Rachel's Rants, Raves, and Recollections

January 13, 1982

2012-01-13T09:28:00.002-05:00

January 13, 1982

Blizzard snow

dances down

indroves.

The girl putters about

outside,aimless,

studying the blanketed landscape

of sidewalks, trees, shrubbery, houses, power lines.

The remnants of ambition: a 1950’s storybook snowman

are abandoned, unrecognizable,

thefigure quarter-finished.

Subsequent snow angels are strewn about

on slates, left unpunctured

bydive-bombing

twigs and footsteps.

Perhaps she’ll amble half a block down

to the flat white expanse of theschoolyard

wherea mass production could take place.

Cold starts to burn

red on her cheeks.

Wet iciness seeps

into her cheap boots and jacket

thatlook

but aren’t waterproof.

The grayness is shading darker.

The promise of outside projects fade

to dreary malaise and tedium.

There is busy work homework to do.

Her neighbor waddles over

andbreaks the silence:

An Air Floridacrash.

The plane slid off

the 14^th Street Bridge,

right into theriver.

But, some survived right?

Only five

Couldn’t they just swim

tothe bridge?

The water was freezing.

A man jumped in

to save people.

A stewardess survived.

Couldn’tthe plane have landed on the bridge?

Whatabout those seat cushions that turn into “flotation devices,” or the slide thatcomes down from the rows of seats with the red-lettered EXIT sign? Didn’t they just slide off and swimto shore?

Guilt for the indulgence

of boredom creeps in.

Snowman and angels fade away.

She turns around and heads inside,

unable to get the image out of her head

of people drowning, trapped in a sky

bus banging on the windows,

converted to stone.

Why I Stand with Wisconsin Workers

2011-02-28T08:15:00.001-05:00

(This has been cross-posted at my education blog: All Things Education.)

Since Madison, Wisconsin is burning as I blog, I must to take a moment to support teachers unions and unions in general. And I want to explain that support. Despite my own teaching and union/non-union experiences, I don't think I understood and appreciated the role of unions until just recently. These two pieces, one by award-winning Maryland social studies teacher blogger Kenneth Bernstein and the other by California English teacher blogger David Cohen, helped me to understand the importance of unions.

My parents and their parents before them, were not wealthy, but nor were they workers, unionized or otherwise (although my maternal grandfather's father was very active in the railroad telegraphers union in Illinois). My father's parents were the children of Eastern European immigrants and owned a stationary store in Brooklyn, New York. My maternal grandfather worked as a chemist for Montgomery Ward and then as a manager for an automotive parts company in Chicago, Illinois, and my maternal grandmother was a homemaker and worked as at the Hadley School for the Blind.

Besides being born white in America, my parents were lucky to have attended two of the best known public high schools in the country; my mother went to Glenbrook in Northbrook, Illinois, and my father to Stuyvesant in New York City. My mother had college-educated parents and the luck of her zipcode (though not if you ask her as she hated the suburbs) and my father had parents who, though relatively uneducated themselves, greatly valued education. My parents went on to attend outstanding public universities--my mother, the University of Wisconsin and my father, Brooklyn College. They met while they were in graduate school at the University of Michigan.

After finishing, they moved to Washington, DC, where my sister and I grew up and attended public schools, so that my father could take a job as a lawyer with the federal government, where he has spent most of his career--primarily as a civil rights lawyer at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and then as a litigator and energy efficiency regulation counsel at the Department of Energy. My mother had been a linguist but couldn't find a job in her field (her specialty was semitic languages--she was a generation early on that one). After learning about my father's work at HEW and watching him in court, she went to law school and became a labor, civil rights and school finance lawyer. I imagine they could have gone to work for any white shoe law firm they wanted to, but they gladly chose civil and public service. While we weren't rich, we lived a comfortable middle class life.

Among other topics they discussed at the dinner table, I definitely recall my parents grumbling about corruption and obstructionism in unions, but they always believed in their importance. When I went to work for DCPS, I was ambivalent about joining the Washington Teachers' Union--I really didn't know much about unions. Despite some of her negative associations, my mother informed me I should join, that it was the right thing to do. Even then, I never developed union pride; for one, I certainly didn't enjoy funding WTU President Barbara Bullock's collection of fur coats and silver candlesticks.

I found my experiences with "management" much more pleasant and reasonable when I taught in public schools in Albemarle County, Virgina, a right-to-work state, but I don't think that had anything to do with not being unionized or not having collective bargaining power. And I did join the Albemarle Education Association chapter of the Virgina Education Association. I can't say they ever did anything directly for me, but nor did I have the need to ask them to. Many other teachers I've spoken to have described the organization as both toothless. I imagine they feel that way since teachers' salaries in Virginia are approximately five thousand dollars below market, being especially low where I live and have taught in Central Virginia. But at the very least, the VEA serves as a good resource for educators and lobbies to improve the working and learning conditions for teachers and students.

I always took for granted my middle class upbringing, which is becoming less and less possible, as middle class wages decrease and expenses increase. With all that's going on in Wisconsin, I have come to appreciate that my parents and I have been able to live a comfortable middle class life because of what labor unions fought for in the first place: fair compensation, safe working conditions, and a decent standard of living in exchange for a job done. Their fight increased wages and other forms of compensation, such as benefits and pensions, and improved working conditions for all of us.

That's why I attended the Rally to Preserve the American Dream in Richmond, Virginia, this past Saturday (pics thanks to Virginia Organizing here) and that's why I will continue to fight for the working and middle classes and for the poor to get out of poverty. Does that mean I think that unions are uniformly or inherently "good"? No. Does that mean that I think that people who don't do their jobs should be able to keep them? No. But I don't have blind faith in the free market, either. Unions serve as a check on unfettered capitalism, and capitalism has certainly been recently unfettered. Unions are the only bulwark right now between fascist capitalism and regulated capitalism. Without the unions, we will have no middle or working class at all, only a few powerful rich and many, many poor.

The more progressive Democrats can't don't this alone, however. Traditionally more conservative members of the working and middle classes must stop voting against their own economic self-interest. Instead of asking "why should others get decent wages and healthcare insurance when we don't?" they need to fight for such basic themselves, like yes, Obamacare, and stop allowing themselves to be the lackeys of tax-dodging, overseas-job creating corporate interests who are doing nothing to advance working peoples' quality of life. Furthermore, while I have been heartened to see neo-liberals such as Obama, Duncan, and some DFER types speak out in support of the right to collective bargaining, they are in part culpable for the attacks on America's middle and working classes and their unions. Neo-liberals and centrist Democrats, their rich patrons, and their mouthpieces in the media have been busy embracing disastrous and crude education reform policies such as those of Michelle Rhee and thoughtlessly bashing teachers and their unions in the process. In doing so, they have weakened the Democratic party and middle and working classes as a whole, emboldening Republican leaders such as Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and Rick Scott and their oligarch overlords, with their ruthless free market ideology, to make a well-orchestrated and dangerous grab for power.

It's time for neo-liberals to do what's best for children and their families by changing course on their wrong-headed education policies. To do this, they must end their collaboration with corporate-sponsored union busters. You can't do what's best for our nation's children if you're crushing their parents and teachers in the process. If neo-liberals really want our children's futures to be bright, then they must fight for a quality of work and home life that will make that possible. Unions, for all of their imperfections, do that.

The Virgina Legislature Joins in the GOP's War on Women

2011-02-23T22:20:00.000-05:00

The Republicans (plus two democrats) in the Virginia Senate have decided to join in the National GOP's war on women. Tomorrow, the VA Senate will vote on SB924, which just passed the House 67-32. The bill would effectively eliminate access for Virginia's women to clinics that perform first trimester abortions by forcing such clinics to adhere to the same regulations as hospitals do. This, of course, is not necessary as such clinics are already sufficiently regulated.

If this effort seems like it's coming out of nowhere, that's because it is. The amendment was slipped in. According to NARAL Pro-choice Virginia:

This bill would require the Board of Health to issue regulations for hospitals, nursing homes, and certified nursing facilities. As originally written, the bill has nothing to do with abortion. Unfortunately, anti-choice Delegate Kathy Byron (R-Campbell County) offered an amendment changing the definition of hospitals to include “facilities in which five or more first trimester abortions per month are performed.”

If you think the bill is being sent from the GOP-dominated House to the Dem-dominated Senate to die, think again. As reported in the Virginia Politics blog:

Two conservative Democrats who oppose abortion -- Sen. Charles J. Colgan (D-Prince William) and Sen. Phillip P. Puckett (D-Russell) -- said Tuesday they plan to support the measure, in a chamber where Democrats hold a 22 to 18 majority. Their votes would raise the possibility of a 20 to 20 tie. A tie would be broken by Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R), who supports regulations.

And then Governor McDonnell will be ready and waiting to sign it into law. Because he and other anti-choicers want to "ensure that all outpatient surgical centers are treated the same, in order to ensure the health and safety of our citizens." I see, they want all outpatient surgical centers to get equal treatment. Or, maybe it's because Virginia Republicans are such big fans of excess regulations. No, no, it's because they want to keep women who get abortions safe. Yes, that's it.

Puh-lease. The Virginia GOP (plus two Democrats) wants to shut down these clinics because they provide first trimester abortions, and probably because they provide contraception, too. Only, they don't have have the balls to admit it.

I am squarely pro-choice, but I can understand why people are against abortion. I would guess that the vast majority of women who choose to have abortions hate abortion. But I agree with Hilary Clinton when she says that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. Ruth Marcus's piece in response to House Republicans' assault on family planning applies here: When those clinics are shut down, many Virginia women will not only lose access to the contraception that prevent abortions in the first place, but to general reproductive health care. Furthermore, without access to contraception, rates of pregnancies will increase and so will unsafe abortions. I would have so much more respect for anti-abortion crusaders if they actually worked to prevent abortions from having to happen in the first place, but they don't; they work to promote ineffective sex education programs, to limit access to contraception, to decimate women's healthcare services, and to keep abortion unsafe, frequent, and illegal.

As my uncle always says about American politics, "You have two choices. You can have the Democrats in your wallet or the Republicans in your bedroom. I'd rather have the Democrats in my wallet." So would I, Uncle Roger. So would I. Since Republicans are already raiding our middle and working class wallets to fund tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, I say to Virginia Senators:

Get the hell out of my bedroom and while you're at it, stay away from my uterus.

Contact your senator now and tell them to oppose SB924.

Publish or Perish

2011-01-14T14:35:00.002-05:00

(This has been cross-published at All Things Education.)

I got an essay accepted at truthout. Yay! I wrote about the Obamas' decisions regarding the education of their children and President Obama's statements about that decision in the context of his administration's education policies. (A recent excellent and comprehensive review of Obama's promises on education in contrast to his actual policies can be found here.)

"Mr. President, We Want Your Children's Education, Too" went through many, many drafts and I was very pleased when it was accepted by the first place I sent it. (An aside about the writing/publishing process: Almost all of my publications had been submitted to targeted publications I know well.) I submitted the piece back in November 2010, but the editor I corresponded with warned me it would be probably a while. It happened to come out on January 9, 2010. At first, I was ashamed of its publication date, given it was the day after the shootings in Arizona; it didn't seem to be an appropriate time to be so critical of the Obama administration.

But then I found out that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was butting (yet, again) into D.C. Mayor Gray's DCPS Chancellor selection decision, urging him to permanently appoint Rhee right-hand woman and Interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson, of whom he's "huge fan," and in the process by-pass a 2007 DC law which requires a rigorous review process including consulting a panel of teachers, parents, and students. Duncan also dangled the possibility of taking back Race to the Top money the District was awarded if his wish were not granted.

Besides registering my disgust with Duncan's confirmation that Race to the Top is nothing but a bribery scheme, with his interference in local affairs, and with his spitting in the face of transparent and democratic governance, I'll repeat one of the same questions I asked in the essay: If Duncan and his boss are such "big fans" of the reforms and "progress" in D.C.P.S., why do they not send their own children to them?

To those who tell me to mind my own business: Point taken. I'd be happy to. Just as soon as Obama/Duncan change course on the policies that are undermining the quality of my children's education and just as soon as, of course, they mind their own business.

UPDATE 1/20/11: A reader was puzzled about this sentence from the truthout piece:

My DCPS past, warts and all, has made me a different person than I would have been had I gone to a place like Sidwell, different in a way that seems lesser to my current eye.

Reading it out of the context of the rest of the piece, I can see that the sentence is confusing and needs a re-write. Given the stance that I took, most readers probably knew what I meant, but I hardly want to assume that readers "probably know what I mean." Rather, I want them to know what I mean because my writing is clear. I can't go back and fix it in truthout (and there was never an interaction with an editor about clarity or wording where this might have come up) but just to be clear, what I meant was that:

My DCPS past, warts and all, has made me a different person than I would have been had I gone to a place like Sidwell. Had I gone to a place like Sidwell I think I would have been different in a way that seems lesser to my current eye.

Readers, if you ever see something that gives you pause or puzzles you or that you think may be factually incorrect, even if it's a simple typo, by all means, let me know. I value your feedback and pushback.

Vaccines & Science Revisited: Watch the Pharmaceutical Companies

2011-01-07T12:10:00.003-05:00

A little over a year ago, I wrote a series of blog posts about vaccines and science. In honor of the Wakefield studies officially being found fraudulent (there's a decent post at the blog Modern School--with links!--about the study's history), I am reposting them, but with a few updates.

Since my original posting of those, I have grown more skeptical of medical studies, particularly as they are increasingly being funded by pharmaceutical companies and reviewed by outside, for-profit review boards. Given the severe conflicts of interests inherent in such arrangements, I hardly have confidence in the truths of the outcomes of these studies. Secondly, the findings of Dr. John Ioannidis (fyi: the task related to this post that took me the longest was spelling this guy's name correctly), which I highly recommend checking out, have also increased my skepticism. Ioannidis is not so much critical of the scientific process as he is critical of what happens to the scientific process in the contexts of medical treatments, academia, and our own (too high) expectations of what science can tell us.

That being said, it is the corrupting forces of money, fame, and politics on the scientific process that has caused my skepticism; my faith in science has not diminished, not because I think it's some kind of magic, but because it's the best process we've got for uncovering a few truths about the world around us. After all, Ioannidis is a true scientist in the sense that he wants to make the process more pure, truthful, and skeptical. How very scientific of him.

UPDATE I: I was cleaning up my delicious bookmarks this morning and came across this article, also by Carl Elliot, from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the phenomenon of medical industry "thought leaders," who are medical doctors paid by pharmaceutical companies to talk to other doctors about "research" findings. I meant to include it yesterday, but had forgotten about it.Take a look.

UPDATE II: Just out for a run, I realized I forgot about another article pertinent to this. (That's what I get for hitting "PUBLISH POST" so impetuously). Here's an article in Vanity Fair about drug trials and how they're increasingly being done in unregulated zones, not to mention on poor people, overseas.

(photo by flickr user jmaklary)

It's All About the Corporate Benjamins, Baby: Education, a.k.a., My 2010 Year in Review Post

2010-12-30T22:32:00.002-05:00

(This has been cross-posted at All Things Education.)

During 2010, thanks to the work of Lawrence Lessig and Chris Hedges, I became much more aware of the unhealthy corporate influence in American democratic institutions. I put aside my creative writing to launch a series of posts on my more general blog on the topic. I wrote about corporate money in politics and government, after which I took a break to write about the VA-07 congressional election, writing, and journalism, and to start a blog dedicated to education. I've intended to regularly update my food blog, as well, but the best laid plans. . .

Right before the Christmas holiday, I completed a piece about Teach For America, which I am hoping will be published somewhere bigger (not likely, I know). In the meantime, I was going to use winter break and the grandparental child care that comes with it to write, blog, publish, write, blog, publish. However, as I tried to organize my thinking about the present and future of journalism, of writing as a profession, of teaching as a profession, of public education, and of efforts to reform education, the topics all swirled together to form a toxic sludge of anxiety that, helped along by my kids' germs, rendered me existentially and then physically ill. As miserable as it was, being sick forced me to take a step back and ignore all of it for a number of days. From this pause grew a less fevered end-of-year collection of thoughts about the confluence of corporate influence and public education.

I am vulnerable to conspiracy theorizing about what's currently happening in the name of education reform, and I understand why others are, too--I think, in fact, that democracy benefits from this type of push back. Are the reforms of wealthy and politically connected individuals harmful to the institution of public education? I have said on my education blog and continue to say: yes, that in many cases they are. But are those folks sitting around together and villainously hatching some grand scheme to bring down public education? No, that's way too simplistic of an explanation for what's going on. Furthermore, I'm doubtful that describing problems with their efforts in terms of a conspiracy is productive. The problem with talking like a conspiracy theorist, even if there's at least some truth to what's being said, is that you're likely to be dismissed by the very people you need to be taken seriously by. In that vein, it is equally hysterical and irresponsible to cast teachers and teachers unions as the villainous "deep-pocketed" (ha!) root of all of our nation's problems or even as the root of our education system's problems, or as sitting around conspiring to ruin children's lives because they only care about the "adults." Unfortunately, these seem to be prevailing narratives these days.

Teachers' unions may defend some people who don't deserve defending and they may make mistakes, and yes, there are educators out there who aren't doing their jobs and yes, teachers need fair and rigorous evaluations, but as a group, teachers and their unions are not responsible for how our society has failed us over the past year. Did teachers unions cause twenty-seven plus percent of America's children to live in poverty? No. Have teachers and their unions driven up heath care costs? Do they deny coverage and care to our the most vulnerable among us? Nope. Did teachers and their unions cause our economic system to melt down? No, that was another group of professionals. Did teachers and their unions go start costly and futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did teachers and their unions create a criminal justice system that disproportionately and often unjustly imprisons poor people and minorities? No, they aren't behind such travesties. Did teachers and their unions fail to recognize the impending dangers of climate change and then sabotage legislation meant to lessen the havoc it's going to reap? No. It's not been teachers or their unions that have done all of these things, but our political leaders, policies, and system. And who is now clearly behind those? Not a bunch of middle class educators, but business, financial, industrial, and corporate interests.

While I don't believe that there is some evil master plan being hatched by the likes of DFER (Democrats for Education Reform), Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Waltons, their influence is unhealthy, undemocratic, and dangerous. Teachers unions and organizations like the National Education Association at least are accountable to the systems and large numbers of people they represent, systems and people whose work and studies will be most affected by the reforms being brought. Whom do DFER, Gates, Broad, and the Waltons represent? To whom are they accountable? Were they elected? Since when should a handful of unelected, extraordinarily wealthy people be entrusted to represent the interests of millions of poor, working, and middle class people?

Two of the most egregious examples of corporate influence in education are in higher education. As there is less public funding of public universities, wealthy patrons such as the Koch brothers are stepping in to establish "institutes" that put out research and teachings that serve not the interests of citizens, but the interests of the industries they own. In medical schools and schools of public health, much research on drugs and treatments traditionally funded by public monies is now funded and supervised by the very pharmaceutical companies who stand to reap profits from their successful trials.

In K-12 education, there are not as many cases of such overt conflicts of interest, but I'm afraid we're moving in that direction. Gates, Broad, and the Waltons support market-based reforms that would include mayoral takeovers, vast expansion of charter schools (which are public schools that can be run in some instances as private institutions), the de-professionalization of teaching, and CEO-like leadership of schools and school systems, and they are pouring money into the system to see such reforms actualized. Influential organizations with deceptively neutral-sounding names such as right-wing ideologue Jeanne Allen's Center for Education Reform directly promote privatizing our public education system. As they already have in New York City Public Schools, test prep companies such as Kaplan (which is owned by the pro-corporate education reform Washington Post) stand to make millions from the new education reformers' policies which rely heavily on standardized tests.

