After the Future

Pope Francis and the Church of the Poor

Pope Francis knew what poverty and oppression looked like: several times a year he celebrated mass in Buenos Aires’s 21-24 slum. Yet, as leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, he denounced liberation theology, and insisted that the priests seeking to defend and mobilise the poor remove themselves from the slums, shutting down their political activity.

He now maintains that he “would like a church that is poor and is for the poor.” But does this mean giving food to the poor, or does it mean also asking why they are poor? The dictatorships of Latin America waged a war against the poor, which continued in many places after those governments collapsed. Different factions of the Catholic Church took opposing sides in this war. Whatever the stated intentions of those who attacked and suppressed liberation theology, in practical terms they were the allies of tyrants, land-grabbers, debt slavers and death squads. For all his ostentatious humility, Pope Francis was on the wrong side. (George Monbiot, "Cardinal Sins")

Montbiot echoes the famous quote by Dom Heldar Camara, the bishop of Recife Brazil who became rather well known in the sixties and seventies: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” Popes Benedict and Francis apparently don't think the 'why' question is one that the official church should bother itself about. As Montbiot's article reminds us, Benedict, during his pre-pope stint as the the head of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, was the heavy who shut down the efforts of so many priests and nuns who did care about that question.

They asked why, and understood why, and they risked and often gave their lives to do something about it by working to organize and empower poor people. But they were perceived as communist or as abetting a communist program when Cold War tensions were still high. But communism is an atheistic ideology, and it's a scandal for the church to be associated with anything so impious. As in Vichy France, better to work the fascists than the resistance, too many communists in the resistance, after all. 

Perhaps some day Benedict and Francis will be canonized because they understood how the church expects a saint to act. But in my view a saint is not a pious conformist; he or she is rather someone who is willing to risk everything in working for the regime of compassion and love to which Jesus and the gospels point. What have our current and former ecclesial CEOs risked in that way? Did they even have a clue when they met someone who did in fact live such risk? Or did they just see them as reds?

The Roman Catholic Church is animated more by the spirit of imperial Rome than it is by the spirit of the gospels, and that's why its spiritual authority is not taken seriously by anyone who has a clue about the latter. At least the new pope gets that the imperial thing and the red Gucci shoes are bad p.r., but we'll see if there's any substance to his humility. We'll see whether, in fact, his humility is just a mask for moral cowardice. I hope it isn't. But even if his is a true humility, will it have any impact in changing the imperial ethos that has dominated the Vatican since the 300s. Give me a shout if that starts to happen, but until then, who cares about what happens in that corrupt little city state. 

School Choice is Not a Solution

The Milwaukee voucher schools have never outperformed the public schools on state tests: See here and here. The only dispute about test scores is whether voucher students are doing the same or worse than their peers in public schools.

Accountability? Read here about some very low-performing schools in Milwaukee that have never been held accountable. One of them opened in 2001. Over the past 11 years, it has collected $46.8 million but its students perform worse than those in the public schools. Some choice.

And anyone who looks at the NAEP reports on urban districts will see that after 22 years of vouchers, charters, and competition, Milwaukee is a poster child for the failure of vouchers, charters, and competition. The students in those schools all perform about the same level. No sector is better. The Milwaukee schools are ranked among the lowest performing of the urban districts tested by NAEP, ranking just above sad Detroit.

If choice was the answer, Milwaukee should be at the top of the nation’s urban districts. But it is near the bottom. Why? Because choice is not the answer. Addressing the causes of low test scores is the answer, and choice does not address the causes of low test scores: poverty and segregation (Diane Ravitch)

See also the CREDO report from Stanford on how most charters underperform public schools.

Anybody who has been paying attention to what's been going on in neoliberal education reform understands that the big push to promote charters and vouchers has little to do with improving poor kids' academic outcomes and much more to do with pushing a privatizing ideology that in the minds of its proponents is medicine for all that ails us. And as I pointed out the other day, standardization tools like the common core have less to do with raising standards and more to do with providing a justification for closing public schools and privatizing them. This can be done because so many people buy the propaganda that our schools are failing rather than understanding that our society is failing the kids who go to those schools, and that there is little the schools can do that can make a real difference.

