The Myth of the Evil Teacher Union, Part V

5. Teachers unions prevent effective merit pay systems from being put in place.

This one is half true, which makes it completely false. Teachers unions have actively worked to prevent merit pay systems from being put in place. That’s because merit pay systems, at least all the ones I’ve ever read about, will not be effective at improving teacher performance or student performance. Worse than that, I don’t honestly believe they are designed to do so.



As pointed out above, merit pay systems complicate the dynamic between teachers and students. Unless students have a reason to try hard on standardized tests, merit pay sytems offer them a vehicle to punish their teachers without consequences. We saw this dynamic play itself out when there was no perverse incentive for the students at all; for years our state tests were used only to measure teachers and schools, but had no bearing on a student's grades, gradation, or acceptance to colleges. Consequently, students just didn't care. This year has been the first year when passing the tests has become a graduation requirement. Suddenly (suprise!) student effort on the tests has increased dramatically. To tie teacher pay to student performance might undermine this effort in a way: Students who have "met" could graduate without trying to "exceed", thereby hurting specific teachers they don't like. Also, students who do like their teachers and want to please them would face even more guilt if they failed. I prefer to have my students doing their best for their own benefit, not trying to hurt me or feeling bad if they take money out of my pocket.

[Lest I forget to mention it, let’s not forget what was pointed out in the book Freakonomics: Merit pay systems encourage teachers to cheat.]

There are different models for merit pay, but most rely on test scores. Ignoring the fact that No Child Left Behind leaves testing up to states, which has encouraged states to create easier and easier tests each year in order to show fictional improvement, the tests are still shoddy measures of teacher performance. In most states (Oregon included) students are not tested against their own previous performance, but at specific grade levels, with their scores compared to previous students taking similar tests, or against other students in the state taking the same test. In other words, as we norm the test we hold the students up against other kids. That’s not a means to test a student. It’s a means to test a school. Even then, it’s a poor measure because the school has no control over who comes through the door. We are not factories trying to make machines out of identical widgets. Regardless of the condition our “widgets” come in, we are not allowed to turn them away. Nor are our students like customers, who can be enticed by better products or lower prices. The idea that schools should be run like businesses doesn’t apply, which is why charter schools keep under-performing on state tests when compared to public schools. They are private businesses, which inclines them to want to import business models onto education. And that causes them to fail.

Despite this knowledge or the limits of their utility (and tests are NOT all bad. Despite what some critics might tell you, they do have a place) merit pay systems use test scores, generally as the be all and end all. They either grade teachers based on the improvement of different students within the district, year after year, or based on over-all passing rates in the state. From there, they do one of two things. Either they identify the “best” teachers and pay them more, or identify the “best” schools and pay all their teachers a bonus.

I’m not sure which model is worse. The first, in my opinion, is a blatant union busting move. To use a sports analogy, it’s locker-room poison. If teachers were rewarded based on the over-all passing rates of their students, some teachers would get a bonus every year, while the teachers (like those who teach our special ed populations) would never get one. How long before that would cause dissension within the ranks? On the other hand, if we measured by student improvement, high performers would be missed. The tests only identify students as meeting standards or exceeding them. I’d love to take all the credit for my kids’ successes, but in my honors classes the kids have been exceeding every year since they were in elementary school. There is no room for improvement, according to the state tests. So I would never get a bonus check based on my honors classes, while those working with what we call the “bubble kids”, those right on the cusp, would see the most dramatic gains every year. And again, those working with our developmentally disabled children would be penalized every year. I also work with second language learners. They often show the most dramatic improvement, but because they are so many years behind their peers in English language acquisition, they almost never meet the state standards. How would we account for that?

I can’t see a way of making an individual merit pay system fair without completely un-doing the system of specialization we have in place, which is one of the things our schools do really well. We should be reinforcing the fact that some teachers have special training and ability when it comes to teaching special populations, like special ed. students, second language learners, and gifted students. To give every teacher an equal chance at a yearly merit bonus, we’d have to give every teacher and equal distribution of students. That would rob the kids of the teachers best bale to serve their specialized needs.

The model of rewarding entire schools rather than individual students seems to be an appealing work-around for this problem. Its advantage is that it encourages teachers to collaborate to bring test scores up school wide. That’s good. But it can’t account for the fact that schools serve different populations, so schools that are behind will have less incentive with which to acquire and retain good teachers, thus falling further behind. In that system whole schools would face the challenge faced by individual teachers in the first model: Schools with disproportionately advantaged students (i.e. schools in wealthy areas) would either succeed every year in meeting benchmarks, or fail every year to show dramatic growth. Schools serving disproportionately challenged populations (high poverty, high non-English speaking populations, etc.) would also be winners or losers depending on whether we measure meeting state standards or measure improvement. In both cases, the success would be largely out of teacher’s control, thus eliminating the chief aim of merit pay, which is to motivate teachers.

At its heart, the problem of merit pay systems is that they are based on an incorrect assumption; that students are failing in school because their teachers are unmotivated. If teachers were primarily motivated by pay …THEY WOULDN’T BE TEACHERS! We don’t do this to get rich. We would like fair pay. I think that any merit pay system that doesn’t recognize this will read like a slap in the face, because that’s exactly what it is. If a pay scheme were to be devised which attempted to deal with all the variables mentioned above, it should still be preceded by a general pay increase. That would show teachers that the scheme isn’t based, first and foremost, on an insulting presupposition, but really is a means to reward the best performers among a group of already respected professionals.

Tomorrow, Myth #6: The Teachers Unions are in bed with the Democratic Party.

The Myth of the Evil Teacher Union, Part IV

4. Teachers stand in the way of school reform.

Bunk. You tell me there’s a book I can read that will make me a better teacher; I’ll read it. You tell me there’s a conference (during my summer “vacation”) and you’ll send me there, without paying me, because it will make me a better teacher? I’ll go. I want school reform. I’m desperate for it. Just one caveat: You have to be as serious about improving the education of my students as I am, because your kids are precious, their time is precious, and my time is… well, you buy my time cheap, but the point stands.

So far, most efforts labeled “school reform” simply aren’t serious.

If we really wanted to improve student performance, we wouldn’t give kids three months to forget what they’ve learned followed by a month to review what they’d forgotten in each calendar year.

We wouldn’t delude ourselves that measuring one tenth grader’s test score against another tenth grader’s test score tells us anything of value about an individual tenth grader. Testing would measure improvement of an individual student over time, and the students would have access not just to a numeric score, but to the answers they got right and wrong, so they could actually learn from the testing experience. If we’re more concerned about protecting the property rights of the multi-million dollar test making corporations than we are about kids’ learning, we aren’t serious about school reform.

We would stop using A,B,C,D, and F as measures of student performance. They are ridiculous. They’re arbitrary, inconsistent, and subject to inflation. Worse, a D means a student has not mastered the content to a satisfactory level, but we’re sending him on to the next grade anyway. Today’s D is tomorrow’s F. Why do we use this terrible, cruel system? Because when a school tries to switch, two things happen: Parents want any description of their child’s performance translated back into a letter grade they can understand, and colleges want a GPA for admissions purposes. If we’re more interested in satisfying parents with meaningless letters and with providing colleges with fuzzy data than we are in accurately describing what an individual kid can accomplish, we aren’t really serious.

We would stop funding school by localities. It’s absolutely backwards. The kids who live in the largest houses, with the best educated parents, get to go to schools with the largest budgets. The kids who don’t have enough food to eat and may not have a single book in their home go to schools with the least means to support them. School reform initiatives that don’t address this aren’t serious.

We would give up on the stupid idea of local control. I have yet to hear a single good argument for the benefit of local control of schools. Sure, there’s the hysterical paranoid notion that the evil federal government is going to make all our kids into communist robots. Um, that falls squarely in the “not serious” column. Let’s look at the reality: Local control means a school board of elected officials who may not know a thing about education are chosen from a given community to determine what kids should learn. Despite all their good intentions, they have to spend a massive amount of their time and energy trying to keep their schools in good standing with state and federal law, and with the requirements of universities, who don’t care about what small town their students come from. In exchange for all this work, school boards can’t possibly identify a single bit of knowledge that students from our small town need in order to be successful in the working work which isn’t also essential for kids from the next small town, or the nearest metropolis. Can you imagine a major chain retailer designing itself with a CEO, a CFO, a complete board of directors, a human resources department, and an independent product line in every town where it intended to compete? I want my small town restaurants to have a unique flavor, and my small town bookstore to have a proprietor who really loves books rather than a Walmart stock-boy working on his GED, but my school does not need to provide students with different facts than any other school in this country. Can somebody please explain the merits of “local control” to me, beyond paranoid dystopic fantasy? Please?

I could go on and on about the ways our reform efforts have been piecemeal, cosmetic, political posturing, or blatant union busting maneuvers, but the one thing they haven’t been is serious, comprehensive efforts to make our schools truly competitive with our international competitors. I remind my kids every year that India has a billion people, and that their kids work harder in school, study more at night, have a longer school year, and read and write better in English than we do. Oh, and they’re multilingual. Then I ask my students, if they owned a company and could choose between an employee from India who would work for half as much, or the kid sitting next to them in my class, who would they hire? Without fail, they say they would hire the Indian student. But we continue to complain about jobs going overseas. We aren’t serious.