As public schools are being told by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to do "more with less" and as school budgets are being reduced and reduced and stimulus money runs out, with no enthusiasm for alternative means of raising revenues, the private sector is stepping to fill in the gaps often with strings attached, shaping our education system to their liking, whether its largesse benefits its supposed recipients or not. What's about to happen in Los Angeles Unified School District is only the tip of the iceberg.

An example of private takeover of public schools already in progress is in DC. The DC Public Education Fund is privately run on private donations with no public oversight, and very little of the money that's raised goes directly into the D.C. Public Schools' budget or is dispersed by those appointed to run the schools; yet, the fund directly influences outcomes in public schools. For example, the organization funded IMPACT, DC's controversial new evaluation system, teacher bonuses, as well as the infamous new contracts with teachers. During the negotiations, then-Chancellor Rhee stated that if she wasn't going to be around later, a.k.a., if Adrian Fenty didn't get re-elected, that the money raised for the teacher contracts would go, too. That is a clear example of private interests using private money to influence public elections and public policy. When public money is used to fund public schools, such blackmail can't take place, at least not legally. Much more democratic would be for the wealthy individuals who are behind such efforts to be taxed appropriately with the tax revenues funding social and educational programs vetted by democratically elected and appointed officials.

The Gates Foundation and the DC Public Education Fund have their hands in many places, and surely, not all of them are harmful to public education, but when I read Gates's thoughts and ideas about education, for example in these interviews about teaching in Parade and Newsweek, I'm horrified. (I'm also horrified about what such coverage means about the state of education journalism, but that's another story.) Not only has Gates not been elected or appointed by an elected official, he speaks simplistically and ignorantly about education even just at the level of basic facts, and his ideas have not been shown to work or improve the systems they impact.

While Eli Broad is no right-wing ideologue, his private education foundation and school leadership training centers have profound impacts on the public systems they're meant to reform. This New Yorker article about Eli Broad's influence in the Los Angeles art world is very instructive on Broad's approach to philanthropy. Broad has good intentions and interesting ideas, enlarging the arts scene in LA and making art exhibitions more accessible, for example. But he doesn't simply give money directly to art institutions or entrust the experts with funding; rather, he has to own and control the institutions, even if that means promoting poor practices or destroying the institutions. I can only imagine that a similar dynamic occurs in the Broads' education philanthropies.

If Gates, Broad, the Waltons, and the hedge funders behind DFER weren't rich, would they be listened to? Why are they being listened to now? Why are such a small group of extraordinarily wealthy individuals allowed to wield so much power and control over education policy? This is at the expense of democracy. Obama has rightly stated grave concerns with the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling. Why is he not concerned with big money in our public education system? Why does he, in fact, welcome it? Is corporate influence any less problematic in the halls of our schools than it is in our halls of government?

One need not launch ad hominem attacks, speak of ethical dilemmas, or list the hypocrises of these education reformers. All Americans, regardless of political affiliation and educational ideology, can agree that our great nation was founded on the ideals of democracy. Corporate money and influence in our public democratic institutions, especially in our public schools, corrodes and corrupts our democracy. Anti-democratic forces are un-American. A healthy democracy requires a well and publicly financed, equitable public education system. Unfortunately, that's not what the Obama administration and the particular education reformers they throw their support behind are going to produce. Unchecked private and corporate influence in our public education system is as big a threat to our democracy as the unchecked corporate influence is in our political system. In fact, they are one in the same. Our public schools should no more belong to Gates, Broad, Bush, or any DFER member as they do to any taxpayer and any citizen; it is from them we must take our country, our democracy, and our schools back.

UPDATE 1/6/11: Too bad I didn't see this brilliant piece by writer Joanne Barkan before I posted this. I could have saved myself the trouble--it's a much better, more comprehensive piece on the problems with education philanthropy than anything I have ever written. Read it in Dissent Magazine or in truthout.

On False Equivalencies, Dichotomies, and Golden Ages in the Media

2010-11-19T21:34:00.005-05:00

Still taking a much needed break from the behemoth in the room that is corporate influence. . .

When I first heard about plans for The Rally for Sanity and/or Fear, it kind of annoyed me. What's it about? What's Jon Stewart trying to do? Do we really need another rally? Mobilizing thousands of people--for what? The explanation that it was going to be a "festival" didn't squelch my grumpiness, either. Then why call it a rally?

Upon my neighbor's recommendation, I watched Jon Stewart's speech and I thought: Okay, he did a good job with that; I enjoyed hearing what he had to say. I liked what I saw and what I heard from folks who had gone. But still something nagged at me about it. Although his speech was stirring, he looked rather undignified. I know, I know, when does Jon Stewart actually look dignified? But there is an authoritative dignity in how he metes out criticism, regardless of party affiliation or views, of those he satires, and I admire him for that. His rally undermined my high estimation of him. To me, he's not the guy who is supposed to organize or host the rallies; rather, he's the guy who is supposed to critique them.

When the more lefty pundits responded to his rally and the statements he made with the criticism that he was making false equivalencies between the right-wing television media, such as Fox News, and the left-wing television media, such as MSNBC, although it was not my particular quibble, I thought they had a legitimate point. As Bill Maher said, "two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments."

After defending himself against the criticism, Stewart agreed to an interview with Rachel Maddow, which was quite lengthy, so I won't reflect on all of it, but one thing he did say was that he organized the rally in response to what he sees as the false dichotomy the media portrays between, for example, red states and blue states, and that what he hoped to bring attention to were the real problems, for example, of corruption and of deception. This is exactly what I like about his show and what I think he compromised--he should have known better than to expect to maintain that message during and after such a rally. Of course, then Stewart went on to make more false equivalents, this time between Republicans' seeing President Clinton through rose colored glasses and the Democrats' viewing Reagan much the same way. "Come on, you hated these guys," Stewart chided. No you come on, Jon, were the Iran-Contra hearings really the same as those of impeachment?

As I was pondering the death of journalism and my own role as a blogger and writer after reading this article in The New York Times Magazine and this one in the Columbia Journalism Review, this op-ed by Ted Koppel came out in The Washington Post, entitled, "Olbermann, O'Reilly, and the death of real news." I think I was kind of bemoaning the same thing in this post about the death of true print journalism. But I realized after watching Olbermann's response that just as there was no golden era of television journalism, there probably was no golden era of print journalism, either.

Come to think of it, as I explained in my comment (scroll all the way down) on Ted Genoways's "Death of Fiction" piece in Mother Jones, I'm usually suspicious of false golden era claims or what I sometimes call "the kids today. . ." complaint. Conditions change, perspectives change, technology innovates, and transitions occur, but human nature and the need to write and report stay the same. In his response to Koppel's piece, wise lowkell over at Blue Virginia was able to express way better than I could, especially at 9:21 on a Friday night, how this is all coming together here and now.

On that note, good night and good luck.

UPDATE I: I forgot to mention this excellent article in the Atlantic by Michael Hirschorn about what happens to facts as they go through internet reports and social media.

UPDATE II: I'm waaay too sleepy to write coherently about this seven-year-old article in the Columbia Journalism Review that I just read about journalism and objectivity, but I will say for now that man, is it good and man, is it still relevant. If only anyone had or would follow author Brent Cunningham's proposals. Unfortunately, we're more entrenched than ever in a journalistic culture that includes major holes in coverage, lazy reporting, balancing coverage (as opposed to truthful coverage), and dearth of varied perspectives, aka, economic diversity, in newsrooms. But, hey, that's what happens when investigative journalism is not funded or valued as an integral part of a healthy democracy.

From Writer to Blogger to Writer

2010-11-11T12:03:00.003-05:00

I have been quite busy with my education blog, but I wanted to take a break to write here about writing, a.k.a., the reason I started this blog in the first place.

Recently, I was a guest blogger on Valerie Strauss's blog on The Washington Post website, "The Answer Sheet." I sent her this, the original post, a critique of Michelle Rhee's tenure as chancellor of D.C. Public Schools.

Valerie wrote back and said it was "terrific" and that she wanted to run it. Yay! After a day or so she wrote back to let me know that she still wanted to run it but that her editor said it was too long and needed to be cut and reorganized. I agreed, given the context and audience. Since I was tired of looking at the thing and knew she could do a much better job than I could of molding it to fit her particular blog, I let her do the edits.

The final version of the revised piece came out more strident and less contemplative than the original post, as it should have been, but the experience caused me to do some thinking about writing, blogging, voice, and what my goals are.

When I started this blog, my purpose was to self-publish and get feedback on my writing, to hone my craft, same with the food blog, just that the topic merited its own blog. I got good feedback on the writing, but many told me, including my own mother, that the posts were too long. One friend asked me if I could provide cliffs notes. Valerie's editor was essentially saying the same thing. As I've sent my education blog around to education people, I've gotten some additionally similar feedback, for example, one guy told me the posts should be "shorter and punchier."

This feedback is right on, for blogging, but when I started this blog I had no intention of becoming a blogger, per se. I just wanted to work on being a writer. On her own blog, education journalist Dana Goldstein discusses what it means to be a blogger and a writer in the digital age. I thought it was she who said (I can't locate the sentence now), "why can't blogging just be called writing?" Indeed. But I have come to realize that I should be writing in one way for my blog and in other ways for other publications.

This article in The New York Times Magazine explores the world of online journalism and blogging (and I just discovered another good one on the same topic in the Columbia Journalism Review). One line that really resonated with me was, "Opinions posted on blogs are cheap. Great journalism is expensive.” That's basically what I was trying to say in this post on journalism. For me, though, I am blogging to become a writer. It's so challenging to get anything published right now for reasons I won't go into here--blogging keeps me writing, publishing, and keeps the discouragement at bay that the constant stream of rejections bring.

But blogging is cheap, or rather, uncompensated, and I can't go on doing it indefinitely. People say, "do it for yourself," or as Ted Genoways, the infamous editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, spat at writers last winter, "Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood." I agree with that in principal, but one has to eat. Does that mean only independently wealthy or comfortable people can afford to write? Is that fair? What will that do to the richness of our country's body of journalism and literature?

I suppose I could move to Norway where, I read in McSweeney's Issue 35, writers are heavily subsidized by the government. I found, though, that the stories in that Issue 35 collection (and perhaps that collection wasn't representative) were rather, well, boring. Is that what comfort and security do a country's body of literature? Does the system in the U.S. weed out the crap and publish only work with the most vital sense of urgency?

I don't know. In the meantime, I'll keep writing, and blogging, until I either can't or won't any longer.

Eric Cantor is a Threat to Democracy

2010-10-29T16:57:00.004-04:00

On Monday, October 25th, a Louisa County, Virginia, voter and Democrat named Jon Taylor showed up with some members of his family to a local Louisa coffee shop, Solid Grounds, to attend an Eric Cantor campaign event (see event invite below). Eric Cantor is his congressional representative (VA-07) and he and some friends of his had RSVPed for the event.

They wanted to talk with their congressional representative about his campaign and about his policies. They ordered their coffee and sat down. The police came in once and asked Mr. Taylor to move his car, which was adorned with campaign material of Cantor's Democratic opponent Rick Waugh, from a metered public parking spot. Mr. Taylor produced his receipt. The officers left and returned later, and a combination of the police, the coffee shop owner, and Cantor's advance man asked him to leave. Jon Taylor ended up out on the street being roughly slammed against a car and then to the ground by three policeman as they arrested him and charged him with trespassing, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. The officers charged some of the other Dems there similarly.

There are a few different versions of what happened. There's Jon's account, on the blog Blue Virginia. There's an eyewitness account, also on Blue Virginia, by Lewalta Haney. There's coverage on MSNBC's The Ed Show. There's a sad excuse for a story about it in The Richmond Times-Dispatch. The Daily Kos features a bit from all of these, including the video Jon Taylor's son took of his father's arrest. Eric Cantor's campaign declared that, "this was a clear attempt [by Taylor] to disrupt the meeting. The voters of Virginia are going to reject this thuggery." When I called Cantor's campaign office--he is also my congressional representative--to voice my discontent about this incident, I was essentially told the same thing by the woman I spoke with.

Now, I'm sure these folks weren't there to give Eric Cantor a Progressive Representative of the Year Award, but this is how the democratic process in a representative democracy works. You decide to run for office, you get some signatures to get on the ballot, you debate your opponents, and you go around and talk to the voters that you're going to represent. You talk to them, you answer their questions, and then they decide who to vote for.

At this point, although I don't agree with it, I am not asking Eric Cantor to change his philosophy of government. I accept we have different views. I am asking him to honor the democratic process that he agreed to be a part of when he decided to run for office. Even though he is morally reprehensible and even though he is owned by corporations, until yesterday I still had faith that he believed in at least a tepid democracy and that he would uphold the democratic process. That he would say, even if they don't agree with me, my constituents are allowed to hear what I have to say about where I stand and they are allowed to ask me questions; I work for them. Even Eric Cantor, I thought, has some small amount of respect for the democratic process.

Eric Cantor is supposed to a leader in our democracy but Eric Cantor is a traitor and a threat to American democracy. Eric Cantor is a coward. Eric Cantor is a tyrant. I weep for any citizen who would hand over their voice in our national legislature to someone who would so denigrate democracy's basic tenets. But most of all, I weep for the democracy that Eric Cantor would see destroyed.

Check out my new education blog!

2010-10-26T17:34:00.000-04:00

Hello loyal readers!

This is a quick note to let you know, in case you didn't already, that I have started a separate blog dedicated to education. It's called All Things Education, inspired by the name of the N.P.R. program All Things Considered, which reminds me of the show's theme song, which reminds me of my mother preparing dinner on weekday evenings, which I am doing as I type.

In any case, I have copied and pasted and accurately dated all of my education-related posts from this blog to that blog and have so far posted four new pieces, including An Introduction: "My New Education Blog!," "What I Read About About Waiting for Superman," "On the False Manifesto," and "Follow-Up to 'On the False Manifesto': What about RE:FORM SCHOOL?"

Please read and if you think it's worthwhile, subscribe and suggest to your education-interested friends, family, and co-workers.

Thanks for your support.

Fighting the Corporate Dragon: We Need Solutions, Not Just Presentments

2010-10-26T09:54:00.001-04:00

I continue to read about corporate influence in American democratic institutions and I continue to be alarmed. Most recently I read three articles, all in truthout. In "The Perfect Storm" Robert Reich describes how our democracy is turning into a plutocracy: "We're losing our democracy to a different system. It's called plutocracy." In "Juraissic Ballot: When Corporations Ruled the Earth," Rebecca Solnit, a California-based writer and activist, compares corporations to dinosaur-like monsters:

"We call these monsters corporations, from the word corporate which means embodied. A corporation is a bunch of monetary interests bound together into a legal body that was once considered temporary and dependent on local licensing, but now may operate anywhere and everywhere on Earth, almost unchallenged, and live far longer than you."

Finally, I read Chris Hedges weekly essay, and this week's was entitled "The World Liberal Opportunists Made," which makes the case that the liberal class has done failed and died:

"The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry."

I'm feeling a wee-bit down about all of this. Perhaps I should stop reading these truthout writers or perhaps I should try reading them with more skepticism. But I don't want to put myself in the position of not reading stuff because it's too hard to hear or because it's too dark or too complex. I want to face what's wrong, but I also want to try to fight for what's right in a productive way.

In "What If? So What?" on truthdig via The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson says that there was only so much that the liberal class, embodied by Obama, could do to push the liberal agenda, and that while "nothing would have been more satisfying than an FDR-style progressive blitz that set the nation on a path toward being stronger, fairer and more prosperous" that Obama and his administration are constrained by certain economic and political realities.

So what are the solutions, then? Because paired with descriptions of the problem, we need solutions. Otherwise, we are accepting, as I fear Hedges is doing, defeat--in this case, defeat of a liberal society and of democracy. At least in the essays cited above, Reich and Robinson offer none. To find one from Hedges, I had to go back to his first essay that got me started down this road, to find this:

"All resistance will take place outside the arena of electoral politics. The more we expand community credit unions, community health clinics and food cooperatives and build alternative energy systems, the more empowered we will become."

Solnit offers more actionable solutions in her depictions of how the people of Richmond, California, many of whom are poor, have latched onto "The Phantom of Democracy" and have organized themselves and fought the Chevron oil company's incursions. She also describes how groups around the world are "acting locally and thinking globally" to fight for ownership of their communities.

We must all act locally and think globally, take ownership of our communities as communities and as citizens. And we must not let corporations do that for us, for they will not act in our best interests, but in their own.

It's All About the (Corporate) Benjamins, Baby: Politics & Government

2010-10-12T14:23:00.006-04:00

The most commonly recognized type of corporate influence in American democratic institutions is in politics. I recall learning in Mrs. McCarthy's US Government class at DC's Wilson High School that special interest groups or PACs (Political Action Committees) wielded a certain amount of influence. It wasn't until the past couple of years that I realized how many of these are funded by corporations. Furthermore, it has become impossible to successfully run for office without gobs of corporate money. It has oft been said that the media is the fourth branch of government. That idea needs updating: corporations and their lobbyists, including conglomerates with holdings of media companies, now make up the fourth branch of the U.S. government. And it looks like the new branch on the block may increasingly be pulling the strings of the other three branches.

In my post about the death of journalism, I rather pooh-poohed this essay by Naomi Klein entitled "How Corporate Branding is Taking over America" as sensationalist and conspiracy-theory crazed, but I really shouldn't have. I am, I admit, late to the party here (or perhaps now I'm the conspiracy-theory crazed one). Klein was right to point out that while George W. Bush was criticized for incompetence and "acts of destruction," that he was very effective in privatizing many essential functions of government. It's true that Obama marketed and branded his campaign better than many ad campaigns for popular products do. I agree with her that,

"This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much. . . . Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-party monopoly through dogged organization and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate, swallowed the Democratic party establishment in one gulp after defeating Hillary Clinton, then pursued 'bipartisanship' with crazed Republicans once in the White House."

Obama didn't only take money from Wall Street, but, according to Mother Jones, from corporations such as BP as well. I don't feel as strongly as Klein and Chris Hedges do (an essay by Hedges started me down this path of blog posts about corporate influence in American democratic institutions). For example, I assume, perhaps naively, that Obama preferred not to take money from corporations, but that his m.o. was to get into a position of power first, no matter with whose money, and then fix things from the inside. The only problem is that "fixing things" has become next to impossible. This Vanity Fair article gives some insight into what Obama's presidency grapples with.

If the most recognized type of corporate influence is in government and politics, then corporate money in Congress seems to be the most easily identifiable manifestation of corporate influence in American politics. Members of Congress routinely take enormous sums from corporations to fund their campaigns--just take a look at this Campaign Cash Seating Chart in the September/ October 2010 issue of Mother Jones.

In a 5-4 ruling in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, the Supreme Court allows corporate money to flow unchecked into campaigns. Another less publicized case, previous to the Citizens United one, Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life did essentially the same thing. According to The New York Times, the Roberts court is the most conservative and corporate-friendly Supreme Court justice we've had in decades. One of the principal themes of Jeffrey Toobin's recent profile in The New Yorker of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is that the Roberts Court is looking to get rid of one of the primary reforms of the Roosevelt era: government regulation of our economy. As New York University Law Professor Barry Friedman and SCOTUS expert Dahlia Lithwick tell it in this recent piece in Slate, what's particularly dangerous about the Roberts Court is how sneaky it is in hiding its conservatism as it chips away at U.S. citizens' fundamental rights.

And that's only what the three "official" branches have been up to.

