How do state budget cuts affect educational philosophy?

Apparently, one of the great lessons of politics has finally come crashing down in some Illinois school districts under extreme pressure from state budgetary shenanigans. What is that great lesson of politics? Why, it is as old as civilization: Ideals are fine when they remain in the abstract. One example of this is the recent decision of some Illinois school districts to abandon the middle school model to save some money:

"For 10 years, Bethalto middle school students have moved through the school day in teams. While the 125 or so students were in art, music or technology, each team's teachers would meet to discuss academic progress and lesson plans.

Next year, that will all change.

Sixth-graders will return to an elementary school model with one main teacher all day. Seventh- and eighth-graders will switch to a junior high model.

No teams, no art, no music or technology.

The move goes against a decades-long trend toward middle schools in which school districts have invested in the middle grades by adding enrichment courses, reducing class sizes and boosting planning time for teachers.

But budget issues are causing several Illinois districts to reconsider the middle years. Collinsville Middle School will revert to a junior high after seven years as a middle school. East St. Louis will adopt a hybrid of the two models, in part because of finances. And Waterloo has decided to keep the middle school this year, but with deficit spending. If the economy doesn't pick up, it will revert to a junior high the following year.

Currently, there are more than 11,000 middle schools and fewer than 3,000 junior high schools nationwide.

Instead of seven 47-minute classes, the seventh- and eighth-graders at Bethalto will have five 60-minute class periods: social studies, English, math, science and P.E.

Bethalto School District Superintendent Sandra Wilson would prefer to keep the elective classes and the teams, but with the Illinois budget crisis and the state owing the district nearly $2 million, administrators think they have no other choice. Amid a $13 billion budget shortfall, Illinois is behind in paying about $1.4 billion to schools for such expenses as special education and transportation.

'We will cut as much as they fail to send," said Russ Clover, Bethalto School District's business manager. "Educationally that's a mistake, but financially this is a requirement. The state has no idea the damage they are doing to these kids.'

The middle school model is inherently more expensive because of its smaller classes, extra electives and additional teacher planning time...."

Now, I am not exactly a fawning fan of certain parts of the middle school philosophy. I have said before that the middle school model often provides shelter for some of the worst trends in helping our students become literate, responsible citizens. In particular, the middle school model also encourages the hiring of teachers who are generalists rather than specialists, and thus specific instructional content is often a serious weakness just when kids need to be challenged the most. But-- when the team model is done right, and administration supports teachers, educational standards actually both can be increased AND be met by the students. But students and their specific needs are the last priority in these decisions mentioned in the article. To cull bad practices because they are bad is one thing. To completely reorder a school because the state refuses to meet its obligations is quote another.

Well, one can only hope that perhaps, after the chaos settles from these decisions being made, perhaps a new model for early adolescent education may develop that would actually combine the BEST of both the junior high and middle school model.

An unsavory discovery at Hallmark Meat Company

The scandal from the lack of inspectors in meatpacking plants continues to spread, as it was revealed this week that some of the tainted product made it into the school lunch program:

More than a third of the 143 million pounds of California beef recalled last week went to school lunch programs, with at least 20 million pounds consumed, officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday.

About 50 million pounds of the meat went to schools, said Eric Steiner, deputy administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service's special nutrition programs.

Of that amount, about 20 million pounds have been eaten, 15 million pounds are on hold at storage facilities and 15 million pounds are still being traced, he said.

Officials said, however, that they still weren't able to provide the names of all the places the meat wound up.

"Sitting here today, I cannot tell you how many locations the product has gone to," said Dr. Kenneth Peterson, of the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. "Our focus is identifying the locations and making sure the product is under control."

The USDA shut down Chino-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. and issued the nation's largest beef recall after the Humane Society of the United States released undercover video of workers kicking and shoving sick and crippled cows and forcing them to stand with electric prods, forklifts and water hoses.

The plant produces about a fifth of all the meat in the federal school lunch programs, said Bill Sessions, associate deputy administrator for livestock and seed Programs with USDA's agriculture marketing service.

