New York Times Columnist Invents a Crisis (and misses the point)

May 4, 2012

Teaching Me About Teaching

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Next week is National Teacher Appreciation Week, and, as far as I’m concerned, they don’t get nearly enough.

On Tuesday, the United States Department of Education is hoping that people will take to Facebook and Twitter to thank a teacher who has made a difference in their lives. I want to contribute to that effort. And I plan to thank a teacher who never taught me in a classroom but taught me what it meant to be an educator: my mother.

She worked in her local school system for 34 years before retiring. Then she volunteered at a school in her district until, at age 67, she won a seat on her local school board. Education is in her blood.

Through her I saw up close that teaching is one of those jobs you do with the whole of you — trying to break through to a young mind can break your heart. My mother cared about her students like they were her own children. I guess that’s why so many of them dispensed with “Mrs. Blow” and just called her Mama.

She wasn’t just teaching school lessons but life lessons. For her, it was about more than facts and figures. It was about the love of learning and the love of self. It was the great entangle, education in the grandest frame, what sticks with you when all else falls away. As Albert Einstein once said: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”

She showed me what a great teacher looked like: proud, exhausted, underpaid and overjoyed. For great teachers, the job is less a career than a calling. You don’t become a teacher to make a world of money. You become a teacher to make a world of difference. But hard work deserves a fair wage.

That’s why I have a hard time tolerating people who disproportionately blame teachers for our poor educational outcomes. I understand that not every teacher is a great one. But neither is every plumber, or every banker or every soldier. Why then should teachers be demonized so much?

I won’t pretend to have all the policy prescriptions to address our country’s educational crisis, but beating up teachers isn’t the solution. We must be honest brokers in our efforts to fix a broken system.

"[O]ur country's educational crisis?"  Not entirely sure just WHAT that educational crisis is.  This is a highly explosive phrasing.  CRISIS sounds like a very bad thing.  But, let's take a quick look at some of the facts on the ground for some of the school systems that I have ties to: Streator High School, Streator, Illinois,  Barrington Consolidated High School, Barrington, Illinois, and Glenbrook South High School, in Glenview, Illinois (my father taught at all three of these school and my brother in law taught at Barrington High School).

Streator Township High School

Student of the Month

April 2012

Career and Technical Ed.

            Student:  Mike Tafoya          Year:  12  

            Parents:  Ms. Belinda Alexander

            Nominating Teacher:  Mr. Lyle Peterson

            Course:  Vocational Welding

Future Plans:  Welding Career

Mike is my best welder.  He did most of the welding on the “Grill” Project.  Congratulations to Mike on being the Career & Technical Departments Student of the Month.

English

            Student:  Amberly Walter    Year:  12 

            Parents:  Sherri & Matt Walter

            Nominating Teacher:  Mr. Ray Yanek

            Course:  English IV-A & Creative Writing

Future Plans: X-Ray Technician

Amberly’s natural love of reading and writing shines through in the classroom.  She is inquisitive, imaginative, and original.  She has come to use the skills taught to her in her English classes to express those parts of her, not just creatively but academically as well.  She has never once settled on choosing a clichéd or overused essay or creative writing topic.  Also, Amberly had truly come to understand that real writing occurs in the rewriting.

Fine Arts

            Student:  Allyson Grabowski  Year:  12   

            Parents:  Teresa & Joe Grabowski

            Nominating Teacher:  Mrs. Janelle Garcia  

            Course:  Drawing & Printmaking II 

Future Plans:  Attend IVCC and study English

Allyson is highly talented in the area of Drawing and works hard to improve upon her skills as an artist.  She is an inspiration to others and works hard to do her very best on each project assigned. 

Foreign Language

            Student:  Bridget Parr          Year:  9   

            Parents:  Kathleen & James Parr

            Nominating Teacher:  Mrs. Alison Clausing

Course:  Spanish I

            Future Plans:  Attend College

Bridget is an excellent student.  She is enthusiastic, motivated and talented on many levels.  It is a true joy to have Bridget as a student.