According to this recent article by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, prominent members of the unofficial fourth branch of government, Charles and David Koch, who are the almost sole owners of owners of the Wichita-based oil conglomerate Koch industries, have been funding organizations that advocate for lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and less oversight and regulation of industry, as well as funding ones that fight health care reform and economic stimulus programs. They fund Americans for Prosperity Foundation, Tea Party organizations and training sessions, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, as well as many other conservative and/or pro-corporate organizations. One former Koch adviser cited in Mayer's article was quoted as saying,

"They're smart. This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves."

Just as in the Civil War when mostly poor non-slave-owning men were drafted to fight for the Confederacy, it looks like middle and working class white people are allowing themselves to be the lackeys of the powerful, rich, and corporate, even as they are railing against that kind of influence. Although Mayer shows that billionaires, like George Soros, who fund more liberal causes are more transparent and less likely to fund studies and programs that are only self-serving, she still makes the case for the increasing danger of politics, politicians, policies, and programs being bought and sold by a few wealthy individuals.

Matt Taibbi also wrote about the Tea Party with a focus more on its followers than on funders, but he came to a conclusion similar to Mayer's: "The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation."

Now, what to do about all of this? I agree with Chris Hedges that it's not just the G.O.P. and Tea Partiers who are responsible for the current state of affairs, but the Democratic Party too. Lawrence Lessig, a Berkeley law professor, is one of the leaders in the fight against corporate money in Congress. His organization, Fix Congress First is doing good work. The Fair Elections Now Act could also help get us out of this pickle. Finally, Hedges's giving Ralph Nader a voice in his essay is a nod to the idea of moving beyond our two-party system. I don't think that we were quite ready for it in 2000 and the idea that there was no real difference ideologically between Al Gore and George W. Bush was wrong and ended up causing a great deal of harm. But now members of both parties seem equally beholden to corporate interests, neither party has halted the privatization of government functions or adequately upheld the idea that the government, while flawed, is the best institution we have to maintain our democracy and represent the needs and rights of the American people.

The solution may be to move beyond our two-party system, to divide into neo-liberals, liberals, greens, social democrats, moderates, conservatives, neo-conservatives, right-wingers, and the like. But would this even work? Is our two-party system also "too big to fail"? Are we too deep in what Taibbi describes as "an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change"?

Unfortunately, this won't happen in time for the upcoming mid-term elections. For now I feel I've been thrown a small bone. In my congressional district, the 7th of Virginia, Eric Cantor is facing two challengers: a Tea Party candidate named Floyd Bayne and a Democrat, Rich Waugh, a former social worker who has said that he has taken no corporate money. Is this maybe what we could consider a step in the right direction? I hope so.

Rick Waugh, you have my vote.

(photo from Public Citizens photostream on flickr)

It's All About the (Corporate) Benjamins, Baby

2010-09-30T09:41:00.000-04:00

People across the political spectrum are talking about getting corporate money out of politics. I've come to realize, though, that corporate influence is ubiquitous throughout American institutions--it's not just in politics. It can seem tricky to figure out who is funding what, but once we get past the misleading maze of independent- and beneficent-sounding organizations, it's pretty simple: the pool of wealthy people and companies have shrunk down to a few mega-conglomerates and uber-rich individuals. What's been more tricky for me to figure out is how my behavior as a voter, as a citizen, and as a consumer can counter this corporate takeover of American institutions.

A facebook friend recently posted this essay by Chris Hedges. Hedges states that, "There are no longer any major institutions in American society, including the press, the educational system, the arts, religious institutions, and our dysfunctional political parties, which can be considered democratic. The intent, design and function of these institutions, controlled by corporate money, are to bolster the hierarchical and anti-democratic power of the corporate state. These institutions, often mouthing liberal values, abet and perpetuate mounting inequality. They operate increasingly in secrecy. They ignore suffering or sacrifice human lives for profit. They control and manipulate all levers of power and mass communication. They have muzzled the voices and concerns of citizens. They use entertainment, celebrity gossip and emotionally laden public-relations lies to seduce us into believing in a Disneyworld fantasy of democracy."

Hysterical and doomsday-toned pieces like this often turn me off because they are dire to the point of making me feel utterly hopeless, i.e., we're all screwed, so why bother? I understand, though, that such a style can often demonstrate the actual direness of a situation and can light a fire beneath readers. No matter the style, I couldn't help but think that Hedges' piece had an enormous grain of truth to it.

Corporate takeover of American democratic institutions and the development of an American ruling oligarchy is one the defining issues of our democracy's time, if not the defining issue. With this as an introduction, I plan to write a series of blog posts about increasing corporate power over American democratic institutions. Let's just hope, although Hedges might claim otherwise, that it's not the final challenge to face our dying democracy.

(photo by flckr user PaDumBumPsh)

My Adventures with The Coffee Party

2010-09-25T14:30:00.002-04:00

This is a tale I meant to tell months back, but the best laid plans. . .

Last spring, I joined the Coffee Party after questioning the effectiveness of my spending all day calling my representatives, signing petitions, and sending prefab e-mails developed by various organizations and non-profits. (And believe me, a person could spend ALL day doing this. I know because it's one of my top writing procrastination tools: I'll finish my novel after I stop the feeding of chicken feces to cows, prevent babies from being born with hundreds of chemicals in their blood, and help the nine tortured elephants that urgently need me.)

I participated in tele-training, organized a meeting at Ashland Coffee & Tea, tried to recruit people, suffered through my husband's dubiousness about the whole thing, and worked in earnest on starting a local Coffee Party chapter. There were six of us at the first meeting and I had received e-mails expressing interest from many more. We came up with our key issues which were: civil rights, health care reform, education, and too much corporate influence in our government. It was very exciting. I was part of something HUGE!

But then, during a second meeting, I got into a debate with an off-duty member of the Ashland Police Department (I actually know him from around town--we've compared notes on running workouts) about the veracity of Glenn Beck's "journalism," particularly as they surrounded the912project and claims of Obama's socialism. The CP representative for the state of Virginia interjected to say that we were both "right." I didn't think too much of that.

Then, during a tele-debriefing of that meeting I got told that I was being "too confrontational" and not focusing enough on the central piece of the Coffee Party platform: civility. (The lady from LA with the New York accent, talking about taking down Henry Waxman, however, supported me.) And that the best thing I could do was to tell Eric Cantor that I was here and that I was ready to be civil (oh yeah, that will make him change his tune). When I explained to the next CP higher up for the state of Virginia, who was very empathetic, that I didn't think that a non-political political movement would be effective, she responded that many Coffee Party people felt otherwise. "Some people think we should be political, but some people don't." "But aren't you a political, albeit, supposedly non-partisan movement?!?!" I wanted to scream. I mean civility is a worthy type of comportment, but it's not a stance.

The last straw was the CP's use of the pseudo-scientific "Coffee Sphere," which I had drafted my quantitatively-gifted and -trained husband to explain to them was an inaccurate and faulty crap-o-meter. You can read that exchange here. The Coffee Sphere remains in use as tool by the Coffee Party and claims to be "Reflecting America's views: the 15-minute issues barometer to ignite dialog and educated actions."

I continue to be in touch with some of the fabulous people I met at the initial meetings, and I hope that the Coffee Party is successful. Besides their use of the Coffee Sphere, I think they're doing good work, and I appreciate the way that the Coffee Party has gotten so many people to be politically active in a way they hadn't previously been before. But being a part of that organization just wasn't for me.

Since then, I have returned to firing off the prefab e-mails and receiving a daily piece of mail from Eric Cantor saying that I may be rest assured that he will keep my views about health care reform and the saving of the sea turtles in mind. Some of the organizations I think are doing great work are: Media Matters, MoveOn, CREDO, Bold Progressives, ColorOfChange, Change.org, Fix Congress First, American Rights at Work, DC Vote, Rethinking Schools, TrueMajority, Repower America, and Green America. Check them out!

From NCLB to RaTTT

2010-09-13T21:31:00.001-04:00

Just as I love Mondays, I love back-to-school time with its promise of a fresh start, return to structure and routine, and feeling of possibility. Come Wednesday, and February, I usually feel otherwise, but that's a different story. My family is personally having a great return to school, but back to school for me also means back to writing and thinking about education, and I continue to feel discouraged by Obama's education policies.

One of my least favorite of the current administration's initiatives in education is Race to the Top, for which eighteen states and D.C. were named finalists. A few weeks ago, nine of those states (Hawaii, Rhode Island, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, New York, and Florida) and D.C. were awarded a total $3.4 billion. Under Bush, we got NCLB. (No Child Left Behind), which I liked to call No Child Left Untested. There were some positive things about NCLB, for example, it forced school systems to pay greater attention to the education of ELL (English Language Learner) and SpEd (Special Education) populations, and it forced educators to document and pay more attention to achievement gaps among different groups of students, sorted, for example, by race. However, NCLB caused standardized tests to become the centerpiece of the public school curriculum, with much less emphasis on critical and analytical thinking and writing, scientific inquiry, rich experiences with literature, arts education, physical education, and conflict resolution.

Now, we have Obama's Race to the Top, which I like to call Race to the Flop or RaTTT. There are several education academics who don't like RaTTT, either. For example, Dan Willingham, University of Virginia cognitive psychologist and author of Why Don't Students Like School? says it's a doomed bribery scheme, not much of a change from NCLB, and that it's based on ideas that fail to take scientific evidence into account. In these two blog posts, UCLA education professor Mike Rose talks about the flaws of RaTTT as a policy: Part I and Part II. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan seems like a good guy and I think he means well, but according to this New Yorker profile his background in education before working for Chicago Public Schools consisted of helping out in his mom's after school program. Really? Does that qualify him to run a major public school system and then to be secretary of education? Oh, I forgot, according to the same profile, Duncan was a good basketball buddy of Obama's, and he has an MBA, so those must be his qualifications. Now, don't get me wrong, I like Obama. He's a good man and the best president we've had in a long time. But he doesn't know squat about public education and he's outsourced the top education job in his administration to someone who knows only a smidgen more than he does.

The criteria for winning RaTTT funding includes allowing school districts to take over failing schools, improving curriculum standards, encouraging school innovation (meaning lots more charter schools), and retaining the best teachers possible. I don't disagree with these goals, or with the "ends" of Race to the Top. Mostly what I disagree with is the how, the "means."

I think we should have national standards, but they need to be thoughtful and superior to what they'd be replacing. So far, I don't see much evidence of that. Dr. Willingham says that the new standards are solid, but that they neglect to include the crucial step of how they will be achieved. In these other Washington Post blog posts (Part I and Part II), Willingham talks about what else is missing from national standards.

I am not anti-charter school. I think it's good to have some public school alternatives for students who aren't successful in more conventional public schools. I have considered sending my own children to charter schools (and would in the future), and I have considered teaching in them. I can understand why people would want to form them if they feel that they can't get a decent education at their neighborhood schools. But most charter schools can pick and choose their students and can expel them easily, and often families have to provide their own transportation. We should really focus on improving our neighborhood schools first and ensuring that all children have a reasonably close neighborhood school option first.

I don't disagree that the model of teacher seniority and permanent job security needs reform. I, too, think that teachers should be laid off when there are budget cuts based on quality rather than seniority. And teachers should be paid more and be provided with better working conditions. I also don't disagree that many of the current evaluation systems are seriously flawed. But on what basis should teacher salaries be raised, and how should we measure teacher effectiveness? On what basis do you decided quality? Furthermore, how do you classify a failing school? The answer to this, according to Duncan and the architects and supporters of Race to the Top is: test scores, test scores, and test scores. Dr. Willingham says this is a terrible idea and I agree. Test scores mostly tell you about the students who are taking the tests, and not much about who is teaching them. When I taught in public schools, there were certain evaluation criteria that I didn't make, like high test scores, but there were other ways that my administrators had of observing and giving me credit for being a decent and hard working teacher. Now, it seems like some of the new evaluations, such as IMPACT in DCPS, proceed just as the previous instruments did in that they contain arbitrary and ridiculous criteria, such as putting standards up on the walls, but they don't give administrators some space to get beyond the superficial and arbitrary.

This article in the New York Times describes how RaTTT has interacted with the institution of teachers unions. After reading this, I kind of thought, well, maybe these "reformers" have something, maybe I'm just being obstinate in my thinking, maybe I just have a bad attitude. And, yes, I guess that teachers and their unions should join 'em if they can't beat 'em. If this is the way the ship is sailing, maybe educators should climb aboard and make the best of it rather than give up. Maybe they should take a deep breath and understand that this is just a passing fad, hang on to their principles and their concept of quality education until leadership with smarter and deeper thinking comes along and puts our education system on the right track. I'll just hope for that. I'll hope that soon we can get back to focusing on the art, science, craft, and trade of educating, to reforms of quality and substance, that we'll get out of Arne Duncan's RaTTT race, out of the rat race that I, for one, went into teaching to get away from. Let's just hope that Duncan and his groupies don't do irreversible harm before it's too late.

(photo by flickr user Kate's Photo Diary)

Fare Thee Well, Dear Summer

2010-09-05T16:31:00.008-04:00

We went to day camp, art camp, theater camp, science camp, and had swimming lessons. We went bowling, roller skating, biking, and to the library. We played pick-up dodgeball, kickball, soccer, and baseball. We played legos and we read books and magazines. We wrote in our journals (though not as often as we should have). We played board games and we played cards. We went to the Carter Park Pool so many times that the mention merits its own sentence. We went to a Flying Squirrels game, and we visited the Science Museum, the Children's Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. We went to Three Lakes Park and Nature Center and the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens. We traveled to DC, Charlottesville, New Paltz, Lake George, Cooperstown. We witnessed and participated in the wedding of two of our very best friends. We drove all the way down and across the state of Pennsylvania. We hosted family and friends from out of town. We drank gallons of water. We frequented the produce stand and the farmer's market. We ate tons of tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, green beans, peaches, peppers, greens, and more tomatoes. We slept until 7:00 am, 8:00 am, and sometimes even 9:00 am. We said farewell to old neighbors and welcomed new ones. We lost a few teeth, scraped some knees, and suffered our fair share of mosquito bites. We turned 34, 37, 7, 7, and 3.5. Two very happy boys went to Kings Dominion for the very first time to mark the occasion.

We had a glorious summer, but now it's time to get back to the classroom and back to our other work. Camp Mama (and Papa, though he was fairly busy teaching and researching) is closed for the school year. We will re-open on June 17, 2011.

Submissions, rejections, and meta-lit mag pieces

2010-04-14T11:59:00.008-04:00

One of the secrets to becoming a good writer is to be a good reader: to read widely, deeply, and constantly. Although it can work both ways, in general the nonfiction that I read informs the content of what I write, while the fiction and poetry informs my craft. Sometimes, however, simple functional texts can influence my writing.

This past fall, I went on a major submitting spree, which meant I was reading lots of writers' guidelines, so many, in fact, that the format inspired imitation and I coughed up my own (mock) writers' guidelines and got them published in Defenestration.

Submitting work feels goooood. I get a rush every time I hit "send" to e-mail work, click on "submit" to an online submission manager, or mail a stack of yellow 9 x 12 envelopes from the post office. Unfortunately, most of what goes out comes back in: a few months after my submitting spree, the rejections started pouring in. I read and save every single one.

Some rejections are short, but personal and thoughtful. Some are longer form letters, but are thoughtful and encouraging, nevertheless. The next tier down are form letters also, but are shorter--direct but diplomatic. My least favorite come printed on post-it size pieces of paper that are wrapped in 8 x 11 sized offers to purchase subscriptions to the rejecting publication at a "special writers' " rate. (Ooooooo! I get the special writers' rate! I'm in!) The kicker is that they are mailed in the same SASE I provide for a response, so not only am I paying for the transport of my own pithy rejection, I am paying to receive a solicitation, as well. This is kind of like telemarketers charging callees for the phone calls. I understand that these publications are desperate to stay afloat and that the world of literature and ideas needs them, and I want to support them (most of the time I purchase or read at least one issue before I submit), but that's just plain tacky. Anyhoo, after reading so many rejections, I felt moved to compose a (mock) rejection letter of my own, published recently in swink magazine.

Now, to figure out how to get my more serious stuff published. These "Ten Rules for Writing Fiction" found in the guardian.com have gotten me started as did this provocative piece in Mother Jones by VQR editor Ted Genoways. (My comments are found on the third page--I try not to limit my procrastination-fueled nitpicking to facebook!)

Thanks for reading!

(photo by Mike Atherton, flickr username: Sizemore)

I want my, I want my, I want my NYT!

2010-03-16T08:59:00.019-04:00

Has it actually been over two months since I posted? Yikes! Well, after a feverish period of rejection letter solicitation and much hounding from my loyal readers (hahahahaha!) I am here with another post.

I know relatively little about journalism as a field, except for what I read and discuss with those people who are in the know. But I do know the death of newspapers is a much bemoaned topic these days. This report in the Columbia Journalism Review (which I found in a re-tweet of Nicholas Kristoff's) paints a bleak picture of state of the media. And I can tell you how journalism has disappointed me lately: it seems like there are more and more pieces that sacrifice nuance, accuracy, and any acknowledgment of complexity for the sake of a strong thesis and an uncomplicated narrative. Journalistic essays seem to be posing as investigative journalism. Maybe this has always been the case, but to me, it seems worse lately. I am all for a good journalistic essay, but sometimes, I want just the facts ma'am first.

Back in November 2009, in my vaccines & science series, I touted this article in the Atlantic, only to find out later that while the narrative is compelling, the facts and accounts of the science are off.

Being an education person, I immediately saw this article by Amanda Ripley in the Atlantic for what it was: an infomercial for Teach for America. Amanda Ripley is a bona fide journalist who does good work, especially on natural disasters and epidemics, but she seems to be dabbling here. I found this article in the New York Times Magazine to be much more balanced, detailed, and informative on the topic of teaching.

In this piece in the guardian.co.uk, Naomi Klein shows creative thinking and challenged my own, but only once I was able to wade through the sensationalist, conspiracy-theory-minded theme. In this piece in The Nation, Lawrence Lessig does a much better job of showing the insidiousness of corporate influence in American politics. This essay on 3quarksdaily (a blog I read religiously) on a similar theme, is interesting and makes some of the same points that Matt Taibi does in this meticulously researched article in Rolling Stone, but Mr. Strabone's thesis is over-reaching and lacks evidence, and hence fails in the end to be convincing. I later found out that Jeff Strabone is not a journalist or academic with expertise in political science or economics, but an English professor, although to be fair, he does hold a degree in political science and appears to be an active citizen.

This article in Time managed to be both amateurish and condescending; Dan Fletcher decided to decry the faddish but harmless Doppelganger Week on facebook by comparing it to groupthink, a most disastrous and ill-thought out analogy.

Finally, I hate to pick on Nicholas Kristoff because he's a good guy, a great journalist, and, you know, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, but this hysteria-inducing column on BPA (bisphenol A) was full of misinformation, which is evident in the comments, where several people more knowledgeable than Kristoff set him straight. Lately, I've noticed more and more columns in the Washington Post and New York Times that are written like model A.P. essays, which may be a triumph for a high school student trying to place out of Expository Writing 101, but looks rather jv on the editorial page of a major newspaper.

Why is this happening? I don't blame the journalists here and I don't meant to bash them. First of all, it seems like as journalism is being replaced by the likes of blogs and opinion-based "news" (think of words that rhyme with "crocks lose"), journalists are being driven to publishing bits like the ones I was critical of above because of pressure from investors and the need to compete with publications like The Huffington Post, which, by the way, while flush with funds, pays their columnists and bloggers $NOTHING. Smells like exploitation to me. (To get a beautifully-researched whiff of Ariana Huffington's hypocrisy, check out this article about Fiji Water in Mother Jones.) Furthermore, it seems to me that as news publications are forced to cut positions, journalists are forced to abandon specific areas of focus or expertise, spreading themselves too thin. Michael Kinsley argues in this Atlantic piece that many newspaper articles are simply too long.