Education is investment. Teachers, underpaid and underutilized, have already proven themselves willing to make sacrifices for our children’s, and our nation’s, future. Complaining about unions is a means to avoid talking about the realities of the challenges we face. It’s a pathetic blame-game, and that’s a posture for people and nations who lose.

Tomorrow, Myth #5: Teachers unions prevent effective merit pay systems from being put in place.

The Myth of the Evil Teacher Union, Part III

3. Teachers get lots and lots of vacation.

If you had a friend who lost his job at a factory, would you tell him he’s lucky because he now has lots and lots of vacation? If so, you’re a jerk.

“Vacation” implies that one has a period of time in which they are not working, but are being paid by their employer. Teachers may have extended times during the year when they are not working, but we are not paid during those periods.

Do you know how many days I can choose to take off and still get paid? Two. Do you know what I would do if I chose to take those “personal days” off? I would grade the piles of essays sitting on my desk. Now, I do get bank holidays. I have no complaint about those. And I love my Winter, Spring, and Summer breaks. But I don’t get paid during those breaks, so they aren’t “vacation”. They are regular periods of unemployment. In fact, we are given contracts in the Spring so that we cannot file for unemployment compensation in the summer. We have jobs, just without pay. Your pal who got laid off from the factory might get unemployment. So who’s getting “vacation”? Personally, I would love shorter summers. They would make our students more competitive with their peers over seas, who have shorter summer breaks (or none at all), and they would mean I could work a lot more of the year. I think many parents would love it, as they wouldn’t have to pay for so much childcare during the summer. In all the talk of school reform, how much do you hear about lengthening the school year, one of the guaranteed and proven ways to improve student performance? Not much. Because you’d have to pay teachers. Reformers don’t want to do that. So quit saying I get lots of vacation, and worse, that the union is to blame, when I’m asking you to let me work more.

Tomorrow, Myth #4: Teachers stand in the way of school reform.

Myth of the Evil Teacher Union, Part II

2. Teachers are overpaid.

Critics of teacher’s unions like to claim we’re overpaid. This is a convenient claim, because it’s impossible to refute exactly without a clear sense of what we’re worth. They aren’t lying if they think we’re essentially worthless, which many of them seem to do. I suspect these kinds of critics have very little sense of what we do each day, and I would love to change jobs with one of them for just one day and see how they succeed with my 170 students. Unfortunately, because these vague claims about our compensation are repeated so often, many rational people who value education and educators come to believe we are overpaid, while filtering that notion through their own conception of fair payment.

One of my best friends was working as a tax attorney for a private firm in Portland, and overheard his boss complaining about how little teachers are paid. “They only pay them eighty thousand dollars a year,” the boss informed everyone. My friend, whose wife is a public school teacher, bit his tongue. The boss was trying to argue for teachers, but had no idea that we make far, far less than that. Starting pay, on average, is in the low thirties. In places like Oregon, it tops out in the mid sixties. This is slightly on the low end for national averages. California’s average is $64,424, while South Dakota has the bottom spot with an average of $36,674. This wouldn’t be so bad, if one could get a job teaching right out of high school, but many of us have masters degrees we’ve refinanced for thirty years so that we can still pay the rent. That means we are making student loan payments for, in many cases, our entire careers. This particular boss, a lawyer, probably paid a hefty sum in student loans for his education. For that large amount he received one more year of education than I have (unless he went on for an LLM). As a consequence of that education, he made so much money that he considered that mythical $80,000 a year teacher paycheck laughable.

Critics often bring up our benefits. It’s true, we’ve accepted salary reductions in exchange for the security of fixed retirement plans (usually provided by our states) and better medical plans. But I can tell you that all the school districts I’ve taught for try to chip away at these with higher out-of-pocket expenses and co-pays every time our contracts are renegotiated. Without our unions, we’d be working for our health care coverage alone.

Some point out that teachers earn more, per hour, than many other white collar jobs. That’s true. So, how can teachers earn more per hour when we earn less per year? Because, even though we work vastly more hours than we’re paid for, technically we’re unemployed for months out of every year. More on that tomorrow.

Now, one can certainly argue that all things are relative. Compared to a teacher’s salary in, say central Africa, I’m rolling in dough. But compared to most Americans with a similar level of education, I’m a shmuck if pay is the measure of success. I tell my students I do my job because I enjoy it and think it’s important, not for the paycheck, and that’s true. But every time someone implies that my paycheck is too large, I admit I enjoy my job just a little bit less.

Tomorrow, Myth #3: Teachers get lots and lots of vacation.

The Myth of the Evil Teacher Union, Part I

Last night, as I lay in bed, I found myself itemizing some of the most pernicious lies people accept about the teaching profession and the teacher’s unions in particular. Then, when I came into work, I received this great cartoon from a colleague (and my former student teacher) and felt compelled to put it all down on paper (so to speak).



We'll get to merit pay in a few days. As I began to hammer out this list, it quickly became too long for a single post, so I'll put them up in serial form. Here's lie #1:

1. Teachers unions are responsible for keeping bad teachers in the classroom.

I can’t speak for every school district nationwide, but if my district is any guide, this is flat-out wrong. I’m not saying we don’t have any bad teachers teaching in our district. But the union does not protect them. Our contract, like many, creates a three year window at the beginning of a teacher’s time in the district (regardless of how many years he/she has taught elsewhere) in which a teacher can be fired for no reason whatsoever. The union does not prevent these people from being fired, but in my years as a teacher, the district has not exercised this ability once. Not once. Teachers have been let go due to budget cutbacks (Reductions in Force, or RIFs), and a couple of teachers have been let go because of inappropriate behavior which came to the attention of the state’s Teachers and Standards Commission (TSPC), but new teachers, even if they are really struggling, aren’t fired. That’s not the union’s fault. In fact, the representatives who serve on union committees are all teachers, and we don’t like it when a bad teacher makes us look bad. But getting teachers fired isn’t our job. We play our role, trying to fight for fair and consistent working conditions, and we privately wish that administrators would do their jobs and take care of certain teachers.

Now, once a teacher has survived that three year probationary period, they CAN still be fired. At that point, it gets a bit more difficult because the school district would have to find a reason. But they have a lot of discretion in this area. They would simply have to do some classroom observations, put someone on a dreaded “plan of assistance” (the threat of which can often send a teacher into early retirement or in search of another school), and then show that the teacher was not making adequate progress on that plan. The union does try to make sure that this is done fairly, that the school district isn’t running someone out for political reasons or creating some unfair and impossible plan of assistance as retaliation for union activity, but if a teacher is performing below par, they could certainly be let go and the union couldn’t do a thing about it.

Unions don’t keep bad teachers in the profession. School districts that are frightened of consequences, or loathe to do the extra legwork, allow those teachers to stay in the classroom. Or they try to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings by promoting the bad teachers into (sometimes made-up and completely unnecessary) administrative positions. Some administrators were great teachers. And some are great at their current jobs. But the Peter Principle is alive and well in public schools, and that's not the union's fault. We don't make hiring decisions for teachers or administrators.

So if your kid's teacher stinks, don't blame the union. Look up the chain of command. But don't be totally shocked if you find yourself talking with someone who wasn't all that hot as a teacher once upon a time.

Tomorrow, Myth #2: Teachers are overpaid.

How To Train You Dragon, Avatar, or Native American

We went to see How To Train Your Dragon this weekend. Short version: We all loved it, and I think I may have enjoyed it more than Noah or Paige, though it was a close contest. The sensation of flying on a dragon's back was captured just as magically, if not more so, in HTTYD as it was in Avatar, the characters were more likable, the dialogue vastly improved, and the action just as engaging, though it didn't have the immersive quality of Pandora's jungles.

Here's the thing, though; the story is almost exactly the same. Sure, there are dragons and Vikings, but Avatar had its Na'vi and Marines, Dances With Wolves had its Native Americans and Union Soldiers, The Last Samurai had its Samurai and Union Soldiers, Last of the Mohicans had its Native Americans and colonists... you get the idea. This is not a new story.

But two of these stories in such close proximity, and both enjoying such wild critical and box office success, has me wondering about the zeitgeist. What does this say about us? I wonder if the marines references in Avatar obscured the point, to some extent. Sure, these can be read as a critique of U.S. foreign policy. They can be dismissed as the normal liberal PC apologies from Hollywood. As David Brooks pointed out, the "White Messiah" fable is both a racial pat on the back and more than a bit racist when it's about human beings, so dragons are a bit safer in that way.

But I wonder if there's more to this coincedence.

