perfect educational system described above, we would need to find some other way to distribute inequality. If education were to truly provide an equality of opportunity, and if we chose to continue tax and regulatory policies designed to increase inequality, there would need to be some other way than education for the wealthy to preserve their status and power. An advantage of this state of affairs might be that it would become more transparently true that wealth and power are now generally inherited, not a matter of “meritocratic” achievement (by whatever measure such a thing is determined).

There are two problems with our current state of affairs: we have extremes of wealth and poverty that are unsustainable in a democratic polity, and the mechanisms of the perpetuation of inequality are hidden such that even the victims of the system too-often think the system is fair. Too many of the poor accept the notion that if they had worked harder, been smarter, stayed in school longer they would be economically better off. That is possibly true, but ignores the systemic dimension of poverty: in a world of surplus workers, the movement of one worker up the hierarchy would mean the downward displacement of someone else.

As long as we conceive of poverty as the result of individual failure of will and effort or the lack of talent, we conceal the structural elements that are designed to guarantee a certain level of poverty. As long as we blame the victims of a game played with loaded dice for their losses, we are prevented from making the changes that would result in greater equality and justice. As long as we keep the current game intact, we continue in a downward spiral of competition for the few open places at the top (for example, the search for the “right” preschool that begins with the positive pregnancy test).

And so I wonder how to construct a public conversation about schools that both decouples schooling from being a purely economic and purely competitive enterprise, while at the same time allowing or fostering a public awareness of the fact that the system is rigged. While it may be the fact that the individuals suffering from extremes of poverty are in the situations they are in because of the fact that they did not receive a good-enough education, the fact remains that if everyone worked hard and received a great education, poverty might be distributed differently, but it would hardly be eliminated.

The damage our commonly-held myth about education leading to economic success does twofold damage to our civic life: (1) the myth of meritocracy is a classic case of blame-the-victim, and it prevents us from discussing the real causes of inequality and abject poverty; and (2) it equally prevents us from discussing the purposes of schooling and the meaning of education, since schooling becomes a means to winning the economic competition that defines capitalism rather than the pursuit of either human flourishing in the humanistic tradition or democratic citizenship in the democratic one. And whatever we can say about the arguments for and against the latter two purposes of education, clearly preparation for winning economic races cannot be justified as the goal of education even as it becomes the only purpose of schooling.

What would it look like if we designed a system of public schooling in which we actually tried to educate children?

Don't Turn Your Dairy Cows into Hamburgers, Wisconsin!

What do Wisconsin politics and nuclear catastrophe in Japan have in common? Wisconsin voters have much to learn from Japan about the state of their own backyard, and here’s why.

This spring is also the 25th anniversary of the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, and as events as the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan unfold, the media has been reminding us how much worse things could be. Without understating the anxiety of the Japanese, or the concerns they have about whether their politicians and TEPCO management are telling them the full truth, it bears emphasizing that because they live in a liberal democracy, the Japanese are already many, many times safer in the face of nuclear catastrophe than were Ukrainians in 1986. Because they live in a state that respects freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and intellectual freedom of many sorts, the Japanese people would never be sent in to fight a nuclear meltdown in their shirtsleeves. Engineering expertise, both local and international, and the personal heroism of workers are rightfully praised for preventing complete meltdown in Japan, but freedom of speech and information deserves a fair share of the credit for insuring that the expertise and heroism were properly deployed.

In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the Wisconsin Republican Party recently invoked its Open Records right to access the state-provided email account of a government employee, in order to search UW Madison William Cronon’s correspondence. As Chancellor Biddy Martin and William Cronon recognize, Open Records legislation is important legal support for freedom of information. In this case, however, there is reason to suspect that it may have been invoked for purposes of harassment rather than freedom. The Wisconsin Republican Party made its request soon after Cronon published an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times about Wisconsin politics. There was no evidence whatsoever that Cronon had abused his position at UW Madison in order to promote a political cause. The Wisconsin Republican Party appeared to be acting out of retribution rather than reasonable worry. The reasonable worry in this case comes from Cronon, Martin, and others, who fear that such acts of petty retribution, and the resulting fear of harassment, will discourage scholars from exploring politically sensitive topics. The great irony, as Cronon points out, is that Wisconsin was an early leader in promoting academic freedom.

I am no farmer, but I suspect that successfully dairies do not turn their best dairy cows into hamburger. What Wisconsin, and the United States in general, has going for it in times of economic, political, environmental, and social uncertainty is our free access to knowledge. Our free speech, freedom of information laws, academic freedom – all that enables our workers to be heroes, our scientists to do their best work, our citizens to hold politicians and CEOs accountable – that’s our best dairy cow in the herd. True conservatism, the conservatism that Wisconsin at its best has exhibited, knows the value of holding on to the good things you have. Wisconsin, of all places, should recognize the importance of taking good care of its dairy cows.

School to Prison Pipeline -- Call for Papers

The Journal of Educational Controversy announces its call for papers for Volume 7 Number 1.


