The New York Times's "Misunderstanding" of Corporate Education Reform

Two months ago the New York Times published a feature story reporting (with apparent fright) growing opposition to education reform in Democratic states.  At the time I derided this as the Times's version of "late-breaking news" because this development has been growing for a couple of years at least.  I should clarify that by "education reform" I mean the current variety, which has been conceived and funded by billionaires like Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, Eli Broad and Rupert Murdoch.  Its central tenets seem to be endless high-stakes commercial testing, the final destruction of developing kids' curiosity in favor of test prep, the privatization of schools through the use of charters, destruction of teacher unions, and the replacement of teachers themselves with low-cost (and ill-trained) temps through programs like Teach for America.

Who could possibly oppose such noble aims?  The Murdoch-owned New York Post describes this program, with its implicit war of all against all, as "the civil rights movement of the 21st Century."  They even had the colossal hubris to describe a big rally in Albany by charter schools as the equivalent of the Selma March.  We are supposed to forget that Alabama Governor George Wallace violently opposed (literally) the Selma March; he did not speak alongside Martin Luther King in favor of voting rights as Andrew Cuomo spoke in favor of charter schools alongside Eva Moskowitz at the Albany, New York rally.  We are supposed to forget that the Alabama State Police and sheriff's posse viciously attacked the Selma marchers with truncheons and knotted ropes; they did not protect them as the New York State Police did the Eva Moskowitz rallygoers.  And we are supposed to forget that the Selma marchers knew they were risking their lives by supporting voting rights.  The original purpose of the march was to carry the murdered corpse of Jimmie Lee Jackson's to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery.  Eva Moskowitz's supporters were given paid bus rides to Albany, the children were their in lieu of school attendance, the teachers were ordered to be present.

The Times has not engaged in such bizarre fabrications.  What the Times has done is probably more insidious.  It has played along with Arne Duncan's claims that the test refusals are by middle-class parents who choose to opt their children out of an unpleasant experience, making the resistance analogous to parents who refuse vaccination of their children.  They have failed utterly to report on the fact that teachers are not allowed to see itemized breakdowns of their students' results, which alone makes assessment worthwhile.  They have failed to report that these tests are treated as trade secrets.  They have failed to report on the children who used to love school and now hate it.  They have even avoided discussing some of the stranger test questions, like the talking eggplant, which came out because the kids didn't understand that they were bound by a gag order.

The Times has avoided discussing the replacement of experienced teachers with the five-week wonders of Teach for America in a number of cities, especially Chicago, New Orleans and Newark.  Instead it discusses the enthusiasm of the Corps Members and the challenges they face.  That is all true, but it is easier for a Times editor to identify with those young temps than it is with the parents of kids who never get an experienced teacher.  If TFA is so great, why don't the parents at Horace Mann and Trinity beg for them to teach their kids?

The Times has reported -- slowly and belatedly -- on the fact that charter schools don't get better overall results than public schools.  But they have resisted reporting on the way many charters cheat on their lotteries.  They have resisted reporting on the large number of children, especially boys, who are forced out of the charters.  And they have avoided altogether reporting on the horror that is "zero tolerance" or "no excuses":  children suspended for slouching, for looking around the room, for failing to keep a silent and perfect line in the halls.

Opposition to all this comes from both left and right.  Some of it is ideologically motivated, or narrowly political: Obama is for this so I am opposed.  But most of the opposition has to do with these three simple ideas:

1. Children deserve to learn, explore and create.
2. Children deserve teachers who are experienced, trained and committed.
3. Our communities deserve public education.

The New York Times pretends that none of this exists.  The Times pretends that opponents of corporate reform don't care about poor kids.  The Times wants to portray this opposition as a movement of the lunatic right, with maybe some union hacks who want to protect their jobs.

The Times is not confused.  The Times is engaging in a big propaganda job.  The Times Corporation is allied with the other media giants like Pearson Education and Murdoch's News Corporation who stand to make gigantic profits out of this "reform".  The Times lies.

