Day 1092: Live From Rising Tide 3 - Education Panel
August 23, 2008 - Filed Under blogistas, education, new orleans, rising tide conference
Panelists, from L-R:
* Clifton Harris - concerned parent and blogger
* Dedra Johnson – professor and blogger, author of Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow
* Leigh Dingerson - Education team leader of the Center for Community Change, editor and contributor to Keeping The Promise?: The Debate Over Charter Schools
* Christian Roselund - UTNO Communications, blogging at Dirty South Bureau
* Jeffrey Berman - teacher, Booker T. Washington High School and Schwarz Alternative School.
Links at the RT schedule page. Coozan Pat moderates.
Look, I don’t pretend to know anything about the intricacies of the educational system in New Orleans. Neither do I have children nor does the history and complexity of the system make sense to a five-year veteran of this city like me. What I know, is like Christian Roselund says, the system is thoroughly Balkanized and that I am on the side of concerned parents like Cliff Harris who live here and want to do good by their children in getting them quality educations without taking out a second mortgage and selling organs. New Orleans cannot afford more poorly-educated children, especially during its recovery. From Cliff’s blog:
… I am going to be representing those parents that are confused, concerned, angry, frustrated and hoping they made the right decision when it comes to where their child is going. I’m going to represent the hard working people who don’t want to have three jobs, or lie about their situation in order to be in a better situation. I’m going to represent three generations and the parent of a fourth generation of family to go to public schools in the city. That is important because there is no way anyone can reform the system and ignore the last 40 years.
I’ve always hated public education in the United States because the quality of education is generally low and the system attracts bad teachers. This is not an excuse to kill public education or let it fester. Dedra Johnson says, “The prevailing notion is that public schools are bad because they are public, that private education is good because it’s private and that the privatization of schools will get rid of a union that removes bad teachers.” Dedra continues that this is just an excuse to foist conservative, anti-union ideals on the nation.
Leigh brings the problem home for me: “What New Orleanians lost after Katrina in terms of schools is the right to make their own decisions. This is now a market system explicitly. It changes the paradigm … it is now less about community and more about a consumer-based, individual escape model. What’s been lost is the sense of public education as a community institution. It is now endemic across the country, these market-based reforms.”
Cliff counters that members of his community are suspicious of the continuation of the public schools. “We don’t want to have anything with the RSD schools. I went there and was an honors student and when I got to UNO, I hadn’t seen half the stuff up there … I don’t want to go to the same schools, I don’t want the same education … A large part of the population doesn’t care [whether kids are educated well or not].”
Jeff comes back that “only in New Orleans is public education a bad word” and he wants to get rid of that. (Not true, really, this a prevalent opinion all across America and the world.) Cliff comes back that there is distrust, anger, bitterness that has lasted for forty years and was exacerbated after the storm, and what he wants is better schooling for his daughter.
Christian slams RSD’s actions after the storm, including dismantling a program that promoted arts and music for “kids from the ghetto.” Tiny word to the wise: A neighborhood is not a “ghetto.”
Leigh and Dedra (and everyone else on the panel) argue that the school board should not be dismantled. Leigh mentions promoting an order that was rescinded by the governor - I’m unaware of what’s going on there, so help me out with explanations and links. Cliff brings up the example of Ellenese Brooks-Sims and the usefulness of a school board that steals and lives on patronage. He asks, “Why isn’t there a sub-board under the board that is different from the status quo, which is bad?” New Orleanians with kids agree more with Cliff than with the reinstatement of a school board; they are not in the minority.
Closing remarks - can’t quite concentrate because a mosquito just bit my left arm and it hurts like a MF. Patrick asks each panelist their key to changing the system. Jeff beseeches parents for total involvement - he sees a handful of parents at meetings, but wants to see more involvement from parents and the community. Cliff says, “The only thing that sets me apart from my friends who are incarcerated or deceased are my parents. Those parents are isolated - they won’t know that we had a conference here today, what’s going on in the Times Picayune. Go to these parents and ask what we can do to help … Until, as a city, we get to the point of thinking as a whole.”
Patrick has all parents of kids in the New Orleans school system stand up for a round of applause. Hats off to the teachers, too, I say. Q&A time, and I smell J’anita’s BBQ back there.