Well I can tell you that some of that beef made it here to the Land Between the Coasts, and several area school districts had their names splashed all over the news for having received some of the recalled beef. Some of these districts are very large, and some are from very wealthy areas.

Interestingly, the school district in which I teach ALSO received some of the tainted product, but somehow we managed to keep our name out of the media. Seriously, you've gotta admire the job our PR folks do-- somebody there HAS to have sold their soul to the devil or something, because the media never hears anything about anything negative about our district. I make this point not to cast aspersions upon the Powers That Be, but to simply say to those of us who are parents: Just because you haven't heard that your district was affected by this story, doesn't mean that it wasn't. At least our school district disclosed it to parents in a letter. Other districts certainly aren't as accountable. So, if I were you, I would contact my school district to find out what had happened in your situation. Food poisoning in small children is very dangerous, and this should serve as a wake-up call.

Oh, and if you go back and read the rest of the article, you will see that an employee caught on film abusing the downer cattle has turned himself in to police. Let's hope that the accountability doesn't stop with employees but goes up to the management and ownership of Hallmark Meat Company.

And the next time you hear someone rail against taxes, think about what it would be worth to you if the government actually could afford to put inspectors into these plants more than once in a blue moon. Another thing that would be nice would be if our government would make this a priority, too, but that's just wishful thinking....

Labor Day 2007: We come to bury workers, not to praise them

It is Labor Day. In honor of this day, I would ruminate for a while on the state of the working person in this country.

I am the daughter of working people. I am the granddaughter of working people. I watched my father either get up at 4:30 each morning and trudge off to the first shift or come home at 11:30 from the late shift nearly every day of my life. For over thirty-four years, my father worked on the aircraft that ferried people around the country. I watched my mother get up even earlier to make his lunches of fried bologna or fried Spam or pork chop sandwiches-- no fear of cholesterol there, obviously-- and thermoses of coffee, and wash his incredibly dirty clothes.

Dad sometimes came home from work covered in tiny metal shavings that would scrape everywhere that they had gotten under his clothes. For years, anytime I would see him without the dark blue work shirt, dark khaki pants, and black Red Wing shoes, I would know it had to be the weekend. When he wore a pair of sandals my brother bought him after he retired, I almost recoiled in horror. He did not enjoy this work, but he did it because that's what men did. He was tired a lot. He worked hard. My mother worked hard.

I was able to be the first person in my family to complete college because of union wages. I was able to get braces on my teeth because of union wages-- and my mother's scrimping. It was union wages that made it possible for millions of people to gain a foothold into the middle class.

Yet whither the American worker? For the last twenty-five years, it has become the fashion to denigrate the American worker as lazy, as incompetent, as a toady of organized crime, as fat and ungrateful, or as wild-eyed socialists. Countless politicians have curried the favor of corporations and their deep pockets by chanting this mantra repeatedly, and the most puzzling thing of all to me is, some working people themselves have voted some of these Judases into office.

My father was one of these people-- voting for some clean-cut, vacuous talking-heads that had never worked a hard day in their lives because they promised to bring "morality" back into the publc sphere. Twenty-five years later, I don't see morality being any more prevalent-- far from it. Let us not discuss the inadvisability as well as the impossibility of legislating morality in a free society (witness, please, all of the recent scandals regarding so many of these paragons of virtue). Instead, let us consider morality. How is it moral for children of working people to have no health care? How is it moral for worker productivity to be up but real wages to be at their lowest point since 1947?

After twenty-five years, why haven't all these politicians delivered upon their promises to re-order society according to their so-called moral mandates? Could it be because, if they were to end access to abortion or actually balance the federal budget (HA!) or actually deliver on any of the other empty talking points they cynically employ, people might wake up and realize that their own economic self-interests have been destroyed by these very same politicians? Might the voters suddenly see how those politicians are are the trollops of corporations, but dependent upon the votes of the workers?

