Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

First in my summer reading is Cormac McCarthy's Blood meridian.  The book has one lasting virtue and one soft spot.

First the virtue.  McCarthy's writing is elegant throughout.  He never allows the violence to wane, always finding a lyricism in his language of agony and human destruction.  The narrative is bleak, hostile; at times, unrelenting gruesomeness. His skill is to normalize the ongoing misery experienced by most of the characters, without romanticizing it, nor diluting its effecting, arresting shock.  There are no heroes here, few protagonists, just characters who live through a series of deadly encounters. What makes the writing so evocative is McCarthy's ability to constant find seams of beauty in his descriptions.  As if he writes so as to explore and describe the levels of depravity, each scene comes fresh, despite the dulling routine of violence and shared agony.

The end comes abruptly, not because the narrative ends (there is hardly an arc of a story to tell), but as if in recognition that McCarthy could continually find eloquence amid the shower of emotional and physical toil he depicts. He could go on, at ten times the length of the book, finding new insight, new levels of literary expanse and shattered beauty.  But the end brings the quishy thud of the character in the kid.  Now, the man, twenty years on from the main segment of the tale, he seems to have learned nothing during that time.  That is a shame, for while the kid/man need not serve as the allegorical characterization (only a brief coda stumbles there), his lack of psychic change mars the end.  His relating to the Judge demonstrates no growth, no earned human wisdom, no change from the naive, survivalist moralism of his earlier experiences.  The reader is left with no traction on how the slaughter of landscape and human devastation helped shaped the attitudes of a generation of American identity.

Blood meridian should be read slowly, with care and abandonment of expectation. Let McCarthy's writing push you into flow, as he trips along the edges of prose into the unwinding power of poesy.

Ed Week sponsors another corporate attack on education

EdWeek once again spearheads distortion of our work, giving space to a corporatist approach to educational reform.  

The authors work for an organization with the following mission:

• Teacher Preparation Analytics, a limited liability company founded in 2011, is focused on high-leverage strategies to strengthen teacher and education administrator preparation. The company will draw on unique tools and approaches in working with individual programs or institutions, state university systems, and state or national associations, networks, and consortia to generate several instrumental outcomes that are critical to program improvement:
• Accurate, detailed analysis of the problems that compromise program excellence and the challenges that hinder program improvement
• Identification of measures, data, and methods required for ongoing program self-assessment
• Development of action plans and strategies to address key problems and challenges
• Strategic support -- research, convening, assessment, and capacity building -- for preparation programs individually or in networks dedicated to program improvement
• Research-based reports and white papers that discuss important policy and practice issues in educator preparation and provide reliable information and guidance to inform the decisions of educators and policymakers

TPA's founders are national experts on teacher preparation programs and can provide reliable information and guidance to inform decisions of educators and policymakers. TPA seeks to be an objective and effective resource on teacher preparation.

TPA is an LLC - most likely a for-profit venture.  LLC's allow partners to risk less of their own stake in the performance of the company; they are not personally on the hook if the company goes under. Other advantages include  lawsuit protection, credibility, tax savings, deductible employee benefits, asset protection, anonymity, the ease of raising capital, creating a separate legal entity for personal protection. The arose in the 1990s as a convenient way to attract foreign capital.

Peggy Noonan's Flag Day non-surprise

She uses the holiday to bash the Obama administration.  I wrote back.

To the Editor;

I just wanted to confirm that when Peggy Noonan writes, "It is a great irony, and history will marvel at it, that the president most committed to expanding the centrality, power, prerogatives and controls of the federal government is also the president who, through lack of care, arrogance, and an absence of any sense of prudential political boundaries, has done the most in our time to damage trust in government" she is referring to the administration that invaded another country for false reasons then failed to adequately plan for nation building which spawned a civil war, instituted torture and the rendition of suspected bad guys to nations that torture and used the office of the Presidency to privilege the already rich and powerful to a degree unseen in this country in over one hundred years.

Right?

NYTimes on the panopticon

A good rebuke to claims that NSA programs are 'benign' or 'modest' sacrifices of privacy in the NYTimes draws a letter:

To the Editor;

The claim about NSA 'dragnet' programs like Prism, as emphasized by James Rule in "The price of panopticon" (June 12, 2013), that "... no serious analyst can doubt that such steps may be helping to pinpoint terrorist acts in advance, as supporters, like Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, have insisted," rest on two questions.  First, do other, less Constitutionally suspect measures exist that can work equally well?  And second, have people who are not terrorists been unduly burdened or investigated through faulty analysis of massive medadata connections?

Until both of these are rigorously examined, debated and proven, please take all claims about the necessity of big data government surveillance as abrogation of our fourth Amendment rights.

Brooks on Snowden

I wish David Brooks believed even half the stuff he writes.

In commentary on Edward Snowden, the whistleblower on the NSA data mining, Brooks sees him as an exemplar of the "... the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good."

In doing so, Brooks mistakes his 'lone wolf' theory of social breakdown for the truly menacing character who wraps himself in just these social institutions, claiming to speak through them and for them.  We see this in religious leaders who castigate all those who believe differently as immoral degenerates, unworthy of social capital; political leaders who  marginalize opponents as anti-American, unworthy of civic participation and open dialogue; school leaders who abrogate the rights of teachers and students in order to pursue 'official knowledge' that serves the interests of their political or economic class; economic leaders who influence policy that benefits their sector above all other concerns, thus spreading inequality and ecological devastation in the name of progress and growth.

Brooks is not wrong, of course.  He makes sharp insight into our climactic age.  His basic point, though, that "For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures," does not go farther enough to inquire into how the leadership of this country has modeled just this lack of trust and cooperation.  Through the practice of fear-based campaigning, authoritarian justifications for policy, both domestic and foreign, and ethnographic perception of what are the best interests of the public, our leadership has arrogated trust, faith, respect and the willingness to follow.

Edward Snowden may not be much of a hero. He may only be a product of what he has been so long witness to.

Ed Week stumps for Common Core

In a commentary/op-ed at Ed Week, Alice Johnson Cain makes this case for the Common Core State Standards: "The common core defines critical, real-world understandings that students need for success in college and career, broken down by grade level. Until the development of the common standards in English/language arts and mathematics, teachers have been expected to cover a surfeit of material. The common core reduces this load, but in return demands that teaching be pursued with increased rigor, depth, and relevance. This call for excellence has been met with great enthusiasm from teachers and students alike. Best of all, all students will benefit from this standards push, and the increased rigor across the board has the potential to catapult our schools—particularly schools in states that do not currently offer a rigorous curriculum to all students—to levels of quality and equality of opportunity that have not yet been reached."

Since the CCSS have yet to be implemented, taught, assessed and made sense of in practice, these claims are hopeful only. Consider this, though.  Teachers have not really needed assistance in leading students to 'critical, real-world understandings.' Almost any curricular reform since the post-War period has made a similar claim.  A litany of education philosophy traced back to John Dewey, at least, has also documented just that approach to schooling. What has usually stood in teachers' way has been politicians who are reluctant to allow students to grasp critical, real-world understandings. Think of what would happen if our students actually do start to perceive their society with greater acuity, fluency and understandings of the social context to policy.  As for "success in college and career," these are more of the rhetoric business interests use to justify co-opting the education process in order to serve their institutional aims.  Of course, that history does not mean the CCSS will fail in its mission. Rather, the point is that such abstract claims are immune to critique.  The reformers adopt performance measures that demonstrate how, no matter what the current system provides, it fails on their terms.

Having worked in schools since 1996, I do not remember a time when teachers were not pursuing "... increased rigor, depth and relevance."  Nor has there ever been a "call for excellence" not met "with great enthusiasm from teachers and students alike."  The idea that "increased rigor across the board has the potential to catapult our schools ... to levels of quality and equality of opportunity that have not yet been reached"is  conjecture, wish-fulfillment and blindness to the work educators have made over the past 30+ years (since a similar tone of cheer-leading and dire warning emanated from A Nation at Risk, in 1983)

Johnson Cain serves as a VP for TeachPlus, a non-profit for urban ed advocacy, funded, it seems, within the Gates constellation of organizations, most of advocate strongly for the Common Core. She has a background working for the good of schools and in defense of under-served students.  I have no reason to doubt her veracity, just her proximity to an ideological mission to privatize public services.

Let's look at what else she writes.  After the above statement, she claims that the CCSS has sparked a revolution in education.  The result? "Thanks to the common core, for the first time in history, teachers across the United States are united in a way that opens the door for the use of massive online open courses, or MOOCs, as professional-development tools."  The leaders of this revolution are tech companies, like Microsoft and Pearson, who see vast wealth in education, not the teachers and committed leaders intent on teaching students in excellence.

Johnson Cain calls for the creation of a hybrid teacher-leader: "... districts should find ways to empower and invest in teacher-leaders, who would make ideal trainers for their colleagues. This would enable teachers to learn about the standards from in-the-classroom experts they trust, instead of outsiders. Hybrid roles for teacher-leaders, so that they can teach part time while also coaching colleagues, is one way we can invest in teachers as experts to make the common-core rollout a success without wasting time." A great idea, one that has needed not a CCSS but funding from schools.  Teachers she works with are "enthusiastic about the standards because they offer opportunities for cross-country collaboration on best practices and for high expectations for students' critical-thinking skills—the learning that matters most." Teacher currently have this opportunity (through acronymic vessels like PLCs), though are often bogged down by district mandates and a lack of planning/meeting time.  No reason that a CCSS is needed, except to create opportunities for professional development through products neatly aligned with the CCSS and its assessment apparatus.

Thus, near the end, comes the lede: "The federal government sends states $2.5 billion each year for professional development for teachers and gives great latitude to states and districts on how they spend those dollars. Rather than delays or moratoriums, there is an opportunity for leaders like Weingarten to help states figure out how to squeeze every possible dollar to fully prepare teachers and schools for the common core and to ensure that the transition to new standards-based assessments, currently slated to begin in September 2014, goes well."  Moving forward on the CCSS and its assessments creates a massive need for entrepreneurial organizations to create products to tap that spending. Obstacles that interferes with that potential market, like delays to consider the long-term comprehensive complexities of the CCSS, must be removed.

Were Johnson Cain not funded by Gates, I would still be skeptical of her claims.  Nothing prevents teachers and schools from creating exactly the reforms now that she sees as burgeoning with the CCSS.  The scope and sweep of education philosophy for the past 30 years has argued for these forms of teacher mastery, autonomy and purpose.  Clothed in arguments about excellence, revolutionary potential and un-before-seen potential, they mask an aggressive encroachment by those staking gains for their private interests, not the public good.

Ross Douthat on Reform Conservatism

I have never much understood what it means, or had meant, to be a Reform Jew. But I have always been one. Reading Ross Douthat's argument about Reform Conservatism does not help me understand reform movements in general.  It is hard, then, to consider myself one.

He writes that its major premises constitute "... not just a tendency or an impulse, but at least the outline of a reasonably coherent reform agenda." Already, I wonder if being a reformist means stretching for certain specifics or attempting to reorient the project along its main principles.  Revisiting Oakeshott, I have always considered conservatism to be tendentious, rather than concretized into details. Thus conservative reform would not concern content, per se, but about vision.  And vision bogs down precisely when principles are exhumed into rules.

He presents the dilemma this way: "The core economic challenge facing the American experiment is not income inequality per se, but rather stratification and stagnation — weak mobility from the bottom of the income ladder and wage stagnation for the middle class ...  But economic and social policy can make a difference nonetheless, making family life more affordable, upward mobility more likely, and employment easier to find ...  The existing welfare-state institutions we’ve inherited from the New Deal and the Great Society, however, often make these tasks harder rather than easier: Their exploding costs crowd out every other form of spending, require middle class tax increases and threaten to drag on economic growth; their tangled web of subsidies and credits and tax breaks often benefit the already-affluent and create perverse incentives for the poor, and the distortions created by the way they pay for health care, in particular, contribute mightily to the rising cost of health insurance and thus the stagnation of middle class incomes. So we don’t face a choice between streamlining the welfare state and making it more supportive of work and family; we should be doing both at once."

Conservatives prefer to adhere to our collective inheritance, until exigent conditions deserve change.  From my experience of the past 30+ years, today's conditions make it seem more crucial to protect the infrastructure of these programs, explicitly for the reasons Douthat entertains: growing inequality in social opportunity and outcomes, stratification along economic and thus social lines and a stagnation of social mobility.  In fact, the failure of conservatism to be conservative begat the heart of the problem Douthat raises.  These inherited programs have been long predicted to 'explode' in costs because of the aging baby boomers. And yet past attempts to ameliorate this disproportionate expense - by uncapping the SS and FICA levies; creating a 'lock box' for the future - have been met with derision.  Adjustment now includes middle class tax increases only because past attempts to structure differently - progressivity in the tax code above $250/450k - have been met with tax absolutism.

Thinking of conservatism as a set of philosophical and policy specifics distorts it from an orientation of sustainability to a tribunal of activism.  Put another way, the more outcome-focused reform conservatives become, the less they are conservative.  We can see this in the first two of Douthat's recommendations for action:
"a. A tax reform that caps deductions and lowers rates, but also reduces the burden on working parents and the lower middle class, whether through an expanded child tax credit or some other means of reducing payroll tax liability."  A conservative would look at Social Security, Medicare and other social wide programs and ask how well they are integrated into the American social structure.  In the first two cases, hugely.  A conservative would then ask how we can continue to fund them in order for them to function as purposed. The answer is one that political conservatives abhor: raising revenue: tax increases on the segment of the population whose behavior will be fundamentally altered through the imposition. We are back to uncapping SS and FICA fees and increasing the progressivity of marginal tax rates. We can lower pay-outs, of course.  But that is not what the program was created to do.  It boggles the mind that anyone could assume that those who depend on Social Security and Medicare do so as malingers, nested in moral hazard through life-long dependency on the nanny state.  To do so means to have no idea what life is like living solely on state aid.

"b. A repeal or revision of Obamacare that aims to ease us toward a system of near-universal catastrophic health insurance, and includes some kind of flat tax credit or voucher explicitly designed for that purpose." Revision, yes. Repeal is merely a flag waived to signal allegiance to the current flavor of political conservative, not a policy implication of a conservative orientation. Rather than fight the current law, conservative awareness demands agressive action to make sure the reasons behind the law are functional and prudent. Does increasingly universal advancement toward single-payer coverage create poorer health outcomes? That is a question best answered not through ideological rhetoric but through efficiently empirical science and qualitative feedback of those in such a system. A conservative would prefer to find out before either abandoning the project or erecting a system through wild abandon.

The rest of his ideas unspool in equal measure: a kernel of an idea, shaped to appeal to existing political conservative proclivities.  His one pseudo-reformist solution ("An attack not only on explicit subsidies for powerful incumbents (farm subsidies, etc.) but also other protections and implicit guarantees, in arenas ranging from copyright law to the problem of “Too Big To Fail.”") would be better served by naming powerful incumbents who have the expressed power to block this idea: military contractors, energy conglomerates, insurance and bank multinationals.

Douthat makes other specious claims about what a reform conservatism would not do, particular regarding addressing climate change (When is conservationism not a conservative tendency? When it is opposed by radical, aggrandizing economic interests) and  tax increases (When is fiscal prudence not conservative? When it means raising the revenue needed to sustain the infrastructure upon which America demands).

Reform conservatism is needed.  Or rather, conservatism needs reform, if by conservatism, we mean those in Congress and in state government who are pushing for radical not conservative ideas.  If not, then conservatism does not need reform. It needs conservatives to be, actually, conservative.