Guided Program for Success

            Student:  Anthony Gray       Year:  10 

            Parents:  Robert Gray & Kelly Carl

            Nominating Teacher:  Ms. Erin Knuffman & Mrs. Tina O’Brien

            Course:  GPS Resource

            Future Plans:  Undecided

            Anthony has made great strides in GPS since joining us a year ago.  He is on top of his grades and extremely organized.  Anthony comes to class prepared and works quietly and diligently without having to be told.  He frequently helps other students and is known for being a voracious reader.  Anthony is a great example of the other GPS students.

           

Health, PE, and Driver’s Ed.

            Student:  Jeremy Griffin      Year:  12   

            Parents: Ms. Teressa McNeal

            Nominating Teacher:  Ms. Kari Hagerty

Course:  P.E.

Future Plans:  Plans on becoming an electrician

Jeremy is very active in physical education.  He is a class leader.  His effort is outstanding and he is respectful to his classmates. Congratulations to Jeremy on being the Physical Education Departments Student of the Month.                       

Math

            Student:  Payton Billups       Year:  12       

Parents:  Mr. Dunuvan Billups

Nominating Teacher:  Mr. Doug Harris

Course:  Calculus

            Future Plans:  Attend Lincoln Land Community College on a softball scholarship

            Payton was chosen because she is consistently one of the top performers in Calculus.  Whether its test scores, thoroughness of daily work, or overall average, Payton is always at the top of this advanced class.

Science

            Student:  Brian Kerestes      Year:  9   

Parent:  Colleen & Timothy Kerestes

Nominating Teacher:  Mr. John Burke

Course:  Biology I

            Future Plans:  Go to U of I and study Ag Science

            Brian is an exceptionally gifted student of the biological sciences.  Congratulations to Brian on being selected as the Science Departments Student of the Month. 

Social Studies

            Student:  Martha Montes    Year:  11  

            Parents:  Martha & Javier Montes

            Nominating Teacher:  Mr. Ken Carlson

            Course:  Basic U.S History

            Future Plans: Attend College, maybe become a bilingual educator

            Martha is a hard-worker.  She is very organized and self – disciplined.  She is a joy to have in class and has a bright future ahead of her.

           

Student Services

            Student:  TJ Fleming            Year:  10       

Parents:  Ms. Peggy Fleming

Nominating Teacher:  Mr. Rob Beck

Course:  Economics/Government

Future Plans:  Undecided

            This month the Student Services department is selecting a student that has made huge improvements and gains that have not gone unnoticed by all of his teachers.  TJ Fleming has shown what it takes to be an outstanding student.  He goes above and beyond of what is asked of him.  He will research and report information on a topic that is part of the curriculum when it is not even asked of him.   He is a sponge for information.  He shows leadership in the classroom and mentors other students when they might need extra help.  He makes wise and healthy choices on an everyday basis.  With his motivation, insightfulness, maturity and work ethic the student services department is proud to have TJ Fleming represent them as April Student of the Month.

Jack Wilson Academy

            Student:  Devonta Hunter  Year:  10

            Parents:  Mr. Peggy Hunter

Nominating Teacher:  Mrs. Deb Bain

Course:  Alternative Education

Future Plans:  Undecided

            DeVonta Hunter is the most improved student I have ever had in Alternative Education. He came to us at the beginning of this school year, angry and bitter, believing the whole educational world was out to get him. Over an eight month period, Devonta has developed into a fine student and someone you would like to know. He always has a kind word to share when a fellow student is down or worried. DeVonta is a self-appointed peer coach, who is the first to help when the need arises. He has earned a full credit over the regular credit courses offered in Alt. Ed this semester. He has had excellent attendance, is always on time, and is carrying a B+ average. DeVonta is a hero to me, his teacher, because he lives our motto of "Failure is Not an Option." He refuses to hand in mediocre papers and strives to be the best.

Do we need teacher accountability? Yes.

Must unions be flexible? Yes.

Must new approaches be tried? Yes.

