Category Archives: morality

YGTBSM, Again

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The Teachers College Record is pushing this with a straight face.

Resisting Compliance: Learning to Teach for Social Justice in a Neoliberal Context

by Bree Picower — 2011
Background/Context: This study examines education in the context of neoliberalism and how current educational policies such as high-stakes testing and mandated curriculum create schooling environments hostile to social justice education. Relying on education for liberation literature, teacher education for social justice scholarship, and work on critical pedagogy, this study explores how new teachers who teach from a social justice perspective navigate the challenges of their first year in teaching.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study asks, What strategies do new teachers use to stay true to their vision of teaching for social justice despite the challenges they face in their school environments?

Population/Participants/Subjects: During the course of the study, 4 of the 6 participants were full-time classroom teachers. The 2 other participants were still taking education classes while student- and assistant teaching. All worked in a variety of urban elementary schools.

Intervention/Program/Practice: The participants were all members of a social justice critical inquiry project (CIP) group that met at the university from which they graduated.

Research Design: This was a qualitative study that used design-based research.

Data Collection and Analysis: Data were collected from three sources: transcripts from audio and videotaped CIP sessions, ethnographic interviews with participants, and participants’ written reflections. Data were analyzed using grounded theory method.

Findings/Results: The teachers developed four strategies for teaching for social justice. First, by participating in a critical inquiry project, the teachers supported each other by building a safe haven that protected their vision. Second, the participants camouflaged their critical pedagogy by integrating it with the mandated curriculum, which allowed them to teach from a social justice perspective without rousing the concerns of their administration. The third strategy was to develop their students as agents of change. Finally, in a few instances, the teachers went public with their work by rejecting or speaking against policies that they felt were not in the best interests of their students.

Conclusions/Recommendations: Although these four strategies allowed participants to successfully create critical classrooms, they did not impact the larger neoliberal forces that maintain unjust schooling experiences. This has implications for teacher education, and the author suggests recommendations for schools of education.

The article itself is behind TCR‘s pay wall, should you wish to wade through it.  For my money, it wasn’t worth it.   The sample size says a lot about the laziness of the “scholarship” involved.  One of the strategies—”the participants camouflaged their critical pedagogy by integrating it with the mandated curriculum, which allowed them to teach from a social justice perspective without rousing the concerns of their administration”—says all there is to say about the level of integrity of this “scholarship.”

Their logo includes the slogan “The Voice of Scholarship in Education.”  Yet they haven’t a clue of what scholarship consists.  Are we really teaching our teachers this one-sidedness?

 

h/t National Review Online‘s “Phi Beta Cons“

The Fiscal Cliff “Deal”

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It’s a bad deal, and the Republicans in the House should vote it down.  Indeed, they should refuse even to take up the bill until the Senate has actually voted on the budget bill which the House passed in spring of last year, which would obviate all of this, or on the House-passed fiscal cliff solution from last September (which CBSNews claims doesn’t address the fiscal cliff, even though it significantly reduces Federal spending).

If the House Republicans accede to this deal, there’ll be no meaningful spending cuts, no chance for deficit elimination, no chance for debt pay down, the coming debt ceiling “negotiations” notwithstanding.  No, the Republicans will only be confirming their failure in summer of 2011, and their Senate failure last night, and solidifying their habit of folding under pressure.  And so it will be easy for them to fold, yet again, in two months’ time.

But quite aside from that political failure, they will be creating an economic and social failure: there is no need for the Federal government to receive yet more revenue.  Yet allowing the government to expand its raids on the private pocketbook, they will be condemning Americans to existence as government wards.  After all, President Barack Obama is on record in his victory speech yesterday as saying he intends to use this tax increase to fund additional “welfare,” rather than to pay down the debt, and as saying he wants yet more tax increases in the next round of talks—with which to expand “welfare.”

Even the chump change spending cuts in this deal represent abject surrender for the emasculated party.  The deal agrees to slip the sequester by two months, but that only achieves a spending cut of $24 billion.  That’s one surrender, but it could have been choked down in favor of dealing seriously with spending in the coming debt ceiling debate.  However,

Republicans had insisted the cuts of $24 billion be offset with savings in other areas.  The White House wanted some of the offset to be in the form of tax increases, not just other spending cuts.

Republicans folded (there’s that habit, again).

The deal pays for delaying the sequester with a mix of new taxes and spending cuts[.]  …$12 billion would come from a shift in the rules affecting workplace-based 401(k) plans.

A tax increase from which President Barack Obama’s union allies are carefully shielded, no matter their incomes.

This is a bad deal.

Kill it.

More on the Obama Fiscal Cliff

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From Fox News come these tidbits of information.

Signs that a deal was unraveling surfaced by mid-afternoon [Sunday] when Reid said his party could not make a counteroffer to Republicans.

Could not?  Or would not?

Senator Patty Murray (D,WA) said this:

It’s real disturbing we were thrown in a change to Social Security at the last minute.

Aside from the triviality of this, she’s lying about it.   The “change” is a change in the way Social Security payouts are calculated—that chained CPI bit—and it’s been on the table since last summer.