Where you go to school doesn't matter so much as where you grow up. Schools of any kind--public, private, or charter--cannot offer broad scalable solutions until you deal with the underlying causes and constraints of child poverty. Sure, some schools perform better than others, but there are no formulas. Success has to do with particular people finding something that works in their particular community. I think that particular communities, in an interdependent relationship with the broader educational community, should be given latitude do develop their own solutions.

I'm all for innovation and creativity. But charters don't offer that any more than normal public schools do, because both are constrained by the need to teach to the test. And so too many of these charters are standardized testing mills, and they are delivering exactly the opposite of what these kids need. All kids need to be challenged, but the challenges are different for different kids, and standardization doesn't promote choice; it puts all kids, whether they are in public or charter schools, in a one-size-fits-all straitjacket. 

***

I'm not anti-market; it clearly has its uses, but there's a difference between having a market economy and a market society. In the latter everything becomes a commodity, and there are some things that cannot be commodified.

I'm planning to do a piece, or maybe a series of pieces, on the origins of neoliberalism, and I'm want to frame it as a philosophical debate between Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi. I'm clearly in the Polanyi camp, but I want to give a fair representation to the concerns of people who are persuaded by Hayek. There is a serious debate at the bottom of all this, and it's essentially a debate about human empowerment and the conditions that promote or undermine it.

The Common Core State Standards

I remember when I first heard about the movement to develop a national common core for K-12 public school curricula, I thought, "Why not?"  Why not set standards that will give a high school diploma some meaning? Why not set up a national curriculum that insures that every kid has a solid grounding in history, arts, math, and the sciences?  Since then I've learned a lot about what's really going on, and my opinion about it has reversed.

First of all it's way too top down, one-size-fits-all. Although there are some situations where centralization is desirable and necessary, this is not one of them. A centralized core is too easily coopted by powerful players, and the more you learn about the Common Core State Standards, the clearer it becomes that it is a child of neoliberal establishment elites foisting its ideas about reform on public education.

Reform for neoliberal education reformers is akin to what reform means for the IMF when it seeks to impose the bipartisan neoliberal program known as the Washington Consensus on countries that are in debt crisis. There is a 'Washington Consensus" concerning education as well. We see it in the neoliberal reforms promoted by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Neoliberal education reformers want you to believe that our public schools are in an analogous crisis--the educational equivalent of Argentina in the eighties or Greece now--so they need drastic intervention to reform the schools on neoliberal principles.  But as I said in a post earlier this month, our schools are not the problem, poverty is. And while schools have a role to play in any efforts our society makes to deliver children out of it, any strategy that believes that schools should carry the full burden of that effort is doomed to failure.

The Common Core is not going to solve this problem, not even a little. Here's Diane Ravitch on this subject:

The most reliable predictor of test scores is family income.

The Common Core will have no impact whatever in changing the scandalous proportion of children who live in poverty in this nation. Nearly a quarter of our children are living in poverty, as compared to far smaller proportions in other societies. If we were to make a dent on that number, bring it down to, say, 15%, that would have a bigger impact on test scores than Common Core. But that is just my guess.

The common wisdom, repeatedly predicted by state superintendents, is that test scores will drop by 30% or so when the Common Core standards are assessed because the tests are “harder.” This will feed the corporate reform narrative that “our schools are failing.” They will use the new stats to attack public education and demand more vouchers and more charters and more privatization. The entrepreneurs are eagerly awaiting the moment when the bad scores are announced, as it will give them new opportunities to sell their edu-schlock.

The fact that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, was an original member of the board of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst–the corporate reformers’ attack machine against public education–is no comfort. The other members of her original board were Jason Zemba, who wrote the Common Core math standards, and a third person, who worked for Coleman’s Student Achievement Partners. In other words, Rhee’s board was the same as the Common Core leadership.

Do you see how this game is played? There are so many different tactics that are being deployed in the neoliberal education reform agenda, and any one of them--charter schools and vouchers, common core, teacher accountability, Teach for America--when taken in isolation seem innocuous enough, but taken together are designed to destroy a system that whatever its flaws should be community controlled, not corporate controlled. 