Zygmunt Bauman, in this interesting piece, posits that we are living in an "interregnum", a period between the traditional power structure of the nation-state and a period where the next order, of some new and as-of-yet undefined nature, takes hold. I'm skeptical of these pieces. Part of me wonders if they are the academic version of a guy standing on a street corner with a sign that says, "The End Is Nigh!" (For that matter, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers was published in 1987. Every time I read someone say he was just a bit ahead of his time, I wonder how long we can stretch out that "bit".) Still, Bauman makes an interesting case, comparing the way multinational corporations, international criminal organizations, terrorist groups, and individual "non-state-actors" can all circumvent the traditional model of national sovereignty. Could films that tell us to reexamine some of our presuppositions about our friends and enemies be tapping into our collective discomfort? Perhaps this goes well beyond our disenchantment with US foreign policy. We should all have felt some unease going back long before the "War on Terror" to our involvement with the Contras, supporting Saddam, the internment of the Japanese, ignoring the plight of the Jews at the beginning of WWII, and on and on. A critical eye toward the actions of the US government at home and abroad is both healthy and patriotic. But, in the context of this interregnum (if that's truly what we're experiencing) I wonder if these kinds of films can also tap into a queasy feeling in our stomachs related not to seeing our government's warts, but instead caused by a world that is genuinely shifting under our feet.

Maybe we just want to fly with dragons and have sex with giant blue people. Fine. I have no problem with either of those. Zoe Saldana is super hot, even when digitally remastered, and I've been into dragons since I was a little kid. Maybe it's just a coincidence. But if I was going to go into a Hollywood pitch meeting tomorrow, I'd want to sell a story about one of US joining up with THEM, only to discover that THEY are cool and WE need to learn to understand THEM. We want to believe this story right now, because we know the world is changing, and though we're not sure who exactly THEY are, we hope they turn out to be friendly.

Please submit your suggestions for the wildest versions of THEM and US. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that it wouldn't really matter.

Mom the Early Adopter

I just posted a comment on the first post of my mother's blog. She's blogging as a marketing tool for her new business (she's a life coach). If you're interested, you can find the blog here.

My mom is something of an early adopter. We had a personal computer, complete with a black and orange monitor and that paper with the edges that had to be neatly trimmed off, before most folks in our income bracket. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on it. I'm pretty sure my dad typed his on his type writer.

I'm not sure which of us discovered email first. I know I'm more addicted to it (I check it hourly, and worry about it during camping trips). Mom had a cell phone first. I resisted, based on the idea that I would be giving up my freedom and privacy. Now I can't remember how I lived before my phone. My wife and I call each other from opposite sides of a Target in order to meet up.

I do know Mom beat me to Facebook. I resisted that one, too, on the grounds that it would be as lame as MySpace. I beat Mom there, but that's nothing to brag about. It's like saying "I discovered that farts smell bad before you did. So there."

I certainly wasn't on the cutting edge of blogging, and I still enter into it fully cognizant of the narcissism inherent in the medium. But that's where I think Mom has me beat once again: I blog for no justifiable reason. Mom blogs for her work. Point for her.

I have beaten Mom to Twitter, which has all the drawbacks of blogging and only one discernible benefit. It's an education in brevity. And, speaking as a teacher, I can say for certain that an education does not necessarily lead to an educated student. But I've put that too succinctly to make my point. Let me drone on about that for a bit... Oh, nevermind.

My latest salvo in the early-adopter war with Mom is my itouch. This is, frankly, the coolest thing I own. I love it, and it's a portal to another medium I've discovered: the podcast. My mom has an itouch, but, for the first time, approaches the technology like your grandma did the VCR. She claims it's too complex, that she can't keep it charged, that she can;t figure out how to adjust the setting so that it will update the podcasts she might be interested in.

I am going to enjoy this slight edge for as long as I can, because I expect that she'll soon realize that she can not only market her business with a blog, but also with a podcast, at which point she'll be creating with a purpose while I dink around pointlessly.

Thank you for reading this post which argues against its own existence. Again, here's my mom's.

Is the Internet like Edward Scissorhands?

If you haven't seen the new video for the OK Go song "This Too Shall Pass", you've short changed yourself. If you missed their last viral hit, for the song “Here It Goes Again”, well, I'm not sure what you do with your time on line, but you either work too hard or don't know how this Internet thing works.

As I watched the video for "This Too Shall Pass", I caught the little Easter Egg of the smashed TV showing the Video for “Here It Goes Again” and remembered lead singer Damian Kulash's op-ed for the New York Times. He describes the way his record label, EMI, shot themselves in the foot by trying to maintain ownership of the video and keep it from going viral. He tries to empathize with their old-world view of property rights but explains how they stood in the way of democratization at their own economic expense.

Watching the new video (backed by their new label, Paracadute Recordings) I'm reminded of the kind of quality appearing online. Without the gatekeepers (or in spite of the efforts of gatekeepers like EMI) the quality of work on the Internet seems to be bifurcating. On the one hand, we have artists like OK Go and, arguably, Lady Gaga, have come to the attention of mass audiences because they work so well in the medium of video and thus benefit the most from YouTube. That’s not to say that OK Go and Lady Gaga aren’t talented musicians (I have three OK Go songs on my ipod right now) but their videos are better, and I don’t think that’s any knock against them. They are masters of a medium, in very different ways. That particular medium, the music video, has been well served by the rise of the Internet. But all other media have been affected as well (I’m struggling to think of one that has remained largely unchanged. Opera, maybe?) and that got me wondering: has the loss of gatekeepers been good in other media, as it has for music videos, or bad, as it has for music?

When I say music has been adversely affected, I don’t mean that people aren’t listening to music. Thanks to iTunes, which essentially saved the industry from Napster and the like, we’re still even willing to pay for some of it. But pop music, as a whole, has been diminished. Artists used to be able to think in terms of an album, if they so chose. Top forty radio could then turn audiences on to a track from an album, but the album itself retained that cohesion. Now, the concept album is dead. The Decemberists, a band with a loyal following who could risk a concept album, came out with one just last year, called The Hazards of Love. I listened to the tiny samples of songs on iTunes and bought one song I love. It just seemed too expensive to buy the whole thing knowing some songs wouldn’t really work while on “shuffle”. Goodbye, concept album.

Worse than that, many songs are written not to stand alone (no shame in that) but to be even more fragmentary, as ring tones. Some of the most cynical science fiction authors predicted that our musical tastes would one day come to resemble advertising jingles. Tada.

While the music industry seems to have been generally negatively affected by the rise of the Internet, something far more interesting is happening with Television, Film, and Novels. To me, it seems all three of these media are bifurcating as their gatekeepers disappear. As a greater quantity gets through, we’re seeing a lot more bad, but also more good work. It’s too soon to tell the degree to which this will affect publishing. People love to sound the death knell, as they did for your local movie theater when the VCR became popular, but sales of novels are up. Are we seeing better books? Not yet (as a feminist, don’t get me started on the terrible message the Twilight series sends to teenage girls). But ask any agent and publisher, and they’ll tell you that social networking, viral marketing, and the sheer ease of email have sped up the business to a fever pitch. The effect: We can burn through the dreadful tail-ends of trends much faster (Don’t start writing that teen vampire novel now. Too late. Wait a decade.) and rush to brave new ideas more quickly. Also, I am hopeful that the explosion of YA Lit will rejuvenate a generation of readers who will want more from their books as adults, improving both YA (the best writing being done today) and “Literary Fiction” (which could use a shot in the arm).

When it comes to television, the bifurcation of quality is even more dramatic. On the one hand, TV fans like me are living in a Golden Age. Shows like The Sopranos and Lost have opened the doors to some of the highest quality TV ever, in terms of the writing (I know. I know. I need to watch The Wire.), the acting, the production values, and more. The stigma about working on the small screen has essentially vanished for big name actors, and rightfully so; good TV beats bad movies any day of the week (literally). On the other hand, the successes of so many cable shows has brought cable to the forefront, which has produced so many new slots in the schedule that need to be filled, and with diminished ad revenue thanks to TiVo, so networks have turned to Reality TV, arguably the worst art you’ve ever voluntarily let into your home. Maybe this shift has nothing to do with the Internet. Maybe the rise of the high quality pay channel series simply happened to coincide with the rise in Internet use. But I doubt it. The Internet may not magically get you HBO (though, with some tricky finagling, it can be done) but it does allow your “friends” on Facebook to turn you on to a new show, and then it allows Netflix to send you the DVDs right to your house (Confession: This makes Netflix a more important friend to me than a few of the people on my Facebook friend list).

Similarly, it seems movies are simultaneously getting better and worse. Thanks to vastly improved, inexpensive technology, many more people can make high quality Indie movies. And with the help of the Internet, you and I can find out about them without the massive marketing machines of the big studios, and can see them without the going to the local Cineplex (thanks again, Netflix!). The gatekeepers aren’t gone, but they are playing a very different role, capitalizing on directors and actors who’ve already shown their brilliance in the Indie scene rather than taking such big gambles while deciding who will get through the studio gate. Talented directors, actors, editors, light and costume designers, etc., will now get through. Movies that wouldn’t have made a good pitch will now get made. Imagine: “It’s about an old man and a young boy who go for a ride to South America in a house lifted by balloons. It’s animated, but adults will probably enjoy it more than kids. And it probably won’t sell many toys. And there’s not really any way to make a sequel. Can I have $175 million dollars?” Yes, I know Up was made by Pixar, which is now owned by Disney, a major studio, but Pixar began as a small firm making animated short films. Who watches animated shorts? Everybody. Thank you, Internet.

