Eucatastrophe Reader

"If competition, then rules"

Deepwater Horizon REVIEW

Neither the oil company BP nor its investors will be promoting this film. Its simplification of the causes of the Deepwater Horizon explosion make it fit in nicely with a world view that sees good and evil in Marxist terms (“Four legs good; Two legs bad” as George Orwell puts it in Animal Farm.) The managers at BP wear clean blue button down shirts and take risks with people’s lives to save money. The grime besmeared working men on the rig all wear oil stained jumpsuits and live for their families. You could probably determine how good or evil any character in the film is by the amount of grunge under their finger nails. And yet there are so many pyrotechnical explosions in the course of the movie that you wonder if an entire oil well had to be dedicated to supplying the fuel for them.

All of the reading that I have ever done on the Deepwater Horizon explosion suggests that the causes were complicated. You can learn more about the technological failures in layman’s terms HERE. I am not an engineer but this presentation made sense to me.

What the well drilling company was doing was exploratory and cutting edge. What the oil company was asking them to do was risky. They were pushing the envelope on what could and could not be done in deep water and doing so in ways that implied more risk than I generally take in life. I am not sure anyone could know what was likely to happen because the endeavor had not been tried before at that depth. Just the name of the well – Deepwater Horizon - suggests that this was a venture on the margins. One commentator calls what was happening in the Gulf of Mexico that April of 2010 “risk creep” – the process whereby risky choices that do not end in disaster become the evidentiary foundation upon which an even riskier choice is made. All the companies involved in this “well from hell” were “running until they were tackled. The men and women working on the rig were doing the same – taking what they thought were calculated but safe risks. And nature tackled them in the form of billions of squashed flammable dinosaur plants we call “gas.”

Diane Vaughn, author of the book The Challenger Launch Decision, calls this process that one sees in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, “the normalization of deviance.” It is the process by which some risky behavior or other becomes accepted as not risky. Bet your house on your belief that you will shake the dice and not roll a six. After fifteen throws not throwing a six, you begin to stop seeing what you’re doing as risky. Realistic fears are naturalized. You up the anti and throw in a kid or two. Do a google search for quotes on “risk” and note just how many of them are written by people who see risk taking as a virtuous behavior.

It is easy for movie directors in hindsight to say that they were not careful enough. The movie makes that obvious and no one is disagreeing. I have no doubt that BP’s movie on their disaster would look different than this one. It might even include American citizens demanding more energy, less dependence on foreign sources of oil, and lower gas prices.

Question for Comment: At the beginning of the film, there is a moment of foreshadowing at the main character’s breakfast table. Mike’s daughter stages a little experiment by sticking a straw into a soda can and then pouring honey into it to “cap” the explosion. Mike’s wife mentions that one of their daughter’s classmates who works at a zoo brought in a real live penguin. A penguin! Mile exclaims. How can you compete with that? There should be rules.” Then the can explodes all over the table.

The point may be too subtle for many movie goers to get but it seems clear enough to me. In a world where competition will drive people to take risks, there needs to be rules and regulations to counter the pressure of that competition. What do you think? This policy suggestion of getting to pass a regulation only at the expense of getting rid of two existing ones. Good idea or bad?

"I was just far from home"

The New Americans REVIEW and a Christmas Sermon

In the documentary, The New Americans, we are given the opportunity to follow a half dozen families through their journey to America and through their attempts to adjust themselves to their new lives “in Babylon.” We get a chance to feel the forces that compel them to leave their homes (in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, Ramallah in the West Bank, and India). You get a chance to see how people’s relationships with their parents, their spouses, their children, and themselves are radically altered. Living in Vermont, I do not get to meet these sorts of people very often and so their stories are particularly riveting to me (they would have to be as the documentary is about eight hours long). As it is Christmas and as we enter a period when the issue of immigration will be in the news a lot, the documentary got me to reflecting about the lives of refugees. And about how the Christmas story itself is about a family of refugees.

 “When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.”