Personally, I am praying for the the rejuvenation of investigative journalism. A healthy democracy needs strong investigative journalism and we need journalists who are trained and experts in what they do. We bloggers can provide analysis of and links to journalistic work, but we shouldn't try to replace journalists. And I know many journalists maintain blogs, but if they're done right, they serve as a forum for expansion and discussion of their work.

We need to start reading and supporting again publications that feature investigative journalism and stop getting our news from the likes of Fox News and The Huffington Post. We need to get used to the idea of paying for our news again or donating to non-profits that will, and we need to start paying our news reporters in a way that matches the importance of their work (I used to think teachers were paid poorly until I saw reporters' salaries). Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe! Despite ripping on two Atlantic articles here, I just recently ordered a subscription. And I unsubscribed from The Huffington Post--until they cease their sweatshop-labor-like practices, I encourage you to do the same.

Let's leave the investigating and reporting to journalists and the dabbling and blabbing to us bloggers.

(photo by flickr user Ricardo Francone)

I had a miscarriage and gave birth to a poem

2010-01-06T22:51:00.018-05:00

In mid-December of 2005, I had a miscarriage. I was about eleven weeks along when it happened, so I hadn't told the world yet that I was pregnant, but I had gotten the old maternity clothes down. Now this isn't going to be a poor-me-I-had-a-miscarriage story; I am not in the business of trying to rattle the fertility gods who have been more than generous to Cedar and me. I've only had the one miscarriage and at that point I already had twin boys, Caleb and Liam, who were conceived spontaneously just a few months after I went off of birth control.

I've heard stories of pregnant women intuiting that something is wrong with their pregnancies. This may well be in hindsight, but during this pregnancy I did not feel totally right. I had almost no nausea and just didn't feel, well, pregnant. But because I had an inherently high-risk twin pregnancy and because I had gotten severely ill when I gave birth to them (which is another story), I reasoned, faultily it turns out, that I had nothing to worry during any subsequent pregnancy; I figured I had earned a get-out-of-miscarriage-and twins-and-other-complications-free card. So when I started spotting, I was optimistic that it was just normal bleeding. Then the bleeding continued and intensified, and I went in to see my ob/gyn and she confirmed that I was, indeed, having a miscarriage. Sitting in her office that day, I was definitely bummed, but I kind of thought of the whole thing as akin to a dental procedure--you make an appointment for it and it happens and it's uncomfortable and unpleasant, but then it's over after a few hours and you go about your day. "Will I still be able to work while it's happening?" I asked, thinking that making sub plans would be a real drag. She paused and looked somewhat disturbed and responded tentatively, "Well, some people do." Translation: You have no idea what you're in for, do you? Two days later, I was so weepy and distraught, I could barely drive myself to her office for the examination I needed to have.

At this point, once the miscarriage was really underway, I realized no way could I have worked. Luckily, I shared my classroom with a sympathetic, supportive, and talented teacher and she agreed to cover my classes. But then a major snow storm came that night or the next day, so the schools were closed for a long weekend and it turned out I didn't have to make those pesky sub plans, or attempt to teach E.S.L. and World History to ninth graders while my body purged itself of a botched pregnancy.

I also remember telling my and Cedar's family and our friends about it in the beginning and feeling pretty self-satisfied with myself for being so rational about and comfortable with it all. "It's how nature works," I explained. "It meant there was something seriously wrong with the embryo and so it wasn't meant to be," I reasoned. "I have two already and I'm happy with them. It's just a bunch of dead cells anyway," I reassured them and myself. Of course, I still knew all of that when the great purge really began, and I still know it and then some (with the gift of perspective), but once it was really happening, I felt much differently. Soon, I was cramping, contracting, bleeding, sobbing, and grieving.

Even so, in the world of miscarrying women, I was one of the lucky ones. Besides having the weather elves on my side, I had excellent medical care and my caring husband, my two boys (just seeing and being with them during that time cheered me up), and a very supportive group of friends by my side. Plus, it all happened naturally: I was able to go through most of the process in the privacy and comfort of my own home, I didn't have to take a pill to jump-start the process, and I didn't have to have a D&C (Dilation and Curettage) at the hospital (where they essentially extract the dead embryo from you). I didn't even get to the point where I felt I needed to take the percocet prescribed for me. Part of me wanted to, to treat myself to a percocet high(Mmmmm, percocet), but the other part wanted to be all there, all present, to be a responsible mother to this little being, which maybe never was a being, but in the case that it was, to accompany him or her in sobriety to wherever it was they were off to next.

So the real point of this post is to share a link to a poem that was accepted and published recently in Literary Mama that I wrote about the physical and emotional experience of the miscarriage itself. The piece started as a series of free writing and was gradually whittled down to the essential narrative and images. The version published in Literary Mama, though, was not the original one. The editors suggested I cut out the first five lines, feeling that "the opening material acts as a preface and weakens the poem's urgency." So even though it was painful to sever a limb from my poem, I decided they knew what they were doing and to trust their judgment.

Looking at it on Literary Mama's page now, I am fine with that change, but I feel like I could have tinkered more with the formatting; for example, adding mores pauses and white space within the poem. That being said, when I was in the process of writing the final versions, I chose a block form without much white space to recreate the sensation of that experience being a blur, with one moment running into another. Also, I wanted to create the sensation of being surrounded by water, by liquid, because that's what it felt like, emotionally and physically: the tears and emotions and the waves that they came in but also the event of the miscarriage itself started small but then grew and became like a storm, the contractions rhythmic like the tides of the ocean. Finally, I was sending the embryo out into the water, into the sewage system, actually, the idea and images of which serves as the heart or climax of the poem. It was very hard for me to get past the fact of just flushing it all down the toilet; it seemed so heartless, so inhumane, so flippant. At the same time, there was no other option and no way to preserve anything for a ceremonial burial or anything like that--there was just so much well, stuff, coming out of me and I had no idea which part of the "product" was the actual embryo (or even what to call it).

Before I share the poem, I want to stress that all of this has a happy ending. The day I found out I was pregnant again (with Amelie), was the due date of the miscarried baby. Even if I had not had another baby after that for whatever reason, I'd like to think that I would not have considered the miscarriage to be a tragedy or anything of the sort. Liam and Caleb would always have been enough, more than enough (those of you who have spent more than five minutes with us know what I mean).

I know this probably contradicts some of what I said in the recent posts that emphasize science and reason, but it helps me to make sense of what happened: I feel like that miscarriage happened for a reason, to bring Amelie to us. We all love her so much and she brings so much magic into all four of our lives that I actually feel grateful that I had that miscarriage. I also know that so many women have them (something like 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage), that I feel like it was a rite of passage for me. Of course I have the luxury of feeling this way--perhaps I wouldn't were I on miscarriage number five; it's simple and easy to have just one. But I really learned from the experience and gained wisdom from it and was humbled in a positive way.

So, here's the published version:

http://www.literarymama.com/poetry/archives/2010/01/it-has-a-mind-of-its-own.html

Thanks for reading. And thank you, universe, for my wonderful life.

(photo by Robin Macklin)

Spellbound

2009-12-01T13:02:00.008-05:00

If there's one thing I have learned from all of the writing I've been doing recently it's that I can't spell. It can sometimes take me up to five tries before I give in and consult with Merriam-Webster on-line (I don't normally advocate for on-line reading--I struggle with it myself, but the subscription is well-worth it: no paging through a book, no having to replace the dictionary each year, plus several references in one place). Sometimes I am so off that even Merriam-Webster doesn't recognize the word.

When I was in Mrs. Abbott's second grade class at Hyde Elementary School in D.C., though, I thought I was hot shit because words like "geography" appeared on my weekly word lists, which we had to write sentences with, spell ten times over, and then make a story out of. I credit Mrs. Abbott with getting me started with creative writing. She also taught me how to spell dessert (rather than desert): there are two s's in dessert because everyone always wants a second helping.

During my writing in November, I kept track of the words I had a particularly troublesome time spelling. This list of twenty is dedicated to Mrs. Abbott:

1. Everyone misspells entrepreneur. I even misspelled it again writing this.

2. Behemoth sounds exactly like what it means, but spelling it isn't so natural.

3. The spelling of combative should be obvious, but for the longest time I thought it was "combatative." I think Cedar actually corrected me several times on this, but I wouldn't listen.

4. I'm not sure why I have trouble with charlatan, It's really a beautifully and perfectly spelled word, which is maybe why my tendency (there's another one that always gets me!) is to misspell it. Also the word reminds me of Charlemagne, who was no petty charlatan.

5. I first wrote ilk as elk. I mean, don't elk follow the herd mentality, too?

6. Foolproof went through various incarnations, like scientific studies aren't "full-proof."

7. I wasn't aware of the u in fluoride, probably because I never learned how to spell fluorine, probably because I didn't study much in my chemistry classes.

8. For the longest time I thought that acetaminophen was acetametaphin. It's so much catchier that way, isn't? There are also many opportunities to go wrong with the vowels in the -minophen chunk of the word.

9. The two p's, one r, and two s's in suppressed are too much to keep track of.

10. I should have been able to spell nutritious on my first try, but I tripped over the "iti" bit.

11. Is it dialogue or dialouge? I can never remember and probably won't remember a week from now.

12. Vacuum is a great word and one of my favorite activities, but I dread spelling it. Are there two c's? two u's? Two m's? I can never remember. Someone give me a pneumonic (spelled that one on the first try) device for this one. Please!

13. I just have to remember that accommodating can accommodate two c's and two m's. But that won't help me to remember to not try to put a's in the o's spots.

14. Why is it marshmallows? Who in God's name doesn't call them marshmellows? Nobody says marshmallow. I'd wager that majority of you just found out it was -mallow and not-mellow.

15. Ensconced fucked me up for a good day or two before I figured out how to spell it. Even once I had the correct spelling in front of me, I couldn't see where I had gone wrong. The first n is nearly silent, and then all of the soft c, soft s, and hard c sounds get all mixed up together.

16. It is hard enough to know when to use phenomenon or phenomena. I had to say to myself idiotically slowly: fe-no-me-non to spell it correctly.

17. Who knew about that sneaky little first i in plagiarizing? Not I.

18. Six years of French in junior high and high school, plus three in college including a year abroad in France and a French studies major and I still couldn't spell vinaigrette. The second i was a revelation to me.

19. I've bought balsalmic vinegar so many times, you'd think I could spell it by now. Why all of the toothless l's?

20. Exceedingly is part of the accede, antecede, cede, concede, intercede, precede, recede, secede, exceed, proceed, succeed, supersede group. Patricia O'Connor in Woe is I calls them words with "seedy endings." I agree.

I hope I don't learn to spell well anytime soon--I'll loose another one of my procrastination tecniques.

(photo by flickr user elginwx)

Another Haiku on Politiku, a Clarification, and a Brief Follow-up

2009-11-20T19:54:00.010-05:00

A few follow-ups from my last post:

1) Another haiku of mine is up on Susanna Speier's Politiku. Exciting! This one is about, you guessed it, the H1N1 virus and vaccine. I even got to work a bit as a co-editor with Susanna on her post and haiku choices.

2) It may seem from the following paragraph in my last post that I am equating other types of medicine such as chiropractic adjustments, massage therapy, and acupuncture with pseudo-science:

"Natural medicine is all the rage right now. Part of this is simply brilliant marketing--'all natural' products and curing our ailments 'naturally' sounds instinctively more purifying, wholesome, healthy, and safer than the 'un-natural' alternatives. Herbals and vitamins can be key to good health and there are conditions, like chronic back pain, that conventional western medicine doesn't handle well and that chiropractors, acupuncturists and massage therapists handle in much less invasive and less medicated ways. But many pharmaceuticals are made from herbs and ingredients found in nature. And natural doesn't mean safe: poison ivy is natural and so are rattle snakes and so is hemlock."

With poor clarity of ideas and poor organization in that paragraph, I can see how that would come across. What I meant to say is that while I am suspicious of products that toot their "all-natural-ness" specifically for the purpose of marketablity (and not because there's some proven health benefit to their having that quality) and while I don't agree that "all-natural" medications are automatically superior to "non-natural" ones as many consumers seem to believe these days, I think that there are some unconventional (and often non-western) medical treatments, practices, and ways of healing that are valid and even superior in some cases to those conventional western medicine has to offer. Moreover, western medicine has a lot to learn from the emphasis of those practitioners on maintaining health and preventing illness first and foremost over simply reacting to illnesses after they happen. That being said, I believe that it is unprofessional, unethical, and irresponsible when and if such practitioners advise their patients to entirely renounce conventional western medical treatments, especially ones that have proven successful.

There are places where science and medicine diverge. My concern is with medical and health practitioners who claim their treatments and protocols are valid according to the scientific approach, when they clearly aren't. Science, unlike art, is not a malleable concept. Unlike beauty, science is not in the eye of the beholder. To me, science doesn't seem to be a relative term. More on this later, maybe . . .

3) This New York Times article is about a case where scientists are advocating for fewer tests and procedures, less spending, and less medical intervention, based not an any political or economic agenda, but on findings from research. These findings show that the benefits of the current testing protocols may not be worth their cost and the harm they cause. This article also illustrates the divergence between medical scientists and practicing medical doctors. I can see how women's groups would see this recommendation as an attack on women's health care, the advancement of which has been hindered by discrimination against women, and I acknowledge the influence of politics and economics on medical science, but I don't think that's what is behind these particular findings.

The Accidental Science Advocate

2009-11-12T22:27:00.018-05:00

While Cedar is ensconced at the Mayflower Hotel this weekend attending an A.P.A.-sponsored science advocacy meeting in D.C., I'm at home ensconced in my wobbly-backed, duct-taped office chair playing single mom to our three young children and doing bootleg science advocacy, and seeing if I can synthesize these three blog posts plus pages and pages of notes and e-mail exchanges into a succinct and presentable essay about vaccines, distrust of the mainstream medical community, pseudo-science, and the like. (I can't seem to stop thinking about all of this, but I am telling you, scientists and doctors, I will soon go back to being primarily a cranky mother and solicitor of rejection letters. After this, you're on your own and I return to reading my horoscope every day!) At least my mom is here to help out, correct my grammar, and tell me my blog entries are way too long.

First things first. In my last post, I plugged this article in the Atlantic as a good source on the swine and influenza flu vaccines. That may have been premature. It's still better than anything Russell Blaylock has to offer on the subject, mind you, but according to my peeps over at Effect Measure there are some definite errors in journalism. Please don't ask me exactly what those folks are talking about because I have no idea. I'm not literate in science-geekese, particularly not when it's spoken with a strong epidemiologist accent (yeah, like I even found that blog myself). I also found that this recent book review by New Yorker journalist Elizabeth Kolbert does an excellent job of addressing the topic of "all the information out there" (although she doesn't include the example of vaccines).

As a result of my last post, I have been sent to wade through some more anti-vaccinators, such as Kent Holtorf, Jane Burgermesiter, Gary Null (the producer of the self-funded documentary Vaccine Nation), Joseph Mercola, and a video from the National Vaccine Information Center. Honestly, they all scared the crap out of me. Which is good because it meant that after I had listened to them, I figured out why I shouldn't have. Plus, like Mrs. Anders, my favorite middle school substitute teacher, taught me when she made me argue on the pro-life side (for the record, I prefer anti-choice) of a class debate, it's always a good experience to challenge your own knowledge and beliefs, and to see another perspective. Now that I've done that, next time they come at me, I'll know right away to clap my hands over my ears and sing loudly Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me with Science."

Like Russel Blaylock and Rauni Kilde, most of these people have absolutely no real medical or scientific credentials, and they are neither trust-worthy nor credible on matters such as vaccines. Kent Holtorf was labeled as an "Infectious Disease Expert" by Fox News when he blasted the swine flu vaccine (not to mention he was a contributor to Fox News). Meanwhile, he's not even certified in internal medicine according to reddit.com, a good skeptic site. Joseph Mercola also nixed the swine flu vaccine, saying that a good dose of Vitamin D would do the trick. On her site, Jane Burgermeister invites believers to donate to her "criminal legal fund," which she ostensibly uses to sue organizations like the United Nations. Quackwatch (the name alone makes me giggle), my favorite pseudo-scientist-busting site, gave me good reasons to doubt the claims of Null and Mercola. I didn't explain this in my previous post, but just so we're clear, pseudo-science means fake science. It's not a field within science, like earth or life science.

This brings me to a key point, which is not that these people are nut jobs or astute profiteers or not credible, but that their claims are not part of a scientific dialogue and in this way, they are disavowing the scientific approach. The views of pseudo-scientists are not a legitimate "side" in any scientific debate. In the arts and humanities, it is possible to be isolated from one's field and still contribute to knowledge, but science doesn't work this way. And these folks don't even study natural medicine; they sell it. They have a vested interest in getting us to distrust the mainstream media and medical community, so that we'll buy their vitamins and products, and are just as motivated by greed as the big pharmaceutical execs. And they're not merely controversial, they're frauds. Their research may be slickly presented, well-written, and full of compelling anecdotes, but it's not scientific research. They have done absolutely no studies at all to prove their claims or that their own treatments work; they are accountable to no one, and there is no oversight or peer-review over their "research." I accept that some of these folks have some expertise in nutrition and living healthfully, but I whole-heartedly reject pseudo-science. I don't accept the "scientific" views of Christian fundamentalists or Scientologists or televangelists, either.

People admire Burgermeister and Koltorf because they supposedly speak truth to power. They may be speaking to power, but they ain't telling the truth. When health care entrepreneurs promote their products, saying that they can cure cancer, advise people who are HIV-positive that there's no way they can contract AIDS, and discourage people from using fluoride toothpaste, they are being irresponsible and dangerous, and obscure any real expertise or credibility they may have. And they contribute to a false dichotomy between promoters of common-sense good health measures (which most members of the mainstream medical community are) and the scientific and medical community.

This video by Richard Dawkins.net does a fantastic job of explaining what I mean by the scientific approach, although I must renounce their clumsy association of superstition with Native American rituals. You're not furthering your cause this way, scientists. I know you people are socially awkward, but do you really want to be culturally awkward as well?

So, why are people turning to pseudo-science to help inform their medical and public health-related decisions?

For one, there is deserved suspicion of the pharmaceutical companies. But while those companies and other health care companies have certainly earned that distrust, as this Gawker post by Foster Gamer and recent New York Times article about recent price inflation show, I'm not sure that the scientists who work for those companies have, or that all the doctors who prescribe medication have, either. In general, the paranoid thinking about this is too simplistic; it implies that the government, research scientists, medical doctors, and pharmaceutical companies are a monolithic entity, when in fact, none of those four groups alone even operate as monoliths. Furthermore, greed is always a motive, but the truth is profitable too. Look at the success of Prozac and Viagra. If those were ineffective or if they were ever found to be dangerous, those companies would lose buckets of money.

Natural medicine is all the rage right now. Part of this is simply brilliant marketing--"all natural" products and curing our ailments "naturally" sounds instinctively more purifying, wholesome, healthy, and safer than the "un-natural" alternatives. Herbals and vitamins can be key to good health and there are conditions, like chronic back pain, that conventional western medicine doesn't handle well and that chiropractors, acupuncturists and massage therapists handle in much less invasive and less medicated ways. But many pharmaceuticals are made from herbs and ingredients found in nature. And natural doesn't mean safe: poison ivy is natural and so are rattle snakes and so is hemlock.