But are all movies getting better? Certainly not. Name your top ten favorite comedies, and if more than half come from the last decade, I'd bet good money you're under twenty years old. And in the horror genre, for all the buzz created by the viral marketing campaign, Paranormal ended up being a universal let-down, while The Shining and Jacob's Ladder will still freak you out twenty and thirty years later. Movies, like TV, are getting better and worse.

This leads me to Edward Scissorhands, not as an example of an Indie film, but as a metaphor. I teach Edward Scissorhands as part of the school adopted ninth grade language arts curriculum, which has a whole unit on reading film as text (I know! How cool!). If you missed it back in 1991, it really was a wonderfully made movie on many levels, and worthy of the kind of close reading my students give it each year. Spoiler: It’s a fairytale about an unfinished android with scissors for hands who comes down from a creepy mansion to an exaggerated, stylized suburb. There, he’s the subject of fascination, until the community turns on him for being too different, and he’s exiled back to the mansion.

Before Edward leaves, he changes the community. First, the changes are superficial. He trims the hedges. Then grooms the dogs. Then cuts the women’s hair. But the changes become more and more substantive. He humiliates the community’s vile cougar by rejecting her. He earns the love of Kim, the girl of his dreams. He turns Kim’s boyfriend from a small-time crook and consummate d-bag into a homicidal maniac. He turns everyone in town into a torch-wielding mob. And we know these changes leave a lasting impact, because the whole fairy-tale is presented as a bedtime story Kim tells to her grand-daughter generations later.

So, is the Internet like Edward? At first, our art changed, but only superficially. Now, it can never go back. Similarly, our politics have changed. As Paul Krugman pointed out, the regime in Iran could not hide their violent suppression of dissent from the Iranian people in the same way the Chinese government was able to hide the Tienanmen Square Massacre. Like Edward’s foray into the suburb, the Internet made Dean a candidate in 2004 (and sunk him, too), but made Obama a phenomenon, and, arguably, President, in 2008. It’s also unleashed some of the most despicable vitriol in the protection of the anonymity of message boards, and that level of anger contributes to a kind of partisanship we haven’t seen in the U.S. in over a hundred years. In fact, the “War on Terror”, in many ways resembles the battle between the old gatekeepers of war, nation states, and the Internet warrior, the “non-state actor”, and that’s no coincidence, as global jihadists use the Internet as one of their main tools. Like Edward’s story, the story of the Internet is one of ever deepening effects on our lives.

But Edward isn’t the Internet. Edward is us. As we watch the quality of our TV, our movies, and our politics bifurcate, we can’t blame the technology. The Internet is just Edward’s trip down the hill. We, the boring, controlled community of little houses made of ticky-tacky, are being confronted by ourselves, a screaming, whispering, beautiful, ugly humanity which is, like Edward, incomplete. The gatekeepers didn’t necessarily make our media better, but they kept the rabble out, and made the arts more palatable and digestible. Now we can see what our entire species really looks like through a screen, and it’s not too far from Tim Burton’s vision back in the early days of the Internet; a lonely teenager who can create beautiful things, who desperately wants to be loved and accepted, and who is very dangerous to himself and others.

Why Reading Literature Is Essential

One of my colleagues (and, I'm proud to say, my former student teacher) Sam Cornelius has given me a homework assignment. He found this piece by Nancy Atwell, "A Case for Literature" and assignment to weigh in. Atwell's concern is that the powerful forces pushing for national curriculum changes do not recognize the merits of reading literature because it does not satisfy their interests in profiting from more expensive curricula, more expensive testing, etc. She cites some research that shows that independent reading literature, and lots of it, not only increases reading proficiency, but is one of the best predictors of over-all academic success. At first glance, this is preaching to the choir, and I don't know how I'm going to satisfy Sam's assignment.

Luckily, the very first commenter on the comment page, Tomliamlynch, after claiming to agree with Atwell, writes, "English education has never had a convincing rationale for teaching literature; thank heaven for writing, as at least a teacher knows when a student does it! Literature has always been--and continues to be--use-less: it doesn't have a clear use that translates into a value for non-literature-teachers... Teachers don't know if and when students really read. They can't know; reading is wonderfully private."

Oh boy.

First of all, we don't teach literature for its own sake. Literature, on one level, is entertainment, just like films or music or any other art. We wouldn't expose a student to a famous painting just so they can say they've seen it. Similarly, when I teach a book (or a film, or a short story) my focus is always beyond the text itself. Now, that work of art can do many things, and I'm hesitant to tier them because they're all important, so these are not in a particular order.

Literature, like any art, teaches its appreciators how to participate in that art in the future. Tomliamlynch alludes to this by making a connection to writing, and that's certainly one part of the value. Reading makes students better writers. But if that were the limit, that a piece of literature might allow a student to become a professional novelist someday, we would be devoting far too much time to prepare such a tiny fraction of the population that we would be criminally negligent. But reading literature not only allows a student to participate in the art form as a creator, but as a different kind of consumer. Beyond simple comprehension (essential, but merely foundational) a reader or literature learns to make connections between a work and other works in that medium, in other media, in their own lives, in their culture, and across cultures. A bad reader can understand that Jack and Jill go up the hill to fetch a pail of water. A good reader asks why these two children are going up to get a resource that's usually found a lower elevation, what the task says about their socio-economic level, what the pairing might imply about a familial or romantic relationship, what the language might tell us about the time frame, how this might be different in another country, culture, or time, and what this might relate to in the reader's own life. These processes might be private if the student is reading at home, and eventually I want my students to be able to do this on their own, but as a teacher it is my role to make sure these processes are public, conscious, and intentional.

These skills are not useful in some tiny, compartmentalized way. Last night I was sitting with a couple dear friends arguing about the TV show Lost. All of the language we were using came directly from specific and targeted instruction provided by out English teachers. But these skills don't just allow us to interpret other art. They allow us to interpret Narrative with a capital "N". Whether I'm trying to follow the story of the debacle of the health care bill making its way through the Congress, or studying the way The Big Bang produces a singularity, then energy and time, then later matter, or the process by which the used car salesman evaluates his costs and benefits as he negotiates with me over the price of a '91 Isuzu, I need to be able to interpret a narrative.

Which brings us to the greatest virtue of literature (I know I said I wouldn't tier these, but I lied): We are stories. In fact, we are stories within stories within stories all the way down. If I can't understand the arc of a plot, the influence of a character, the consequence of a choice, the vagaries of fate or coincidence, then I cannot understand my self, my family, my faith, my community, my culture, my country, my world, or my universe. Try teaching history without narrative. Every discipline has a history. For that matter, try successfully teaching science without narrative (imagine teaching the water cycle without sequence). The skills one acquires when learning how to interpret literature cross over into every other field. In fact, if there is some kind of brain injury or developmental disorder which prevents a person from understanding all stories, I would bet that person also cannot be successful in any other field. (Somebody do some research on this for me.)

It should also come as no surprise, consequently, that people who do not know the same stories have trouble relating. Our culture is a composition of our stories. On the surface it just might seem like a person can't get the clever jokes on The Simpsons, or some off-hand Biblical allusion tossed out in a conversation. But it goes far deeper: if a person doesn't know the same stories, they can't understand another person, validate (or even fully respect) their decisions, or work effectively with them toward a common goal. Find two people in a crisis situation working toward some shared goal at the base of Maslow's hierarchy (a subsistence farmer in a third world country and the Peace Corps volunteer who's come to help provide emergency relief) and I'll bet you'll find two people telling each other stories. They are interpreting each other's literature, because if they don't they will only understand even the most basic needs from their own cultural contexts, and will not be able to make larger plans or connections.

This sounds hyperbolic, but without narrative we cannot make meaning of our life experience. In short, without stories, life is meaningless. The more stories we are exposed to, and the more skilled we become at interpreting those stories, the more meaning we can make.

Education without literature (on paper, encoded digitally, filmed, etc.) is not only diminished; it's pointless.

Who's More Condescending, Liberals or Conservatives?

Gerard Alexander, an associate professor at University of Virginia, is sure to get lots of play with his piece in today's Washington Post, "Why are liberals so condescending?". I really hoped he could shed some light on why conservatives are far more reasonable than they appear to liberals. Instead, he makes one of weakest logical arguments I've ever heard, so much so that conservatives who cite it will be condescending to liberals and participating in a parody of themselves. I'm not sure if Alexander is in on his own joke, though.

I have great respect for my conservative friends who make reasoned arguments. More than once I've had to backtrack or concede points to them, much to my chagrin. But Alexander's arguments betray these intellectually honest conservatives by playing at the lowest kind of ad hominem exchange: "You call me a doodey-head? Well you're a bigger doodey-head!"