But is it just as important to address the poverty, stress and hopelessness that some children bring into the classroom, before the bell rings and the chalk screeches across a blackboard? Yes.

Do we need to take a closer look at pay and incentives for teachers? Yes.

Do we need to lift them up a bit more than we tear them down? A thousand times, yes!

A big part of the problem is that teachers have been so maligned in the national debate that it’s hard to attract our best and brightest to see it as a viable and rewarding career choice, even if they have a high aptitude and natural gift for it.

A 2010 McKinsey & Company report entitled “Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching” found that top-performing nations like Singapore, Finland and South Korea recruit all of their teachers from the top third of graduates and then even screen from that group for “other important qualities.” By contrast, in the United States, “23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent in high poverty schools, which find it especially difficult to attract and retain talented teachers. It is a remarkably large difference in approach, and in results.”

According to the report, starting teacher salaries in 2010 averaged $39,000 a year. Let’s assume that federal, state and local taxes eat up a third. That would leave a take-home pay as low as $26,000. However, according to the Project on Student Debt by the Institute for College Access and Success, a college senior graduating that year carried an average of $25,250 in student loans. The math just doesn’t work out.

Furthermore, jobs in education were slashed substantially from August 2008 to August 2011. According to an October White House report: “Nearly 300,000 educator jobs have been lost since 2008, 54 percent of all job losses in local government.”

If we want better educational outcomes, we need to attract better teachers — and work to retain them. A good place to start is with respect and paychecks. And a little social media appreciation once a year wouldn’t hurt either.

So, on Tuesday, I plan to send this message on Twitter: To the teacher who taught me what it means to be a teacher: My mama. Everybody’s mama.

What will you tweet?

Warriors Are Not the Only Wounded

 May 16, 2012 by Common Dreams

At a Military Hospital, Warriors 

Are Not the Only Wounded

by Michael Winship

The weather’s getting warmer in Afghanistan and the war there is heating up again. That means – as it has meant every year for more than a decade -- that the pace will quicken at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. More casualties will be brought to this largest American military hospital outside the United States. The Critical Care Air Transport teams and their C-17 Globemasters will fly in from “downrange,” as they call the Afghan battleground, and the injured will be brought by ambulance bus from nearby Ramstein Air Force Base to the hospital front door.

In this photo released by the U.S. Air Force on Thursday, Dec. 23, 2004, an unidentified soldier is removed from an ambulance by medical personnel during a snow storm at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Landstuhl, Germany, Wednesday evening, Dec. 22, 2004. The service member was wounded in an attack on a dining facility in Mosul, Iraq. (AP Photo/U.S. Air Force, Melvin G. Tarpley)

I spent a few days at Landstuhl recently, one of a group of writers from the Writers Guild Initiative, part of the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation (Full disclosure and just to add to the confusion: I’m president of the Writers Guild, East, the union with which the foundation’s affiliated).

For the last four years, the foundation has been conducting writing workshops. The project began with professional writers from stage, TV and movies mentoring veterans from the Iraq and Afghan wars, working with them on writing exercises and projects ranging from memoirs and blogs to children’s books, screenplays and sci-fi novels. Recently, in collaboration with the Wounded Warrior Project, the foundation started similar workshops with caregivers, the loved ones of veterans helping them through the aftermath of catastrophic injuries.

Now, Wounded Warrior had asked some of us to come to Landstuhl to meet with the medical staff there. Some 3,000 strong, military and civilian, they work ceaselessly in what has become one of the busiest trauma centers in the world, helping between twenty and thirty thousand patients a year (not just from the battlefield, but also military and their dependents from all over Europe, Africa and much of Asia).

Landstuhl is where the victims of the 1983 bombing of the US Marines Corps barracks in Beirut were brought; Bosnian refugees from the Sarajevo marketplace bombing in 1994, too, wounded from the American embassy bombing in Kenya in 1998 and the 2000 attack on USS Cole. During the first Gulf War, more than 4000 service members were treated at Landstuhl, as have been men and women fighting in the Balkans and Somalia. Since 9/11, the hospital has treated coalition troops from 44 different countries.

