On Educational Reform I

This post was initially premised as a contribution to current debates over education reform in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  As I began to rethink the current debate over educational standards and evaluations grounded on student performance between the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)/Common Core standards and earlier or newly developed versions of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam, I realized that the concerns that I had with educational reform in Massachusetts run much deeper than the grounds of the present debate.  For that matter, as an intellectual otherwise amenable to the idea of utilizing charter schools as a means for building greater heterogeneity into the public education process, I shoulder certain misgivings regarding the larger, market-oriented framework of consumer choice in public education currently being advanced as the primary argument for expanding the number of charter schools in the Commonwealth as an alternative to "standard" public education.  In the end, debates over educational assessment/accountability and over choice in public education fundamentally take certain rationales in the educational reform process for granted without undertaking a broader debate about where the education process fits within the economy, civic/political life, and cultural development of the Commonwealth.  Emphatically, we are taking for granted that public education constitutes, for all intents and purposes, the production of workers for the Massachusetts economy.  Insofar as the educational process certainly does have an economic rationale grounded in the development of a workforce capable of undertaking tasks that will sustain the vitality of a dynamic, Twenty-first century economy, including programming of electronic devices for automated manufacturing techniques, it further stands to reason that, if we allow the public educational process to degenerate into a "cradle to career" workers' training program, then we will condone the hijacking of public education by a strictly economistic logic that subordinates broader human developmental concerns, including citizenship, nurturing of artistic creativity, and the interpersonal socialization of young people, to the problem of employability upon graduation.  With my basic concern that the administration and reform of public education, from kindergarten through grade twelve, is becoming a subject of public debate along lines ensuring that economistic rationales always take precedent over other priorities in defining the mission(s) of the public education process, this post seeks to advance a larger vision of what public education is, what purposes it serves, and how it should be evaluated in the interest of ensuring that it serves the needs of the community that undertakes its establishment.  At this level of abstraction, the arguments advanced here will necessarily obtain cursory treatment.  The material broached in this post could occupy several book-length monographs.  My intention is not to be conclusive but to lay down a set of principles on which I think any discussion or debate over the direction of public education should be premised.

1.  The educational process, as the inculcation of accumulated curricula of ideas to students on a range of diverse fields of knowledge, fundamentally expresses the outcomes of political processes, determining the overall mission of education and the necessary standards for transmission of knowledge to students.  That is to say, in order for a process involving the transmission of ideas between individuals to be qualified as education, it must involve a broader, explicit or implicit, determination that the ideas being transmitted achieve some mission that the broader community or politically dominant groups consider definitive of the educational process.  Education is necessarily an outcome of political processes and the educational process necessarily works, at least in part, to reinforce existing power relations within a community, however large or small, diverse or homogeneous, democratic or authoritarian, the community is.  This is not to say that the truths expressed in the educational process are purely rhetorical objects of partisan control over docile, infinitely mutable minds or that educational processes can ever take place to the exclusion of other information transfers between individuals that do not qualify as educational matter.  Simply stated, the body of information that qualifies as educational matter derives from processes through which individuals or groups with the political capacity to evaluate ranges of ideas determine which ideas are important to convey to students.  This determination is fundamentally predicated on the principle that the transmission of these ideas will advance the welfare of the community, as determined by those with the power to make the determination of what is in the community's best interests.  This principle is sufficiently broad to encompass all scales at which decisions on curricula take place, whether we are talking about the determination, in the American context, of national educational standards in federal statutes or through collaborative processes between various state-level educational decision-makers (e.g. the Common Core initiative), or we are talking about decisions on curricula effected by home-schooling parents.  To the extent that we accept this general principle, the idea of educational reform is subsumed within a larger structure of decisions through which politically influential decision-makers in a given community (of any size) have already determined the mission and goals of education from diverse potential missions.

2.  The notion that education and formal schooling are not equivalent amounts to something more than a cliche, to be posted on a bumper sticker. Education is a lifetime endeavor, transcending the temporal boundaries of formal schooling. This conclusion should, likewise, be basic to my further argument. When an individual in their forties, like myself, is introduced to a new set of ideas, either through formal lecturing/training or by incidental or purposeful exposure to divergent information media, education is taking place. Examining this conclusion in reference to conclusion 1, we, emphatically, must recognize the political nature of the process taking place, even when the individual has freely chosen to be exposed to a certain set of ideas that reflects the efforts of their creator or disseminator to exercise authority in reframing the reality of the particular subjects involved in order to change the way the subject is perceived by the student. The education process, as a conjointly political and cultural process, in this sense, is absolutely coterminous with every dissemination of information, by every conceivable media, however mundane. If we accept this principle, then we must simultaneously truncate the larger subject of this document in order to prevent its degeneration into a larger discourse on epistemology writ large. In this document, I am not concerned with educational processes as they affect me, in my forties and, at least presently, out of any formal educational setting - my interest resides entirely in formal schooling, as a distinct educational process, and, more pointedly, on formal schooling from kindergarten through grade twelve (henceforth: "k through 12").  