“More so than test scores, we need to socialize these kids. What’s the point of high test scores when they’re kicking in your door?”
Comment on woeful lack of adult education programs in New Orleans. “I can’t imagine what it’s like for a mother who reads at a fourth-grade education. What the bloggers can do is ask yourself about adult education in your neighborhood, write about it and talk to your politicians about it. Adult education gets forgotten, they keep running to me at the library and I’m strapped.”
I close out the Q&A session with a comment to Jeff Berman, “Public education is not just a bad word in NOLA. It is all over this nation and the world considers American education, in general, woefully inadequate. Education has to become a national priority, New Orleans is just the tip of the iceberg.” Jeff agrees, but states that he grew up in California and that the system here is especially disturbing. I get it, but this only adds fuel to my argument that education going to hell in New Orleans follows the downward spiral of American education in the past half century.
Day 1075: Harvard, The Strange Handshake
August 6, 2008 - Filed Under culture-society-history, education
This essay by a Harvard visiting professor of Social Studies shows the dichotomy of being a student (more so an undergraduate) at an institution which hires some of the best professors to run what is effectively an assembly line. The students work and learn, but do they really when they are the physical and intellectual hyperdistillates of once-hippie privilege? This is not to say that the young rich, in their quest for the degree of pedigree, cannot learn; the question is what do they want to learn?
Times Higher Education | All the privileged must have prizes
… Most of the students I encountered had already embraced the perspectives of the rich, the powerful and the unalienated, and they seemed to have done so with appalling ease. In keeping with the tradition of the American rich they worked exceptionally long hours, they were aggressive in exercising their talents, and on the ideological features of market capitalism they were unanimous. Their written work disclosed the core components of the consensus upheld by their liberal parents: the meaning of liberty lies in the personal choice of consumers; free competition in goods and morals regulates value; technological progress is an unmixed good; war is unfortunate.
… the students are the opposite of apathetic and indifferent. The new student rich have retained the radical energy of the 1960s, only to engage it in more lushly monetised competencies. The New Left occupied universities to protest against the bureaucratic hollowness of examination rituals and grading rationales. Now its children complete the attack on the authority of teachers, who are simply annexed to the management of student careers, drawn into a tacit agreement between corporation and client in which failure is not an option. I had to grade the students, and I had to grade them well. Everyone expected a recommendation letter.
… the sedulous banality of the rich degrades teaching into a service-class preoccupation whose chief duty is preparing clients for monied careers. The liberal flattery of the student is both sentimental and irrelevant. If youth is wasted on the young, is teaching wasted on students?
This list is a damned lie because the University of Wisconsin is not on it. 3 comments #
Day 1032: My God
June 24, 2008 - Filed Under culture-society-history, education, government, the game of life
92% of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit, Pew survey finds
I am one of the 92%. God has always been with me, and I with God. God is such a meaningful, soul-gripping and peace-giving entity in my life that I cannot begin to explain this relationship to anyone else, much less myself. Hence the daily exploration of breathing in, examining and worshipping the all in the all.
Rarely, if ever, do I discuss my religious beliefs other than utilizing the convenient pigeonhole of Hindu. It’s not a lack of conviction or the inability for pedagogy, but an absence of zealotry and the unwavering belief that no two humans can experience anything in the same way, even God. My husband’s notion of the divine is not mine, just as I do not expect our children to mimic their parents’ independent assessments and voyages in the physical and spiritual realms. How may I externalize something this personal and so exclusively created by and for me? Why should I trivialize it? Some of it I’ll share with you, however, that I can put in words. That:
- * God spoke to Moses, but didn’t speak to me,
- * Krishna imparted the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna on the battlefield as outlined in the Mahabharatha, but I haven’t seen the Vishwa Rupa Darshana, the universal form of the Lord, myself,
- * Jesus walked this earth a couple of millennia ago and that his words offer solace and opportunity for self-possession, but it is up to me to listen and act accordingly and every day,
- * the bhajans of M.S. Subbulakshmi and songs of the Sufis are threads which lead out of their mouths and into the tapestry of the metaphysical, that they offer a direct line to something unimaginably beautiful and terrible at once,
- * temples, churches, mosques and buildings of worship are great, laudable works of architecture, which are wholly useless if God does not live in the altar of your personal being. As a very Hindu cousin wrote me recently, “I never buy pictures of God because I feel that God’s picture should be enshrined in your heart,”
- * vampires do not exist, Sasquatch does and ghosts may or may not,
- * I can see God in a microscopic section of rock and in the smiles of children,
- * a Bodhisattva, a Tzadik Hador, Kalki or a Kwisatz Haderach (for you Dune-ists) arrives every generation, but I wouldn’t know one if he or she walked up to me and said, “Hello,”
- * in truth, we are each our own Messiah. No one else can be that for you or me,
- * God just is, in and as everything, even in the mundane, occasionally taking form and putting on airs, and
- * death isn’t the end.