The all-natural movement includes the belief that our society over-medicates, that many of the diseases that we're vaccinating against are harmless, and that we should stop vaccinating so that our immune systems can learn to fend for themselves. I agree that as a society we over-medicate, but that is a separate issue from vaccines. A vaccine isn't really medication. Yes, we need to build our immune systems up and yes, we should avoid antibiotics as much as possible and in general expose our kids to colds and other viruses, but those infectious diseases can be really, really dangerous. I had chicken pox and I am not worried about my own children getting it and bouncing back, but chicken pox can hurt or kill immune-suppressed members of our communities. In any case, I don't think the infectious diseases we vaccinate against in childhood are as harmless as some think they are. Unscathed survivors in our parents' and grandparents' generations were lucky. Plenty of others weren't so lucky, including my uncle who has one leg shorter than the other and my aunt who is deaf in one ear, not to mention all of the people who were killed by the likes of German measles, polio, mumps. Look at how many people malaria (an infectious disease against which there is no vaccine) hurts and kills every year. Finally, vaccines are designed to strengthen our immune systems, not to weaken them, so the idea that we shouldn't have vaccines because they'll weaken our immune systems isn't logical. Vaccines just allow us to build up our immune systems minus life-threatening diseases and massive public health crises.

Many people have had negative experiences with the mainstream medical community (I know I have) and that community has understandably lost their trust. In some cases, doctors practice bad medicine, turning to hefty drugs and surgery when there are less invasive and more cost-effective treatments. But most doctors encourage their patients to eat sensibly, exercise, get enough sleep, and avoid stress and smoking. Unfortunately, some people get severely ill despite maintaining a healthy lifestyle; they can't be treated or cured by common-sense good health measures and vitamins alone.

In other cases, doctors aren't responsive to patients' or parents' concerns. For example, following a well-child visit and some vaccinations, my son Caleb was running a fever, had a bad diaper rash, wasn't sleeping, was crying a lot, and we were having trouble consoling him. I called the on-call doctor from our pediatrician's office and found myself talking to a very exasperated man. I was very upset by the way he spoke to me and reacted to my concerns, and I wrote a strongly-worded letter to the practice the next day. It wasn't that he was wrong or that what was happening with Caleb had anything to do with the vaccine or that even if it did that it was cause for medical concern; he was just an asshole. But our frustration should be with medical training that neglects bedside manner and empathy, and not with the science behind vaccines. In cases such as these, doctors should first respond to our concerns and reassure us, and then present us with rational facts, rather than handle the situation with patronizing dismissal.

In other cases, patients and parents are frustrated with uncertainty. Medical doctors are trained as scientists and as such, can speak in vague probabilistic terms, which can come across as uncertain and uncaring, but patients want certainty in answers, diagnoses, and treatment plans, and doctors don't always have that. Pediatricians behave as they did with me because there's absolutely no evidence that vaccines cause certain reactions, and scientific evidence, and not hunches and intuition, is what doctors are trained to consider. When parents want to know definitively why their child has gotten severely ill, isn't developing normally, or has autism, and vaccines are an easy target. (An aside: I don't actually think that the incidence of autism has gone up; rather, its diagnosis that has gone up. The boundaries of an autism diagnosis used to be narrow and now they're vast, so it seems like autism is on the rise, but relatively speaking, I doubt that it is. Jody Becker shed some light on this in her October 2009 article in the Atlantic: “Behind the Autism Statistics.”)

When doctors are poorly trained, arrogant, or don't have the answers, it's easy to run into the arms of reassuring and confidently certain pseudo-scientists. It's easy to mistake the uncertainty for incompetence and the dismissal for dishonesty. But in those cases, we should seek out more knowledgeable and empathetic medical professionals, not vitamin salesmen. We need to vet our doctors, to get recommendations, to research them, to choose them carefully. And if they're not practicing sound medicine, or lack a bedside manner, then we should go elsewhere.

Scientists and doctors have a way of communicating that's unsettling and turns their patients and the public off, but before we dismiss their findings, we should consider how scientists think and talk, and then place their findings and comments in their proper context. I am not saying we shouldn't question orthodoxy, be skeptical of public health officials or the pharmaceutical industry, or choose our doctors carefully. But there are plenty of scientists and medical doctors with relevant expertise who challenge medical orthodoxy, but in a legitimate way. And they give their kids vaccines, and many are just as paranoid and just as concerned about their kids' health as the rest of us are. Some examples of doctors (and excellent writers) who challenge and work to improve the practice of mainstream medicine while holding fast to the scientific approach are: Jerome Groopman, Atul Gawande, and Marcia Angell.

I have a happy ending to this tale of accidental science advocacy. A reader I had been wrestling with over this topic ended our conversation recently by sending me this article about the history of the vaccine and autism scare, telling me what a great resource it is. I'll remember this pay-off next time I shoot a manuscript out into the black hole for the umpteenth time. Hopefully, that same persistence and stubborness will pay off then. In the meantime, I may not always understand science, but, and some scientists may roll their eyes at this, I have faith in it.

(photo by Justina Kochansky, flickr username: Articulate Matter)

The Great Vaccine Follow-up (and Swine Flu too!)

2009-11-05T10:30:00.012-05:00

Since my last post, "The Great Vaccine Debate," (which was spurred by a recent article in Slate about the dangers un-vaccinated children pose to children and adults with suppressed immune systems) I have received some interesting feedback and comments, which I thought I would share. I continue to think about the dimensions of the issue myself. I've been watching a lot of The Daily Show lately and Jon Stewart's persistent criticism of mainstream media television outlets, such as Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, is that they boil down news and current issues to two sides squaring off against each other, giving each side equal weight. This seems to be happening in the vaccination issue as well. People think that both sides are equally (scientifically) valid and that whatever people decide should be respected by the other side. First of all, there shouldn't really be sides here as much as claims that have qualities and quantities of evidence. Second of all, many of these same people (on the far left, at least) wouldn't agree that there are two valid sides to global warming or to abstinence-only sex education, for example, and would see deniers and abstinence-only zealots as being anti-science. But being anti-vaccine is being anti-science in a very similar way. Also, not vaccinating against infectious diseases means deciding to put vulnerable people and public health at risk and that's, well, dangerous, and very hard to respect.

Here is what other folks had to say:

The author of the article, Stephanie Tatel, sent me this quote from one of the parents on the pediatric leukemia list-serve she's on, referring to her son who finished his chemo treatment, "My son is permanently immune deficient. He also has autism. I will run for the nearest vaccine, anytime. Hysterical vaccine worriers have never sat by their child's bedside, unsure if he would make it through the night. "

One friend who is very active in the pro-natural childbirth, pro-breast feeding and pro-local food worlds told me, "The broader discussion of vaccinations is fascinating, for the reason you cited: why is it that rational, educated, smart people refuse to believe science? So often I hear the argument that our bodies know how to fight off disease, which is similar to the argument I've told mothers about drug-free childbirth. What is getting missed in that discussion is that people for thousands of years died from those diseases: their bodies cannot fight the bugs all the time. And while most of our bodies can birth children naturally, I've yet to meet a mother who would turn away the skills of modern medicine if and when she has a complication. I've never heard of someone refusing a midwife's decision to transfer, for example. Sadly, the group that tends not to vaccinate also tends to be the pro-breastfeeding, pro-natural birth, pro-organic, local food group. I often feel that I'm in an awkward place within my local circle--seeing otherwise smart people make a poor choice because one issue is closely bound with others that they believe in. How to get them to broaden their view? This article is a good start. Otherwise, talking, talking, talking."

Another friend who is a resident in internal medicine at a major research hospital said, "As you can imagine, I have many discussions with patients regularly on what they do or don't want to take and the value of scientific literature. The question of community good is another level that doesn't usually come into play but adds another level of complexity and importance."

A science and environment journalist said, "There is nothing like wading into the whole vaccination debate to get the blood pumping. Take it from me, the person who gets to write about things like this, climate change, autism, stem cells, plus a whole host of other scientific issues that get people all riled up and emotional. Rationally presenting facts does nothing in many of these circumstances."

But I feel a stubborn need to keep rationally (albeit sometimes emotionally) pushing paying attention to the facts. This past week, I got into some conversations on facebook about the flu and H1N1 vaccines, and since I was fresh from this other debate, I was chomping at the bit. This vaccine is new and and I think people are right to question its safety and effectiveness. There is good reason to suspect the big pharmaceutical companies. In these matters government institutions can be inefficient and incompetent, and also inappropriately influenced by the drug companies. I'm not saying we should all rush out and get the H1N1 or flu vaccines without careful consideration. But that doesn't mean we should give in to pseudoscience and misinformation, either. We should think critically about these matters, but get our information from reliable sources with the goal of making informed decisions.

I'm not quite sure why I am wading into all of this; I am no scientist. I got my worst high school grades in science courses and in college while taking an introductory chemistry class, I did a little science experiment of my own. Problem: Can I pass this class? Background Research: The class is known for being easy and straight forward. Hypothesis: Yes, I can! Experiment: Take two exams; study for the first and not for the second. Results: Only a few percentage points higher on the one I studied for, but failed both. Conclusion: No, I can't, especially if I'm too lazy to do the (granted, low-weighted) homework assignments or go to the TA-lead help sessions. Other than conducting some amateurish social science research and taking a statistics-for-teachers course during my master's degree program (and those were my least favorite parts of the program) in education, I have no background in science or social science research. I am susceptible to being overly influenced by emotional and irrational fears and conspiracy theories, especially if they are well presented. All that being said, I have been raised to consult with the best evidence, thinkers, scholars, professionals, experts, and researchers to get at the truth and to make the most informed decisions possible (and to research the sources before I consult with them) about how to vote, how to eat, how to treat illness, how to raise my children, how to spend money, how to maintain good health.

This article by Russell Blaylock, M.D. spurred one of the discussions about the H1N1 vaccine. I flipped out when I started to read it, but then I stopped and asked my very rational, scientifically-trained, smarty-pants husband to read it and let me know what he thought. Here are his thoughts, "Some of his points are no doubt true. And the flu vaccines (seasonal or H1N1) are a different issue than the other vaccines, for which there is near absolute medical consensus. But he is cherry picking the evidence, and accepting certain studies which confirm his viewpoint, while not accepting others that don't, and then distorting the evidence. The NIH and NEJM are pretty clear now that the vaccine works, maybe not as well as the other vaccines, and maybe the consequences of not taking them aren't quite as strong (H1N1 does not seem to be lethal like polio). But according to this study, it still works."

Cedar also pointed out that Blaylock has insurmountable credibility issues, "He is a total wacko right-wing nut job who thinks that the Soviets invented crack cocaine, MS is caused by aspartame, and that his special vitamins can prevent your brain from aging. You should read his Wikipedia page, but not for the page itself, but for the fantastic links to some of his more bizarre writings." The last thing he told me was that the web site that the article was published on was an organization founded and chaired by Blaylock, which lacks any peer review or oversight. The article is well written and sounds authoritative, but it's all him; there's no scientific or medical consensus behind what he's saying. There's no consequence to him if he's wrong, whereas major publications have at least some vested interest in being balanced and supported by solid evidence.

Another facebook friend posted this You Tube video featuring Dr. Rauni Kilde's thoughts on the swine flu and its vaccine. This, too, freaked me out until I realized she was not actually speaking cogently and until I read about her background and figured out the woman was in a serious car accident and suffers from mental illness.

I am disturbed by the number of people who are willing to accept the ideas of people like Blaylock and Kilde without question and by how quick they are to distort the arguments of those who do question or attempt to refute them. With access to the internet there is so much information that is so quickly available on any given topic. In turn, it's quick and easy for us to spread that information around. This is a wonderfully liberating development in many ways, but it is also dangerous. We need to make extra certain that the information we're reading and passing along is reliable and that it has been vetted. Consulting with professionals, experts, academics, journalists, and (qualified) bloggers is essential. And we need to vet those folks, too. When it comes to topics like the vaccines, we should be skeptical and ask questions of our scientists and government, but in that case we need to be skeptical of the skeptics, as well. This piece from NPR's Weekend Edition gives an excerpt from New Yorker science and technology journalist Michael Specter's new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, represents both what I'm trying to get at in this piece and also may be an example of a reliable source. I say "may be" because I'd have to read it or what a New York Times book review has to say about it first.

Speaking of reliable sources, I found that these were worth consulting on the subject of vaccines:

1) The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has a great Vaccine Education Center.

2) a recently published article in Wired magazine on vaccine hysteria.

3) this conversation about the hysterical public reaction to the death in Britain of a 14-year-old girl, and the media's role in that, who coincidentally had had the vaccine for cervical cancer immediately before she died.

4) an article in Wired on the history of vaccine panic.

4) this article about the flu and H1N1 vaccines in the Atlantic.

5) this recent opinion piece in the New York Times advocating for the consideration of gender differences when producing vaccines (H1N1 and otherwise).

Please let me know if you know of any others. After this, I plan to return to writing about politics, education, and food. This commentary by Mike Rose in truthdig about ill-conceived trends in education reform is a good place to start, or you can read about the infinitely important topic of salad dressing on my food blog.

Procrastication via compulsive facebooking can, in fact, lead to a blog post: The Great Vaccine Debate

2009-10-22T13:38:00.017-04:00

When I am not taking care of my children, and heck, even when I am, I write. But I will do whatever I can to avoid actually writing. My kids' clothing is perfectly laundered, folded, and organized; the dishwasher doesn't go more than five minutes of being full before I run it; and more than one crumb in the dining room is cause to vacuum the entire house. I have also started to compulsively submit my work, so if you or anyone you know works at an obscure, or not-so-obscure, literary journal, chances are I've heard of their publication and they will soon receive a brown envelope full of lame writing from yours truly. I jump at the chance to make comments and have debates on facebook about whatever: grammar, reality television, vaccinations. I should probably get a job. In the meantime, after reading and posting a friend's article in Slate magazine about the dangers to other people of neglecting to vaccinate our children, I got involved in a few stimulating discussions on facebook. One friend had posted the same article on her facebook page. I may be the only who thinks this, but the conversation spurred by the article and her posting of it was fascinating and important, and hey, at least I can get a blog post (which masquerades these days as a valid piece of writing in my book--no pun intended) out of it.

Please note that I have edited the conversation of meaningless personal banter and have done some light copyediting. I also have only supplied the initials of some of the participants to protect the privacy of those besides myself, Cedar Riener, and the original author of the article, Stephanie Tatel.

Here it is:

S.L.: After doing a lot of research, my partner and I decided not to get most of the traditional vaccines for our kids. I am more than a little put off by the author's dismissive tone when she attributes decisions like ours to "fear" and "unproven danger." I am exceedingly sorry that her son has leukemia, but can't begin to understand why she thinks I should take that into account when deciding what is best for my children.

Rachel Levy: Well, um, with all due respect, I think the bigger point is that when deciding what's best for the health our children, some of the decisions we make affect others while some don't. For example, I could decide not to brush my kids' teeth or get them fluoride treatments at the dentist's office. That's probably ill-advised, but I could do it without putting anyone else's health at risk. Unfortunately, when people decide not to vaccinate their kids, it does put the health of those in their community and greater society, especially those who are younger, older, weaker, and more vulnerable, at risk. And I 'm sorry, but I haven't seen any research that adequately proves that taking that risk is medically necessary or ethically acceptable (with the exception of the risks vaccines pose to those with weak or non-existent immune systems).

E.M.: Just as living in society means obeying rules (red is stop, go is green) it also involves being responsible--herd immunity is not a myth.

Cedar Riener: I think what Stephanie is referring to in the "fear and unproven danger" is that the scientific data is resoundingly in support of vaccines being worth the very small risk that they pose. Maybe "fear" is an emotional exaggeration of the decision process of those who do not vaccinate. However, if you re-frame that decision as "doing one's research and coming to the conclusion that the risk associated with taking the vaccine is greater than the risk of not taking it" then you still have to somehow describe it as rejecting the data and evaluation of the scientific and medical community in favor of some other source of evidence. Whether you apply emotional words such as fear or distrust, or others that might be more neutral, what a decision to not vaccinate amounts to is a rejection of the modern scientific method and an acceptance (and prioritizing) of other evidence, whether it be an ideology, or anecdotal evidence. In other cases, this rejection of scientific consensus (say, with evolution and intelligent design) does not have direct consequences on the safety of our community, but this does. What's more, the more people that reject the scientific consensus, the more dangerous it is for the rest of us. I don't see how there is any doubt in that. Perhaps the better analogy is environmentalism and climate change. Many who reject environmentalism also doubt the science, as well as the importance of considering common goods in individual decisions. In this way, I don't see how the logic of environmentalism differs in any important ways from the logic of vaccination.

S.L.: First of all, thank you for a mutually respectful discussion. I wish the author of the article in question had a similar approach.

What I hear you saying is that vaccines should be mandated in the name of public health. That suggests that the risk posed by those of us who decide not to use certain vaccines is so dire that parental rights should be overridden. Clearly, I disagree.

Some vaccines we get for our kids, some we don't. We did not make this decision because of something Jenny McCarthy said on Oprah, or even based on discussions with friends and family. We did our own research and had long conversations with our family practitioner. We read accounts both in support and against the notion of vaccinations and made, what I believe to be, informed decisions.

There is scientific evidence to suggest that certain vaccines are not worth the associated risk, or are superfluous in modern society, and, yes, there is scientific evidence to suggest that parents like us are nothing more than irresponsible.

My kids are vaccinated against pertussis, but we do not get them flu vaccines. When friends of our son had the chicken pox we sent him over there to play. You might make different decisions for your kids and I respect that.

Are couples who decide to have home births attended by midwives rejecting "modern scientific evidence"? Perhaps you'll say that such a choice may not pose a public health risk, but might traditionalists not argue that it puts the baby's well-being at unnecessary risk?

I believe we all have a responsibility to the society-at-large, but my primary responsibility is to my children. My parenting decisions must be informed by their affect on society, but not dictated by them. As of yet, I have not heard compelling enough arguments, or seen compelling enough data to suggest I am being irresponsible or overly cavalier.

Rachel Levy: Just so we're clear, I am not including flu shots in my discussions. As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on their effectiveness and on their benefit to general public health.

I don't think that vaccinations should be mandated. But I do think that those who don't vaccinate (unless they demonstrate a medically necessary reason) should be required to take precautions when coming into contact with the general public and that perhaps they should be prohibited from taking part in public schools.

I'm not sure the associated risks you speak of have been established. If you can cite valid, scientifically rigorous studies that show they have, I would love to read them. Which accounts and studies did you read to inform your decisions? I don't care how many you read--I care about their quality. And I don't trust accounts in lefty versions of Fox News, even if they were written by educated liberals who voted for Obama.

Why are certain vaccines superfluous in modern society? Because we eradicated those diseases by way of vaccination. Those diseases still exist in less developed societies. Unfortunately, thanks to people who don't vaccinate, diseases like polio are making a comeback even in societies where they have been eradicated. Is that really what we want to return to?

I think the homebirth/ mid-wife analogy is not particularly instructive to the vaccination debate. For one, most midwives are professionals who use science/biology/medicine to inform their practices. And I have not read enough evidence that midwife-attended births cause any risk to the baby being born. Even if it does,we're talking about a decision/action that affects the health of population as a whole, so I'd ask before we go further that we stick to that topic or to relevant analogies.

S.L.: I thought I WAS sticking to the topic and citing a relevant analogy. Obviously you disagree. Furthermore, while I did vote for Obama and tend to exist left of center, I do not generally watch TV news, nor do I rely on Rachel Maddow to make my parenting decisions for me.

Since I'm at work and don't have access to my library, I will have to respond later to your question about my research sources. There are two, however, I remember off the top of my head:

1. Our family physician with whom we had numerous extended conversations. I assume he counts as a "professional who use science/biology/medicine to inform [his] practice."