I was reading about the use of H-2B visas for the last two days. Thousands of foreign workers have been brought to the US to do work that employers supposedly can't find Americans to do. In the story, the majority of the workers were brought up to the US to work manicuring the lawns of people in million-dollar homes. Ahhhh, the irony.

Why can't these employers find American workers? No one considers that pay might be the problem, not the hard work. The employers advertise for American workers, and get few responses, but perhaps the fact that they're advertising for landscaping workers in February might have something to do with the lack of response, as well. That's how early they have to advertise in order to then show that they can't find Americans so that then they can get the authorization to go south of the border and recruit workers.

There is no such thing as a job Americans won't do. There is such a thing as a job Americans can't afford to do on the salary offered.

God bless the working man and woman. They deserve much more than a day off from work. They deserve our respect. They are the backbone of our country.

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."*

A veto-proof majority in the House today passed a bill to overturn a Bush administration order which severely limited access to presidential and vice-presidential papers:

The presidential papers bill nullifies a November 2001 order, criticized by historians, in which Bush allowed the White House or a former president to block release of a former president's papers and put the onus on researchers to show a "specific need" for many types of records.

Among beneficiaries of the Bush order was Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, a former vice president and president.

The order gave former vice presidents the right to stop the release of their papers through an executive privilege that previously only presidents could use. And it extended to deceased presidents' designees rights to keep their papers secret indefinitely.

The House bill would give current and former presidents 40 business days to object to requests to view their papers, allow a sitting president to override a former president's claim of executive privilege and strip former vice presidents and the designees of deceased presidents of the power to use executive privilege to block access to their historical documents.

In its veto warning, the White House said the bill encroaches on the president's constitutional authority and the 40-day deadline would force presidents to use executive privilege to block information requests "out of an abundance of caution" and thereby invite litigation.

...Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archives at George Washington University, said the average time to release presidential documents has grown to 78 months from 18 months since the Bush order, which he said directly contributed to one year of the lag.

A similar bill is expected to be introduced in the Senate.

...A third bill, which passed 308-117, was aimed at speeding requests for government information made under the Freedom of Information Act. The White House stopped short of threatening to veto it but said it could not support the bill.

As a member of the American Historical Society, I am pleased to see bipartisan support for this long-overdue attempt to restore openness to government. It is ironic indeed to know that information about ME is open to myriad searches by the FBI, but nothing apparently is so feared in Washington as a historian having the ability to deny the spinmeisters their ability to obfuscate. This is a preliminary victory for our generation and generations to come. Let's hope the Senate does its bit.

Happy Ides of March! As Brutus proclaimed, "Sic Semper Tyrannis!"

*- Title quote by Galileo Galilei, another rebel for truth.


----And, in a similar vein, the wondrous Education Wonks have put together another awesome trip through the Edusphere with the Carnival of Education #110. If you don't explore the Carnival, you'll miss out on the best the internet has to offer!

Answers about New Orleans

Well, I post a thought, and a few minutes later I find out that I'm not crazy paranoid. Here follows a gem from my personal goddess of reason, Molly Ivins at Working for Change:

New Orleans: It's about us
Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate

09.01.05 - AUSTIN, Texas -- Like many of you who love New Orleans, I find myself taking short mental walks there today, turning a familiar corner, glimpsing a favorite scene, square or vista. And worrying about the beloved friends and the city, and how they are now.

To use a fine Southern word, it's tacky to start playing the blame game before the dead are even counted. It is not too soon, however, to make a point that needs to be hammered home again and again, and that is that government policies have real consequences in people's lives.

This is not "just politics" or blaming for political advantage. This is about the real consequences of what governments do and do not do about their responsibilities. And about who winds up paying the price for those policies.

This is a column for everyone in the path of Hurricane Katrina who ever said, "I'm sorry, I'm just not interested in politics," or, "There's nothing I can do about it," or, "Eh, they're all crooks anyway."

Nothing to do with me, nothing to do with my life, nothing I can do about any of it. Look around you this morning. I suppose the NRA would argue, "Government policies don't kill people, hurricanes kill people." Actually, hurricanes plus government policies kill people.

One of the main reasons New Orleans is so vulnerable to hurricanes is the gradual disappearance of the wetlands on the Gulf Coast that once stood as a natural buffer between the city and storms coming in from the water. The disappearance of those wetlands does not have the name of a political party or a particular administration attached to it. No one wants to play, "The Democrats did it," or, "It's all Reagan's fault." Many environmentalists will tell you more than a century's interference with the natural flow of the Mississippi is the root cause of the problem, cutting off the movement of alluvial soil to the river's great delta.

But in addition to long-range consequences of long-term policies like letting the Corps of Engineers try to build a better river than God, there are real short-term consequences, as well. It is a fact that the Clinton administration set some tough policies on wetlands, and it is a fact that the Bush administration repealed those policies -- ordering federal agencies to stop protecting as many as 20 million acres of wetlands.

Last year, four environmental groups cooperated on a joint report showing the Bush administration's policies had allowed developers to drain thousands of acres of wetlands.

Does this mean we should blame Bush for the fact that New Orleans is underwater? No, but it means we can blame Bush when a Class 3 or Class 2 hurricane puts New Orleans under. At this point, it is a matter of making a bad situation worse, of failing to observe the First Rule of Holes (when you're in one, stop digging).

Had a storm the size of Katrina just had the grace to hold off for a while, it's quite likely no one would even remember what the Bush administration did two months ago. The national press corps has the attention span of a gnat, and trying to get anyone in Washington to remember longer than a year ago is like asking them what happened in Iznik, Turkey, in A.D. 325.

Just plain political bad luck that, in June, Bush took his little ax and chopped $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction. As was reported in New Orleans CityBusiness at the time, that meant "major hurricane and flood projects will not be awarded to local engineering firms. Also, a study to determine ways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has been shelved for now."

The commander of the Corps' New Orleans district also immediately instituted a hiring freeze and cancelled the annual Corps picnic.

Our friends at the Center for American Progress note the Office of Technology Assessment used to produce forward-thinking plans such as "Floods: A National Policy Concern" and "A Framework for Flood Hazards Management." Unfortunately, the office was targeted by Newt Gingrich and the Republican right, and gutted years ago.

In fact, there is now a government-wide movement away from basing policy on science, expertise and professionalism, and in favor of choices based on ideology. If you're wondering what the ideological position on flood management might be, look at the pictures of New Orleans -- it seems to consist of gutting the programs that do anything.

Unfortunately, the war in Iraq is directly related to the devastation left by the hurricane. About 35 percent of Louisiana's National Guard is now serving in Iraq, where four out of every 10 soldiers are guardsmen. Recruiting for the Guard is also down significantly because people are afraid of being sent to Iraq if they join, leaving the Guard even more short-handed.

The Louisiana National Guard also notes that dozens of its high-water vehicles, humvees, refuelers and generators have also been sent abroad. (I hate to be picky, but why do they need high-water vehicles in Iraq?)

This, in turn, goes back to the original policy decision to go into Iraq without enough soldiers and the subsequent failure to admit that mistake and to rectify it by instituting a draft.

The levees of New Orleans, two of which are now broken and flooding the city, were also victims of Iraq war spending. Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, said on June 8, 2004, "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq."

This, friends, is why we need to pay attention to government policies, not political personalities, and to know whereon we vote. It is about our lives.

(c) 2005 Creators Syndicate

Where's the National Guard?

Here's an unwelcome thought.

Usually when there's a natural disaster, the National Guard is called out. The news channels keep affirming the fact that there are not enough rescuers, and that there aren't enough police to stop the looting.

Why hasn't the Guard been called out immediately this time, as soon as the scope of the disaster was obvious?

I wonder if the war in Iraq has anything to do with it. And how many policemen, troopers, and EMTs are deployed in the war effort right now instead of being available to help with the crisis in the Gulf-- I mean OUR Gulf, not the Persian Gulf? I fear that a military is already stretched to the breaking point just can't be stretched further in this crisis.

This undeniable problem might be something to consider, especially in light of all the base closings and realignments that have been going on in the last few days.