He goes to great lengths to show that liberals have often criticized conservatives for not being interested in evidence, then fails to provide anything but the most selective anecdotal data. He even goes so far as to say, "I doubt it would take long to design a survey questionnaire that revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average Democrats." If it would be such an easy task, why doesn't he do it?

I would argue that measuring condescension isn't easy at all. Where is the line between claiming that an opponents views are incorrect and condescending to him? Ironically, one of the consistent conservative attacks against liberals is that we are too PC, too willing to see both sides of an issue, while conservatives claim he mantle of the people who can easily identify right and wrong and call it as they see it. Apparently, when they do this, it's folksy, while when liberals do it it's condescending.

Alexander even brings up Nixon and Reagan's "Southern Strategy", and subtly acknowledges that conservatives played on racial fears to get elected, but then says "survey research has shown a dramatic decline in prejudiced attitudes among white Americans in the intervening decades." This does not necessarily mean conservatives have abandoned the strategy entirely, though it certainly argues that they should. It might merely explain why Senator Trent Lot lost his job for claiming a segregationist would have been been a great president, while Senator Harry Reid gets off for complimenting a black president for weaving in and out of a "negro dialect". Conservatives called this a double standard. Is it possible that they have more ground to cover to earn back the trust of black voters than Democrats? I think it would be a more fair criticism of the Democratic Party to point out that they only did the bare minimum to position themselves as the party that was sightly friendly-er to African Americans to reel in that large voting block without doing enough to show their allegiance to them. But then, I'm an ideological liberal, not a politician who needs to get re-elected.

And that's the central problem with Alexander's piece: Without the survey data he claims would be so easy to acquire, he can make no distinction between liberal voters and liberal politicians. Politicians are in the game of persuading people, and it isn't persuasive to say the opposition is probably correct. Of course both sides claim the other is incorrect. Alexander points out criticism of "ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel", but forgets the conservative punching bag of the so-called "liberal media". In fact, he even forgets the fact that a concerted effort was made to make the term "liberal" a slur, and that Republican strategist went out of their way to try to re-brand the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party, which they found to be more derisive.

Now, I'm not arguing that conservatives are more condescending. I don't think a good poll on this would be so easy to come by (and the little, non-scientific poll on the Washington Post page is a good example of a bad way to measure it), and I'm not qualified or resourced to conduct one. But if we're going to follow Alexander's entirely reasonable advice at the end of the piece, to think twice and listen to one another, then starting the process with a selective history of partisan name-calling seems to me like a really bad way to get that discussion going.

But maybe that just sounds like more condescension coming from this liberal.

Response to Jen Widrig's Truth-Telling

Jen Widrig, my friend from college (and fellow teacher, and a writer, and a parent) has just posted a good piece about telling kids the truth on her blog here. I thought I'd share a similar (but less fraught) incidence of some truth-telling tonight.

Tonight, while we re-watched an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender (great show, by the way), Noah asked why the camera cut away from a fight scene right in the middle just because the protagonist flew away.

"Well," I said, "because this is third person limited narration."

Paige burst out laughing. "Noah, your dad is such an English teacher."

"What I mean," I explained, "is that this episode is Appa's story, so when Appa leaves we follow him."

"Oh."

"Can you say 'Third person limited narration'?" I asked.

"'Third person limited narration'," he said.

"There. Now you know something that I teach to 9th graders, and you're only five. Not bad, eh?"

He nodded. "Not bad."

Pat Robertson's Service to the World

I expect that everyone has now heard about Pat Robertson's comments about the earthquake in Haiti. If you missed it, he claimed it was a punishment from God for a pact the Haitians made with the Devil to free their country from France.

Here's what he said: "And you know Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story, and so the Devil said OK it’s a deal. And they kicked the French out."

Well, this complete myth about Haitians sacrificing to the Devil supposedly happened in 1791 (and whatever). That's four years before Napoleon III was born (true story), and, if you believe the myth, they gifted the nation to Satan for two hundred years, which means Satan's lease ran out in 1991. (Thanks to Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver for pointing this out on The Bugle.) But why quibble over details when the man's logic is so sound?

I had a little insight about Pat Robertson I'd like to share.

Now, this is no defense of the man, mind you. But I've tried to be charitable and imagine why he might say something so thoroughly awful. And here's my guess. I think Pat Robertson sees a genuine tragedy and wants us to take our minds off it. He's not doing this to gain attention for himself. That would be selfish douchebaggery. No, he sees our pain and wants to help us. He realizes we feel a sense of helplessness in the face of such horror, and is concerned that we'll blame God. As a man of the cloth, he has to do his part to defend the Big Guy, so he tries to redirect our hatred towards himself.

Pat Robertson's logic, in a nutshell: Hate the giant earthquake that just caused such devastation? Well, maybe I can make you hate me even more.

Remember what he said about 9/11?
Jerry Falwell: "I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen."
Pat Robertson: "I totally concur, and the problem is we've adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government."

See, it's Pat Robertson logic again (with the help of Jerry Falwell): Think 9/11 was a bad thing? I can try to do worse.

Like I said, I'm not defending the guy. He's essentially said we should worship a God who would cause things like 9/11 and devastating earthquakes. Way to evangelize, Pat.

Still, I give him points for effort. I think 9/11 and the Haitian earthquake are, on balance, worse than Pat Robertson. But you have to admit, he is competitive. It's hard to hate something as abstract as the shifting of tectonic plates. But hating the host of The 700 Club? Easy.

Thanks for replacing my sadness and despair with revulsion and anger. Heckuva' job, Pat.

Pitch for Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest

I'm going to enter the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest. They ask for a 300 word itch. Here's my 297, with some very good feedback I've received on the list-serve on Amazon for exactly that purpose. Please feel free to add your two cents. Nickles and dimes are better. Feel free to hammer it (how much change would that be?).

Pitch:

On her knees, hands tied behind her back, Portia looks up at the two government agents who will torture her before killing her. Why would she give her life for the boy who showed up at school halfway through the year? Sure, he's special. But Portia doesn't care about politics. So why is she helping Calum escape from their boarding school? After all, he's not interested in her. He's dating her roommate and former best friend. As one of the agents touches the knife to her skin, Portia acknowledges the sad fact; she's broken her strict rules. She's fallen in love with Calum.

Portia’s Broken Rules tells the story of Portia, the consummate popular girl who knows all the tricks for getting the right boy, handling herself at the party, and staying in the spotlight. It also tells the story of Calum, the lower-class guy who finds himself at the elite prep school. And the story of Jenea, Portia’s mousy best friend who finds herself in a relationship with Calum. So what if Portia has secretly fallen for Calum, despite all her rules? It’s the most innocent love triangle in the world.

Except…

Except that world is the most elite prep school in Phalangium, a country where the upper class maintains control through The Subjugation, the ritual Highs use to take control of the bodies of their servants; to humiliate, to punish, to kill. Calum, a Low, could destroy the strict caste system if he can’t be assimilated, because he knows how to perform The Subjugation. If Calum steps out of line he’ll have to be killed, along with anyone foolish enough to get too close to him. There is no innocence in Phalangium. But in the midst of so much pain, can there be any real love?


Comments so far:

Barbara J. Angstadt says:
Benjamin -
I really like your pitch; it starts out sounding like a fairly routine boarding-school novel (except the government agents bit, a teaser to the final paragraph) and then it adds the twist at the end. Personally, I'd love to read your book. It sounds original and edgy. Good luck in the contest! :-)

Sheryl Dunn (SWOOP) says:
Benjamin, don't use any wording similar to "tells the story of" in the pitch. That's telling. Just show us what the story is about with the emphasis on your main character.

Kieth Massey says:
Hi Benjamin,
I wonder if you shouldn't bring in a description of the alternate world/country where this happens a bit earlier, perhaps even highlight it as a fusion of a fantasy world with elements of a typical teen's existence. For me, I was reading this as our world/country, albeit one in which a young person is facing down an intelligence officer, so when the final description came, it seemed intrusive to me, kinda like, oh, all the above was taking place in Phalangium, etc.
My two cents.

Vivian Davenport says:
Benjamin,
The story starts out sounding like Portia's story but the last paragraph makes it sound like Calum's story. It's difficult to critique the pitch without knowing whose story it is.
We should know the sci-fi/fantasy aspects of this in the first paragraph, not the last.
If this is Portia's story...
The first paragraph has way too much detail about Portia. The first two sentences are real grabbers, and I think you should answer the question right away, not wait until the last sentence. You could combine two things like: [She loves him, and she loves him more than her country's strict caste system.] Then start the next paragraph with info about the Highs and Lows and The Subjugation.
If this is Calum's story...
Don't start off with Portia.
Now why is a lower-class guy attending an elite prep school? Is he attending there under false pretenses?
Capitalize the title.
Drop the 'finds him/herself'. They weren't dropped from a plane, were they?
Good luck!

Any other suggestions out there?