2. One of the books I best remember is Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent's Guide by Aviva Jill Romm.

It feels like your position is that there are not two valid sides to this debate.

Clearly, disease is still rampant in underdeveloped nations and I should have clarified my point about "modern society." If my family was living in a place with a much different level of sanitation, infrastructure, medical care, and public health oversight, I'm sure we would have gotten more of the vaccines. As I said, we chose to get some vaccines, but not others.

S.G.M.: S.L.- ALL the arguments you made are on a personal level. You weighed and measured the risks and benefits for your own children and decided not to vaccinate.

What Stephanie writes about in her article, the reason I posted this article and what I believe Rachel agrees with is that there is another element that should be included in our decision to vaccinate. We must think of others and society at large.

In fact, one can even infer from your last paragraph that disease is NOT rampant in the United States. But at various times it was. The reason it isn't now is because of vaccinations. That is why public schools require students to be vaccinated.

I strongly believe that we ALL have a responsibility to think beyond the walls of our own homes.

R.M.: Hi there. Imagine what our society might have to contend with if a majority of children do not receive vaccines. Then, the safety net will have disappeared. In other words, by feeling safe in a choice not to get vaccinated one is relying on the immunity of those who chose to do so. There is some tipping point, however. Is that acknowledged and identified by any of the research relied upon by those choosing not to vaccinate their kids? If, say, 25% of the population is not vaccinated, would it then no longer be considered "safe" not to be vaccinated? Or is it 10%? Or 2%? I'm not an epidemiologist (in fact, I can barely spell it), but I do know that one of the primary reasons the flu is so dangerous every year is because the virus called "the flu" is brand new, every year. We don't possess the antibodies necessary to fight it. And so it spreads from one system to the next, which it must do in order to flourish. (This is the only reason Ebola virus hasn't brought about the apocalypse: its victims don't survive long enough to spread it.) I note this not to support flu vaccines, but to demonstrate what happens when our population is invaded by a virus against which it has no defense. According to the CDC, the flu kills 36,000 people, every year on average, in the U.S., a place where "employees must wash hands."

Hand-washing, sneezing into an elbow crook, soap and other simple measures are invaluable defenses against infectious illnesses. But look out on your left for that un-vaccinated person thoughtlessly sneezing in your direction!

Rachel Levy: My point about lefty versions of Fox News was not meant to put down people with left-of-center views who voted for Obama. (I voted for Obama and my views are much further left of his policies) or even to put down all television news--the News Hour is fantastic. And I like Rachel Maddow. Lately, though, it seems to be trendy among some left-wing educated liberals to eschew things like, oh, the government, public education, science, and vaccinations, which is interesting because Fox News and the people who watch it eschew things like the government, public education,vaccinations, and science, too... (I am meandering illogically off topic, I know).

Back to the topic at hand. I'm not going to pussyfoot around this: it's true, right now, I don't see that there are two valid sides to this debate. I also don't believe there are two valid sides to the Creationism vs. Evolution debate, or the Homosexuality as a Choice vs. Homosexuality as Innate debate, or to the World is Flat vs. World is Round debate, either. And I've never believed that the idea you get could AIDS from hugging or kissing someone who had it was valid. So far, I think that the arguments against and the evidence used to argue against vaccinations are comparably flimsy, cause comparable ignorance, and spread comparable misinformation.

Which is not to say that the vaccination debate shouldn't occur or that that parents should not know about and talk about the risks or side-effects or that they don't exist at all. Or that there shouldn't always be people questioning the necessity and benefits of vaccinations. A healthy society is a skeptical society.

S.L.: I respect the three of you and will give thought to all that you say.

I am no ideologue and don't "eschew" any of our institutions, including science and medicine. I do, however, try to consider all available alternatives as much as it is realistic to do so.

I am aware of the "herd immunity" debate, and suppose that on some level I am taking advantage of it. On the other hand, I have had exactly one flu shot in my adult life. "One" also happens to be the same number of times I've had the flu. I also believe that it was the development of vaccines coupled with advances in sanitation, food safety, preventative care, etc., that has led to a reduction in disease.

I do consider the world outside of my insular family when making decisions and taking actions. It is something we stress to our children and one of the reasons they are at a Jewish preschool. Call it tzedakah, tikkun olam, or just doing what's right and realizing that you are part of a whole. Is our decision regarding vaccinations in opposition to this? I've never thought so. I'm not sure if this conversation will change that, but I will definitely bring it up with my partner.

As my son has gotten older, we have chosen to catch up on some of the vaccines that we skipped when he was little and will probably do the same for our younger children. Perhaps, as I look at this more closely, it is the proscribed schedule of vaccines for the very young and the sheer volume of vaccines to which I object more than the general idea of vaccines.

I also have to admit to being weary of the swine flu cautionary tales. Perhaps, I am over-compensating in reaction to what I see as reactionary. In talking to my doctor regarding whether to get H1N1 vaccines for our kids, he suggested that much of what we are being served is over-hyped.

Rachel Levy: With our third child, we decided to space out the shots a bit more than is normally done. I've been told this wasn't necessary, but it made me feel more comfortable.

I think you and your doctor are right to wonder about the swine flu--it's all so new. We are puzzling over that decision ourselves, although we are leaning towards getting the vaccine, both for swine and the "regular" flu. I found this article on the subject to be helpful and informative:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200911/brownlee-h1n1.

Stephanie Tatel: Hello, friends. I have hesitated to weigh in here, but R.M. asked a really good question about how high vaccination rates must be to provide herd immunity - I have heard that for measles and meningitis, for example, you need at least 95% of the population vaccinated. I am attaching a great article from the CDC website that describes what the consequences would be in our nation if people stopped vaccinating against infectious diseases such as MMR, pertissus, meningitis, polio, among others. It really sends home the message that this is a PUBLIC HEALTH issue, not simply a matter of personal choice. Also, we have to remember that although we enjoy low rates of these infectious diseases in comparison to other countries in particular the developing world, our borders are fluid: Most measles outbreaks in the USA have come from someone getting infected overseas and bringing it back to a community where there is a certain threshold of un-vaccinated people. This is also true for polio. This article will also provide more links to other very informative and reliable articles from the CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/whatifstop.htm#measles.

J.F.:Hey everyone. My wife and I were just reading this discussion and wanted to weigh in on one part of this debate that hasn't been discussed. I have to second much of what S.L. wrote: the decision to vaccinate, or in our case not fully vaccinate is not one we make lightly or on a whim. The risk of disease for our children and public health is important to us, but there is a risk of injury from vaccines; there's a reason there is a fund that exists to compensate children injured or killed by vaccines. And while many people believe the question has been resolved on whether vaccines play a role in autism, for many in the autism community, the jury is still out because there have not been any/enough valid studies on this issue. We know many parents of children with autism who saw their children regress into autism just days after vaccination. One of our son's doctors informed us that she absolutely believes that our son's seizures were brought on by a particular vaccine (his seizures cause him to stop breathing so they are life threatening if they are not controlled). We believe a major culprit in people's fears over vaccination is the drug companies' role. People are suspicious of companies that profit from mass vaccinations and use dangerous preservatives such as mercury--this has finally been removed from most vaccines, but the fact that it has been removed indicates some admission that it was not safe to use--and it still widely used in the flu vaccine. There are other adjuvants used such as aluminum and formaldehyde which bring up health concerns. My point is, with all that modern science is capable of, blame should not be directed at parents who are legitimately concerned about their child's well-being, but rather at the drug companies who haven't come up with a safer way to vaccinate.

Rachel Levy: Hi J. I am sorry about your child's seizures and about your friends' experience with autism. If one of my own children seemed to be affected negatively by a vaccine, I might be singing a different tune right now. The only thing I can say is that I don't think anyone here is denying that vaccines aren't without their side effects or real dangers. But the children of people who opt not to vaccinate (unless they have a medically solid reason to do so) aren't any more likely to experience those side effects and rare reactions than the children of those who do vaccinate are; we're all taking the same risks. And the main result and side effects of not vaccinating for the major diseases, unfortunately, are contracting the major diseases on a mass scale. And, yes, the drug companies are not always (or even usually) benevolent actors. I can understand why you'd say anger should be directed at them and I can understand that drug companies have done much to erode the public's trust. But don't the people who work for the drug companies get their children vaccinated, too?

I do want to address the mercury concern. I posted this article on my fb page too, which led to another lively comment thread. I learned this: "Thimerosal is ethyl mercury, not to be confused with methyl mercury. Methyl mercury builds up in the food chain, and potentially in your body, and causes neurological damage. Ethyl mercury gets cleared from the body pretty quickly. Also, to put things in perspective, there is 28 mcg of mercury in a tuna sandwich and about 25 mcg in a flu shot." I also learned that The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has a great website about vaccinations: http://www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety.

S.L.: I've been thinking about this conversation a lot since signing off yesterday. I wonder if the "herd immunity" aspect of it comes down to this: At what point should decisions about the greater community override decisions about one's own family.

I assume you would all concede that our first responsibility as parents is to our children. So if one firmly believes that skipping certain vaccines is what is best for one's children, but vaccinating them is what is best for the larger community, then doesn't the community benefit have to be fairly extreme to trump priority one? Can we say that there is now a clear indication of such?

Rachel Levy: It's clear that if over 5% of us stop vaccinating that these diseases will return on a mass scale and cause a massive public health crisis. So, there may not be an extreme community benefit right now, but if over 5% of the population isn't vaccinating, then one will soon be created. The consequences of not vaccinating a certain percentage of the population will be that many, many people will get very, very sick and that many, many people will die.

Yes, some people should be medically and ethically exempt from vaccinations: people with compromised immune systems, those likely to have allergic reactions, those who have already had extreme reactions (like J.'s child) and probably the siblings of those who have had allergic or extreme reactions.

Otherwise, it's not a matter of proven personal necessity--you're deciding that your children are more important than someone else's children. Because beyond the categories I mentioned earlier in this comment (and perhaps some others I've missed), we're all equally likely (or highly unlikely) to experience an extreme reaction to the vaccines. Tell me,why is one child more important than another? Why is one child of more value? How do you decide that? Why does he/she have more of a right to avoid the risks of the vaccine than someone else?

And, your belief, no matter how strong, that your child will be negatively affected by the vaccine doesn't change the actual chance that your child will be negatively affected by the vaccine. The chances stay the same, no matter what you believe. Let's say there's one umbrella for three of us who are outside. Only one person can fit under the umbrella. You say you should get the umbrella because you strongly believe that it's going to rain. It's cloudy. I think it might rain, but I'm not sure. In fact, what we believe doesn't change the actual chance or likelihood that it's going to rain. And if it does rain, I'm going to get just as wet as you are. Let's say that there's a relatively high chance that the third person is going to have some pretty dire consequences if it rains and they get wet, but we wouldn't have any consequences beyond experiencing some discomfort and a very, very small chance that we'll catch a cold, and even smaller chance that we'll catch a cold and then get much sicker. Yes, that third person should be granted the umbrella and the two of us should be willing to get wet and take the tiny risk that some other factors could come together to make us sick.

Cedar Riener: I agree with S.L. in that at some level, this is an instance of the commons dilemma (in which short-term self interest runs counter to long term community interest). However, I think in this case the actual risks and probabilities are crucial. That is, thinking philosophically ignores the importance of the concrete details in this particular matter. The short term personal risk is small and the long term community risk is great. Ultimately a large problem is the disagreement of the scale of these two risks. And despite the fact that I am not in general a fan of drug companies, I am adamant that the source of evidence should be properly conducted studies, not anecdotes, or personal experiences. We can agree that placebo-controlled, double-blind studies are the standard for deciding the safety and efficacy of drugs. The reason for relying on this method is that bad things happen to people on the placebo, and people spontaneously recover on the placebo, and left to our own devices, many people would interpret individual instances as being caused by a placebo, given our penchant for finding patterns where there are none.

Ultimately, the chances of getting autism from a vaccine (which have not been confirmed, despite many studies trying to find a connection) must be compared to the risk of getting the disease that it vaccinates against (like pertussis, which is experiencing a resurgence).
Unfortunately, as J. points out, for many, this does come down to a lack of trust. Scientists, who may be funded by a drug company, do a study on vaccines using data from 100,000 people, use accepted methods and evaluation procedures and publish their findings in a top peer-reviewed journal. Many readers are hung up on the fact that the study was funded by a drug company rather than the methods of the study itself.

I think this issue also cuts deeper than just distrust in drug companies, but also the lack of trust in any journalistic institution. We may decry the rise of Glenn Beck, but if we on the left had a responsible media source that we trusted, we would all vaccinate our kids, because anyone who actually knows the science in this case would tell us that there is no contest, we should vaccinate our kids.

Anyways, I'll sign off, but I'll just add that pseudoscience has always been popular and well-funded, but that is no indication of its grasp of the truth.

S.L.: Cedar, I think that for me there is one other aspect of weariness at work. I feel like there is a tendency in this country to over-medicate our children whether it be antibiotics or ibuprofen and I guess that the plethora of vaccines recommended to us seems like part of the same dynamic. I am in no way adverse to giving my children prescription meds if required, just as we have chosen to get them certain vaccines (pertussis is one example), but there are other lines of defense that seem under-utilized and often ignored.

Cedar Riener: S., I absolutely agree. This is another of my frustrations. There is a wealth of rigorous research on the bad effects of stress, or the influence of diet and exercise on health, but we are constantly looking for a pill to solve whatever ails us. I guess in this case that is why I refer to the medical consensus, which in this case seems to point to many vaccines being more like the prescription meds, but even more so, since the general decision to administer vaccines to the whole population passes through many more levels of consideration and evaluation than one doctor's decision to treat one child with a particular med.

It seems like my personal decision in this case has such clear public health consequences (and a lack of personal consequences), while my preference for local organic food doesn't have quite that direct effect (although there are certainly eventual public health repercusions of our food choices).

E.M.: As a hospital administrator in the NYC public hospital system, I have access to "in the minute" information from the NYC Dept of Health.

I say that because I saw a notice today that there is an outbreak of mumps in a single Brooklyn neighborhood - over 55 cases so far. This is what can happen when herd immunity breaks down!

I don't think people should depend on others to maintain the health of the community - it is a communal responsibility.

Stephanie Tatel: Thanks for that great example of how the herd diminishes. As far as the link to autism, the original Wakefield study that claimed a link has been totally discredited and all of his co-investigators have recanted their statements on that study, and subsequently at least eight valid and reliable studies have come out since then disproving the connection. Now, are vaccines, like ANY MEDICATION, without risks? No, but no one, not even ME, is saying that. Here is a link to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that J. mentions, http://www.hrsa.gov/Vaccinecompensation/statistics_report.htm, which details by year the number of people compensated for their medically proven vaccine-related injuries. You will see that ALL cases of autism were dismissed, meaning there was no medical evidence for a connection between the vaccine and a child's autism. Are there sometimes injuries? Yes, but they are far outweighed by the number of people who get very sick (and sometimes die) from vaccine-preventable infectious diseases. Are vaccines 100% effective? No, but that has been known about vaccines since they were invented. BUT it is TRUE that vaccines have in some cases such as small pox, eradicated disease, and in others such as measles and pertussis reduced their incidence significantly. You cannot argue with that fact. But now with the increasing number of people who are not vaccinated we are losing that safety net. And now one more word about risk and medication: NO medication is risk-free, and I understand the consequences of taking those risks. When my son was diagnosed with leukemia, I was thrilled, to say the least, that modern medicine offered a treatment (with NO guarantees, mind you, and PLENTY of risks.) One of his medications, one very crucial chemotherapy agent, caused him to have a massive stroke. He won't get that drug again. It, along with many other drugs that he has had and will have, carry risks, risks that our doctors tell us about. We assumed those risks. You might say, "Well I assume the risk of disease in my child when I chose NOT to vaccinate," but I am merely asking the readers of my article to keep in mind that they are also assuming the risk of disease to other children. I am not comparing chemo to vaccines--do not make that mistake about what I am saying. I am merely saying that no one is arguing that there are not risks associated with medication, such as vaccines. This is NOT the point I was making in my article, but rather the effect to the community at large of a diminishing herd immunity with regard to vaccine-preventable diseases; this has been very clearly established by the many recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease in non-vaccinated people. You can look up these cases on the CDC website I provided earlier. For the remainder of this discussion, can you PLEASE provide some sources of information for your position? Otherwise it's just hunches and intuition. And please let me reiterate, I don't dispute that there are risks involved in medication and I don't dispute that most people, myself included, think of our own children first. I mention these two things because in every contrary response these two elements are cited over and over again to the point that the discussion is no longer being furthered with regard to herd immunity and vaccine-preventable illnesses.

E.M.: I also want to mention that in 1964 I lost my best friend to German Measles which progressed to encephalitis. She was a teacher who most likely contracted it from one of her students. That was the last big GM outbreak before the vaccine for GM was released. That is what a "harmless" childhood disease can do. As I said, I believe in the effectiveness of herd immunity.

Rachel Levy: What a great and vital discussion this is. I think this will be my last comment on this thread. I am wondering what we can do to get the members of the anti-vaccine movement to listen to the science. I think herbalists know a lot about herbal medicine, which is valid for some medical treatments, but immunologists and other scientists who study infectious diseases are who we should be listening to on protecting ourselves from infectious diseases and on maintaining public health. I have found in these conversations that when I present the science over and over again and hit a wall, I turn to engaging the ethical considerations (hence, the zany umbrella analogy), which I realize can be distracting and unproductive from the primary consideration, which is the science. With vaccination and public health, we have a very small margin of error and only a few people should ethically and medically be allowed to take advantage of that. My question to people who don't vaccinate is why should they be able to take advantage of the safety net? What is their medical reason? And what is their ethical reason? Short-term self interest and exceptionalism do not provide a solid ethical justification. I suppose the problem with that logic is that I am assuming that members of the anti-vaccine movement acknowledge the following: that there is only a small margin of error, that the serious risks associated with vaccinating are infinitesimal, and that in order for us to maintain our current level of public health as many of us as possible must participate in vaccinations. Also, ultimately, in being selfish and not vaccinating, these actors are actually acting in opposition to their own interest, and the interest of their children because if we don't all participate, they will get sick and die too. But in order to truly weigh these ethical considerations, they have to buy into the science first. So, back to my initial question, how do we get people who are in many cases rational, educated, modern people to trust and accept the science?

Because if you're basing these decisions on a belief system (you spiritually believe that the toxins in the vaccines have a high chance of doing your child serious harm) rather than on science and logic (which has proven that vaccines in the vast majority of cases do not do serious harm and that, in fact, not vaccinating on a group scale does do serious harm), then you're adhering to fundamentalism and behaving as a fundamentalist would.

(photo by flickr user tansengming)

I got a politiku published!

2009-10-17T19:46:00.004-04:00

One of my oldest friends, Susanna Speier, has a project she blogs about for the Huffington Post called Politiku. She comes up with a topic--usually related to recent news--and then puts out a call for submissions of haikus. The most recent topic was Obama's Nobel Peace Prize and she included one of my submissions! Susanna was by far my most intellectually creative and interesting childhood playmates and I'm thrilled to be back in touch with her (thank you, facebook) and to be a part of one of her publications.

To read my politiku, click the link here.

Obama's Controversial Speech to Schoolchildren that Wasn't

2009-09-09T08:54:00.013-04:00

I am all hot and bothered over President Obama's speech to schoolchildren yesterday, September 8, 2009, and it's not because the (actually rather bland) speech turned me on. It's because of all of the dramatics surrounding the speech. I procrastinated writing this post, or producing any other type of writing I should have on my first full day of childcare, by picking debates on the topic with people on facebook.