For more on this read how principal Carol Burris's opinion changed too. She even co-authored a book promoting the idea of the common core, but she says the well has been poisoned. See here and here. Interesting grafs: 

The best way that I can explain my trepidation is with the following analogy.

Hurricane Sandy hit the shores of New York and New Jersey at high tide when there was a full moon, a time when tides were 20% higher. It was a Category One hurricane of no great fury—its winds were “only” about 74 miles per hour.  However, Sandy became a super storm due to a Canadian cold front, which wrapped around the hurricane, making the storm larger and more ferocious.

Think of the Common Core standards as the high tide—the tide intended to lift all boats. Testing is the hurricane—a strong storm that blows through each year and affects our every action as educators.  Now add the cold front, the ever-increasing high stakes, wrapping around the tests. Those high stakes—school closings, grade level retentions, and the evaluation of teachers by student scores—have given the hurricane additional fury and strength.  High tide, which in and of itself is benign, now becomes a destructive force.

As a New Yorker who saw the tide of a nearby bay fill four feet of our home, I have new respect for what occurs when strong forces converge. 

Neoliberal reforms are the factors that make something that seems benign into something terribly destructive. 

Iraq Ten Years Later

Many decent people after Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, et al., believed that the international community had an obligation to intervene to protect the human rights of Tutsis, Bosniaks, and Kosovars. They were horrified to learn how the U.N. stood by and allowed the massacre in Rwanda, and supported the interventions in the Balkans later in the decade.

This same argument was proposed as a compelling reason for intervening in Iraq. I was astonished at how many people whose thinking and poltics I otherwise respected justified the invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds, arguing that national sovreignty should be superseded when the rights of a naton's citizens were being egregiously abused. It should have been done in Rwanda, and it was good that it was done in the Balkans. Why was Iraq any different? Why was Bush doing anything differently than Clinton did?

Well, there were plenty of reasons that Iraq was different and why the Bush administraton's rationale for invasion never passed the smell test. And the first thing anybody with any nose at all smelled was the oil. The overwrought attempts to connect Saddam with al-Quaeda, the hysteria about WMD--none of it added up. And then when the influence of the neocon Project for the New American Century came into view, it all made sense. This was a geopolitical power grab and an exercise in state building engineered by second-rate, chicken-hawk technocrats. The hubris was fantastical, and the results predictable.

 

Wage Discipline

Why are wages are flat, unemployment high, and inflation stable despite the economic recovery? Because it benefits the so-called investor or rentier class:

But capitalists are always fighting a two-front war in democracies, against workers and against their representatives in the government, who might begin to change the social framework to give workers more bargaining power. Capitalism is predicated on the asymmetries of power, on capital’s ability to compel workers to sell their labor power. Capitalists must fight anything that threatens that imbalance, regardless of whether it leads to an aggregate increase of social wealth or even improves their individual profits. . . .

Not to be too functionalist about it, but it often seems like a good idea to work backward from the need for labor discipline to understand certain vagaries of economic policy; at the level of policy and not individual firms, class struggle and getting leverage over workers matters more than efficiency or profit or even growth. (Source)

In other words it's all about developing and maintaining a set of power arrangements that give the rentiers the upper hand in all conflicts with the majority, i.e., everybody who is not them--the 99%. 

I believe that the behavior of the 1% is more fear motivated than greed motivated. Ever wonder why wealthy elites see themselves as victims? It's not because they are; it's because they fear they will be. They see themselves as an embattled minority in which the majority hates them. They live, whether consciously or unconsciously, in a world in which they know what goes around comes around, and if people they have kept down get the chance, they will reciprocate. I think the same kind of psychology infects white people, especially in the Southwest, who are freaked out by Mexicans. They know the history, and they believe that If Mexicans eventually get the upper hand politically, they will treat white people exactly as the white people treated them. Same psychology governs the thinking of the Rick Santelli types who speak for the 1%--if they give workers the upper hand, they will treat them as they treated the workers.  And people whose brains are soaked in adrenaline are simply not people you can talk sense to. That's not the whole story, but I'd argue that's a big part of it. 