According to Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL), Senate Budget Committee Ranking Republican,

The biggest obstacle we face is that President Obama and Majority Leader Reid continue to insist on new taxes that will be used to fund more new spending, not for meaningful deficit reduction[.]

Progressive good faith negotiating, indeed.

Progressive Cooperation and the Fiscal Cliff

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In last weekend’s interview with NBC‘s “Meet the Press,” President Barack Obama said this with a straight face, according to The Wall Street Journal:

Singling out the two GOP legislative leaders, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Mr [Mitch] McConnell of Kentucky, the president added that “Congress has not been able to get this stuff done.” The reason, he said, is “not because Democrats in Congress don’t want to go ahead and cooperate, but because I think it’s been very hard for Speaker Boehner and Republican leader McConnell to accept the fact that taxes on the wealthiest Americans should go up a little bit, as part of an overall deficit reduction package.”

Really?  Based on what theory must “taxes on the wealthiest Americans…go up a little bit?”  The revenues collected won’t amount to walking around money compared to your budget deficits.

Democrats want to cooperate?  What was the Senate vote on the fiscal cliff spending solution (albeit for only six months) which the House passed last September?

What were the vote outcomes on the Federal budgets the House passed each of the last two years?

What were the Senate votes on any of the 40, or so, jobs-related bills passed by the House and sent up to the Senate in this Congressional session?

What were the deficits contained in your own budget proposals which you sent to Congress in each of the last three years?  Oh, wait—most of the Democrats (yourself, only, excluded) did cooperate on these: you couldn’t even get a single vote, Democrat or Republican, on any of those “budgets.”

Where are your Democrats on entitlement reform or on spending cuts—real ones, now, not reductions in growth rates that you masquerade as cuts, to occur some time in a nebulous future?

What was it you threatened to do in your 2013 inaugural and State of the Union speeches if you don’t get your way on taxes?  Oh, yeah.  You said

[you] would use [your] inaugural address and [your] State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault.

You berate Republicans for acting against 98% of Americans by holding out for no tax increase on the remaining 2%.  Yet you’re ready—anxious—to blow up our economy and gravely harm honest, hard-working Americans because, having already gotten 98% of what you claim you want, You’re greedy and want more.  Where’s your cooperation?

Where is any Democrat’s cooperation, Mr Obama?  You’ve offered no evidence to support your assertion.

NLMSM Strikes Again

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Just two days before Christmas last week, The Journal News kindly advised all readers of the locations of gun owners, and of the locations of their unarmed neighbors, in the two New York counties of Westchester and Rockland.  The JN‘s Putnam County outing is pending.

They write, with an absolutely straight face, in justification of this invasion of privacy:

Anyone can find out the names and addresses of handgun owners in any county with a simple Freedom of Information Law request….

So they thought they’d do the home robbers, second-story men, and leftist anti-gun kooks a civic favor by outing these private citizens themselves, and save those others the trouble.

The good citizens of New York know better, and they object to this arrogant abuse of journalistic”…practice.

One objected:

Do you fools realize that you also made a map for criminals to use to find homes to rob that have no guns in them to protect themselves?

Another

You have just destroyed the privacy of these law abiding citizens and by releasing this list, you have equated them to that of sex offenders and murders.

And another:

These are law abiding gun owners, they are no danger to anyone except for criminals.  And with this information you have made them targets for both criminals and anti gun lobbyist who i am sure are going to treat them like monsters.

And another:

Tom King, president of the New York Rifle & Pistol Association, said the release of additional pistol-permit information [beyond the currently releasable name and address] would endanger gun owners, some of whom have valuable collections of weapons.

You’re giving a shopping list to criminals.  Does it matter if you own 47 guns or you own one gun?  Everybody likes to think that someone who has all of these guns is evil, that there’s some nefarious reason they have all these guns.  There are collectors.

And another:

Paul Piperato, the Rockland county clerk, said he’s always uneasy providing it.

You have judges, policemen, retired policemen, FBI agents—they have permits.  Once you allow the public to see where they live, that puts them in harm’s way.

Only a fool thinks judges and law enforcement personnel don’t have a plethora of enemies.

And there’s the hysteria and illogic of the anti-gun folks.  Jackie Hilly, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence Executive Director, insists

You don’t have more success with more guns.  You certainly don’t want our schools turned into armed camps.

Never mind that armed guards, or teachers or school staff trained and armed, don’t make the schools “armed camps.”  This is just an hysterical exaggeration.

Never mind that, presently, we give more protection to our banks and the money therein than we do our children.

Never mind that when the bad man comes and seconds count, the police will be only minutes away.  Absent an armed presence at the scene of the murders, the killing just goes on until the police can, finally, get there.

Never mind, even, that guns are not involved at all in one-third of mass killings.

The Journal News, though, in all of its wide-eyed innocence, is careful to point out that their reporter

Dwight R. Worley owns a Smith & Wesson 686 .357 Magnum and has had a residence permit in New York City for that weapon since February 2011.

But his dot isn’t on the map of gun owners and of unarmed homes that the NJ so kindly published.  Oh, wait—Worley isn’t in the counties he outed; he’s in NYC.  How convenient.

Merry Christmas