I think we can all agree that the idea of Obama's addressing the nation's schoolchildren to stress the importance of education is a fine one. That he was going to "indoctrinate" the children or "brainwash" them with his "Socialist" (I wish!) agenda is laughable. And there is absolutely nothing in the content of the speech that is political or harmful. But by giving these right-wing extremist ravings coverage, the media was able to stoke the fires of polarization. Unfortunately many liberals took the bait, obscuring what were valid reasons for school districts to show the speech, but also valid reasons to opt not to.

The speech was a decent one with an admirable focus, but to ask the nation's educators to make time during the first day of school for this speech was asking too much. I know the first day in my classroom was always a very important one, one where I was worked damn hard to establish myself as a challenging teacher my students could trust and to establish my classroom as a safe and stimulating place. The last thing I would need on that day would be for some politician, even if I did vote for him and even if he were a Democrat, to be beamed in on the television pontificating in the same predictable educational-inspirational sloganese students hear all of the time and see plastered on the hallways of public schools: work hard and stay in school and achieve your dreams and don't talk back to your teachers. Then you can get accomplished, rich, and important like me and send your kids to private school so they can avoid being with riffraff such as yourselves (okay, that was cheap, that's his personal life, but wait, one-third of the speech was premised on his personal life, so perhaps the topic is fair game and I have to wonder if he nixed giving the speech in a D.C. public school because he imagined the irony of telling students to stay in a school he wouldn't send hs own daughters to). But back to the topic at hand. I have my own way of telling my students why my class is important and I don't need the President to do it for me. Furthermore, does he have any idea what it means for a principal to stop the school day and air a speech? How disruptive that could be? Obama says the most important thing in any student's education is the quality of the teacher they have, so I am perplexed by his beginning the school year by usurping those teachers' time and supposing that twenty minutes of his words would suffice to snap the nation's schoolchildren into shape.

I am glad that my own first graders weren't plopped down in front of a television the first day of school. They were busy enough keeping their teachers' names straight, avoiding getting lost on the way to the cafeteria, and remembering their bus numbers. Furthermore, I think the speech was fine for secondary students but I'm not sure it was appropriate for younger elementary school students, and I don't know what they would have gotten out of it. Hanover County, Virignia, Public Schools published this statement, which brought on accusations of being politically motivated and "anti-Obama." Maybe the school board is full of Republicans and maybe their statement was coded language for "we are not exposing this arugula-eating socialist to our students because he's going to brainwash them and we have a gubernatorial election coming up and don't want to give the Democratic candidate any kind of advantage," but I don't think so and even if that were the case, I still agreed with the spirit of the statement. (Hey, I wouldn't be above showing the Obama speech if I thought it would help defeat the rabid right-winger McDonnell.) I thought Hanover County's, and other school districts with a similar approach, handling of the situation was perfectly reasonable and appropriate: it may be disruptive on the first day and we don't want to pressure our teachers and principals; we are recording the speech, making instructional materials available, and letting the teachers decide when and how to show it. If teachers can prepare for showing and discussing the speech without having to also prepare for the beginning of school madness, then they can tie it to their curriculum and lesson plans, then actually the students would get more out of the speech than they would otherwise. I wish the Obama administration would have done the same thing and also consulted with educators to see what would be the most meaningful and least intrusive way to give the speech.

I appreciate him asking our nation's schoolchildren to work hard and to contribute to our society, and honestly, I would not have protested had it been aired in my kids' school and I might have shown it to my own students were I teaching right now, but it would have been better to do so in the context of a major historical event or the unveiling of education policy initiatives. How about promising to fix the problems of No Child Left Behind? I had plenty of E.S.O.L. (English for Speakers of other Languages) students who were told to work hard and stay in school and they did so until they figured out they had little chance of passing the standardized tests they needed to to get a high school degree and dropped out (speaking of which, was the speech made available in translation for E.S.O.L. students? In sign language for deaf students?) How about talking about pressuring our colleges and universities to make the college admissions process more equitable and not based on someone's ability to pay for SAT-prep classes? How about promising to de-emphasize high stakes testing and the low quality education that ensues because of it? How about talking about how our students perform and are employed relative to other industrialized countries? Obama doesn't have much new to offer about education policy: as I explained in my March 23, 2009 post, his administration's policies are rather more of the same of what we saw from Bush.

The speech had some inspiring moments and some nice rhetorical flourishes and I'm sure at least some students learned something from it. I liked what he had to say and reading over the speech before writing this blog piece, I liked it even more, but it's hard for me to get past the lofty empty cliches and the speech was nowhere as powerful as his masterful Philadelphia speech on race , his gracious presidential acceptance speech, or his rousing Inaugural speech. I hope his health care speech today is better. To me, the speech and the hoopla surrounding it amounted to much ado about, well, nothing significant, or as a friend of a facebook friend commented, "to quote my daughter, 'Yeah...some guy talked to us on the tv about a bunch of boring stuff.' " With all of the test prep Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wants, aren't our nation's schoolchildren exposed to enough boring stuff already?

I have an essay up at Mamaphonic!

2009-08-27T09:56:00.003-04:00

This is one of the first essays I wrote when I started writing seriously again. It was for a non-fiction writing workshop. It has been through many revisions (more than I'm sure were worth it) and has been rejected by many publications. But I finally found a home for it. Thank you Mamphonic!

Check it out:
How I Found My Writing Mojo

I agree with Diane Ravitch!

2009-08-05T10:55:00.005-04:00

Wait a minute, did I just say I agreed with Diane Ravitch? When I was in Ed school ten plus years ago, I seem to recall associating her with Reagan education policy initiatives which I associate with eliminating the Department of Education which I associate with a slew of illogical conservative ideas. But maybe this is all getting mixed up together in a ed school associated readings-writings-research blur. The important thing is that I agree with so much of what Diane Ravitch is saying NOW about the current state of public education policy, particularly in this interview with John Merrow.

Obama's education policy ideas continue to disappoint me.

A follow-up to my most recent post

2009-06-04T16:26:00.005-04:00

One of the elements of Obama's education policy that I took issue with in my most recent blog post was tying teacher pay to student performance on standardized tests. I still think this is a bad idea! In that post, I cited University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham's video about the teaching of reading skills at the expense of content area-studies. Well, just recently Dan released a video about the unfairness of tying teacher pay to student test scores. It's worth a look: it's only three minutes and is much more concise than the arguments people like me go on and on making.

Enjoy!

A prose poem of mine got published!

2009-04-20T16:09:00.003-04:00

Here is a link to a satirical piece I got published in Defenestration, an on-line literary magazine dedicated to humor. Be forewarned that it's quite different from the work I normally post here:

http://www.defenestrationmag.net/

What's Wrong with Obama's Approach to Education

2009-03-23T22:26:00.003-04:00

In President Obama’s recent education speech, he proposed the creation of national standards, more accountability and merit-based pay for teachers, a longer school day, increased funding for special programs, and expansion of charter schools. He showed that he recognizes the vital role that education plays in a vibrant society and that he is serious about funding our schools. However, his ideas don’t reflect an understanding of the teaching and learning process at its best, or of how to build public institutions that would offer high-quality education.

Merit-based pay as well as the method for designating schools as failing or passing would most likely be based, as it has been since the enactment of No Child Left Behind (N.C.L.B.), on standardized tests. Obama’s policies as stated in his recent speech would continue the misuse of standardized tests that is already under way and reinforced by education “reformers” like Arne Duncan, our current Secretary of Education, and high-profile school chancellors (And, what, by the way, is up with this change in title? What happened to good old “superintendent”? Are we trying to emulate the British university system and its reinforcement of classism?) such as Joel Klein of the New York City Public Schools and Michelle Rhee of the D.C. Public Schools. Jeremy Miller’s account in the September 2008 edition of Harper’s Magazine of his year as a Kaplan coach in New York Public Schools paints a depressing picture of how, under Klein's watch, millions of dollars each year are taken away from New York City Public School classrooms to line the pockets of test-prep companies like Kaplan (not to mention the time taken away from teachers to teach content) while students’ education suffers. Miller's story also caused me to wonder if there might be a connection between Joel Klein’s cultivation and close mentorship of Rhee and The Washington Post’s (which owns Kaplan) incessantly glowing reports of Rhee and decision to remove from their beat Metro desk education reporters too critical of her tenure. Might there be a lucrative contract in the future for Kaplan at D.C.P.S.? Perhaps not, but at the very best, the Post is guilty of lazy and sycophantic journalism, and of the same short-sighted thinking Obama is.

Standardized tests do serve some purposes: with other tools, they should be used to help diagnose a student’s current academic abilities, strengths, and weaknesses; to help inform teachers’ teaching of their students; and, yes, to help measure student progress. Standardized tests are a fact of life—for better or worse, they are not going away any time soon. Normally, those who score well on them are those who come from backgrounds of education, power, and affluence. To fail to prepare the children who do not come from similar backgrounds to take and score well on such tests would be doing them a disservice. That being said, the test itself should be one of many measures of a student’s progress, of a school’s quality, and of a teacher’s impact and effectiveness; the tests and their results should be a means to a quality education, and not the end. I do not want a doctor who was trained to score high on his medical board exams but who lacks hands-on medical experience or knowledge of how to work with patients; likewise, I do not want our nation’s children to finish school knowing how to take and score well on a test but without being practiced and versed in critical reading, thinking, and analysis; scientific research; creative composition and interpretation of art, music, and writing; mathematical problem solving; knowledge of geography and history and their patterns; active civic engagement, and making healthy choices. Very few standardized tests currently measure the type of knowledge I just described.

If Obama wants to treat teachers as the professionals they are, he should start with not simply dividing them into “good” and “bad.” Surely, an intellectual like President Obama can be more thoughtful. Teachers have areas of expertise and interests; they have strengths and weaknesses. Why not talk about a system that builds on teachers’ strengths and strives to resolve their weaknesses and that finds the best ways to put their interests and areas of expertise to use? Sure, there are some teachers we could call “good” and some we could call “bad” but such descriptors are not productive, nor do they do justice to the complexity of what leads a teacher to be successful or not. Moreover, most teachers didn’t start out being effective or ineffective; they started out being passionate but inexperienced. I wish Obama and his reformers would first conduct an examination of how public education systems work effectively and how they work deficiently and dysfunctionally, how they turn inspired teachers into “bad” and ineffective ones. How do under-performing systems make those teachers that way and how do more successful systems work to produce more effective teachers? Until we can answer those questions, we'll just fire “bad” teachers and replace them with those doomed to become the same.

Obama called for nationalizing standards and benchmarks. With input from educators across the country, this could be a good idea. Currently, standards across the country differ such that some states’ school systems make the grade where others don’t. Common standards might also keep each state from having to reinvent that wheel every few years, and increase mobility between states for teachers and students, including into out-of-state colleges and universities. Some decisions, though, about funding priorities or curricular content, for example, should be made locally; each state, county, and municipality comprises different cultures and serves different populations.

A longer school day could have a positive effect, but only if it includes enriching academic activities, outdoor education, the arts, sports, and some choice for students, and a isn’t longer simply to accommodate more dreary test-based math and reading drills, short-changing other forms of knowledge. According to University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham, time for reading skills is already taking over time for content-area studies and as he puts it in this short video, teaching content is teaching reading. Also, a longer day may be difficult for the youngest students for whom even six or seven hours of structured activities is already too long.

Talk of more funding for programs such as Head Start is encouraging; however, the spending need not stop with primary schools. Programs like Title I Reading, for example, are phased out by high school. Even students who score well on reading tests need help with how to read a biology textbook. Speaking of secondary schools, the high drop-out rate, which Obama is concerned about, increased when N.C.L.B. and its emphasis on high-stakes testing came to town, particularly among Latinos (whom he singled out by the venue of this speech) and English Language Learners, who struggle to pass the English-language-centered standardized tests needed to qualify for a high school diploma. A return to using those tests to diagnose and inform teaching, rather than to inform the curriculum and unfairly stigmatize, might encourage those in danger of dropping out to stay in.

Charter schools are desirable on a limited scale, but we need to strengthen and re-invest in our neighborhood schools first. As the number of charter schools increases, they begin to displace neighborhood schools, undermining the communities those schools help to facilitate. Obama commends charter schools for being labs of experimentation and progressive thinking. Why can’t we experiment and be progressive in neighborhood schools? In the Oakland Unified School District, where my two sons attend school, neighborhood schools must use the Open Court Reading Program even if educators at those schools haven’t found the program to be successful or effective. High-scoring schools, such as that of my sons, are allowed some space to be creative with such programs; they can use programs like Open Court as they should be used: as a tool to see where their readers are and to teach reading skills. When it comes to having a rich experience with literature, they are free to use more complex and complete reading materials, which Open Court does not offer. Schools with lower test scores, however, are forced to use Open Court in a rigidly scripted way and are not allowed to supplement with other more interesting books and authors. Charter schools, on the other hand, don’t have to use Open Court at all--they can choose the materials, pedagogical approaches, and curricula that they feel most suit the students they serve and most fit the mission of the school. Why not give neighborhood schools this same latitude?

Tying teacher pay to students’ performance, especially to standardized test scores, only sets up perverse incentives that don’t encourage teaching or learning. A study highlighted in the book Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt showed that bonuses tied to test scores resulted in high rates of cheating. How does Obama define “progress” and “failure” anyway? What is due to teacher’s failure and what is due to the circumstances of students’ lives and communities? Didn’t a focus on short-term incentives recently lead an entire sector of our economy to ignore long-term realities? Current standardized tests scores tell us mostly about the educational background and socio-economic status of students who are taking the tests; they tell us very little about how they’re being taught. Looking at the scores of students at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C. (where I taught), one would conclude that it was full of “bad” and lazy teachers. Not true. Never have I worked with such talented and hard-working teachers and we saw some amazing progress. For example, it wasn’t uncommon a ninth grader to arrive reading on a first-grade level and then finish the school year on a third-or fourth-grade level, but to be seen as making progress, the student had to score as proficient for an average ninth-grader. Merit-based pay will reward teachers whose students would score proficiently on the tests regardless of their teaching, and force those who don’t teach such students who focus relentlessly on test-prep at the expense of richer content. In 2008, the chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools, in a desperate attempt to raise test scores, called for the elimination of foreign language instruction for all ninth graders due to low language arts test scores. Why should under-performing students sacrifice foreign language education, the enrichment it brings, and skills they’ll need to survive in our global economy for further test prep? If their test scores did go up slightly at the expense of the quality of their education, who does that serve? Chancellors and politicians; certainly, not the students.

There are ways beyond merit-based pay to both support and reward quality teaching. Many education programs include only a few months of student teaching and pay next to nothing to cooperating teachers. Why not require a full year or two of student teaching, paying those student teachers a modest salary, like medical residencies do, while compensating their master teachers adequately? Next, why not improve working conditions? I heard once that teachers have one of the highest incidences of bladder infections because of insufficient bathroom breaks. This NEA article describes the particular health hazards teachers face. Reducing class sizes and teaching loads and increasing planning time would also make all teachers more effective and students more successful without needlessly resorting to a competition. Increasing staffing at schools of arts and physical education educators, reading and content-area specialists, school psychologists, social workers, counselors, and nutritionists would provide support for teachers and essential services for students. Finally, let’s simply raise salaries for ALL educators.

Obama seems to be listening to only one recent brand of education reformer. What happened to Linda Darling-Hammond, the Stanford professor who was the architect of Obama's education platform during the campaign, and her ideas? Education academic and former teacher Mike Rose describes in his blog how and why Darling-Hammond was passed over. Why doesn’t Obama examine the work of innovators John Dewey, the founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where his daughters attended, or examine the practices of the illustrious Sidwell Friends School, where his daughter are currently enrolled? Surely, the educational philosophy at those schools is not based around the contents and results of high-stakes tests. Why, then, should the education of nation’s public school children be so based?

The problems of our educations system are not as simple as parents, teachers, or schools failing their children and students. Of course, everyone who is a part of our education system should be held accountable, and of course, standardized tests play a role in that process, but we need policies that acknowledge the complexity of the teaching and learning process and that bring out the best in our teachers, students, and learning communities. Abandoning the neighborhood school, sacrificing rich and challenging curricula and education for higher test scores, and throwing merit-based pay at uninspired teachers will not achieve this; and, neither will reducing our teachers to “good” and “bad.”

(photo by flickr user edlabdesigner)

Dark Stew of Bedtime Reading

2009-02-06T21:31:00.003-05:00

It was late at night, past midnight. For a fiction workshop I’m taking, I read several pages of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. Earlier this day I also read an article from spiked, an on-line publication, by Frank Furedi, “After Gaza: What’s Behind 21st-century Anti-Semitism?” about contemporary European reactions to and public conversations about the Holocaust, and also about the forms that anti-semitism seems to be taking in Europe. Just before reading the Borowski pieces, I read an article in The New Yorker about doomersphere and dystopian writers called “The Dystopians: Bad times are boom times for some.” We are most certainly in or headed for bad times, although perhaps not entirely if the occurrence of some bad things will provide the catalyst for more reasonable and rational things to happen.

So, here I had this dark stew of bedtime reading comprising the Holocaust story (what happened to Jews and other Third Reich-deemed misfits in bad times in Europe), the prophecies of these dystopian academics, and the evident presence in Europe (and elsewhere in the world) of anti-semitism that according to Mr. Furedi in part seems to be working on holding the Jewish people responsible for what happened to them during the mid-twentieth century genocide because of actions Israel is taking today. My response: I wanted to crawl into bed with each of my children and hold them close to me and feel fortunate that this is all in the past or far, far away from us. Only, we are in potentially dystopian times and I am Jewish enough to have qualified to be a passenger on one of the transports Borowski describes, and for reasons explained brilliantly in the spiked article, many people in the world may not feel too fondly towards my kind right now, so perhaps something like this could happen again?

I am an anxious person to start with, but every time I read Holocaust literature, I start to picture me or someone in my family getting carted off. When I was little, it was my father and mother. Now, it’s me and my children and my husband. Why am I so worried? Why am I so paranoid? No one in my family that I know of was even in the Holocaust, I don’t live in Europe or Germany, and nothing bad has happened to me in the States because I’m Jewish except for the occasional derogatory remark, ethnic slur, or misguided ignorance and unfair stereotyping here and there. Yet, I can’t help but take what happened somewhat personally. If their reaction is it all similar to mine after reading about Holocaust, how must African-Americans, for example, feel when they read literature from times of slavery or watch footage from the 1960’s of civil rights violations? Or even today, watching on YouTube a defenseless Oscar Grant get shot and killed? How do they not feel frightened and distrustful all of the time of white people, of their government, of law enforcement officers, all of the time?

So, yes, I want to go and feel my children safe and sound next to me. To hold each one of them against me and kiss their soft, delicious cheeks, stroke their still baby fine-hair, to hear and feel them breathing calmly because who knows, they could conceivably find themselves trampled to death on a transport, or if they survive the transport, they could be separated from their dad and me once we arrive. How terrified they would be. How utterly terrified. How brutal. Perhaps I should give up my religion, and any religion. Is any religion worth dying like that for? I do not and would not deny who I am, but sometimes I question belonging to something that may target me for a most unnatural and agonizing death. That same something, though, makes me stand by this part of my identity; to ever reject it or attempt to hide it would feel like self-hatred and cowardice.

I also wonder why I am so lucky. Why me? Why my family? Why my children? (Although for now I will not burden them with the angst of their extreme good luck and fortune.) I want to go forth and enjoy each day, hour, minute and second of my life, of them, of literature, of food, of films, of art, of recreation, of my lovely home, of family, of friends, of any beautiful place. I resolve to do this, to not take my children for granted, to not take those things enumerated just one sentence ago for granted. And for the time I take to breathe in and hold my peacefully slumbering children, I will not, just as I have so many other times, ignore the preciousness of life, of my life, that has been so starkly laid out before me this night.