They compare this hospital to the center of an hourglass; it’s the midpoint between a combat injury and treatment in the field and then subsequent care back in the States or other home country. Or it’s where a service member is treated and then sent back into battle.

The staff at Landstuhl sees the wounded at their worst. Many who arrive suffer from multiple injuries – “polytrauma” so extensive that several teams of surgeons with different specialties – neurological, thoracic, ear and eye, facial reconstruction, and orthopedic, among others -- may work on an individual patient, often simultaneously. Bodies are blown apart or crushed by IEDs, grenades and suicide bombs, but so skillful are the medical teams there, so advanced the techniques and technology, Landstuhl’s survival rate runs as high as 99.5%. (The survival rate among American wounded in World War II was 70 percent.)

But all that success takes a toll. One of the little discussed but potent side effects of war is what’s called Combat and Occupational Stress Reaction or Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder. Compassion fatigue.

After all the years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the doctors, nurses, and other staff at Landstuhl are exhausted or worse. Given what they’ve seen -- the horrific wounds and amputations, the infection, agony and grief – some walk around “like zombies,” one therapist said. Feelings of empathy and kindness yield to loneliness, despair and burnout.

Many of the compassion fatigue symptoms are similar to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – physical effects like headaches, gastrointestinal problems, reproductive troubles as well as mental -- nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, emotional distance, isolation and more.

Working with physically damaged men and women who are so deeply traumatized rubs off. The emotional rawness is contagious. A hospital handout on PTSD understatedly reads, “When life-changing events occur, perceptions about the world may change. For example, before soldiers experience combat trauma, they may think the world is safe. Following combat, a soldier’s perceptions may change -- a majority of the world may now seem unsafe.”

That’s why returning vets may reflexively search alongside a US interstate highway for roadside bombs, only shop at Walmart at 3 in the morning, or worry to excess that their children’s school will be attacked by terrorists. And it’s why after hearing the stories of their patients, reliving the horrors of war, watching them endure pain and sometimes countless operations, medical practitioners can suffer from the same fears -- whether it’s the surgeon who heals the wounds, the psychiatrist who probes the mind for the source of anguish or even the clean-up staff decontaminating and removing the blood from surgical tools.

Combine that with homesickness, the high operational tempo of Landstuhl, the low tolerance for mistakes, the downtime when the mind takes over and remembers every awful experience. It’s a dangerous, often unhealthy mix.

And so, on a Saturday morning, we writers sat down with a bunch of men and women who work at Landstuhl and other nearby medical facilities. There were fourteen of us and thirty-two or so of them. We broke into small groups – two writers working with a group of two to four hospital staff.

My colleague Susanna and I mentored four – a male Army nurse and a female Navy nurse, a physical therapist and a developmental pediatric psychiatrist. We weren’t there to interview or pry; they would tell us what they wanted us to know when hey wished, their stories slowly emerging from conversation and the brief writing exercises we gave them.

The male nurse had been in Special Ops, the Navy, Marines and Army; he was reluctant to talk of what he had experienced but wanted to examine themes of good and evil in an epic novel. The physical therapist told us she wanted to explore the mind-body connection, perhaps with a blog; the Navy nurse spoke of her feelings for the soldiers she took care of from the Republic of Georgia, the former Soviet state, now independent. (By the end of the year, Georgia, aiming at membership in NATO, will have some 1500 troops in Afghanistan.) She had learned how to bake for them the Georgian national dish, khachapuri, a cheese filled bread; now she wants to write a cookbook.

For two days, we talked and they wrote, we recommended books and movies, they told us about the ones they loved. Tears were shed as stories and memories came to the surface, many too private to relate here. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll stay in touch via e-mail and meet again; trying to be of assistance as they write to express their thoughts and feelings, to tell their stories.

Do the workshops help? Hard to measure, but intuitively it feels as if they do, that in the talking and writing comes self-awareness and some measure of equanimity. And selfishly, for those of us who serve as writer-mentors, the benefits are enormous and fulfilling.