Not too many people remember that Jesus was once a refugee – a person who was perhaps barely welcomed in another country when his life was threatened in his own homeland. When I look at my own parentage, it takes years of scrolling to get to the parts when we could be called “refugees.” All 1400 some odd people in my genealogy database seem to have ancestors that arrived in Massachusetts Bay sometime before 1650, and though an argument could be made that almost all of those first American ancestors were refugees (most of them unwelcome or uneeded in England) they quickly stopped longing to return. On my maternal side, the Hurlbut family it seems moved up onto the Canadian border during the Revolutionary War because they were Tories and planned to come back and reclaim their property when the British won the war (something, you may have learned in a high school history class that did not ever happen.) But these connections to the life of a refugee are now quite distant for me.

The word refugee comes from a French word, refugié, the noun form of the act of seeking protection and safety. It was apparently first applied to the Protestant French Huguenots who had to flee the persecution of King Louis XIV when he revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. That French word came from the Latin word fugere “to flee.” We can have no qualms referring to Jesus and his family in Egypt as refugees because that is exactly what they were doing there: fleeing. I suspect that I could live in England today if I really wanted to and for that reason, I think it is fair to say that the Crossmans of Rutland County are not refugees any more. But just as I have often said that there are many ways to be poor (memory poor, relationship poor, meaning poor, health poor, or free-time poor for instance), there are several different ways to become and to be a refugee. One does not have to be driven out of their country and made to feel unwelcome to feel oneself “displaced.”

So, how does a person who still lives in the same county as their Revolutionary War ancestors become a refugee? How can it be that someone who owns a home ten times the size of Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond feels like a refugee? Perhaps it is because the word refugee speaks of a person who must give up a place of comfort to go looking for another and that so long as they do not find that place, they are a refugee. Perhaps we are all refugees in some sense if we want to look deep in our hearts.

Dépaysement is one of those words that doesn't have a direct English translation. It's a French word whose quick definition is “disorientation”, but the more elegant definition sounds something like this: “The unsteady feeling you get when you are away from your home country.” Robert Frost illustrates it in his poem, The Woodpile when he talks about getting lost in a swamp.

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.'
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.

Perhaps there are ways that we have all felt that at some point.

We can, for example, be refugees from a health and vigor we once had. Ailments, diseases, aging, arthritis, heart conditions, diabetes, eye-strain, injuries, stress-conditions, cancer, back-problems, hip replacements, memory loss, obesity, hearing loss, lymes disease, or just plain weariness can have us feeling like refuges within our own bodies driven out of the physical beings that we once were. We may not leave youthful health for fear of anything but we must adjust ourselves to our new circumstances as best we can eventually. “Remember your creator in the days of your youth before the days of trouble come …” says the author of Ecclesiastes just before he begins to detail all the ways that your body is likely to start falling apart.

Similarly, we can be refugees from the jobs that we once had and loved. Sometimes this happens because entire industries are exported to other places in the world. Sometimes this happens because a thinking job we once had is now being done by a computer or because the internet allows it to be done in some distant central location. Sometimes we get a new boss that destroys the lovely workplace that we grew accustomed to during the reign of a competent one. Sometimes, we are promoted to jobs that we need for financial reasons but that we do not feel well suited for or fulfilled by. Sometimes, the clients change and we no longer feel the satisfaction of relationships that former clients provided. Now, we are asked simply to provide services to nameless people over phones or at the other end of conveyer belts. Sometimes the markets no longer want what we used to sell or serve. Sometimes, competition intrudes like an invasive species and we watch as some Home Depot puts our hardware store out of business.  In my own field of teaching, one sees more and more the expansion of a model of adjunct faculty and part-time teachers crowding out the field and reducing wages. In the modern world of work, it is entirely possible to go to bed a CFO and wake up a fry cook in a tattertot assembly line. You can feel like screw driver being used for a hammer or a hammer used for a screw driver, or worse, either one not being used for anything – or used but not paid.

I would add a third way that we can become refugees while remaining in our ancestral lands. We can be refugees from relationships that we once had. Statistically, were are just as likely to be disconnected from the marital partners that we start adult life with as to remain with them. In a world of so many influences, it is not easy to retain connection to a person who is constantly changing while we are constantly changing. And where those disconnections take place, whether they be formalized by divorce or not, we can be separated in either spirit or body from our very children if we are not careful. Friends can become lost to us when their work transfers them. Siblings can relocate to other states, other countries, other worldviews. We have built a society that kneels at the alter of freedom and mobility and so we must pay. We must sacrifice to that Baal of liberty. I suspect that few of us can say that every person that they at one time loved and were loved by, is as available to them to love and be loved by as they would like today. We all deal with some heartbreak. Some loss. Some endless coping with some form of empty nestism. I recently heard of a company that grants employees time to deal with romantic loss. Depending on your age, you may claim one, two, or at maximum, three days to recover from being dumped. Three days. Right. Sometimes the recovery process from these sorts of losses can be measured in decades or lifetimes. We have all been shoved out of some attachment that has never healed and doesn’t want to heal.  

Fourthly, we can be refugees from our own dreams. Can it not be said that we all had a dream at one point in time in our lives – a dream that remains unfulfilled and is now all but unfulfillable? Can we not all say with sincerity “I so wanted to be …” “I so wanted to have …” “I so wanted to go …”? Can we not all look into our souls and see that the things that we once wanted and dreamed about have been supplanted by other things that we feel we must want and dream about. Where we once worked towards a goal that inspired us, we now must work towards a goal that pays off some debt? Or that helps our child maintain their dream, or that simply allows us to remain “responsible”? And perhaps we were frightened away from our dream – frightened by the boogieman of affordability – or the ogre of bankruptcy. I am reminded of the film Billy Elliot where young Billy aspires to be a dancer. He is asked by the admissions committee evaluating his application to dance school how he feels when he dances and thinking for a moment, he says, “It feels like electricity.” When we think about our dreams and when we get to work towards them, isn’t that the feeling we have? And is it not ever so sad when the things that we must dream about are not those things? Are we not dream refugees displaced into Egypt from our deepest longings at times? Fortunate are those who are not.

Perhaps I will conclude this litany with a reminder that some of us can even become refugees from a faith that we once held. “Satan has desired to sift you like wheat,” Jesus said to his disciple Peter, referring to the way that the fiery trial he was about to undergo would splinter his faith and drive a wedge between himself and his convictions. This faith can be represented by many different fundamental beliefs that we might once have enjoyed -  a belief in a God who would protect us from all harm or who would grant us all desires – a faith in a God who would maintain a system of visible justice – a faith in a God who loved us too much to allow us to feel loss or pain where we were most vulnerable. This faith that we can get driven from may simply be a faith in people. There is a word that can be used to describe someone who has lost the ability to trust people because of the infidelity of previous confidants: pistsanthrophobia. Life experiences can shove us out of our optimism and make us doubt that anyone who makes a promise intends to keep it. We can become refugees from optimism, living in a state of cynicism, forced out by a series of experiences whereby our trust is abused and our innocence is coined into profit. We can indeed come to a place where we no longer even trust ourselves to know who is trustworthy.

“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion,” The refugee Psalmist cries in Psalm 137. There, he bemoans, his enemies asked him to act as though he was not a refugee. They ask him or her to sing songs of the old country as though she had not been banished from it. You want to know what is more painful than loss? Experiencing loss and being asked to pretend that you don’t. That is what is more painful than loss. Note well how this writer of this Psalm responds to this request that he minimize the pain of his new status as a refugee. He responds with renewed attachment … and with anger towards those he believes to be responsible for his loss.

How can we sing the songs of the Lord
    while in a foreign land?
 If I forget you, Jerusalem,
    may my right hand forget its skill.
 May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
    my highest joy.

Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
    on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
    “tear it down to its foundations!”
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
    happy is the one who repays you
    according to what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who seizes your infants
    and dashes them against the rocks.

This passage reminds us of just how difficult life as a refugee can be. It may require us to learn new languages, build new support systems, acquire new skills, overcome prejudices, all while fighting a constant rear guard action against bitterness and anger and what I would call “toxic nostalgia” – the unbreakable addiction to what was and the burning resentment against those we deem responsible for our displacement. The former spouse. The former boss. The abusive parent. The ancestral home in Bethlehem.

Just outside of the town of Bethlehem lies a huge fortress that King Herod had built to defend himself against insurrections. One should understand that many of those who wished for Jesus to lead a military insurrection against Rome and its surrogates could easily have seen the violent taking of Herodium as the first act of the rebellion. Who better to have led that charge than one who had been driven from his birthplace as an infant? Who would not have wanted to have simply used the power granted them to retake their home? To finally and forever put a stake in the heart of their refugee status.

And yet it is sobering to consider that Jesus’ answer to losing his home was not to “take it back” but to make all that was not home, home to everyone. Maybe that is the secret for a world so full of refugees. Maybe it is not to aim to get home so much as to aim to make the world home such that none of us are refugees anymore.  

Anyway, if I were still a pastor, that might have been my Christmas Sermon this year.

To any and all who read this blog, I wish you a year of feeling right at home where you are.

Question for Comment: How could someone help you stop feeling like a refugee? How could you help someone else in the same respect?

Where land is sacred and people less so

Colliding Dreams REVIEW

God only knows how many documentaries on the Arab - Israeli conflict I have seen in my life. But this was another worthwhile one. Full of interviews and documentary footage, it would make an excellent accessory to a course on Modern Middle Eastern History. Actually, it would make a good course in and of itself. It makes me wonder what I would do if I had to make choices about it rather than simply to understand it with all its facets. I do still continue to come back to the central truth that nothing will be resolved until the debate between those who argue that land is sacred and enemy lives are not and those who argue that enemy lives are sacred and land is not is put to rest.

Question for Comment: What is sacred to you?

"Drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

The Measure of a Man REVIEW

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” –Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A French explanation of the Bernie Sanders – Donald Trump voter before they ever voted.

Thierry Taugourdeau is 51 and he has been laid off from his job for reasons only known to the managers and CEO’s of companies that do such things. When we meet him, he is 51 and he is seeking an explanation for why the folks at the unemployment bereau have sent himto learn to be a crane operator when, in fact, after devoting months to developing an entirely new skill, he is told that no one will hire him without experience.

One feels his shame and rising anger in the face of this salaried government beautrocrat who seemed to be sorry that he sent Thierry off on an occupational dead end.

This is simply the beginning of Thierry’s grueling journey through mine field of despair that the well employed can only imagine entering at the age of 51. He has a handicapped teenage son who will soon need tuition. He needs a loan and the bank requires him to sell his home at a loss before he can get it. He needs a car. Companies do not even have the time to meet him in person. Skype interviews leave his ego bruised and you sense that companies that say they will call, won’t. The economic buzzards begin to circle smelling his vulnerability.

He wants to work. He wants to provide for his family. But his job possibilities are growing ever bleaker … until, miracle of miracles, he is hired on as a megastore security guard. He seems to be good at his job until he begins to realize that many of the people he is catching in the act of petty shoplifting are simply people a small tragedy more desperate than he. The director twists the tourniquet of his dilemma mercilessly. In a world he knows is economically rigged against this entire class of workers, he has to chose between no job at all and a job catching and incarcerating them.  

Thierry Taugourdeau lives at the bottom of a a food chain in which those comfortable in it only pretend to care. What respect the bottom feeders are given is mearly feigned and he can see it all. And meanwhile, he cares for his significantly challenged son and tries to love his wife. I think the most difficult scene for me to watch was Thierry at a workshop having his resume and interview video tape critiqued by an instructor in a suit and tie who is obviously an immigrant from somewhere. One after another, the instructor solicits criticisms from his peers, leaving him in a state of expressionless shambles.

Question for Comment: How does meaningful work and/or meaningless work affect your perception of yourself? Have you ever worked somewhere and crossed some line that you could no longer bear?

 

"He must come to ruin when the times no longer are in harmony with his ways."

Sicario Review

In December of 1513, Nicolo Machiavelli mentions in a letter to a friend that he is writing a book on politics. Ironically, Machiavelli wrote the book for the new ruler of his city, a man who had had Nicolo tortured to get information out o him that might be useful. Nicolo appears to have wanted to prove to this new mafia don that he could be useful as a political advisor. Machiavelli already knew that Lorenzo De Medici could be ruthless in his quest to get and keep power. Machievelli’s book is a lengthy demonstration that he could be an asset to doing so.

At the core of his argument is the conviction that morality must conform to circumstance. That is, the world must be taken as it is and the ethical theories we use to guide us through it must adapt to it. O we should migrate to where our theories will fit the environment. “How we live is so different from how we ought to live,” Machiavelli writes, “that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.”

“A man who is used to acting in one way never changes; he must come to ruin when the times, in changing, no longer are in harmony with his ways.”

In the film Sacario, a moral, by-the-book FBI agent is assigned to work with a ruthless, no-holds-barred, CIA operation in Juarez Mexico. Quickly, she comes to realize that her war against the drug cartels is being lost with the ethically constrained tools she has been using. She is curious to know how she might actually start winning and so, as fate would have it, she finds herself in a “dark” world of effective but questionable methods. Gunfights on the highway – torture – threats to children, hostage taking, outright assassinations, etc. She sees it working and is asked to sign off on the ethical propriety of it so that it can keep working.

“Nothing will make sense to your American ears,” one of the hired mercenaries tells her at the beginning of the film, “and you will doubt everything that we do, but in the end you will understand.”

And by the end. She does … and she doesn’t.

“You should move to a small town,” he says after returning from the murder of the drug cartel head honcho in Mexico, “somewhere the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now.”

This is a different moral environment, he insists. The tactics of another environment will not suffice to do anything but get you killed.

Machiavelli’s argument still lives … in business, on used car lots, in academics, in the field of cyber-security, in international politics. Everywhere the argument is being made, “Don’t ask your environment to adapt to your high morality. Adapt your morality to the environment as it actually is.” It is compelling. You would not put a chimpanzee in a maple tree here in Vermont and expect that the winters would adapt to the chimp’s survival specifications.

But are moral climates like weather climates? Should we not be influencing them to change rather than adapting to them? Or are we like lone Romans defending the capital against the barbarian invasions when we do so?

Question for Comment: What do you think? When someone like Donald Trump says that we have to adapt our ideals to the exigencies of the world as it is, do you agree?

"Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war."

Eye in the SKY REVIEW

This movie takes you through an hour and thirty-two minute ethical decision that involves, two  undercover espionage agents, a military lawyer, a British colonel, a Kenyan general, a Lt. British general, attorney general, parliamentarian minister, the British Foreign Secretary, the American Secretary of State, a risk assessment expert,

. . . And two drone pilots, one of whom has to pull the trigger and launch a hellfire missile at several high value terrorists and some suicide bombers in preparation for attack.

It’s an hour and a half of watching John Stewart Mill be tortured for some sort of certainty that what is to be done is the right thing to be done. It is not a movie that will let you step out of the theater to get a refill of pop-corn and it is a reminder that despite the charge that warfare by drones is war at a distance, it becomes clear that the cameras that are mounted on these drones are taking warfare to a whole new level of intimacy.  When you can identify who you kill by measuring the dimensions of the ear that is left on the ground after you have blown them apart, you have not saved the soldiers who must launch the attack any moral pain.

Don’t expect to come out of this film knowing who was on the right side.

Question for Comment:  Military decision makers in the past had to make decisions about hundreds and thousands of people who might suffer collateral damage (in other words, be killed even though they were non-combatants). Now these decisions that involve one child are debated all the way to the highest levels. This may well be the era of the camera.

I was at a public event the other day and there was a sizable drone flying above this large crowd. Whose it was, I do not know. What it was looking for? I do not know. How do events like this make you feel?

“Let computers go to old school classes”

Most Likely to Succeed REVIEW

Twenty years ago, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasperov in chess. Five years ago, IBM’s Watson slaughters two Jeopardy champions, demonstrating to us all that even thinking jobs are now at severe risk. The world will soon belong to the programmers and the creators of programs.

Given this assumption, this film’s director asks, what sort of education should kids be getting today? The answer is, as you can suspect, controversial.  

I am not a huge fan of the proposition (That the primary role of an educator is to prepare a child for a career) but I am not opposed to the notion that it has to be an important outcome. The fact that someone is asking “what is the end of a good education?” rather than accepting that the answer given a hundred and twenty years ago is THE answer is good enough for me.

Most Likely to Succeed draws a visual contrast between two paradigms of education – In one paradigm, teachers lose autonomy to centralized curricula that are backed up by tests for accountability. In the other teachers are given maximum freedom to provide students with a context in which they can teach themselves as they solve complex problems involving thought, understanding, creativity, talent, engineering, experimentation, collaboration, and applied knowledge. Accountability comes in the form of final projects witnessed by the community.

Success in High Tech High comes down to being able to produce a working solution to a real problem. Assessment is not designed to be easily compared to other classes, other teachers, other schools. “Let computers go to old school classes,” it seems to argue.

Question for Comment: Would you be willing to sacrifice half the content of a traditional high school class in order to give students the opportunity to apply the other half to authentic problems?

“District money gushed and oozed in myriad directions”

The Prize: REVIEW

The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools? asks a question and then provides Newark, NJ as a mechanism for answering it. Why Newark? Because by self-admission, it had one of the most depressing educational systems in the country and was given a $200,000,000 gift to lift it out of the quagmire it had become. Newark had been a place where, “for decades, education seemed incidental to the purpose of the school district.” And “reformers saw in districts like Newark an opportunity to prove that systems built around unions and large public bureaucracies were themselves an obstacle to learning.”

What would a $200,000,000 corporate grant do for the educational system in your nearest challenged city?

The initiative in Newark was to be led by a bi-partisan triumvirate of state, local, and corporate executives who would, they hoped, appoint a progressive, no-nonsense reformer to the post of superintendent. These four individuals are featured at the top of the front cover of the book: the governor of NJ, Chris Christie, the Mayor of Newark, Corey Booker, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Superintendent of the school system, Cami Anderson.

I think this is a book that both conservatives and liberals should read. I suspect that both will think that the author is a partisan for the other side because she doles blame and praise out fairly equitably and what sort of partisan in today’s political climate ever admits that their party is complicit in any way when some initiative fails. The Prize pulls no punches. It is harsh with the love-children of both right and left. It helps us to understand that simply “not spending money” on the education of disadvantaged children is not a solution but, it takes those to task who argue that simply spending money is solution enough. In the end, it is not how much money you spend so much as how much you spend wisely.

“One of the cruel ironies of Newark’s schools,” Russakof argues, “was that throughout their long decline, the district often appeared on paper to be in perfect compliance with all requirements.” Ultimately, any system that has perfected the art of looking like they are actually doing something when they are not will not benefit when given the opportunity to make itself look like it is doing more. In the case of Newark’s $200,000,000 windfall, distant stake holders, posturing for acclaim and higher political offices began hiring consultants to spend the money that they hoped to take the credit for spending. Without the voices of those at the bottom being heard, the voices of those who wanted a “piece of the action” elbowed their way in and absconded with most of the money by the time it was all spent.

“Despite Bookers public promises of ‘bottom up’ reform led by the people of Newark, he quietly hired a team of education consultants – none from Newark …”

“Organizers did not know that Booker and Zuckerberg already had agreed on an agenda.”

Ultimately, less than half of the $20,000 per student dedicated to the betterment of education in Newark reached district schools to pay teachers, social workers, counselors, classroom aides, secretaries, and administrators – “in other words, the people who actually delivered education to children.” “District money gushed and oozed in myriad directions,” says Russakof.

“More than eighty percent of the Newark Public Schools budget went to salaries and benefits, which was typical for a school district. Still, many positions were unnecessary, created years earlier and still locked in by state civil service rules and seniority laws. …”

Newark’s teacher’s union lobbied to take out some of the reform money in retroactive pay raises that they had not received in a number of years (fair enough). They also insisted that there had to be guarantees for seniority. Otherwise, they argued, the school district would just lay off more experienced, i.e. More expensive, teachers under the guise of reform so as to save money. If students left the district schools to attend charter schools, there would be fewer needs for teachers but if teachers were to be laid off, it could not be simply merit that determined their fate. A senior teacher at one school, if laid off, was entitled to take the position of a less senior (but possibly better) teacher at another school. As Russakof puts it,

“New Jersey unions kept the seniority protections intact, fearing that administrators would simply let older more expensive teachers go if they could, regardless of their abilities . . . Anderson could not fire the worst teachers unless they were the junior ones. . . . This meant that the district had no way of shedding leftover teachers. New Jersey’s tenure law included strict seniority protections. If Anderson laid off all eighty excess teachers, those with the longest tenure could bump union ones in any school, without regard to merit …”

And so, teachers were sometimes paid for not teaching. Incentivizing incompetence in the name of reform. Half the grant donation to Newark’s education system went to paying teachers and retroactive raises. And then came new consultant fees and payoffs to administrators. “Bonuses were paid to principals and assistant principals in schools with the greatest academic need,” Russakof tells us. This is understandable as these are not easy jobs. But then “more than half of those who received bonuses left within a year of getting them.” Some educational goals were incentivized – one would get a bonus for reaching specific targets. But it was only a matter of time before the targets were drawn to encompass things that had been accomplished. Like telling a U.S. Congressman that he would get a $5,000 bonus for keeping the budget under the debt ceiling and then defining the debt ceiling a few weeks before the award was handed out.

Administrators began hiring friends who were consultants and additional staff to make their own work-loads manageable. Isn’t this what the money was for? Why should an administrator work till late at night when a clerk could be hired to take on some of the work-load? Administrators have families, don’t they?

Meanwhile, the best teachers … the ones who cared, continued to burn out. I can so totally feel their pain. Teachers who care don’t get to just hire administrative assistants to grade papers and give feedback. They DO have to stay at work till sundown if they want to do their jobs well. And eventually, because teachers have families and needs, they began to move into the charter schools where money was actually more often spent on things like curriculum, books, aides, support staff and children. Not all charter schools, Russakof is clear to state. She will only go so far as to say that “Well run charter networks got more money to their schools than the district did … Charters were structured to more easily deliver money to classrooms than was the district.”

And why were charter schools more likely to be structured to get money to children and to be run well than district schools? One can surmise that attendance at them involved more parental effort and concern and that a parent dedicated enough to get a child into a charter school continued to be dedicated enough to see to it that that charter school served the child. One needs to remember that voices need to be heard but they are never heard when they are not spoken.

In closing, it is important to note that educational success is complex. It involves money, teachers who care, and administrators who see to it that resources go primarily to the mission not the missionaries. Poverty and hardship and stress in the community will be translated into educational challenges. Children’s nervous systems are not designed in such a way as to provide for academic success when they are in trauma mode from birth. You cannot spend money on an educational system alone if the students in the seats are dealing with massive instability in their homes. And to the extent that poverty exacerbates the likelihood of traumatized students, education expenditures need to be seen in a wider context of poverty reduction measures.

 The takeaway from this book is to be wiser in the use of public money. It is to dedicate oneself to the proposition that public funds are no solution to any problem in and of themselves. If a public agency of any sort wants more support, it should have to demonstrate, in terms of real lives, not paper and data, that it has been a faithful steward of public trust thus far. Want ten talents? Show us what you did with one.

Question for Comment: Look around. Of all the various governmental levels and agencies, who can you say that you trust to accomplish actual results should they be given more money to do so?

Controlling the amygdala’s of the public mind"

Years of Living Dangerously REVIEW

The goal of this television series is to get people to think about climate change as a contemporary issue. For that reason, it enlists contemporary news, television, and movie personalities to interview contemporary scientists about contemporary places and events where climate change is having an impact NOW. The producers want us all to think of climate change as a “”us-here-now” issue rather than a “them-there-then” issue and they largely succeed.

Over the course of nine hours, you will get a chance to experience fires and deforestation in Indonesian national parks, to speak to Syrians who trace the present civil war to climate change induced drought, and to speak to Texans who are being forced to relocate due to water scarcity in the American Southwest. You will experience forest fires in California (with Arnold Schwarzenegger), coral experimentation on a disappearing Island in the South Pacific, ice core drilling in Greenland and Andean glaciers, methane gas recording in Colorado, bread riots in Egypt, domestic crisis in Staten Island and Far Rockaway, NY, heat waves in Los Angeles, flooding in Pakistan, and wars over water in Yemen. You will hear from scientists, business owners, home owners, pastors, researchers, environmentalists, oyster fisherman, politicians, lobbyists, social workers, doctors, coroners, skeptics, refugees, and a host of people who have been or are about to be impacted by the seemingly inevitable climate change apocalypse.

The series tries to treat people who are not on the climate change train yet respectfully without lending too much credence to their objections.

One senses that there is a certain struggle going on over who will control the amygdala’s of the public mind (i.e. the part of our brain that determines what our greatest threat at the moment is). Should our primary fear be that we will not have a job? Not get into heaven? Or not have water (or conversely, have too much)?

For most of the people you will meet in the nine hours you will spend watching this riveting documentation of climate crisis, climate change is an even more fundamental hazard than terrorism, liberal agenda’s, or soteriology. Had American Plains Indians had access to television, I can imagine them making a documentary like this somewhere around 1763 or at least by 1836. There would be an episode on the Pequots, the Wampanoags, the Seminoles, the Narragansets, the Abenaki, the Mohawks, and the Cherokee. Some interviewees would be telling the story of how they had lost everything. Some would be telling of how they were losing everything. Some would be expressing their concern that they were about to lose everything. Scattered among the interviews would be a few people saying “Yeah but, we get pots and knives and guns and medicine and better blankets.” Others would be saying “We know that we should be resisting them but if we do, they will just give weapons to our enemies and what will be the point in the end anyway?” “there is no resistance anymore,” they would say, “there is only intelligent accommodation.”

No doubt there would be a few eyewitnesses who would accuse the producers of fear mongering by saying, “I have met white people and all the whites I have met say that they have all the land that they want already.”

By the time I was done with this entire series, I was not entirely sure what the message was. Was it “climate change must be stopped!” or “climate change must be prepared for!”

Should I stop driving my car to work?

Or buy farm land in Quebec?

Or invest in water resources?

I know a few things. One, I will not be moving to southern Pakistan or the Jersey shore. Two: I may have to get used to living in Vermont and being called a “southerner.”

Question for Comment: What has been your personal perceptual journey relative to the subject of climate change? What forces have propelled you or inhibited you as you have sought to make up your mind whether or not to worry about it?

"Mediterranea. Refugees Welcome?"

Mediterranea

Mediterranea reminded me of the film In this World, a 2002 portrayal of what the journey of an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan to London felt like to a young man on the journey. Mediterranea follows the story of two young men en route from Burkina Faso to Southern Italy where they hope to improve their lives.

In both films, the journey involves an obstacle course of treacherous challenges (deserts, eploitations, hazardous transports, water crossings, thieves, borders, legalities, and uncertainty). In both cases, refugees arrive to find that the challenges continue. They discover that the world that they saw on television is not necessarily open to them. Indeed, to some extent, the good life that they have seen people leading on television is predicated on the existence of exploitable populations like they represent. I could not watch what happens to these young men without thinking about the way that Victor Frankenstein’s monster was created by the interaction between human need and a society that could not meet that need with human compassion.

The film portrays an uprising of what seems like senseless civic violence that would cause any sane person to say “Why are we letting these people into our society?” and yet the characters themselves are more the creations of rejection than cause.

This is a slow moving film with little narrative structure to tell you what is happening. You simply watch the story unfold and make most of the meaning yourself.

Question for Comment: There is a temptation to think that one can offer a second class citizenship to people who come from situations that are much worse and that they will be grateful for the opportunities they are given. I wonder though. Does human nature work like that?