There are two things that wealthy elites fear more than anything: First, because they are such a minuscule minority in a democracy, they fear that the majority will use the political process to expropriate their wealth through "confiscatory" taxes or other redistribution schemes. Second, they fear any kind of movement to organize ordinary people that will empower them politically or in labor negotiations, because they fear it gives them the means to realize their first fear. Even if such empowerment movements are sane and reasonable, even if they would lead to greater profits and broader wealth, they feverishly envision in such movements a future with the san culottes running amok in the streets of Paris.

Either wealthy elites don't realize that workers can be bought off, as they were during the post WWII period (workers as a group don't want power; they just want to live comfortably), or they look at their aggressive attempts to destroy unions and other empowerment movements as a long-range strategy. It's a field positions game. Pin the workers near their own goal line, and make them fight for every inch when they finally organize to push back. Why buy them off now if they only have to do it in an emergency?  

So two political objectives follow from this: First, push hard and don't give an inch on taxes. It's not about greed; it's about power and doing what is required to maintain one's position at the top of the pyramid. The best offense is a good offense, because once things shift and the elites are on their heels, then it's over. Or so they fear. Second, do whatever it takes to keep the "mob" confused, divided, and feuding among themselves. Tell big lies. Work the patriotism angle. Use wedge issues like abortion, gay rights, and immigration, to keep cosmopolitan workers hating traditionalist workers. Use the 'no-i'm-not-you-are tactic' to keep the uniformed disoriented. Any time anyone defending the interests of the investor or rentier class accuses those who oppose them of class warfare (or racism, fascism, or corruption, or whatever), you can be sure they are describing their own program, and want to deflect the public's attention away from it. 

This confusion is promoted in various ways, for instance In the very effective way it has coopted populist resentments a la Glen Beck and the Tea Party. In other cases it's not unlike the way Southern oligarchs kept poor whites from ever seeing how they had more to gain in joining with poor blacks to organize economically and politically to break up the oligarchy that oppressed them both. It's in this sense that American politics have been southernized, but it's a strategy that is as old as there have been pyramidal social systems.

I heard someone say the other day that autocracy and oppression don't need to be explained: it's the historical norm. It's rather freedom and self rule that need to be explained. The iron rule of oligarchy is the norm once humans move out of hunter gatherer societies; everything else is the exception. 

People who have a pathological need for power do whatever is necessary in the game of thrones to get it, and normal people who just want to live modest, decent lives let them because they just don't care enough to fight them. The question we have to face is whether we are now in the process of reverting to the historical norm, and because we're living off the fumes of the exceptional period since WWII, we haven't realized it yet. But a part of me is still optimistic that we will figure this out, that we will learn how new information technologies have empowered us to organize push back. But as I've argued here frequently over the last several years, nothing happens until the cultural left and the cultural right understand that they have the same enemy. 

Being in the Grip of Compulsions We Don't Understand

I have been getting this feeling lately about the big historical sweep of things and of our individual seemingly insignificant part to play in it. It’s a feeling of how mostly things don’t change, and yet how they do, how greed and powerlust seem to be in the driver’s seat, and yet that they are not the whole story, how everything seems to point to an undesirable outcome, but that there is always enough to point to that gives one reason for hope.

I've come to believe that a sign of the people who are living well is that their lives are a kind of wandering in the wilderness, of being neither here nor there, of being satisfied with their daily manna allotment, which is just enough to keep them alive and moving. The great intoxications are not for such wanderers; for them it's always just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, and of doing what is required of them on that day and in that place.

We’re at a point in history now where it seems that things will play out the way they will play out. There’s not a lot the wandering folk can do, except what is in front of them to do. The world is in the grip of people who are driven by compulsions they don’t understand, and their compulsions are the root cause of so much needless suffering--for themselves and others. I can rant all I want about the stupidity and selfishness of so much of it, but it’s always been this way. Anything else has been the exception.