Experimenting with Twitter

I've never been quite the early adopter I want to be. I reluctantly bought a cell phone long after everyone else, not wanting to give up that much of my personal space-time. Now I can't imagine how my wife and I found one another from opposite sides of a Target without them. I got into Facebook when my wife told me she'd just friended my mother. Yes, Mom beat me to Facebook. Now, while watching two football games, a basketball game, and the two hour season premier of Chuck, I have some time on my hands and think I'll experiment with this Twitter phenomenon.

Here's the big question: Can I manage to express even the simplest idea in only 140 characters?

So, I'm at teachergorman

We'll see how this goes.

The Princess Bride on American Politics: "The End of History" or the Rise of the Paranoid Right?

There's an interesting juxtaposition on the op-ed page of today's (technically, tomorrow's) NYTimes. Ross Douthat, in "Life After the End of History", argues that we should examine the fall of the Berlin Wall through the context of what neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama called "The End of History", in the sense that we no longer had a real existential threat to democracy and free market economics, in that both Fascism and Soviet Totalitarianism had failed to eradicate our political paradigm. Then Douthat goes on to speculate that we might be hesitant to celebrate the 9th of November as a kind of super, global Independence Day because we cling to the notion that empires do fail, specifically as a consequence of their own decadence, and that we need, on some level, a threat from the outside to... well, here he's less clear. To stave off perpetual decadence? To prevent permanent decline? Anyway, without something bad to motivate us, we're stuck in our current position, and that position is unassailable, and that's bad somehow.

But the other column on the page articulates a danger. Perhaps this is just what Douthat is describing, a function of the impulse to find an existential bogeyman. But I find Paul Krugman's bogeyman to be quite scary. In "Paranoia Strikes Deep", he describes the movement of the Republican party from the center-right to the far-right as a generational replacement in which the lunatic fringe, previously used but ignored by the party, have now become the ones in power. He warns of the danger of America becoming Californiafied (not to be confused with The Red Hot Chili Peppers' notion of Californication) which he describes this way: "In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster."

Could this be the existential bogeyman we need to keep ourselves on the right track after the end of history? Doubtful. Instead, this idea will have to battle, head to head, with the worldview of the far-right, which holds that government is fundamentally evil, our president unfit for office, and the will of the majority on both policy and social issues is a product of a liberal conspiracy determined to strip America of its values. Hence, as a liberal I might find the irrationality of the far-right to be a danger, precisely because of the fervent zeal with which they see me as a danger. They are certain that liberals like me are destroying the country. I am frightened that people with that much certainty (about just about anything) are destroying the country.

As Vizzini said in The Princess Bride, "...then we are at an impasse."

To which The Man In Black proposed an elegant solution. Iocaine powder, anyone?

And now, one can deduce, Fukayama's "End of History" will produce the "Reboot of History" once we figure out where the poison truly lies.

"The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead."

The Grave of Mark Wright

Each year, on Halloween, I take a break from my curriculum to turn out the lights in my creative writing class, shine a flashlight on my face, and read Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven". Cheezy, I know, but I enjoy it (a bit more than the students, but too stinkin' bad). Well, this year I'll be reading two poems, to prepare them for a unit in which they will have to re-write a poem of their choice. The first will be Poe's "Raven", because, thanks to my friend Tim Hornor, I can now read them this gem afterward. Please, if you dare, turn off all the lights, perhaps light a candle or two, and read yourself The Grave of Mark Wright by John Faga.

Bwa-Ha-Ha-Ha!

A Conversation with Noah

Here's a conversation I had with my son, Noah (age 5), today while we grabbed a bite to eat and Momma shopped for clothes. I submit to you, compelling evidence that xenophobia is ingrained, but love of humanity is too:

N: "I think you and Momma are the best mom and dad in the whole world."

B: "You're probably right. I don't know, though. I think my mom and dad, your grandma and grandpa, are the best. They're pretty great, huh?"

N: "Yeah. I think everyone in the world is the best."

B: "You like everyone in the whole world?"

N: "Yeah. But the people from other planets aren't so good."

B: "I agree. Can't be trusted."

N: "Yeah."

Monster Mash

Paige made this of our family, complete with the cats.

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Knock Knock

This isn't new, but I know a lot of kids who could identify. For my students who won't relate from personal experience, it will at least help them to recognize the power of poetry.

No Ideas vs. No Guts

The Washington Post has two thought provoking pieces on the state of the conservative movement. Steven F. Hayward's "Is Conservatism Brain Dead?" asks if the movement has lost the equilibrium between populist rabble-rousers and intellectuals. Stephen Stromberg, in his PostPartisan Blog post "Palin 'Catastrophic' for GOP?", (besides making a compelling case that Palin is exactly that) references a Micheal Gerson piece which conceded that many Republicans are hostile "to the very idea of ideas". These are conservatives saying these things, mind you (well, I don't know about Stromberg, but he doesn't seem excited about a Republican self-immolation). One the other hand, I'm watching the Democrats cow-tow to this notion that this is a center-right nation. Um, didn't we elect a liberal to the White House? Isn't that a pretty reliable poll of political opinion? Obama certainly isn't as liberal as the far right would like to make him out to be (or as liberals like me would like him to be), but he's center-left. Why can't the Dems, when confronted by an opposition party that acknowledges its own intellectual bankruptcy, behave like they have a mandate to enact the changes the majority of Americans want? I have to think it's due to a lack of courage. So that's where we're at: No Ideas vs. No Guts.

Hayward recounts G.K. Chesterton's line about how "it is the business of progressives to go on making mistakes, while it is the business of conservatives to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." As a liberal, I'm perfectly willing to admit that the risk of progressivism is that a willingness to embrace change includes a willingness to make mistakes. The more dramatic the change, the more frightening the possibility that the change is a dangerous error. But we believe that the alternative, an aversion to change and a kind of conscious mythologizing of the past, leads to an even more dangerous regressivism. This is a genuine debate, with people of intelligence and goodwill on both sides, and liberals and conservatives have to continually weigh not only specific policies, but how much change they are willing to fight for, and how much they are willing to fight against.

But it seems both this country's political parties are actively avoiding this debate. It makes me wonder, how does fomenting outrage help the cause of conservatism, in the long run? In the short run, it gets ratings for your show on Fox News or AM radio, and it may even get you on the cover of Time Magazine, but people who've been whipped into a frothing rage about the state of the country generally won't appreciate the central drive of conservatism: To conserve the status quo. I think one of the reasons President Carter's latest remarks about the recism directed at President Obama struck such a cord was not because the prominent voices in conservatism are racists, but because those very leaders have good cause to be worried about their strategy: If you tell people the lie that we need to go backwards to the halcyon days of "family values", beyond the sound bite there's not a lot of substance. Go back to the days when a man could get away with beating his wife and children? Go back to the days when a woman couldn't vote? Go back to the days when taxes were higher (like they were under Reagan)? Go back to the days when politicians observed more civility than Joe Wilson? What past are they directing us to? I think those leaders, regardless of their own mixed feelings about the mechanisms we've put in place to achieve full civil rights for ethnic minorities, have reason to be concerned that too many conservatives might fill in the blanks by saying we should go back to the days when white men had first crack at jobs, more authority in their own households, more faces on TV, etc. Conservatives don't want to hold on to this present, when they are out of power and people are disenchanted. But how can they be conservatives without clearly articulating what to conserve?

On the flip side, liberals in the Democratic party are loathe to encourage real change because, let's face it, they're doing pretty well sitting right where they are. Why risk the presidency and two houses of Congress by enacting real change? What if you get it wrong? What if you create a situation where conservatives can say "let's go back to the moment before that blunder". The status quo, that of the majority desiring to change the status quo, serves the party identified with changing the status quo. As long as they don't actually do it. Of course, it's even easier to be a status-quo-maintaining faux-progressive when the conservatives are intellectually bankrupt.

Political pundits like to talk about the benefits of "gridlock". I think the term is misleading. There are benefits to "gridiron", as in the situation when conservatives and liberals put on their helmets, line up, and play some smash-mouth political football. Progressives move the ball while their ideas are good, but they are slowed down, made more calculating and deliberate. And if they err too greatly they turn the ball over and we move back down the field a bit. The political arc of this supposedly "center-right" nation has been liberal in the long-term. The progressives keep scoring (abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights). But "gridiron" politics has made the game exciting, and almost always kept the teams on the field. What we have now really is "gridlock", in the sense of traffic: Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have clogged the freeway and slowed each other to a near standstill, but they are headed in the same direction. I fear this freeway does not head to the best of our past or the promise of our future, but to something worse. I don't want to be an alarmist or some prophet of doom, but whether the American experiment ends tomorrow or in a hundred years, and whether it ends in fire or ice, the current concoction of gridlock is a recipe for disaster.

Of course, as a liberal, first and foremost I want the Democrats to gird their loins, grit their teeth, and make some change. But I also want the Republicans to identify the values they want to preserve and pick coherent and productive strategies to defend the best of our past. I've never been so concerned with the health of the opposition before, but I'm realizing just how essential real conservatism is for the health of the country. And to progress.