THEME: The School-to-Prison Pipeline


CONTROVERSY ADDRESSED:

The School-to-Prison Pipeline refers to a national trend in which school policies and practices are increasingly resulting in criminalizing students rather than educating them. Statistics indicate that the number of suspensions, expulsions, dropouts or “pushouts,” and juvenile justice confinements is growing. Moreover, there is a disproportionate impact on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems. In this issue, we invite authors to examine the policy implications, the political ramifications, and the causes and possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, what are these policies teaching our children?


DEADLINE FOR MANUSCRIPTS: DECEMBER 31, 2011

PUBLICATION DATE: SUMMER 2012

http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/

Dragged from the classroom? One teacher's lonely battle for free speech rights

A few years ago, somewhere on our great continent, a teacher showed a documentary critical of religious fundamentalism to his Grade 9 class. The next day, the Vice-Principal threatened to remove the teacher from the classroom if he continued to show the film.

Did this happen in Arizona? Idaho? Elsewhere in the Bible Belt of the United States, perhaps? Not at all--this event, which touched off a teacher's lonely, quixotic, twenty-year battle for his own free expression rights, happened in Canada's tiniest, sleepiest province, Prince Edward Island. The story that subsequently unfolded is both a triumph of principle and a human tragedy.

From the great state of Idaho ....

where "it's always a siege on education and budgets." This just in (via private email) from my friend and colleague Matt Sanger at Idaho State. Matt is an educational philosopher who worked with Gary Fenstermacher and is finely tuned to the moral dimensions of educational work and policy. (Reprinted with Matt's permission):

My primary obsession at the moment is how advocates of current ‘reforms’ can support those reforms, while at the same time acknowledging that teachers make such a difference in the quality of education—apparently ignoring the fact that they are making teaching a much less desirable occupation. I wonder how they think these reforms are going to draw in even higher quality teachers than we have now? We may finally be able to get rid of the few fabled bad seeds under the current movement, but I’m not sure what that will leave us with for our future teaching corps (aside from a handful of bright and brave ivy grads signing up for a couple years of service, and those who really feel called to teach and who are willing to overlook the condition of the profession).

Spot on, Matt. We can't trash the profession and then attract the best and the brightest. ...

(Thanks to Idaho Writers Groups for the state seal.)

Can "public" survive a (R)epublican attack?

Every day now there is a news story about education that jerks me to attention. In my home state of Pennsylvania, the new governor announced a budget proposal that cut state funding for higher education by 52%. Funding for local public schools is projected to be significantly lower than last year, a move that will certainly prompt increases in local property taxes even as districts cut teaching positions. Other cost-saving measures are long past scraping flesh off bone. (And cuts for public schools are being proposed at the same time that a new voucher proposal is in the state legislature, a proposal that will further drain public school funding while enabling students to opt out of public schools in favor of parochial schools at taxpayer expense.)

I’ve already figured out what this is about, even as I work against the defunding of public educational opportunities. However, here’s a story I can’t quite figure out -- or maybe I just don’t believe it. The state legislature in Utah has passed a bill that requires schools to teach students that the United States is a compound constitutional republic. This is true and leads me to wonder what they have been teaching.

Apparently, the need for this legislative action is tied to fears (whose?) about indoctrination with respect to pure democracy and socialism. (We apparently have no fears about indoctrination with respect to free market mania or corporate control, both of which seem to me to be more immediate (and more concerning) dangers than either pure democracy or socialism.

As I understand a republican form of government, it can be captured as “majority rule, minority rights” administered by representatives of the people. While I suppose we might quibble about what it really is, I would argue it’s ultimately not a definition to be stipulated but a political stance to be negotiated. Yes, we have a compound constitutional republic, but what does that amount to? We elect representatives following constitutionally-framed procedures and those representatives decide what the majority wants and which minority rights must be honored. And that too is a constantly renegotiated political stance.

While the Founding Fathers (and what about those Founding Mothers anyway?) were pragmatic in their specification of a form of government that was not purely democratic (in both representation and attention to minority concerns), they clearly had democratic aspirations of the kind John Dewey articulated throughout his career. That is, they aspired to a “mode of associated living” marked by communicative competence. While I think it is ducky that students will learn that they live in a constitutional republic, I think it a shame – and an intellectual error -- that they will learn about democracy only as a threat to the American way of life, rather than as a vision that, while admittedly dangerous*, animated the American Revolution and much of American history since that time. (And do I need to mention that socialist and free market economies can exist in constitutional republics, and that more often, as in our case, a nation’s economy is mixed for pragmatic reasons?)

I have the sinking feeling that the defunding of public schools in Pennsylvania at the hands of one of a slew of newly-elected Republican governors is actually very much tied to this legislation in Utah. Both are part of an orchestrated plan to drive a stake through the very concept of “public,” to stipulate what should be negotiated anew with each new political season. Their private interests, their minority rights, are being written into the fabric of governmental and educational possibilities. This should command our attention.