But the statistics are alarming. According to NBC News, “The Pentagon counts more than 6,300 American dead and 33,000 wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Rand Corp study estimates that as many as 300,000 post-9/11 veterans suffer from PTSD or major depression, and about 320,000 may have experienced traumatic brain injuries, mainly from bombs.” The number of civilian fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan remains uncertain but a Brown University study last year reported at least 132,000.

Meanwhile, there are still nearly 90,000 American troops in Afghanistan. More will die and be wounded. President Obama has pledged their complete departure in 2014.

But even after that, the work at Landstuhl will go on. There are still nearly 300,000 American military personnel overseas, plus family members. Landstuhl will take care of many of them. And, says one of the hospital’s surgeons, with a sigh of resignation, “There will always be the Middle East.”

Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America, East, is senior writer of the new public television series Moyers & Company, premiering in January 2012. Go to www.billmoyers.com

New York’s Children Shouldn’t Pay the Price

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May 4, 2012

Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week put out his revised proposal for the next city budget — a $68.7 billion plan that spares teachers, police and firefighters but slashes vital programs for needy children. That is not the way to balance a budget.

The mayor’s budget and other changes will result in losses of about $150 million to city day-care and after-school programs. The programs are a lifeline for the working poor — without them many parents would have to give up their jobs and stay home to care for their children. They are also vital for children and young people who need the extra preparation the programs provide. The City Council can usually be counted on to restore some of these cuts. But it must fight even harder to expand the programs, not allow them to diminish every year.

The city’s child-care and after-school programs have been cut from 137,000 places in 2009 to 94,000 today. The new budget would reduce that further to about 53,000. In these hard economic times, the need, and the waiting lists, are growing.

Mayor Bloomberg on Friday announced that a program called Early Learn NYC would cover about 43,000 of the 50,000 children now in city child care and Head Start programs. The program sounds promising, with nutrition and health care provided along with childhood education. But 7,000 children should not be dropped from the rolls.

On Thursday the mayor boasted that this budget had no new taxes and no cuts for teachers, police officers and firefighters. When pressed about the cut in children’s programs, he said, “The city cannot do everything for everybody.” That is true. But Mr. Bloomberg and the Council need to do a lot more for the city’s neediest children.

aralysis, Perplexity By PAUL KRUGMAN

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May 3, 2012

Plutocracy, Paralysis, Perplexity

PAUL KRUGMAN

By 

Before the Great Recession, I would sometimes give public lectures in which I would talk about rising inequality, making the point that the concentration of income at the top had reached levels not seen since 1929. Often, someone in the audience would ask whether this meant that another depression was imminent.

Well, whaddya know?

Did the rise of the 1 percent (or, better yet, the 0.01 percent) cause the Lesser Depression we’re now living through? It probably contributed. But the more important point is that inequality is a major reason the economy is still so depressed and unemployment so high. For we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion — both of which have a lot to do with the distorting effects of great wealth on our society.

Put it this way: If something like the financial crisis of 2008 had occurred in, say, 1971 — the year Richard Nixon declared that “I am now a Keynesian in economic policy” — Washington would probably have responded fairly effectively. There would have been a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of strong action, and there would also have been wide agreement about what kind of action was needed.

But that was then. Today, Washington is marked by a combination of bitter partisanship and intellectual confusion — and both are, I would argue, largely the result of extreme income inequality.

On partisanship: The Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have been making waves with a new book acknowledging a truth that, until now, was unmentionable in polite circles. They say our political dysfunction is largely because of the transformation of the Republican Party into an extremist force that is “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” You can’t get cooperation to serve the national interest when one side of the divide sees no distinction between the national interest and its own partisan triumph.

So how did that happen? For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

And the takeover of half our political spectrum by the 0.01 percent is, I’d argue, also responsible for the degradation of our economic discourse, which has made any sensible discussion of what we should be doing impossible.

Disputes in economics used to be bounded by a shared understanding of the evidence, creating a broad range of agreement about economic policy. To take the most prominent example, Milton Friedman may have opposed fiscal activism, but he very much supported monetary activism to fight deep economic slumps, to an extent that would have put him well to the left of center in many current debates.