National Gallery of Writing

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Next President of The United States!

I have this student (let's call her "Marla") who always demands that I give every direction ten times. You can almost count to thirty after any instruction and... ding ...she asks what she's supposed to be doing.

So, today, as a preemptive strike, I start saying, "Okay, everybody open your books to page thirteen. Open the book first. Find page thirteen. That's thirteen. It's made with a one followed by a three. It's not after one or three, though. You'll find it directly opposite page twelve, and should you find yourself on page fourteen, just flip back one and there it will be. By the way, that was thirteen. Oh, and in case you missed it, I asked you to turn to page thirteen." (I was thoroughly enjoying myself, I admit.)

And Marla, of all people, says, "Gosh, why do you have to say it so many times?"

"Because I'll bet there are some people who still haven't turned to page thirteen," I say.

And thirty seconds later, two other guys still haven't grabbed their books, let alone opened them to page thirteen. "You see, Marla?" I say.

And Marla says, "Wait, what are we supposed to be doing?"

My wife Paige is convinced that one of these kids, probably one who earns a C in my class, will someday be our President.

Now, when "Marla" is elected President, you and I will know why the reporters in the press corps keep repeating the same questions over and over, and need to frequently remind the President about what position she holds, what the responsibilities of the job consist of, and that the nation she's leading is spiraling down the toilet.

Unless, that is, you first read in the newspaper about a high school teacher who, in a fit of rage, staples some written instructions directly to a student's forehead.

Health Care: I'm ready to declare a Republican victory.

I don't write these words often: The Republicans are correct. Today I listened to Meet the Press and was very disheartened. As a firm believer in the superiority of single-payer and, dare I say it, socialized medicine, I have to agree with the Republicans on the show who asked that Obama "hit the reset button" and start over. Because I've read all about the Baucus Bill and the bills going through the house, and even though we don't know exactly what shape the final bill will take, the Republicans are right to say it won't live up to Obama's core principles.

Now, to be clear, I don't think Republicans believe in or desire to reach Obama's core principles. When he says he wants everyone covered, I think they agree only in so much as they want everyone to buy over-priced, deeply flawed health insurance plans. When he says he wants it to be deficit neutral, I think they love the idea, as long as it involves no tax increases or cuts to any of their programs. Mostly, I think they love the fact that he's voice standards he can't meet, so they can say he's a failure because he's produced growth in the size of government and higher national debt, two things they had absolutely no qualms about when they had the presidency and both houses of Congress. "Please, Mr. President," I hear them whisper, "keep articulating the virtues of fiscal discipline as a nod to Republicans, so we can rake you over the coals if you do the very things we did when we had the chance."

Yes, I think there is some cynicism on the part of the Republicans in Congress, but I also think there's some genuine ideological motivation. They may not have cared about their ideals before, but they do now. Fine. The sad fact is, they're right even when they're wrong. I think they're wrong that government is this perpetually evil entity that wants to swallow us alive. They're wrong that health care is somehow fundamentally different than clean drinking water or police protection or fire fighters or national security. They're wrong when they claim the free market produces the best results in all spheres of life, including health care. They're even wrong when they say the American people don't want the government to be involved in health care, or to have a public option. But they're absolutely right when they point out that there's a disconnect between what Obama wants, and what these bills would provide.

Which brings me back to my biggest frustration with the Democratic Party. Republicans may not hold views I agree with, but they hold them more strongly than the Democrats. In fact, I believe Republicans hold views that less than half of the country shares, to the extent that they wouldn't be able to win elections based purely on abstract policy debates. But elections aren't abstract policy debates, and whenever Americans are feeling even the slightest bit squeemish, they look to the party that projects confidence, consistency, and strength. John Kerry, I believe, didn't lose the presidential election of '04 because he couldn't win over enough people who were really engaged in the issues. He lost because there are a lot of people in the middle who picked up on the flip-flopper meme and didn't understand, or care, about the ins and outs of procedural votes in the Senate. They wanted consistency, they saw the terror alerts bobbing up and down, they heard rumors of hints of terrorist chatter, and they stuck with the guy who never wavered, even when they didn't agree with him or even particularly respect his intelligence or character, because they admired his single-mindedness.

President Obama is not stupid. I'm sure he knows this. Playing cool and collected helped him in the campaign, when McCain was acting erratically, making a desperate choice for VP, botching questions, and wavering when faced with over-the-top hecklers. But Obama didn't want to make the Clinton mistake of ramming something through Congress, so he tried to split Solomon's baby and stick to explicit principles while turning the details over to the Dems in Congress.

But instead of tacking to his left, giving him something he can sign in a heartbeat, they've tried to find the middle. Which is a problem when the other side knows that if you just stick to your position, the middle keeps moving your way. The Republicans don;t bother trying to find middle ground. Why should they? If they stay firmly on the far-right, the middle, between Blue Dogs and other folks who are concerned about being from genuinely competitive districts, moves in their direction. The Dems need every Democrat from some gerry-mandered district or safe senate seat to hold just as fast to the left as the Repubs do to the right. Then let the Blue Dogs and the senators from Maine craft something decent, and the other Dems can vote for it, looking as reluctant as they want, and some Repubs will do the same, and Obama gets his victory. Instead, the Dems have crafted something no one likes, and the Republicans don't have to budge because they know there aren't going to be enough Dems to pass it. I genuinely believe it's an issue of party discipline. The Dems have crafted crap in an effort to find middle ground, rather than crafting something ballzy and forcing the Republicans to take a stand on it one way or the other. Great strategy, Democrats. "What, do you dare stand in opposition to crap?" they shout across the aisle. "Yes, we're opposed to crap," Republicans say with confidence.

So we will get the status quo, which is worse than crap. Without genuine health care reform, the dangerous cost of the various bills in Congress now will look paltry compared to the effects on the over-all costs of not doing anything. Think a 1% tax on people making over $250,000 sounds bad for the economy? Wait until, as the Business Roundtable (not a liberal group by any stretch) predicts, health insurance costs $28,000 per employee. Think your business will offer you that? Think manufacturers will still want to employ anyone here?

If the Democrats had some cajones, they would have proposed a dramatic change to the national health care system, taking it out of the hands of employers and creating a generous safety net, with choice left in for people who wanted health insurance that covered things beyond the scope of government-provided care. What would have happened? Business would have likes it. Doctors and nurses would have likes it. Hospitals would have liked it. Insurance companies would have hated it. Libertarians would have raged. Fringe groups would have freaked out, marching on Washington with angry signs, many of which would contain over-the-top statements about other issues entirely and some of which would even have had ugly racial slurs. Fox News and their ilk would have railed against it. Republicans in Congress would have flatly refused to play ball. But a couple of them would break ranks because they wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of history, or wouldn't want to face the consequences if it were a success, and that would have been enough to pass it.

Instead, here's what I see happening: The Dems try to produce a by-partisan bill which makes as little change as possible to the current system. Businesses are luke-warm. Doctors and nurses like it. Insurance companies hate it. Libertarians are enraged. Fringe groups have freaked out and marched on Washington with angry signs, many of which contained over-the-top statements about other issues entirely and some of which even had ugly racial slurs. Fox News and their ilk have railed against it. Republicans in Congress have flatly refused to play ball. And now, after all that, some liberals will peal off because the plan isn't far enough to the left, and they don't want to face the consequences if it's a dismal failure to do the things the vast majority of Americans agree it should do. So it won't pass.

This is Democracy at its best and worst. As I've said before a million times: Democracy is the best system of government ever devised for giving people exactly the governance they deserve.

So, here's my prediction. Democrats will put some very bad legislation on President Obama's desk, if they can get it there, and he'll hold his nose and sign it, and the Republicans will declare victory. Or the Democrats won't even be able to shovel their bill onto Obama's desk, and the Republicans will declare victory. Because they're right about the bill. They are correct. They win.

And America loses.

Joe Wilson and Presidential Decorum

The kerfuffle surrounding South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's health care speech seems to be devolving away from the core issue. Instead of really asking ourselves whether his behavior was appropriate, the incident has bifurcated into two separate debates; was it tactically wise in terms of money he can raise vs. money raised for his opponent, and is it justifiable because of the vitriol of the attacks launched at President Bush during his time in office.

The first seems to be a wholly separate question to me. He could have done something far more egregious (courted a white separatist group for donations a la Tony Perkins, then senatorial candidate, now head of the Family Research Council), and we could have that same discussion about tactics and their consequences. (Perkins, though not a Senator, is now arguable far more influential as a consequence of his appeals to the far-right. The same may come about for Wilson, whether this stunt costs him his job or not.)

The second question has been hijacked by the debate about whether the attacks on Bush were equally personal. In this case, the logic seems to be that if the left misbehaved, it excuses misbehavior on the right. At that point we're hardly elevating the tone of the national dialogue on an important issue. But even this poor logic overlooks an element of the discussion; is it worse to call someone a liar than to call them stupid or evil? And, more importantly, do these charges take on different moral weight if they are accurate?