These are some of my personal, quirky notions of the invisible and unexplainable. They didn’t come to me all at once and I guarantee you that, as time passes, my mind will change about a few items in the above list because metamorphosis, like it or not, happens. Again, these are my personal, quirky ideas. Hence, I don’t vote with them and believe that a collection so personal is not open to public debate or enshrinement as someone else’s laws. What right do I have to impose the iconoclastic or a syncretic messiah on you and you your own equally bizarre beliefs on me?
Day 1010: LOLCat For New Orleans CIO
June 3, 2008 - Filed Under WTF, computing & internet, education, government, new orleans
Because it can be paid in tuna and catnip and who cares if it falsifies its academic records, it’s cute!
New Orleans City Business: City investigating resume claims of IT chief
The city of New Orleans is investigating allegations that Anthony Jones, the interim director of the Office of Technology, falsified his academic credentials … “[The New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission] received some information that brings into question some of the academic credentials that (Jones) has asserted that he has,” said NOMCC director Rafael Goyeneche. “We have asked the city to review his application forms and resume to determine if he has the qualifications he alleged when he was given that promotion.”
The city is being asked to review one of its own?! Jones will have a PhD from M.I.T. at the end of that investigation. So, how bad was the resume embellishment?
In a 2005 resume on file with the Department of Civil Service, Jones claimed to be six credits away from earning a bachelor of science degree in information systems from Tulane University. His enrollment in Tulane has been questioned and is being investigated.
In an updated 2007 resume, Jones does not list Tulane University under education. Instead, he writes he is scheduled to graduate with a bachelor of science in business management from the University of Phoenix by spring 2008. He has yet to earn that degree, according to the city.
Even as a holder of multiple degrees, I believe that a college degree neither makes a person nor overly qualifies him or her for a job, especially in IT where talent and experience count more than a piece of paper. Several of my friends have degreees in philosophy, economics, linguistics or simply high school and are heads of their IT departments, CIOs and beyond. They’re smart and capable and that’s what got and kept them in their jobs. Who wouldn’t rather have an honest high school grad overseeing their data servers over a dishonest crony? Moral of the story: Jones simply had to have been honest and competent to hold this job and his lack of degree wouldn’t have mattered.
In other news, Oklahoma City unveils public safety wi-fi.
Day 997: Headlines Du Jour
May 21, 2008 - Filed Under education, government, new orleans, wisconsin
* The University of Wisconsin is in the Wall Street Journal for accepting more students from the freshman waiting list due to uncertainty generated by changes in the admissions process.
* IHT: Obama Faces Uphill Battle With Florida Jews “The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel.” I tell these people what I tell some Indian relatives and acquaintances: If America isn’t Indian enough for you, move back to India. You can’t have your 2% milk and drink it, too. What ever happened to being an American and the welfare of America? And where’s Sammy Davis, Jr. when you need him?
* Levees still broken and there are 10.5 days to hurricane season.
Day 983: Yes, But Is Our Children Learning?*
May 7, 2008 - Filed Under education, new orleans
NYTimes: Changes at New Orleans Schools Bring Gains in Test Scores
… Nonetheless, more than half the students who took the test in those grades did not pass, and 60 percent of high school students got an unsatisfactory ranking in standardized English and math tests, a figure three to four times higher than the percentage throughout Louisiana.
* George W. Bush, March 29, 2001
Day 976: America’s Continuing Battle With Necessity And Innovation
April 30, 2008 - Filed Under desi / india, education, global, government, science & technology
ZDNet: Indian techies snubbing US jobs to stay home
Indian tech graduates are increasingly turning their back on western countries in favor of finding work at home … Between 1964 and 2001 the number of IITians staying in India was 65 per cent but this jumped to 84 per cent between 2002 and 2008.
I suspect most of this is because western companies in India have now opened up jobs to locals that are more technically sophisticated in nature than simple call center positions. The overabundance of IIT graduates is an immediately available brain trust. All a western company has to do is set up a technology center in Bangalore or Baroda, hire locals, ship them projects and oversee the work through a western supervisor. Yet, even when Indian workers are paid half of our salaries allegedly to do the same thing, they live better than us because of the cheap cost of living in India.
Besides, why move to the US when the dollar has tanked and we have very little to export in the way of The American Dream?
While Indians are brilliant workers, they are not born innovators. Again, what was The American Dream in its heyday? It was the pursuit of financial as well as intangible rewards in return for good old hard work and Yankee ingenuity. It wasn’t just making money to buy, it was staying competitive and making sure your kids excelled in school so that they could be strong American social and economic contributors (which, incidentally, made for the greatest form of American patriotism). In those days, so many more people and kids tinkered and were encouraged to be part of the American technological experience, not passive consumers. While the work ethic still exists in many parts of this nation, an equivalent demand on our innovative capability does not. Instead, we want to make more money doing the same old thing to buy products cheaply constructed by someone else. Furthermore, we don’t want anyone else in our midst to innovate, lest they create a threat to our financial stability. This is how we’ve devalued ourselves and continue to do so by not investing in education while shipping jobs abroad at rates no American can or wants to live on.
It seems that most Americans are not required any longer, but we’re still being born. My advice to ourselves is not to look for the quick fix in the next seemingly big thing, which really possesses little in the way of substance, i.e. Web 2.0, the housing market, mortgages. It is way past time to want to do little work in return for these dollars, which makes the dollars eventually worthless. Let us focus on what we do best - invention.
Firstly, degrees ought not to be the piece of paper which gets an American in the door towards consumerism. American college and graduate students have to stop thinking in terms of coasting through pre-packaged degrees with minimum-required GPAs that guarantee them a job. Unless there is a lot less rote learning and students work hard to knock an exam out of the park in which the taught material is not only regurgitated but also freshly applied to a new problem, that education will not supply the tools for innovation and renaissance and the upcoming job may not be around for much longer. This, in turn, requires a university to stop being a factory in which 90% of undergraduates and their fat tuitions are nothing more than coal in the furnace that heats the research of a small group of innovators, whose products are waiting to be patented and sold, but whose abilities to query and investigate are transferred to a very small portion of the student population, if at all. In other words, we can’t have professors who are primarily researchers and, in their wee spare time, teachers. We urgently need researchers as well as an equivalent number of teachers who actively engage all students using the tools and skills of technological inquiry.
Secondly, Americans have to learn take care of themselves, regardless of the spiritual or political flavor of the day. This requires less reliance and more imagination. Putting it differently, God gave us brains for a reason. India and China are very old countries with very deeply religious and philosophical folks, but, unlike poor Muslim countries and America (see what I did there?), they have almost never let prejudices or fervor interfere with pure learning. For instance, my own Hindu grandparents’ skepticism about evolution did not hinder their children and grandchildren from learning biology or becoming successful technologists with solid groundings in matters of reason versus those of faith. Somewhere along the way, Americans have lost the notion that destiny is often a tangible and malleable thing within our reach. We misplaced free thought.
Finally, it might just be too late for America, especially when 99% of Americans don’t control what we own and our economy is based on consuming more than producing. I am less and less inclined to believe that our government-economy complex can do more than bail out companies while leaving people out to dry, in the name of propping up Wall St.’s house of cards. Therefore, innovation may also involve re-inventing ourselves in a land to which The American Dream has moved. Is this giving up on America or is it refusing to support what we have become? The spirit of America is that aspect of every one of her citizens which is strong and spontaneous and yet aw-shucks casual and hospitable. No other country has those values on us. None. That, however, will not help recover America in the long run. The question is how to help our children (and, maybe, ourselves) retain this strong identity as more and more of them move out into the world.
These are just some thoughts and questions I offer as someone who ponders her own job and place in the American framework of things. In the day and age of the disposable American, very little is a given. I’d love to hear what you think on these matters, so please comment away.
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