But, really, when has such starkness changed anyone for longer than a relative moment? For how long do the roses smell sweet after one has resolved to stop to smell them? When does one lapse into not stopping to smell them at all? How long do I give myself before my son’s humming gets annoying, before I start wishing that my other son would stop flopping his body with a thud onto the floor, before I lose my patience with my daughter’s insistence on both choosing her shoes and not wearing any at all. I feel this feeling of fortune, of luck, and I try to live my life according to that, but I always lose that sense and then I gradually return to complaining again on a cold night about how poorly the heating works in my house or to feeling sorry for myself because an essay I wrote got rejected from some publication or another. What do those rejections matter when that transport could be me? When that transport is someone else right this minute as I have the leisure to write this? When it’s millions of people? And then, there’s the fact of this person’s suffering that is supposed to make me a better person, or rather, I am supposed to make myself a better person because of someone else’s suffering. And perhaps, I am a better person than I was or would have been had I not considered the suffering of some unfortunate Zimbabwean relative to my own suffering, which is, really, none at all.

How can we just go about our everyday lives when there is so much suffering that is going on? How can we be certain that we are not next? I am not using this is an excuse to do nothing. To say, well, all of that is insurmountable so I might just as well get my reality tv on and be blind to it all. I suppose we just need to live our lives as ethically, tolerantly, and charitably as we can and remember not to ever take our extreme privilege for granted. But, is that enough?

(photo, entitled Cottonteil Muromachi's Dystopia, by flickr user rocket surgery)

Sprinkling on the Parade

2009-01-31T00:32:00.007-05:00

This is my attempt at a much more traditionally bloggish piece (is that an oxymoron?), a departure from the first two posts.

During the primary season, while most people of my ethnic, socio-economic, and age demographic (I’m white, educated, thirty-five, and a liberal) were busy listening to the music of Barack Obama’s awe-inspiring speeches filled with complex and smart ideas, I was busy deciding that I would vote for Hillary Clinton. I left the “Presidential Preference” section blank on my mail-in ballot for days, but diligently researched the options of and filled in every other section. Finally, one day, I grabbed the ballot, hastily checked the box next to Hillary’s name, and sealed it as quickly as I could before my husband, or anyone else, could see it. I have not told many people about this decision, especially not my father, who while not part of my age demographic, has never cared for Hillary Clinton. The man who stormed out of a cruise ship movie theater during a screening of American Beauty, yell-whispering accusingly to the daughter who had brought him there, “This movie won the Oscar for best picture! This movie!” will not be pleased.

At the time, I just wanted a known quantity. I felt at least that I knew her, flaws and cardboard political persona and all. The people who voted for Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections thought they knew what they were getting from him and look what we got there: compassionate conservative, my ass. Hillary’s laundry and flaws had been aired out already, I reasoned. I was also concerned by what I saw among my peers as the pedestalization and idealization of Obama.

I’m known to be skeptical, critical, and wary of the latest trend. I hated the movie Titanic (why should I have paid good money to spend an hour watching people screaming and falling to their drowning deaths and the rest of the time being hit over the head with the formulaic “so evil, so good” character dichotomy); the girlfriends I watched it with wished they had left me at home. When I started questioning the literary quality of the Harry Potter series to my super fan family-in-law, they came close to shunning me. A friend from my husband’s graduate school days, himself no pollyanna, once lamented, “Great, Rachel, you’ve ruined another restaurant for us.” I have a way of raining on the parade, but during the primary, I kept my mouth shut about my doubts about an Obama presidency.

It’s not that I was in any way anti-Obama or that I had any particular problem with his voting record or policies. I liked what he had to say and how he said it. I was not disappointed when he attained the Democratic party’s nomination. In fact, once the racist undertones started in earnest in Hillary’s campaign, once she and Bill alienated the African-American community that had been so loyal to them, and her true turncoat colors began to show, I deeply regretted voting for her. The last straws were the proof offered that her campaign altered Obama’s image to make his skin tone darker and nose broader as well as comments like, “He’s a Christian, as far as I know.” It was too easy for her to sell out the black community for the working-class white males (who vehemently hated her just recently, but the irony of Hillary bashers becoming Hillary lovers is another story) and to try to profit politically from hate and ignorance. Around late February, I started rooting for Obama in the primaries. Once he won the Democratic nomination, I started praying for his victory in the general election.

Once he defeated John McCain, I myself was not immune to Obama fever. Election night was a joyous night, although that elation promptly deflated with the passage of Proposition 8. Inauguration Day was also a glorious and emotional day. I cheered and jumped up and down that morning, singing, “Ding dong the Bush is gone, the Bush is gone, the Bush is gone. Ding, dong the wicked Bush is gone!” I teared up and flat out cried several times that day watching the inauguration coverage on my living room television. To have a president who is educated, eloquent, smart, open-minded, curious, intellectual, from a non-traditional family, a person of color, and with an elegant, stately, and well, presidential wife and children is thrilling. It is refreshing to have Barack Obama be the person of the hour who so many of us, especially young people, are looking up to. Like so many, I felt proud to be an American that day.

That night and the next morning, however, the euphoria began to fade; I started to feel anxious and the misgivings I had during the primary season resurfaced. The excitement of the inaugural consummation started to turn into an inaugural hangover for me, and I started to worry that we might eventually do a walk of shame after the initial fervor surrounding Obama’s historic rise to the presidency. The pictures I saw on-line and that friends had posted were informative and documentary, but the prevalence of iconographic paraphernalia and images of idolatry disturbed me. During election season, the Obama campaign needed all of the free advertising and fundraising resources it could get. I understood the cultivation of a cult of personality for the sake of strategy and marketing. Likewise, Inauguration Day should be marked with all of the fanfare and souvenirs it was (especially if that means money is going into the pockets of disenfranchised and underfunded D.C. residents. Disclaimer: I am a prickly native of the District of Columbia). It was his day, D.C.’s day, African-American’s day, and America’s day.

But now I’m hoping that we can move on from the cult of personality and fan club mentality. I fear Obama has become the new Che, the person who people proudly sport on a t-shirt but of whom they have little idea for what he stands. Obama is not a savior. He is not the Messiah or the Buddha reincarnated or the second coming of Che. He’s a politician. He’s a family man. He’s a human being. Will Obama be like the movie that everyone raves about but which ultimately turns out to be a disappointment once we really watch it? Has he become the politician to love much like Bush became the politician to hate, even for things that he shouldn’t have been hated for (like watching a movie with his family in October of 2001)? Would he become merely the celebrity of the moment to worship, like Angelina Jolie is the one so many of my mommy peers seem to despise because she’s rich, beautiful and has eight nannies? Furthermore, have we built him up so much that he’s destined to fail?

There is a lot Obama does not know. Let’s take education, one of my pet topics (I was a public school teacher for seven years). The author of his education platform during the campaign was, refreshingly, Linda Darling-Hammond, but his choice was the pro-high-stakes testing “reformer” Arne Duncan. In his blog, Mike Rose, a veteran teacher and currently on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, does a good job of explaining the conflicts behind his appointment and why Darling-Hammond was a better choice. Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) has produced some reports on problematic “reform” efforts that took place in the Chicago Public Schools under Duncan. In the last debate with John McCain, Obama praised Michelle Rhee, the current Chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools, as "wonderful." (If she's so wonderful, why isn't he entrusting the education of his own children with her schools. Cheap shot, I know.) Rhee is another pro-standardized-testing-based curriculum “reformer,” who also happens to be a darling of the national media but not of current D.C.P.S. educators or of those who have toiled to improve D.C.P.S. in recent decades. Even Colbert I. King, the Washington Post columnist who was a Rhee supporter, is starting to see through the buzz surrounding her. In an especially paternalistic piece in the New Republic, Joel I. Klein and Al Sharpton, of all people, add to the grand media fawn . An idea of hers that should give Obama pause is her plan to remove many D.C.P.S. career teachers (who are mostly over forty, middle class, and African-American Washingtonians) and replace them with Teach for America-esque recruits (who are mostly white, affluent, and from out-of-town).

Let’s hope that Obama won’t be blinded by the buzz surrounding individuals like Rhee and Duncan, and neglect to gain real knowledge about quality teaching, public schools, and education. Obama does surround himself with smart, knowledgeable people who have differing opinions, and he seems to listen to those people and to be a lightning-quick study. I just hope he listens to all of the experts in education (and other fields) and not just the policy wonks and people who get the media’s attention with gimmicky slogans but no substance. I hope he is able to convert what he doesn’t know to positive, progressive, and logical solutions. His administration's stated agenda for education so far includes a sound and reasonable approach and philosophy that does seem to include making teachers and educators part of the reform effort, and I like how they want to change No Child Left Behind (N.C.L.B.). But still, the statements are full of vague language such as, “demanding more reform and accountability” and neglect to lay out many details or the how of getting their goals accomplished. We need to recognize how much Obama doesn’t know and need to give him a chance and time to learn.

In the meantime, we need to do what we can do and fulfill our responsibilities as citizens and help him to fulfill his promise of change. The Obama team does offer a forum for ordinary citizens to express themselves on various topics. If we have detailed, expert knowledge, let’s speak up and make ourselves heard and remind him of his promises. Using education as an example again, we can make changes at the local level by at least considering enrolling our kids in public schools--if there are things we don’t like or would like to see change, we can engage the school leadership in a respectful conversation about it and join the P.T.A. We can ask actual educators their opinion about policies such as N.C.L.B., rather than rely on politicians three steps removed from the system. We can volunteer to work with young people at schools or elsewhere. We can pledge to withhold contributions to elite institutions of higher education until they vow to get out of the U.S. News and World Report ratings game, reform their S.A.T.- and A.P.-dependent admissions policies, and decide to reward students who are great and promising students, and not punish those poorer students whose parents could not afford S.A.T. prep classes and whose schools are unable to offer plentiful, or any, A.P. courses. (For more on this and to understand why loan-free grants to low-income students are not enough, consider reading Peter Sacks’ somewhat preachy but very well-researched Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education.) While we’re at it, let’s ask them to spend the ten dollars we are able to afford to give on the students and not on those useless pamphlets showcasing new computer labs or whatever. Finally, let’s not assume that just because we’ve studied a subject that we know how to teach it, or that because we’ve attended school that we know how the education system should work. I’ve been a city bus passenger numerous times and I have a driver’s license, but I don’t know the first thing about what it takes to actually drive a bus, unruly passengers and all, and I certainly don’t know how to show someone else how to do so.

Obama is not perfect. He is going to make mistakes. He is going to make compromises. He is going to make decisions that will be unpopular with certain groups of people. To butcher Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote, you can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time. He may have a lapse in judgment at some point, either personal or professional. None of this bothers me or makes me think he should not be president or even stops me from believing that he may be the best president we’ve had. I’m not simply happy to see him in office because he isn’t George W. Bush. I did not agree with all of the Nader supporters in 2000 who said, “How much damage could one man do in four years?” No, I’m concerned that we’ve come to expect such perfection that if he makes one unpopular decision, makes one mistake, or has one momentary crisis or collapse of his moral and ethical code, that he won’t be forgiven and that the people who were engaged in the process for the first time in this past election because of Obama will disengage from the political process altogether. I’m afraid that the thin line between cynicism and unabashed optimism will blur and that all of those people will disengage and not vote again. We need to understand that Obama will make mistakes and the he will do some damage.

So, here’s what I’m inspired to say. Let’s not do that walk of shame. Let’s not be minions of the man and his image; let’s be minions of his message and values. Let’s not end up like my sophomore year economics textbook, full of highlighting for the first chapter but nothing beyond that. Let’s not pat ourselves smugly on the back after our one day of service and ballot casting. Just because we slap a bumper sticker on our car and buy a t-shirt does not make us part of something, except a no-longer-necessary branding. Let’s disavow greed, invest in public education (and be distressed that even the guy who wants to reinvent America's relationship to government did not see fit to send his own kids to America’s public schools), be active members of our communities, become civically engaged, demand affordable and universal healthcare, address the shame of having a class of people called the working poor, demand that equal rights be granted to all Americans, and address the ineffectiveness of incarcerating so many for so long.

There, I’ve said it. I’ll lie in wait for all three people who read this blog to say,"Come on, Rachel, do you have to ruin everything for us? Let me alone to enjoy my feelings of hope and relief." I realize that I am not the first to express these concerns and sentiments. For a much more wonkishly nuanced version of the sentiments in this piece, but regarding the economy, read this. In another wait-and-see piece, Juan Williams asks us to refrain from judging Obama based on the group he represents, although I rather feel that Juan Williams is not giving African-Americans enough credit. As a social studies teacher during the 2000 election, I took part in the Supreme Court Historical Society’s course for D.C. Social Studies teachers. After commiserating about the outcome of Gore v. Bush and bashing Bush, bashing Clarence Thomas was next for the majority African-American class. He got no free pass for being the second African-American on the Court. My favorite response so far to Obama’s Inauguration is from Jay Smooth’s blog, ill Doctrine, where Jay tells his readers to be pleased with the outcome of the election, but not to stop working to make ourselves and our society better.

I have a great deal of confidence in Obama, but I am concerned that the fan club mentality that seems to have swept over some of my demographic peers will cause them to make only superficial changes in the way they think, live, act, and spend. I’m concerned that Obama will fall hard and fast from that pedestal and that no one among us will question his choices or hold him accountable while he’s up there. Here is my commitment: I will endeavor to be a steward of his message and of the promises he made, I won’t be surprised or disappointed when that mistake, that failing, or that compromise comes, and when it does, I’ll still be loyal to Obama and, more importantly, to his message.

(photo by flickr user Lanterna)

Inaugural Memory

2009-01-17T03:15:00.006-05:00

This piece is dedicated to my parents, especially to my Dad, who worked tirelessly to help turn Virginia blue during the recent election.

In November 1980 I learned “Republican” was a dirty word. The word barely passed my lips without some amount of stuttering and shuddering. My parents were civil rights lawyers in my native Washington, D.C., interested and at times active in politics, and they were liberals. That year Republican Ronald Reagan soundly defeated Democrat Jimmy Carter in the Presidential election. I don't remember my parents feeling pinched by the high energy prices, run-away inflation, or high interest rates; if they were affected by those economic conditions that helped to bring down the Carter administration after only one term, they never said as much. But, while I added words like "landslide" to my vocabulary during Election Night in November and tried to make sense of all of the numbers and red and blue representations of the United States on the television set, my parents were submerged in hushed disappointment. I absorbed their views and would deftly rattle them off as my own. For a newspaper assignment in my second-grade class that school year, my own self-published, single-edition manifesto included headlines such as, "Is Ronald Reagan Messing up the USA?", found alongside the feature, "Money Doesn't Grow on Trees, So You Better Start Saving for College Now."

My father often took us to the Mall to visit the monuments and museums and to attend events like the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. And, I know both of my parents attended political events, marches and protests. But, imagine my surprise when my father informed my sister, Dina, two years my senior, and I that we would be spending Reagan's Inauguration Day on January 21, 1981, lining the sides of the Inaugural Parade downtown.

I can't remember if my father suggested that we make posters or if we took the initiative to do so ourselves, but somehow signs materialized. Rather than construct them with paper or poster board, we made them out of an art set – one with hard white plastic boards with grooves into which colored bits could be pegged and then dismantled and used again. My parents were early conservationists and probably thought that using an entire piece of poster board for a non-school project would be wasteful. Plus, I can't imagine they would have wanted the signs lingering for days after, reminding them of the celebration of Reagan's election.

In light of my parents', and consequently our disappointment, Dina and I were plotting creations of an unpleasant and a contentious sort, but my father would not permit this. So, my sister and I each endeavored to produce an appropriately tame placard in honor of the day's event, which meant making nothing too favorable towards Reagan, but nothing malicious either. My sister's was patriotic and a simple testament to the process of our democracy: an American flag. Mine was a portrait of Ronald Reagan, although I concede now that it may not have been recognizable as such. It was, at the very least, a guy with black hair. Beneath Reagan's head, I had written, "He's nice". Without pause, nodding her head with contempt, my sister scoffed, "He's nice?!?! Humph!" To her, I was committing high treason against our family and our long-held political views. Truth be told, I didn't actually know if he was nice or not. Given the number of poor and mentally ill people who subsequently suffered under his administration's policies, I would have to say that niceness was probably not chief among his personal attributes. But at the time, it was the most positive and bland statement I could think to peg with some sincerity onto my white board. He may well have been a Republican who would ruin our country, but he looked like a nice guy. Despite my sister's protest, my Dad did not impose editorial control over my statement. I think he recognized that it was the best I could do under the circumstances.

On the Metro ride downtown, feeling like a hypocrite, I hid my sign beneath my jacket, turning the board so that the picture and offending slogan were face down, and held it against me. Once at the parade, however, I got caught up in jubilation of the moment—the marching bands, the happy people, the sense of being part of a historic moment—and felt emboldened to shed my tentativeness. It was a warm day, the warmest day, in fact, on record for a January Inauguration at a whopping fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, which probably also helped me to transcend my feelings of apprehension. As I sat upon my father's shoulders, waving a little American flag in one hand, I held my sign aloft with the other. We had secured a spot among the spectators close enough to be a stone's throw from the parade participants, including Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who rode openly in their vehicle. As their motorcade passed us, I saw our new President pause his mechanical arm waving long enough to point my sister and me out to the First Lady, and then she looked over and they waved just to us. I imagined him saying, "Look at those sweet little girls with their homemade signs, Nancy. The one on her father's shoulders thinks I'm nice! How wonderful!" And, because of that moment, my shame abated, my statement of betrayal had been worth it and perhaps even confirmed. I realize now that he probably did not notice us in particular, but for that day, I had fallen victim to the parade's pageantry and hoopla. I felt as hopeful as a seven-year old Democrat could about the incoming president.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, my father's enthusiasm to attend this particular inauguration and his discouragement of displaying any negativity also encouraged me to enjoy it. In retrospect, it seems incongruous that he would have taken us, but not uncharacteristic of him. Perhaps my father wanted to reject the role of the sore loser and give the guy a fresh start. To this day, he often remarks upon Reagan's skill as a politician despite disagreeing with his political views and policies. Or, maybe, he wanted to spend a day off from work with his children, taking advantage of this unique DC-based excursion that allowed us to participate in an American tradition, the Inaugural Parade, as a spectacle of our democracy rather than as an opportunity to heckle or pass judgment upon the new Republican administration. Perhaps, he gathered hope in the innocence, wonder, and openness of his children to help ease anxiety about a potentially devastating presidency. He might say it was a combination of all of the above. Whatever his reasons were, I know that although he relishes debate, he strives to approach disagreement respectfully with a rejection of pettiness and bitterness, and to emphasize optimism and graciousness in defeat over bitterness and acrimony. On that day, he taught us to do the same. Even though Republican was a dirty word, it was okay for me to say Reagan is nice.

I live in Oakland, California now. My own young children knew the 2008 presidential candidates’ names and lived through the election night tension alongside us just as my sister and I did with our parents in 1980, the difference being that our candidate won this time. I am sad we won’t be in DC to take our kids, unambiguously joyous signs (and grandparents) in tow, to Pennsylvania Avenue to celebrate the inauguration of “Rock-O-Bama.” My hope is that in our place, some Republican dad will put aside politics and bring his little girl to herald the new Democratic President-elect and for that moment, she’ll leave behind her family’s misgivings and allow herself to hope.

(photo by flickr user Travlr)