During the Bush Presidency I admit I said many angry things about the man in the privacy of my own home. I am not a sitting representative, and certainly would have behaved differently in the public eye, let alone in the well of Congress. But, as a thought experiment, let's imagine that Wilson said something arguably derogatory about the President which was also demonstrably accurate. This is not the case here. A provision of the health care reform legislation which will certainly be included in any final bill will state that illegal immigrants will not be covered. I can't imagine that piece, which exist in at least one of the bills, not making it through to the final one. The contention on the right is that there is no enforcement mechanism, no demand that proof of citizenship be presented to get care. At that point, one could make a rational case that the law might need strengthening to prevent illegal immigrants from being covered, but since it explicitly states that they will not be covered, you can't reasonably call Obama a liar for stating exactly that. But what if Obama had said, "This legislation will magically turn the sky purple with pink polka-dots."? If, at that point, Wilson had shouted, "You lie!", would it be different, or does the setting prevent that from ever happening? And if it's only the setting that prevents it, would Joe Wilson have been allowed to leave the well of Congress and call the President of the United States a liar at a press conference, or chant it in a rally. I think most people would agree that, in that case, he would be getting off scott-free.

Which makes me think that the defense of the right, that people on the left made personal remarks about George Bush during his presidency, a particularly weak argument. No Democrat ever shouted anything untoward at Bush from the well of Congress during his two terms. So, already, we're dealing with something analogous to Joe Wilson making his accusation outside the building. In that case, we would want to know if liberals, like Joe Wilson in our thought experiment, might actually have been making claims which were demonstrably correct.

Now, I'm not sure if it could be proved that George Bush was either stupid or evil. I know that some attacks against him were hyperbolic (comparisons to Hitler or other Fascists when his administration only emulated some of their behaviors, but certainly not all). But when it comes to the question of his intelligence or moral character, I would argue that some of us on the left, at least, wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt out of deference to the office. Consequently, I honestly, publicly wrestled with the question of whether Bush was evil or stupid. You can find this very question in previous blog posts. In the context of Wilson's outburst, I am reminded of those posts, and of the various other liberal writers and bloggers who asked the same questions. Now I wonder if the terms are simply so broad that they can never be evaluated rationally. Somehow, I doubt that. We do believe that intelligence exists. We also believe that it's not evenly distributed. Thus, if stupidity exists, it's not necessarily inaccurate to describe someone as such. Similarly, most people, especially those on the right, believe in good and evil. If these moral qualities exist, someone could be described as evil not as an insult, but simply as an accurate description, right?

When I wrestled with these terms, I wasn't shouting at George Bush, or trying to hurt his feelings. I believed, and still believe, that he didn't have a great deal of concern for my personal opinion of him, and even if he had, I wouldn't have set out to make the man cry himself to sleep at night. Instead, I really did want to understand the motivation behind some of his decisions. I also wanted, out of deference to the office, to believe that he represented the less egregious of the two. I simply couldn't figure out which was worse.

To me, if Joe Wilson had come out of the chambers, and had told a reporter he couldn't figure out if President Obama were actively deceiving the American people or was misunderstanding the consequence of the lack of an enforcement provision in the legislation, and wanted, out of deference to the office, to presume that Obama is simply misinformed, we wouldn't have much to talk about. The setting clearly separates him from a what's-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander defense. But. in this case, I think he's also separated by the fact that his charge of lying is obviously a personal attack, while it is possible that a question about Bush's intelligence or moral motivation could possibly be a legitimate attempt to describe and understand observable phenomenon.

I'm not trying to defend all the personal attacks made against George W. Bush. Some were just that (and some made by me, yelling at my TV). These would have no place as heckling from the well of the rotunda. But if the defenders of Joe Wilson's outburst want us to accept a tit-for-tat defense, they demand that we explore the variable that the veracity of the claims adds to the equation.

What Obama said simply can't be described as a lie. He said illegal immigrants wouldn't be covered. The bill will say illegal immigrants aren't covered. Nuance that however you want. Claim some illegal immigrants might cheat the system. Obama's statement still isn't a lie.

On the other hand, maybe George W. Bush was smart, and maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was evil, and maybe he wasn't.

Is this really a debate the defenders of Joe Wilson want us to have?

Hijacking Facebook

One of my former students, and our son Noah's former babysitters, posted the following as her Facebook Status update:

K: ever read a philosophy book? don't.

My wife, Paige, and I, both former philosophy majors, couldn't let that stand. So, from separate computers in the same room, we launched into this mess:

Ben: No, do! Just read the right ones! Primary sources, not lame textbooks.
Paige: they're not all bad! you just need the right combination of good text, and a teacher who can make it really fun! don't give up on philosophy! (can you tell what my major was!) LOL
Ben: LOL? Seriously, Paige? You're a grown-ass woman! And you aren't laughing out loud. I'm in the same room. You didin't even SOL (snicker out loud). WTF?
Paige: Ok... let's come up with some for philosophy... WTP (will to power) ITTIA (I think therefore I am) i am trying to think of more, but it is past my bedtime. (i am like Descartes)
Ben: TSZ (Thus Spake Zarathustra)[Kelsey, that's Nietzsche. Read him], HotM (Habits of the mind) [That's Hume. Read him, too], TiS (Truth is Subjectivity) [That's Kierkegaard. Awesome.]...
Paige: And maybe i should change that to LOTI Laughs on the inside... would that be better??????? note the multiple question marks! silly English teacher.
and i hope you are having a blast at school K-----... Noah asks about you :)
Ben: CADGAW (Casts a disapproving glance at wife).
Ben: Ah, now you LOL!
Paige: now i am laughing out loud. OK. sorry for hijacking your post K----. hope you are well ;)

So, despite my best efforts, Paige got the last word. And it was an emoticon.

Conservative Response to Obama's Education Speech

I've just read the speech our president plans to give to grade school children on Tueasday. Much hay has been made of this, despite the fact that Ronald Reagan and George Bush I did the same thing, because, as we all know, Obama is a socialist with an insidious agenda. Conservatives, the sole possessors of moral values, are protecting our children from their president just as they protect them from health insurance: It's a gateway drug to socialism too, after all. As a teacher and concerned citizen, I think it's very important that we have a robust two-party system, so that the other side can offer well-reasoned responses on any issue, so that we tack a wise course as a nation. And I expect that we'll hear thoughtful, rational responses from the far-right over the next few days as they respond to Obama's outrageous misuse of his bully pulpit. Just as an exercise, let's see if we can predict what some of those might be, shall we?

Obama will tell kids, "...at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed."

Certainly this is socialist propaganda, somehow. The fault of all our public schools (which, conservatives will tell us, are universally failing) lies with teachers unions alone. All kids show up thirsty for knowledge, but evil teachers sit on their fat, tenured backsides and enjoy their HUGE, union negotiated paychecks while these eager students languish in our care. Obama must just be trying to shift the blame away from the unions, which are essentially socialist enterprises.

Obama will also tell kids, "You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy."

How could these things all go together? After all, curing AIDS would just be undermining God's righteous judgment on the immoral. And protecting the environment? We all know global warming is a myth, so what is the problem to solve there? And why should students with homes care about helping the homeless? Poor people aren't victims. They're just lazy people who couldn't figure out how to be welfare queens and live in mansions with Cadillacs. Let's focus our kids on the problem of making those welfare queens poorer, rather than helping homeless people, who are getting just what they deserve. And how can Obama talk about boosting the economy when he just mentioned helping the environment? The two are mutually exclusive. Instead, let's teach the kids to more effectively rape... er, harvest the planet's natural resources. In fact, let's tell the kids to run out of school on the first day and get jobs down in the mines. Child labor laws, after all, were part of Roosevelt's socialist agenda.

Obama will continue: "But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying."

This is crazy talk. Circumstances justify bad attitudes. If you are white, male, and well off, then you are a victim of classism, feminism, and reverse racism, and you have every right to go on Fox News or am radio and rail against the injustice in the system which has kept you down. Forget homework! That's like fact-checking. Just make stuff up as you go, and people will be so entertained your bad attitude that the namby-pamby liberals won't even have a chance to keep up with your lies... er, inaccuracies and misstatements. And what's this about trying hard? Do you think Bill O'Reilly tries hard to be a journalist? He spends more time on his hair, and he's doing just fine.

Obama: "Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community."

Translation: March with hippies, or join the communist party.

Obama: "No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work."

This is just more liberal, pro-choice fetus bashing. See, he's calling the unborn incompetent.

Obama will conclude, "So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it."

I'm not quite sure how, but I think this is a subtle encouragement for kids to form death-panels and try to kill their grandmothers. It must be, because Obama is the one saying it.

So please, rescue your kids. Save them, and this country, from its president's evil socialist agenda. Keep them home for the day (maybe even a week just to make sure). Their over-paid, under-worked, union protected teachers would love an extra day to plan the communist take-over of America... or at least a few extra lessons on critical thinking.