The world has always been driven by a quest for the great intoxication. Is it really about money and power, or is it about the momentary states of intoxication that come with their acquisition. And enough is never enough because the intoxication is momentary, and life without it is so empty and drab, and so like addicts in desperate need of a fix, they are compelled to get more power and more wealth, not for there own sake, but as a means to an end, and there is never an end to it.

That's what motivates the great ones, and the rest of us settle for the little intoxications that likewise never satisfy, hedonic adaptation and all that, so we look for love in all the wrong places, play our little ego games at work or in relationships, and in general muck things up because we are in the grip of compulsions we do not understand. 

***

It's more complicated, of course, because the intoxication isn't the problem so much as the compulsive need for it. The problems do not lie so much in being in the state of intoxication itself, but rather in the way people behave when they are not in it. I recently watched The Hustler and The Color of Money--both great films about phenomenally talented pool players played by Paul Newman and Tom Cruise--and they're a study in what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow". When they're in it they believe they are invincible, and often they are. At one point in The Hustler, the Newman character, Fast Eddie says to his girlfriend:

Fast Eddie: . . .When I'm goin', I mean, when I'm REALLY goin' I feel like a... like a jockey must feel. He's sittin' on his horse, he's got all that speed and that power underneath him... he's comin' into the stretch, the pressure's on 'im, and he KNOWS... just feels... when to let it go and how much. Cause he's got everything workin' for 'im: timing, touch. It's a great feeling, boy, it's a real great feeling when you're right and you KNOW you're right. It's like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue's part of me. You know, it's uh - pool cue, it's got nerves in it. It's a piece of wood, it's got nerves in it. Feel the roll of those balls, you don't have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody's ever made before. I can play that game the way... NOBODY'S ever played it before.

Sarah: You're not a loser, Eddie, you're a winner. Some men never get to feel that way about anything. 

Was this the feeling that Homer’s Greek heroes had? Eddie's jockey-on-a-horse reference brings to mind the theme explored in Peter Shaffer's Equus.

Whatever the source or cause of experiences like these, they are like being possessed by a god because when in a flow state one operates on a level that transcends one’s ordinary level of talent. As with Homer's heroes, the difference between the good and the great is this capability to move into this other dimension when one is taken hold of by the god. I’ve sniffed it now and then, enough to know what it must be like, but never in a way that led me to have any impact. And it's probably just as well. I'm sure I would have become an addict. 

Because if being in the flow is mostly a positive experience, the problem for people who experience its intensity lies in its becoming addictive. When they are not in it, the only important thing is that they get back into it. And sometimes when they are playing they're not in the flow, and they lose, but they think it's just a matter of time before they get back into it. I imagine something like this happens to gamblers who once had a lucky streak and continuously seek the elation it brought them losing untold sums in the quest, thinking they will win it back when their "luck" returns, i.e., when the god once again deigns to lift him above other mortals.

Both the Newman and Cruise characters, who have this experience of being in the flow, are rather guileless and uncalculating--at least in the beginning. The important thing is for them to be in that state, whatever name they give it; it's not really about the money--the money is important for the people around them, their stakeholders, and the stakeholders are continuously frustrated by their players because they have no interest in the hustle game. There is no payoff for these players in the hustle. Making money does not give them the intoxication that they crave; they want that feeling, to be in that intoxicating state of invincibility that comes with being in the flow.

And when they lose, no matter how badly, they think it's just a matter of time before they get back to it, and when they do, all will be well. And they will win back all they have lost. It's just a matter of having enough time and the money to stay in the game.

Isn't this what we are seeing on Wall Street. The big players there are intoxication addicts.They see themselves as invincible. If things have gone south, it's only temporary. Sooner or later they'll be back in the flow. Look--isn't the stock market at an all-time high? They are winners, and the rest of us should trust them, and rely on them as the Achaeans did Achilles. 

America's "Education Crisis"

 Linda Darling Hammond in a recent interview:

Well, there are a couple of things to know before we talk about the scores. First of all, the United States has more children living in poverty, by a long shot, than any other industrialized nation. Right now about one in four children are living in poverty. In most other industrialized nations we’re talking about well under 10 percent, because there’s so many more supports for housing, healthcare, employment, and so on.