Vandalizing the berms that protect your home from the sea

Since Prophet and I started walking together I have been thinking a lot about shared space.  I really enjoy letting him walk off leash.  There should be a name for this activity, or for the people who engage in it.  Off-leash walkers?  It is legal now in New York City, in certain parks and at certain hours.  The dogs get in fewer fights, because they have the physical space to negotiate their own relationships instead of being confined to a six-foot radius around their owner.  Dog bites of people are down, too.  And since it brings dogs and their owners into those parks at off-hours, other people, with less wholesome interests in the isolation of the park find less isolation there.  Am I being too obscure?

But we still share those parks with people who have every right not to be disturbed by dogs.  There are solitary walkers.  People sit and meditate.  Artists set up in the early morning to take advantage of the quiet and the light.  Many of those people don't like dogs, so when I see a person without an accompanying dog I immediately put Prophet on leash.  Many of my fellow dog walkers don't.  Now I will readily admit that a full-sized German Shepherd can be more intimidating than a Yorkie to somebody who isn't a dog lover, but I think there should be a recognition of shared space.  Instead, I frequently hear from my dog-walking associates that this is "our time" in the park and people should stay out if they don't like dogs.

These are the same people who feel that they are not obligated to observe New York's poop-scoop law in wooded areas, that dog poop is natural.  When this winter's snows were melting the trails along the Hudson became disgusting with their "natural" contributions.  Some don't even license their dogs, and when the police (very occasionally) come around checking for dog licenses they get irate, wondering why the cops aren't chasing "real" criminals.  Which is, in part, my point: we tend to think that everything we do is benign.

The flip side of this is that other park users can be intolerant of us, too.  When I see joggers or cyclists on the trail I always lead Prophet off and put him in a sit.  Rarely somebody will nod, or smile, or even say thank you.  Usually they refuse eye contact.  Do they think they simply deserve this courtesy?  Or are they outraged that they have to share the trail with me at all?

When our kids were young and playing in Little League baseball the parents arrived early to rake and lime the fields.  There were other park lovers who felt that this was a terrible use of Riverside Park.  Mowing the fields reduced bird habitat and shouting children frightened wildlife.  Frankly even dog people and children people get into conflict about the appropriate use of the park.  I have seen too many dog owners allow their pooches onto athletic fields to chase the children, steal their soccer balls, and shit in the grass.  And when parents complain, they are denounced for it.

But these selfish uses of shared space paled for me today when I heard the news that ATV riders have been destroying the sand berms that the Parks Department created on Staten Island after superstorm Sandy.  Neighborhoods that had eight feet of seawater received these incipient dunes to block the direct impact of waves before the next big storm.  Grasses were planted to try to stabilize the berms.  But apparently, some people in these neighborhoods were so thrilled by the creation of these new fun parks that they couldn't resist tearing them up.

I wonder often why we all have to pay for the reconstruction of seaside homes that we didn't all get to enjoy.  But if people want to destroy their own storm protection?  It leaves me wondering.

A Morning Walk on Hunter Island

This morning Prophet and I made the 15-minute drive over to Pelham Bay Park to walk on Hunter Island.  In a few weeks we will have to pay to park over there so I want to make a few visits first.  And it is the time of year that I hope to catch a few songbirds in the woods.  I counted the cars in the (enormous) Orchard Beach parking lot: 13.  For those of you who don't live in New York City that is the equivalent of almost zero.

It was forty degrees and sunny.  We went through the picnic area and headed north on the big trail alongside the rowing basin.  There were a few shells out: two female crews and some individuals.  The girls' coach was yelling at them across the water and Prophet was really interested in who was out there.  When we cut through the marsh to Strawberry Island I was reminded again of how amazed I am at Prophet's sense of geography.  He always knows exactly where I want to go, although he often has ideas of his own.  (Hint: Foreshadowing.)

A Black Lab interested Prophet as we were returning to the main trail, but he and his owner were walking counter clockwise, so I waved, Prophet sniffed their trail, and we continued on our way.  Returning from the blueberry peninsula a little terrier ran up on us from behind.  Prophet greeted him happily and jumped around with him for a few minutes.  Then we followed the trail east across the channel from Glen Island Park.

When we got to the broken former bridge to Twin Island we turned east again, climbing through the woods to the high point of the island.  We ran into two people there with large dogs.  Again, Prophet happily negotiated those greetings with uncertain strangers.  He is getting really good at this.

Near the site where the Hunter Mansion once stood we turned south on a secondary trail.  It runs roughly parallel to the main, paved path and through mixed woods where I was still hoping to see some warblers.  But not many yards along, Prophet really wanted to turn off on a tertiary trail.  He had been such a good boy that I couldn't see the harm in saying no.  The path got less and less obvious until is simply petered out in the middle of what will be a tangled thicket once the leaves are out.  Prophet confidently continue west.  I wondered where he was going, but the visibility is still good and I could see the water, so -- again -- what was the harm?

And then I saw, finally, what his nose must have been telling him ever since we first set out 90 minutes before: deer.  He broke into a run, but didn't pursue them.  Instead, he stopped and waited for me with a huge grin on his face.  And when I caught up, he continued bushwhacking due west toward the trail along the water.

We had one last encounter, with twin female Rotweilers who had been rescued from being chained in a wooden shanty with a concrete floor.  They were a little spooked, but Prophet made himself small, greeted them gently, tried to initiate play, and then calmly walked on when they remained uncertain.

I wonder what my regular mood would be if I didn't have a buddy to go adventuring with every morning.  But I do.

Becoming the Soviet Union

Yesterday I read the excerpt from Michael Lewis's new book (Flash Boys) about high frequency trading that was published in the Sunday magazine section of the New York Times.  What interested me most while I was reading was the ongoing incentive to understand a system better than everybody else and arbitrage that understanding.  With high frequency trading, if I grasped it correctly, that means seeing an impending bloc of trades in the physically closest electronic exchange milliseconds before they go on to a further exchange, and then quickly buying the stock at the current price in order to sell it to the putative buyer a few milliseconds later at a higher price.

We think of a stock exchange as a market for capital, in which firms can acquire "partners" from a pool of unknown people.  But it has always been a place to make money.  When abuses become egregious (and visible) the market has to be regulated or the supply of capital for actual commerce will evaporate.  Nevertheless, people are always searching for a new way to make money.  It is like an ecosystem in which life will radiate into any available niche.  I know that seems like a pretty metaphor for theft and greed, but since the phrase "available niche" already disguises the blood of prey, I also think it is apt.

What only interested me secondarily when I originally read the article was the fact that most of the programmers who discovered this "niche" (millisecond delays between exchanges) and who wrote the code exploiting it were Russian.  Lewis quotes one of them saying that Russians spend a lifetime finding angles in a corrupt system so they are most attuned to this kind of work.  Hmm.

This morning on WNYC I heard an interview with Matt Taibbi discussing his new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.  He talked about the huge decreases in crime we are experiencing, along with the continued burgeoning of our prison population.  He discussed the single prosecution of a bank after the great collapse of 2008, Abacus Bank, which he described as a clear message saying,  "These guys are small enough to be prosecuted."  And he compared the US today to the old Soviet Union, in which the written laws were much less significant than the unwritten laws.  He referred to Soviet teens imprisoned for selling jeans on the street, while the president of the university he (Taibbi) attended for a year wore Western suits every day.

And it occurred to me that we have a gigantic gulag system.  We have a dual system of justice.  We have a political process dominated by oligarchs.  We have massive distortions of the market through collusion.

We didn't defeat the Soviet Union in 1989; we became the Soviet Union.