Now, however, the Republican Party is dominated by doctrines formerly on the political fringe. Friedman called for monetary flexibility; today, much of the G.O.P. is fanatically devoted to the gold standard. N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University, a Romney economic adviser, once dismissed those claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves as “charlatans and cranks”; today, that notion is very close to being official Republican doctrine.

As it happens, these doctrines have overwhelmingly failed in practice. For example, conservative goldbugs have been predicting vast inflation and soaring interest rates for three years, and have been wrong every step of the way. But this failure has done nothing to dent their influence on a party that, as Mr. Mann and Mr. Ornstein note, is “unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.”

And why is the G.O.P. so devoted to these doctrines regardless of facts and evidence? It surely has a lot to do with the fact that billionaires have always loved the doctrines in question, which offer a rationale for policies that serve their interests. Indeed, support from billionaires has always been the main thing keeping those charlatans and cranks in business. And now the same people effectively own a whole political party.

Which brings us to the question of what it will take to end this depression we’re in.

Many pundits assert that the U.S. economy has big structural problems that will prevent any quick recovery. All the evidence, however, points to a simple lack of demand, which could and should be cured very quickly through a combination of fiscal and monetary stimulus.

No, the real structural problem is in our political system, which has been warped and paralyzed by the power of a small, wealthy minority. And the key to economic recovery lies in finding a way to get past that minority’s malign influence.

A Clear Warning From the Jobs Numbers

(Which are all a fictitious bunch of crap anywhere.  Our government lies to our face and the "Newspaper of Record" doesn't say "BOO" about it!)

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May 4, 2012

This week’s economic news was mixed, but the employment report on Friday was unmistakably weak. The economy added only 115,000 jobs in April, versus 154,000 in March and 200,000-plus in each of the three months before that. Even taking into account that unusually warm winter weather probably distorted the recent results, the underlying trend shows an economy that has been creating about 175,000 jobs a month — enough to keep the recovery crawling along, but too weak to appreciably raise hiring or wages.

Nor is it clear where more growth will come from. Manufacturing picked up last month, but activity in the larger service sector slowed. Recent auto sales were up, and home sales have been slowly, if fitfully, improving, but home prices continue to fall. Consumer spending, in general, rose in the first quarter, but it appears to be driven by people who are profiting from a rising stock market. Increased market volatility, like Friday’s 168-point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average, would make them nervous and less inclined to spend.

Election-year politics are bound to further confuse the economic picture and the way forward. On Friday, Mitt Romney blamed President Obama for the April jobs figures,saying that in a normal recovery “we should be seeing numbers in the 500,000 jobs created per month.”

The truth is that the economy has not seen job growth like that in nearly 30 years. More to the point, the policies Mr. Romney espouses — notably deregulation and tax cuts for the rich — were the favored policies under President George W. Bush, years when job growth and wage gains were, at best, anemic. And then the economy barreled into the Great Recession.

More deregulation and high-end tax cuts — along with the deep spending cuts Mr. Romney has endorsed in the House Republican budget — would mean less economic stability, greater inequality and fewer jobs.

Mr. Obama has called for sensible policies that would create more jobs, including infrastructure spending and aid to states to prevent layoffs and boost hiring among teachers and other public employees, but Congressional Republicans have blocked him at every turn. On Friday, Mr. Obama said that he would urge Congress “to take some actions on common-sense ideas” to boost jobs. There is no sign that Republicans are ready to see the light — especially when they see the weak economy as an election-year advantage.

The jobless rate dropped in April, from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, but the decline was caused by 342,000 people dropping out of the work force. A smaller work force means even slower growth.

Without further government help — especially more aggressive spending to boost demand — the economy simply does not have the momentum to heal itself any time soon. Millions of today’s unemployed and underemployed Americans will pay the price for the rest of their lives, in lost earnings, lost homes and shattered retirement hopes.

This is no time for political game-playing or ideological posturing. Americans need help now.