American Education, Sputnik and New Ideas

Sputnik, 10/4/1957

Soviet Sputnik Stamp

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
  It's a wonder I can think at all."
--Paul Simon, "Kodachrome"


Recently, comparative data among various nations have placed the United States somewhere in the middle of all nations with respect to the performance by students  on math exams and on other exams intended to measure the quality of education in various countries.
The usual sub rosa response to this is "Oh, well, if you exclude the scores of the inner city kids and the recent immigrants, America would be right up there on top."
In fact, analysis of the data shows that even students from the richest, best public American schools place just below the upper 1/3 of all nations, with Singapore, Korea, Finland, Norway, England and Germany all ahead of us.
Of course, we want to know more about the exams, how meaningful they are, what biases may be built into them. The last thing we want American schools doing is "teaching to the test."
In an intuitive way, Mad Dog is prepared to believe American education is simply not competitive, that it ranges from really dismal, if not worthless, in the inner city schools to just mediocre in the best public schools. It may be better in the really elite private schools--Phillips Exeter Academy, Sidwell Friends School, Georgetown Day school, but these schools cannot provide the numbers to lift and sustain our economy and innovative edge.
No better examination of the troubles besetting the lowest level of public education, the inner city schools of Washington, DC, Baltimore, New Orleans and of dozens of big cities exists than the detailed, sophisticated examination provided by the television series The Wire. Conceived and written by a Baltimore policeman who retired and then taught in the Baltimore inner city schools, this thorough going docu/drama revealed the interactions between the various dysfunctional institutions and community forces which ensure the failure of the school system in the inner city: The street culture of drugs and violence which shape the students, the absence of family, the political structure from the mayor's office to the city council to the state assembly, the competition for funds from police, public works and other governmental services which deprive schools of funding, the nature of the type of people available as teachers--all combine to make public education in these deprived, depressed places a farce.

There was a time when this was not true in the economically challenged inner cities. During the 1930's to 1940's the job of a public school teacher was a plum: It provided a reliable income at a level which placed teachers in the upper middle class when unemployment was high, and it came with pensions and benefits which were the envy of the working class. Teachers were smart, respected, on a par with engineers. And they were teaching students who had challenges, for whom English was a second language, but the culture which formed these students had strong families and parents who pressed their children to succeed in school.

As the economy changed in the 1950's, there were better jobs to be had than teaching, and the public schools slipped into complacency.

Until--October 4, 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in the setting of the cold war and this was successfully sold to the American public as the first knock on the door of American  undoing. The Soviets were graduating ten times the number of engineers churned out by the United States. Something had to be done about our dumb kids! Money and thought and urgency were focused on education and that single event did more for public education than any set of test scores could ever have done.  Of course, cynics said all Sputnik meant was the Soviets had captured more German rocket scientists than we had, but that got lost in the hysteria. The Soviets had engineers and those engineers knew how to make rockets and rockets could carry bombs and the Soviets would launch nuclear attack from the moon.

It was the classic example of the event which could be spun as a new perception, probably on spurious assumption. But it worked for a good outcome: American education became a priority in the 1960's. 

After Sputnik, new thinking about science education probably improved science teaching, at least marginally, and it may have refocused career ambitions of some talented students, and more money flowed to education. 
But money proved to be the least important factor in improvement, probably because it went to the wrong places. What would really have made a difference would have been if enough money were spent on teacher salaries. That's what attracted good minds during hard economic times.
 The best and the brightest did not seek jobs as teachers--some did, but not enough--there was simply more money and more prestige to be had elsewhere. 

So the moment was lost.  The inner city schools, bled dry by white flight, sunk beneath the waves. 
And even the rich suburban schools did not rise to the level of say, English or German schools; they just got more attention. Mad Dog attended public schools in the Washington, DC suburbs, some of the most affluent suburbs in the nation, with parents who wanted their kids going to Ivy League colleges. The problem was the teachers were simply not up to the task. There were some extraordinary teachers, to be sure, but the percentages were against excellence.  And the kids were smart enough to perceive their teachers were only one chapter ahead of them in the textbook. 

The moral of this story is simply that pouring money into schools, whether they are inner city schools or rich suburban schools is not enough. Schools do not exist in a vacuum.  For all his good intentions, President Obama has bought into some pretty unhealthy misconceptions about education, like the idea of judging teachers faced with inner city students by the test scores of their students.  You can judge students who have demanding parents by test scores, but you cannot apply that test to the teachers in inner city schools.
In fact, the test scores of the highly motivated children of tiger mothers likely reflects the efforts of the mothers more than the proficiency of the teachers.

The solutions for inner city schools, or for schools in places like Gaithersburg, Maryland, or Seabrook, New Hampshire will be different. In places like these, the problems are those of the immigrant, or of  parents working two jobs, who have no academic background themselves. The solutions for these schools will have to be very different from the solutions for the rich suburban schools or the solutions for the bombed out inner city schools.

In schools where money is not a problem, the public schools of Beverly Hills, California,  Chevy Chase, Maryland, Winiketa, Illinois, Shaker Heights, Ohio, Westchester County, New York, the problem will be finding academically gifted teachers and keeping the top heavy bureaucracy from getting in their way.

Too much money can actually be a problem in rich counties. In Montgomery County, Maryland dumbed down curricula from a central county education department bureaucracy are forced on teachers who could teach more sophisticated, better and smarter material, if they were allowed to do so. The huge education budget of this rich county supports a gargantuan, bloated administration of non classroom teachers, churning out lowest common denominator lessons sent out from the county seat.

Mr. Obama is right about one thing: It's easier to see the value of a new bridge or a new building than a new and better education.  One is concrete, the other is in the minds of children. But the GI Bill which sent returning veterans to college after WWII, and the support for public education after Sputnik, were investments which paid off, which created not just a middle class but upper classes of doctors, engineers, lawyers and businessmen.  You could not drive a car over it; you could not take an elevator ride to the top of it; you could not move your furniture into it, but the fact you could not see it did not mean it did not matter.

There will never be a perfect school, and certainly not a perfect high school, not in America, where hormones thwart some of the best efforts of teachers. 
But there could be improvements, if the right people were involved.

One last thought: Some years ago Mad Dog gave a presentation at a very spiffy, elite private school for an introductory biology course. The teachers were very attentive and they were very smart and picked up on all the things Mad Dog thought they would miss for sure. But they informed Mad Dog his course could be an "enrichment" course for seniors, not an introductory course for freshman. Mad Dog slunk out of the school, embarrassed he did not know more about teaching. But on reflection, he thought, maybe he was not as wrong and they were not as right as it seemed. Maybe even the best teachers could benefit from hearing thoughts  from outside the education world. If medicine is too important to be left in the hands of doctors, is education not too important to be left solely in the hands of teachers?

Duckworth vs Ayotte: New Hampshire Can Do Better

By some estimates, one in five veterans have received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Have you? 
I do not have PTSD, but if I watch part of a movie like “The Hurt Locker” or when I spend time around Blackhawk helicopters, I will close my eyes that night and live an entire day in Iraq, flying my missions. I remember the smell and the feel and the heat and everything about it. Then I wake up in Illinois, and I’m exhausted.
--Tammy Duckworth, The New York Times Sunday Magazine


Reading the interview with Tammy Duckworth, the Congresswoman from Illinois, Mad Dog had to reflect upon who we have representing us from New Hampshire. Senator Shaheen and Representative Shea-Porter are solid citizens, but then there is that other United States Senator, the Tea Party darling, Kelly Ayotte.

Ms. Duckworth flew a Blackhawk helicopter in Iraq and lost both her legs, below the knees. She speaks frankly about her experience and does not trade on it as if it were some "back story" to use the  Washington speak phrase. In fact, she is famous for having remarked she felt as the politicians trooped in to be photographed with people like her at Walter Reed  as if she were a part of a "petting zoo," providing photo ops for some politicians.
 But she also says Paul Wolfowitz, the Republican neo conservative, came by at nights and on weekends, and Bob Dole, the Republican Senator, sat on the floor with her and told her stories about his war wounds. She surprises you.  She does not sound as if she is saying things for effect. She sounds, to use another Washington word, "authentic," which is to say you never get the feeling she is playing you.

That is exactly not the feeling I have from Senator Ayotte. She has endorsed every right wing extremist the Republican Party has placed beside her, from Sheriff Arpaio, the Arizona Gestapo wannabe of Maricopa County, the man who marches prisoners, before they are convicted of anything, down the street in pink underwear.  When asked about her endorsement of Arpaio, she chose her words carefully and said she admired his work.  And Ayotte should know better: She was a prosecutor. 

If New Hampshire Democrats have one priority over the next two years, it ought to be tracking Ms. Ayotte, recording what she says and noting with whom she is jumping into political bed, and then making every effort to roust out this Tea Party extremist.  She has that sweet face and she is very careful about what she says. She has learned the Washington game well, a quick study, which makes her a rising star among Republicans.

But she is the legacy of the  wave of irrational disgruntlement which swept Tea Party candidates like Frank Guinta into Congress in 2010.  We are stuck with her until 2016. 

But then, we need to incise that pus pocket and drain that wound.

Somewhere, in New Hampshire, we have to find our own Tammy Duckworth. 

Here is the link to Rep. Duckworth's interview in the Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/tammy-duckworth.html?_r=0

Why President Obama Should Not Travel to Israel

Mad Dog would like to make it a matter of public record he read Exodus as an impressionable twelve year old and imagined himself as Dov Landau, and spent much of his youth looking for the real life equivalent of Karen Hansen. So Mad Dog claims his bone fides as a person conditioned from early childhood experience to sympathize with Israel and the reasons for its founding and the suffering of those who sought to build a new life after the horrors of Germany, Poland, occupied France, Denmark and the Nazi holocaust.

Having said all that, Mad Dog is currently reading about James Garfield, the second American President to have been assassinated, of four.  There have been at least 14 assassination attempts on American Presidents and several against President Obama we know about from a brief internet survey.

Of all the places on planet earth where Mad Dog would forbid President Obama from traveling here is the list:

1. The Middle East from Iran to and including Egypt.

2. Somalia

3. Venezuela 

4. Columbia

5. Mexico

6. North or South Korea

7. Texas

8. Arizona

9. South Carolina

10. Mississippi

11. Anywhere in Georgia outside of Atlanta

12. Alabama.

13. Anywhere with a higher proportion of rednecks and guns than listeners to NPR.

In the internet age, there is simply no reason for Mr. Obama to step out from behind the bullet proof glass and shake hands with citizens.

He can do that after his next 4 years in office.

We need him to complete his term. As Mad Dog has advised, Mr. Obama should spend plenty of time outside of Washington, D.C., embarrassing Congressmen where they live, but he ought to confine these visits to places where there are at least as many sane people as lunatics.

The Middle East does not need Mr. Obama to be personally present. Jimmy Carter brought the Egyptians and Israelis to Washington. If anybody in Israel or Palestine or Lebanon or Syria or Egypt really wants American advice, they can travel to America to get it. Our intervention in that part of the world should be restricted to Skype and the occasional drone strike (fully vetted.) We do not need to step into a dog fight to prove we love dogs.

Now, if I can just get Barack Obama on the phone.

State of the Union: A Sacred Effort

I knew there was something about this President.

Tonight, I listened for 60 minutes to the man I voted for, and I felt fortunate, nay, privileged,  to have had the chance to mark my own ballot next to his name.

Not since that thrilling speech at Lincoln Park, the night of his first Presidential victory in 2008, has President Barack Obama been as moving or as spine tingling.

For me, at least, the 60 minutes were as one. 

It wasn't the litany of programs, although these were important.
It wasn't the selection of topics, or the inclusion of key phrases to address the priorities of particular interest groups, who were represented by people shown on camera around the room.  All those little phrases are important to various stake holders, people who run associations, unions, companies, for whom the night is complete if they can raise a fist because their little group got a line in the speech. All that is now de rigeur  for the modern State of the Union address.

No, the excellence of the speech lay in the simple logic of its arguments, the clear enunciation of a sense of fairness in simple phrases. 

And, of course, there was that building emotional crescendo, as he went around the room telling stories of a policeman who was shot 12 times trying to save Muslims worshiping in a Sikh temple, a cop named Murphy or something Irish, an Irish American trying to save Muslims. Or the 102 year old woman, who had waited on line 6 hours to caste her vote in Florida,  despite the best efforts of shameless Republican politicos who conspired in Florida, as they did in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, to deny the vote to those who were determined to vote against them.

The peak, emotionally, came when Mr. Obama said victims of gun violence, and their families, since Newtown and before "Deserve a Vote." And of course, as the chant went round the room it was like a repeated rapping on the door of the National Rifle Association's undoing. It was brilliant, on pitch, emotionally and intellectually correct. The President followed it with a shake of the head, a Reagan like shrug of the shoulders, as he said we will not prevent the next Newtown with laws or programs, but we owe it to our citizens to try.

It reminded me of Reagan's remarks after the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing all on board, including a school teacher from New Hampshire. Reagan spoke the lines written for him by Peggy Noonan about the space ship breaking the surly bonds of earth, or some such and then he said, very matter of fact, "But there will be other shuttles launched. This will not be the last. They would not have wanted our efforts at exploration to die with them." And so Obama, in his humble  acknowledgment we cannot control the lunacy, but that should not stop us from trying, echoed that wisdom of humility but determination.

And you looked around that room, with those aged, no aged is too neutral a word, at those failing, decrepit Supreme Court justices, at those old white men, like John Dingle and Mitch McConnell, and at the young Republican lions, dumb as sticks, like Eric Cantor and the T party bimbo, Kelly Ayotte, and you had to think, the guy at that podium is so much more vigorous and brighter than any of them. How can he accomplish anything, trying to teach ballet to these hippos?

Then he got to the idea of The Citizen, and that is where he really had me. That simple, neglected idea, of the humble citizen as the inevitable, central, indispensable unit of our democracy.

I could not turn off the television, watching the President make his way through the crowd after the speech, although I had to turn off the sound because Judy Woodruff did not have the good sense to tell the yammering David Brooks to simply shut his mouth, as he opined the speech was "prosaic."  David Brooks, evidently, would not recognize a historic speech if he were hit over the head with it. He would undoubtedly judge the Gettysburg Address as underdeveloped and lacking emotion, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address as long winded and too partisan. 

The sad fact is, David Brooks may be a loving father and a kindly man, but he is one of the most clueless white men who  ever pooped between two shoes. And Mark Russell, the liberal token,  is wearyingly droll, trying to hard to coin a quotable phrase with every sentence, where a simple, "Memorable," would have done.

President Lincoln asked Frederick Douglass what Douglass had thought of his Second Inaugural Address, the evening of the inauguration.  Douglass, who had had his differences with the ever-cautious and lawyerly Lincoln replied, "Mr. President, that was a sacred effort." 

From out here in New Hampshire, that's the way I heard the President's speech tonight.

The Northern Pass Sorting Out Reality

Justice Douglas

Sock it to those robber barons

Public land is a public trust

How does a citizen of New Hampshire, living on the seacoast begin to sort out the competing claims flying back and forth about the efforts to bring hydroelectric power down from Canada across pristine New Hampshire scenery in the form of power wires strung between steel derricks, cut through forests?

Listen to the men who work for the power companies, the people who stand to profit from power lines running across their land (and on to their neighbors' land) and you would think those who oppose the power lines are foggy minded, tree hugging types who would thwart economic growth, who are willing to put the nation at risk for increased dependency on foreign oil, all in a misguided attempt to see themselves as the heroes in a passion play which pits the virtuous environmentalists against the avaricious capitalists who care only for making a profit and leaving town, with no concern about the rape of the environment. The power company men say they are being hard headed, smart and they are, ultimately operating in the public's interest because you need power to drive the American economy, and this Northern Pass power line will bring power from Canada, not from Saudi Arabia. 

Listen to the opponents of the power line proposal and you hear a simple message: This is environmental rape for private profit.  As for any economic gains, these will be scarfed up by the men employed by the power companies, and the stockholders, but the citizens of New Hampshire will lose, in the end, because the pristine wilderness which draws the tourist dollar will be defiled.  Their argument is essentially aesthetics, but they stretch it to cover an economic argument as well.

So, who do you believe?

On the face of it, one would think the power from Canada argument has lost its force, now that fracking has produced an energy boom in the United States. We are about to become energy independent without the Northern Pass. We don't need it. 

A similar fight is happening over a different sort of line, a pipeline,  across some Western states, but there the source of power is dirty oil shale in Canada, so the environmental impact, globally may be an easier case to make.

So, who do we believe? And how do we go about figuring out how to know who to believe.

For enlightenment, Mad Dog looks to...Fiction. Movieland. Chinatown, to be precise. In that story, a private entrepreneur wants to corner the market on water in the Los Angeles basin, but his virtuous partner resists that notion, insisting things like water (and one might substitute here "power") ought to belong to the people, in the public domain, not be owned by private capital.  So, to Mad Dog, the power people who want the Northern Pass look like Noah Cross in Chinatown.

Or, one can look to that other form of fiction, history.  In the mid 20th century, road developers wanted to run a big highway 180 miles from Cumberland, Maryland, right down into the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., paving over the C&O canal and its towpath, which runs hard by the Potomac River. The road building companies had a bunch of Congressmen in their pockets.   Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas, a liberal and a fervent outdoorsman, led a group of newspaper reporters, Congressmen, wildlife enthusiasts on a week long trek along the canal, where they saw fox, beaver, great blue heron, deer, eagles, osprey.  By the time Douglas reached Trav's tavern at Glen Echo, Maryland, just a few miles from Georgetown, the newspapers had daily front page stories depicting the road builders as killers of birds, beaver and Bambi.  Congressmen who had supported the road were running for cover and the road plan collapsed. The canal and towpath became the most intensively used national park in the entire National Park system.  Even today, just a few miles from the Capital building, along the canal you can see beaver and fox.  In fact, beaver hump up the hill and are occasionally spotted foraging around the campus of Georgetown University. The towpath is part of an extensive bicycle path and you can ride your bicycle from Georgetown more than a hundred miles north without ever crossing a road with an automobile. 

So, knowing nothing more about the details of the Northern Pass, until proven otherwise, Mad Dog chooses to believe the environmentalists on this one and he tends to see the power company entrepreneurs as just so many Noah Cross types, looking to rape and profit.

George Packer, Hillary Clinton and Prestige

Writing in this week's  New Yorker , George Packer describes Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State as valiant but doomed in her efforts to sustain an effort to mold a foreign policy which would return the United States to international "respectability" and to restore America's "standing" and "prestige" and "presence" in the international community, among the nations of the world. 

"Obama and Clinton wanted to 'pivot' away from the Middle East, toward the Pacific, but a bloody hand keeps reaching out to pull America back.  Sixty thousand people have died in Syria's civil war, Egypt is on the brink of state collapse, and the region is moving toward Sunni-Shiite confrontation. These are not problems that can be addressed by drone strikes and fitful diplomacy."

As if...As if America could or even if it could, should attempt to do anything about Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Tunisia or Libya. Good Heavens, man, have you not heard of a little country called Vietnam?

Or how about Afghanistan?  Does the word "quagmire" mean anything to you?

Now Mad Dog is a longtime fan of Mr. Packer, who is usually well informed, analytical, thoughtful and astute. But this is the sort of tripe which gives liberalism a bad name. 

Mad Dog grew up going to school with the sons and daughters of foreign service officers, and he knew many people who served bravely and tenaciously in the Foreign Service for many years.  Having had these friends, he wonders where Mr. Packer gets his idea of what diplomacy is capable of doing. 

If you lose your passport traveling overseas, you need an American consulate. If you get thrown in jail, you need some American diplomat to help try to get you freed. If an American company wants to sell stuff overseas, American diplomats and government employees from other departments and agencies may be able to help you. 

But restoring "prestige?" As soon as you see that word, your antennae ought to shoot up and the needle on your bull detector should gyrate wildly. 

Apparently, Mr. Packer has read a book by Mr. Vali Nasr, The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat, and Mr. Packer has been much impressed.

Anyone who wants to become dis enthralled with the possibilities of diplomacy and power need only tune into any  News Hour interview on Youtube and plug in "Henry Kissinger" or" Zignew  Bryshenski" and you will hear the ultimate in Chauncey Gardner (Being There) in pseudo wisdom, baso profundo, coming at you. Or, if you really want a very sad version of this, where the speaker is not even aware she is in deep doodoo, plug in "Jean Kirkpatrick," and pick a date toward the end of her life, when she was in the firm grip of Alzheimer's, but still appearing on the Sunday morning news shows intoning deep thoughts like, "The American government must proceed cautiously and judiciously, ever aware of the many ramifications and far ranging implications of any precipitate action," with gray heads all around the table nodding sagely in agreement with these pearls.

The fact is, this is not rocket science or even medical science; nobody knows anything among the foreign policy pundits. Pundits in this arena simply describe a world as they would like to imagine it, usually a world which has a place for themselves as the trusted adviser to the king or president, and that becomes "fact" for them. Kissinger was the most obvious example, a man who created a persona and milked that phony wisdom for all it was worth.

The fact is, power grows out of two related things in this world: The barrel of a gun and the economy which can produce guns.  No nation's leadership embraces or respects the United States out of love or admiration--not even, especially not the United Kingdom. Poor nations look to the United States as the rich uncle who never hands out enough money. Rich nations look at the U.S. as a competitor,  and hostile nations look at the U.S. of A as the great Satan.

The best thing the United States can do overseas is to get out and mind our own economy. Get those troops home, and close those bases and withdraw our Navy, at least the surface ships.  Come home and grow our civilian economy and stop fighting endless war.

The reason the United States was able to help win the war against Hitler, which was mostly won by Stalin and the Red Army, was we were in a position to build 15,000 airplanes a month, a number Hitler refused to believe, but we helped Britain first, and then on our own we filled the skies over Germany with bomb droppers. 

Now we have drones and that is what makes a difference to Al Qaeda. 

We can worry about what happens when Al Qaeda gets drone technology.

But to say Hillary Clinton could have made a difference in the world, if only President Obama had allowed her to do this is to betray an infantile credulity unworthy of an estimable author writing in a  high quality magazine whose editors should have known better.

President Obama Out of Washington

Mad Dog is not a political scientist, nor a journalist, nor well connected, but he has a political thought, unsolicited, but offered for free.

It seems to Mad Dog the only times Republicans seem to really wail and gnash their teeth is when Mr. Obama leaves Washington and speaks in the Republican back yard.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama went to a bridge between Mr. Mitchell's state of Kentucky and Mr. Boehner's state of Ohio, a bridge which became a symbol for the deterioration of American infrastructure, a bridge which is creaking and groaning and which is now so inadequate lines of trucks carrying goods from Michigan to New Orleans back up for miles and vital commerce, goods and business from the upper Midwest to the South and back again wither on the vine.  So Mr. Obama goes to this bridge and says if only Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Boehner would get out of the way and stop obstructing efforts by the government to widen and repair this bridge, both Ohio and Kentucky would benefit, as would the entire economy of the middle of the country. 

That really seemed to shake Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Boehner. They must have heard from their own locals. 

When Mr. Obama gets on the road and talks about gun control to people in Detroit and Chicago, in Arizona and Virginia, his supporters rally and is it not possible, that scares his opponents? 

The trouble with urging Mr. Obama to travel around the country to engage real people, who then shout at their own  Congressmen, is getting Mr. Obama out among the people puts him at risk for physical harm.  If he could be whisked in for lightning strikes and then whisked out again before the local lunatics with guns can react, this might be a technique to bring the rabid Right to heel.

If the most effective antiseptic is sunshine, then putting Mr. Obama's own radiant star shine out there, pushing for the big issues--gun control, Supreme Court reform, economic stimulation, immigration reform--might be the best hope for moving these things forward. 

The President will give his State of the Union address next Tuesday. Mad Dog urges you to look around that room at the assembled Senators and Congressmen.  When you see the faces of the Congress, you will understand why Mr. Obama is wasting his time in Washington.