With that very high poverty rate, our average scores on international tests look a little above the average in reading, about at the average in science and somewhat below the average in math, and a lot has been made out of that in the United States. But in fact, students in American schools where fewer than 10 percent of the students live in poverty actually are number one in the world in reading. Students in schools with up to 25 percent of kids living in poverty would rank number three in the world in reading, and even schools with as many as 50 percent of kids in poverty scored well above the averages in the OECD nations – which is mostly the European and some Asian nations. Our teachers are doing something very right in terms of educating kids to high levels in much more challenging circumstances than children face in other countries.

The place where we really see the negative affects are in the growing number of schools with concentrated poverty, where more than 75 percent of children are poor. And there -- the children in those schools score at levels that are near those of developing countries, with all the challenges that they face.

When I was running for school board in 2011, everybody was talking about the "achievement gap" and the pervasive narrative then was to blame teachers and schools for it, to bemoan the cataclysm besetting American public schools and how despite the money we spend our rankings are so low in international testing. And when I pointed out that poverty was to blame and not teachers and schools, I was told my attitude was rooted in "the soft bigotry of low expectations", that the real reason was that teachers looked at poor kids and didn't have the high expectations that they had for more affluent kids, that education was the way out of poverty, and that the solution was to have an excellent teacher in every classroom. A good propagandist knows how to take a partial truth that resonates with uncritically accepted popular assumptions and to make it the whole story.

I guess we've been told for so long now that education is the way out of poverty that a lot of Americans have bought this story as applicable for all children everywhere. I'm not going to deconstruct it here--it's too tedious and obvious. But it became a commonplace, and still is, that the schools are the problem, and newspaper editorialists across the nation for the last decade and more have ardently supported the "reformers"--the Michelle Rhees, Wendy Kopps, Arne Duncans, Joel Kleins, Bill Gateses, Eli Broads, etc. who have been behind this idea of closing failing schools and replacing them with charters, of blaming teachers and insisting on tying their evaluations to student progress, and of promoting high-stakes standardized testing as a way of improving academic standards.

None of these wants to look at the root cause, which is poverty. All of them are promoting ideas that are driving the good teachers out of teaching because they don't understand the intrinsic motivations that drive all good teachers. They don't understand how they are making things worse--or if they do, they don't care because they have other fish to fry.

And so the idea that our schools are failing is a commonplace, especially among the rich liberal democrats who fund the politicians who make education policy --the kind who hang out at the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival. Some them are naively sincere. Others clearly are opportunists. As David Sirota pointed out the other day:

You know how it goes: The pervasive media mythology tells us that the fight over the schoolhouse is supposedly a battle between greedy self-interested teachers who don’t care about children and benevolent billionaire “reformers” whose political activism is solely focused on the welfare of kids. Epitomizing the media narrative, the Wall Street Journal casts the latter in sanitized terms, reimagining the billionaires as philanthropic altruists “pushing for big changes they say will improve public schools.”

The first reason to scoff at this mythology should be obvious: It simply strains credulity to insist that pedagogues who get paid middling wages but nonetheless devote their lives to educating kids care less about those kids than do the Wall Street hedge funders and billionaire CEOs who finance the so-called reform movement. Indeed, to state that pervasive assumption out loud is to reveal how utterly idiotic it really is, and yet it is baked into almost all of today’s coverage of education politics. 

It's amazing to me how so many people don't want to look at the hard truth that poverty is at the heart of things, that the burden of solving all the problems associated with learning and poverty are too heavy for schools and their teachers to shoulder alone. It's amazing to me that the corporate reformers' technocratic cluelessness, their obsession with quantifying and measuring what cannot be measured is so influential. But it is, because like so much of what influences policy in our country right now, it's about money, who has it and who doesn't.

P.S. Good piece in the New Yorker about the teachers at Seattle's Garfield High School who are boycotting the use of the standardized MAP test. The MAP was also something I ran against back in 2011. Its use both subtantively and symbolically points to everything that is wrong with corporate reform ideas about closing achievement gaps.

Wake Up to the Egregious Inequality

 

Hacking at the Roots

Larry Lessig is always worth listening to: