Welcome to the Third World

 Alternet has a good piece on how, despite jingoistic sloganeering to the contrary, America is not number one in most categories that matter.  As the author points out:

 Three decades of trickledown economics; the monopolization, privatization and deregulation of industry; and the destruction of labor protection has resulted in 50 million Americans living in abject poverty, while 400 individuals own more than one-half of the nation’s wealth. As the four Walmart heirs enjoy a higher net worth than the bottom 40 percent, our nation’s sense of food insecurity is more on par with developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania than with OECD nations like Australia and Canada.

 What is frightening is the degree to which we have essentially cannibalized ourselves into lowering wages and, hence, lowering our standard of living.

The destruction of labor has been so comprehensive that first-world nations now offshore their jobs to the U.S. In other words, we’ve become the new India. Foreign companies now see us as the world’s cheap labor force, and we have the non-unionized South to thank for that... 

 IKEA has set up a factory in Virginia. Volkswagen has set up in Tennessee, and the likes of Hyundai, KIA, BMW, Honda, and Toyota have all set up in the South to take advantage of the world’s latest cheap labor source. 

This has resulted in an America that does not have any cities among the top 10 cities in the world, that ranks behind 30 countries in life expectancy and infant mortality, and ranks first in such distinguished categories as incarcerated citizens per capita and adult onset diabetes.  Despite the ascendancy of and the abject failure over the last three decades of Reagonomics and other supply-side economic fantasies, we have a Congress that thinks the answer is to shrink the government further, privatize public goods to unparalleled extents, and cut the few benefits those hit hardest by their policies rely on to put food on the table.  Perhaps most frightening is the fact that a near majority of persons in the United States thinks Congress is right.  

For anyone interested in the incarceration issue, WUWM is doing a series on the rate at which Wisconsin incarcerates black males.  We're number one in this category also.

More Reasons Not to Believe the Hype About International Test Scores

Diane Ravitch has a great piece on the OECD PISA scores at commondreams.org.  Of note, Ravitch points out the common misconception that U.S. students scored well on these tests in some halcyon past.  The fact is that U.S. students have never scored particularly well on these tests.  It is also true that the U.S. student performance on PISA tests has had no relationship to the economic success of the nation.  Ravitch summarizes and quotes Keith Baker who has written extensively on this issue:

Baker wrote that a certain level of educational achievement may be "a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of national success." What has mattered most for the economic, cultural, and technological success of the U.S., he says, is a certain "spirit," which he defines as "ambition, inquisitiveness, independence, and perhaps most important, the absence of a fixation on testing and test scores."

Unfortunately for school age children, their teachers, and anyone else who has firsthand knowledge of the education process, the education reform movement (or, as Ravitch dubs it, "The Bad News Industry") seems to lack the very spirit of ambition, inquisitiveness, and independence that matters most for our economic, cultural, and technological success. 

For a nation that has risen to be the world's leading economic, military, and cultural power, one would think that those with an interest in education would be asking themselves, "how can we ensure that we continue to get it right?"  Of course this would mean that we would have to address the profound negative impact that growing income disparity has on education, the profound negative impact poverty without adequate social safety nets has on education, and the profound negative impact diverting resources away from public education has on education.  (The fact that I had to write that last clause both shocks and nauseates.)  I am not betting that the corporate interests that pervade the Bad News Industry has any interest in tackling these problems.  It is much easier to bemoan our students' performance on a meaningless international examination than to actually do something that would make education better and stronger.

I will leave the last word to Ravitch:

Let others have the higher test scores. I prefer to bet on the creative, can-do spirit of the American people, on its character, persistence, ambition, hard work, and big dreams, none of which are ever measured or can be measured by standardized tests like PISA.

Public Education Is Not a Job Training Program

There is a piece at theconversation.com on the uselessness of using comparative PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) scores to assess the state of any individual nation's education system.  In a brilliant summary of the problems with looking to PISA results to justify particular educational reform, education lecturer Graham Birrell points out:

The results released by the OECD would be more useful if they helped us to identify how to improve, but the countries ahead of us have such radically different approaches that anybody can pick and choose almost any educational approach and say there is “evidence from PISA” that it would work.

 Birrell is referring to Britain, but he could be making the same statement about the United States.  It is amusing to think about the vicissitudes of education reform in this country when considering Birrell's next statement:

Do you favour long hours and rote-learning? Well apparently they work, since countries in the Far East do very well in PISA. Perhaps you prefer shorter hours, very highly qualified teachers and light-touch accountability. Well PISA tells us they work too, as can be seen in the success of Finland, which, despite a dip in the 2012 results, has historically always been at or near the top. The data you cherry pick from the PISA results is likely to tell you far more about your own political inclinations than something meaningful about educational answers for the UK.

Certainly one could substitute 'USA' for 'UK' and the statement would apply equally well.

What is particularly interesting about Birrell's piece is the revelation that the PISA examinations are not what everyone assumes them to be.  In short,  

Children in each country only take a small sample of each of the three tests, with their total score being estimated using a mathematical model that David Spiegelharter, Professor of Statistics at Cambridge University, has declared “demonstrably inadequate”.

Of course this aspect of the PISA methodology is rarely reported when (typically) conservative alarmists tout the results as reason to commodify and privatize public education.

Birrell does note that PISA scores can be useful to evaluate education within a nation.  For example, in Britain the results demonstrated that "state schools did much better than private schools" when socioeconomic status was controlled for.  Not surprisingly the tests also showed that economically challenged areas serve disproportionately high percentage of "disadvantaged students."  However, Birrell accurately notes:

However, this more useful side to the results does not justify the central flaw with the whole PISA approach, which is the fact that the scores are used as a tool to reconfigure education according to economic goals.

Much like the UK, we too have abandoned the notion that education has "intrinsic self-worth" and instead consider it little more than an instrumentality to "prepare children for the world of work and the 'global race.'" I for one loathe the idea of public education as job training, which, it must said, ought to be the responsibility of the private sector and not the public schools.  Not only is this wholly instrumental approach to education depressing in an existential way, it also functions in a perverse manner as justification to devalue education.  Rather than focusing on the right to a decent public education, which would entail a broad-based approach to learning with concomitant expenditure of resources, education reformers in this country want to focus solely on whether students leave school ready to find a job.  When this is the focus, education suffers because so much of what we have historically considered valuable in education (the arts, music, physical education, competence in a wide range of subjects) becomes so many useless expenditures to be cut (at least for public schools - if you can pay for an elite private education then you can have all the arts and useless humanities that you want).

The New Tyranny

Pope Francis is proving to be a remarkable leader of the Catholic church. In the Evangelii Gaudium recently published he admonishes unquestioned faith in capitalism and the free market. Using exceptionally strong language he refers to an “idolatry of money” that will lead to a “new tyranny.” I think it is about time that this aspect of the Catholic faith be brought front and center. Perhaps now we will finally see the duplicity of those Catholics who claim to be pro-life with respect to abortion but remain steadfastly anti-life in their economic and social policies. In what would be a welcome bit of schadenfreude, perhaps the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops will recommend denying communion to any politicians who support economic policies that lead to the further exclusion, marginalization, and suffering of the majority of the world’s population. I for one suggest we start with Paul Ryan. After all, as Pope Francis notes, “an economy of exclusion and inequality … kills.”

The Couch Sags

My couch is broken and I couldn't be happier because my son uses it as an end zone and it is beautiful to watch him imagine players and plays and connect his imagined scenarios with a physical enactment, a sort of nascent and unforced drama, an endless series of one act plays, supernally creative play, going through cards and stickers with dates of birth, age, height, weight, college attended, position, playing statistics, and he riffs off every category imagining the battles and who ends up winning and why and I could watch him destroy my couch this way all day.

Piety and Politics

By now most people have seen the photo of Pope Francis kissing the pilgrim with neurofibromatosis in St. Peter's Square.  I am not sure what to make of this other than that the world seems to have an incredibly humble and pious man in what is probably the single most significant and powerful ecclesiastical office in the world.

Amy Davidson has a nice piece in the New Yorker about the picture, the moment, Pope Francis, and whether the Catholic Church is in the midst of change.  I think, however, that she misses the importance of moments like this.  Whether Pope Francis effects institutional change or not will be an important historical question some day, but the remarkable thing about this photo is the striking manner in which it seems to capture the essence of Francis as a man.  I didn't get the impression that this is theater.  Commentators seem to agree that this is a genuine moment and genuinely reflects who Pope Francis is.  If that is the case, then we should celebrate the man not because of his historical significance but instead because as the Vicar of Christ he actually lives as Christ commanded.

Riding a Bicycle

I recently had a discussion with some friends about why we ride bikes.  The answers were typical for persons in their mid-thirties to mid-forties:  it keeps us healthier than we would otherwise be, we like the competitive aspects, we enjoy the camaraderie of racing and the community bikers we see around, etc.  As I thought about it a little more though, I realized that I ride my bike because it puts me in the world in a way that a car cannot.

The immediate trigger for this line of thought was commuting to work on a bicycle.  I enjoy my commute for many reasons.  I love the way the air feels early in the morning.  I love ticking out a rhythm on my ride in to work.  The cadence of my pedaling can almost be musical, unifying mind and body.  I enjoy looking around at the buildings and houses I pass, the people waiting for the bus, the athletes practicing on the fields.  I cannot tell you how sublime it feels when I find myself riding along the lake front on one of those perfect days when the breeze pushes gently off the lake, driving away the summer heat, and the light causes the water to turn a mesmerizing cerulean hue.

I could go on and on about all the things I enjoy when I am commuting by bicycle; however, I realized that what drives all of these things, what makes commuting by bicycle different than commuting in a car or riding a bus, is that cycling puts you in the world.  You are present in your community and almost by default have to engage it.  When I come to a stop light and put my foot down while I wait for the light to change, I hear the people at the bus stop talking.  I hear and feel the vibrations of the car engine next to me.  I smell the exhaust.  I look around and see what is there, my surroundings.  Of course I am focused on the road, but I am also focused on the buildings and the people and the horizon, the clouds in the sky, the wind, the heat (or cold).  I ride by a high school and see the boys preening for the girls and the girls laughing.  I see a group of men under an awning awaiting the bus, commiserating.  I see the city workers painting the lines.  I hear the train rumble on the tracks as I cross one of the bridges and marvel that the cars seem to go on to infinity.

I tell pedestrians that I am passing on their left and they often acknowledge me and say 'thanks.'  I always reply, 'you're welcome.'  I meet other cyclists and sometimes we ride for a while together, chatting.  I see many of the same riders passing me each morning and enjoy the sense of familiarity that this engenders.  I see mothers running behind jog strollers containing their smiling or nodding toddlers.  I see a father riding with his young daughter who pedals furiously to keep up.  I see the young men and women at the Urban Ecology Center planting and clearing and making the river beautiful again.  I pass walkers and runners and old women in scooters.  Often we look at each other and smile or wave or say 'hello.'

I am in the world when I am on my bike.  I hear the city and feel the city and smell the city and see the city in all of its brilliance and ugliness and the in between.  The meat packing plant sometimes burns my nose with the ammoniac reek.  I pass through places with torn sleeping bags and shredded cardboard that were somebody's home.  I see placarded houses and empty storefronts.  I see and feel and hear and smell everything.  The lovely addition to our art museum with its brise soleil unfurled fills me with wonder.  The fox crossing the bike path puts a smile on my face.  The neighborhoods with old trees canopied over the streets and the families in front yards kicking a ball or riding bikes or chasing around fill me with hope. All of this is my city and I love being part of it.

When I ride I engage my surroundings.  I am not averse to automobiles and like taking road trips, but in the city you miss so much when you drive.  The radio is on or the air conditioner is on and the windows are shut and you look at the road and listen to the news or the music and pay little attention to anything not on the road.  Sure, we all look around, but cars move fast and before you have time to think about what you see (and usually it is just see) you are already gone.  On a bike I move slow enough to think about what I am experiencing, to pay attention to the world around me.  While I move faster than a pedestrian, I am still slow enough to notice the world and pay attention to it.  And I am able to cover much more ground than I could walking.

It is lovely to ride and feel and hear and smell and see the place where you live.  It is lovely to be on a bicycle riding.  That is why I ride.