* A nod to Winston Churchill who noted that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others that had been tried. He appreciated the dangers of “mob rule,” but also the vitality of political structures in which all had a stake.

Justice in the Ethnic Studies Ban in Tucson

If it weren’t for an extension, today would have marked an important date in the ongoing legal battles raging around the ban of Ethnic Studies courses in Arizona. House Bill 2281, which went into effect at the start of 2011, narrowed the prescribed curriculum toward a celebration of a dominant image of America and its past by ensuring that classes cannot “promote the overthrow of the United States government” or “advocate ethnic solidarity.” This bill entails banning Ethnic Studies courses, including classes in ethnic literature and history, where such views were allegedly taught. Mexican American Studies (sometimes called Raza Studies in Tucson Unified School District) received the brunt of the allegations with bill proponent former state Superintendent Tom Horne describing the “revolutionary program” as “an abuse of taxpayer dollars” because it allegedly promotes racial divisiveness and teaches Chicano children “the downer that they are oppressed” and “they should be angry against the government and they should be angry against the country.” During an Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing, Senator Russell Pearce accused Ethnic Studies of teaching “hate speech, sedition, anti-Americanism.” A student of the program responded, “It doesn’t teach us to be anti-American, it teaches us to embrace America, all of its flaws and all.” In a later interview Pearce added, “This is anti-American revolutionary talk in a high school.” Another Arizona legislator at the hearing, Steve Montenegro, made explicit the connection between these courses and the fear that schools are teaching children how to speak out about injustice by claiming, “these programs are aimed at creating dissention.”

Instead, Horne argues, schools should teach that America is the “land of opportunity” and immigrants should learn “American history.” I contend that teaching a version of American history that omits or only briefly touches upon the historical and ongoing oppression of significant populations within its borders stamps out the plurality of perspectives on American identity and shared experience that are central to a democracy that is accountable to all of its members. This is especially problematic when a sizeable portion of the school population, as is the case in most of Arizona, are themselves members of the minority group whose history or literature are being omitted or downsized in the curriculum. Moreover, equating the teaching about oppression of racial minority groups to spreading communism and government overthrow, as Horne does, aligns students who have legitimate justice claims about their fair treatment in society with extremists. Implementing this view into prescribed curriculum limits children’s ability to learn how to raise worthy issues of dissent. Preventing them from not only learning about, but also speaking out about the injustices toward certain groups that have pervaded America’s past and present, prohibits children from fulfilling their Declaration of Independence-backed duty to dissent against injustice and makes the fulfillment of justice less likely insofar as it denies the existence or importance of ongoing racial oppression and actively works against solidarity building amongst historically oppressed peoples. Indeed the Ethnic Studies courses themselves resulted from a claim to justice; they were part of a court ordered program following a federal desegregation case. Ending them means not only ending an aspect of justice in that case, but also ending an education that can build justice-seeking capacities within students. Notably, many students within the banned classes took to the streets, to official government hearings, and to the media to protest the Bill and its meaning (as seen in the photo). In the next few weeks, I anticipate that we will continue to see teacher and student frustration and protest as the Tucson schools figure out if and how to comply with HB 2281. Let’s hope justice prevails.

Fomenting a revolution? Who is?

Update on the situation at McCaskey East High School:

A few weeks ago, I commented on an effort at McCaskey East High School in Lancaster, PA to create supportive homerooms (basically advisory groups) for students of color -- and segregated by gender as well. Somehow the effort in this small Pennsylvania city found its way to CNN. (You may also remember Lancaster, PA as the place where surveillance cameras on the streets surrounding Franklin and Marshall College raised a bit of a national fuss.) You know the formula: CNN = big fuss = noisy school board meeting with "outraged" citizens = school board fails to support a thoughtful experiment on the part of the school administration and faculty. As CNN later reported "School Scraps Race Specific Mentoring Program."

Typically, the reality is a little more complicated than CNN (or any other news outlet) reports. Based on conversations with folks in and out of the school, it appears that the mentoring opportunities were not "scrapped" so much as they were made open or optional.

What is worth noting is what is behind some of the opposition to this effort. Specifically, some white citizens reported worries about whether a segregated mentoring program might foment a "black power" vibe. I found myself wondering why exactly that would be bad and for whom? It reminded me of the time several women faculty at my previous institution were standing on a street corner on campus, talking as male members of the administration walked to lunch at the student center. It was pretty clear we were making them nervous just by being "huddled" together -- as they commented while walking by.

I suspect we were only talking about our children or our workload or perhaps (horrors!) the next women's studies faculty development meeting. But after seeing their reactions, we immediately started joking about “fomenting a revolution." So let's keep an eye on who's worried about who is gathering and for what purpose. It may be the worriers who are fomenting something.

(An excellent example of this phenomenon can be found on the mashup of Fox New video clips put together by TPM. These collected clips of the supposed “violence” of the Wisconsin protestors point clearly to the source of any violence being done. Check it out! And thanks to Nick Burbules at the thorough and provocative Progressive Policy Digest for point this out.)