3.  The financing of formal schooling is a secondary question except to the extent that public financing of formal, k through 12, schooling with tax revenues invokes concerns regarding the sufficiency of returns to public investments in the education of young people.  As a final, critical entry point to the broader argument that I intend to make in this document, it is fundamental that the educational process, in all of its divergent forms, involves expenditures of labor and capital that usually, though not always, demand a rate of return, frequently involving market processes.  With regard to formal k through 12 schooling, professional educators, possessing years of specialized schooling (with costs incurred at their expense), an evaluated formal practicum, and, perhaps, years of prior experience in the formal schooling process, demand a rate of return sufficient both to maintain a desired, if modest, standard of living and to reimburse the (increasingly less than modest) costs of their formal schooling (e.g. to compensate for the servicing of higher education debt!).  Such concerns, channeled through the collective bargaining power of public teachers' unions, in turn, elevate the concerns of tax payers that their investments, to compensate teachers and administrative staff and to finance infrastructure development, are yielding an adequate return in regard to educational goals.  Educational reform, as a legislative initiative at the state and federal levels, remains ultimately grounded in these latter concerns of local tax payers, filtered through policy debates in higher echelons of government on the best ways to support local educational processes at the least possible cost to higher level governmental authorities.  The public financing question, thus, becomes wholly intertwined with educational reform, as an agenda, to the extent that the latter seeks to tweak the educational process in ways that will render it more efficient relative to the investment of tax revenues for its purposes.  

Is Bernie Sanders the Racially Blind "White" Democratic Candidate?

This post is conceived as a response to Joan Walsh in The Nation ("What's Wrong With Bernie Sanders's Strategy," The Nation (3/21/16), at: http://www.thenation.com/article/whats-wrong-with-bernie-sanderss-strategy/).  Walsh, who apparently is an expert on the latent problem of trying to build a successful electoral strategy around the idea of winning White, working-class Reagan Democrats back to the Democratic Party, makes the argument that this is precisely the source of Sanders' failure to generate greater momentum among African-American voters in Southern Democratic primaries.  To take Walsh's argument a step further than she seems to be willing to take it, the sort of electoral mass that Sanders seeks to assemble to win Democratic primaries in economically marginalized constituencies in the South and in other less favored regions appears to be decisively split on racial lines, with African-Americans voting for Clinton and White working-class voters overwhelmingly sticking to the GOP and running into the arms of Donald Trump.  Who can help the confusion of working-class Whites?  Both Trump and Sanders appear as decisive and uncompromising enemies of free trade and globalization, generally!  Oddly enough, for the sake of at least maintaining some appeal along these lines, Clinton now opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that, in principle, I would support but, in its details, few people can because its details have in no way been clarified!  Proceeding thus, Trump appears to manifest himself as the implicit and never mentioned background to Walsh's piece, in the same sense that the initial White, working-class turn toward the GOP demanded Reagan.
               Being a post-structuralist Marxist thinker, this piece just screams out the larger conclusion that, notwithstanding all of the old-time united front strategies of the 1930s, there is no such thing as a monolithic working-class voter, either in the United States or anywhere else!  Conversely, it seems somehow to be my mission here to argue, as decisively as I can, that there are no monolithic White voters and no monolithic African-American voters in the Democratic primaries, their results notwithstanding (to say nothing about monolithic women voters!!).  That is to say, if we want to be truly serious about the demographics of the Democratic primaries, then we have to acknowledge the multifarious cross-cutting racial, ethnic, and gender specificities of the Democratic electorate, the relative appeal of particular policy positions by particular candidates toward particular constituencies, and the relative effects of mass media and social media on the electorate.  In these respects, it might be true that Sanders has not made a career in Washington by catering to traditionally African-American issues.  For that matter, neither has Hillary Clinton.  Walsh acknowledges substantially that Clinton's 2008 campaign for the nomination against Obama was oriented toward a Democratic "Southern strategy" to rebuild the "(Bill) Clinton coalition."  I may have missed something but it does not seem abundantly clear, at a time where the idea that "Black lives matter" has entered into debate in the mainstream American consciousness, that Hillary Clinton has ever embarked on a strategy that might, in some way, be characterized as an appeal to African-American voters.  In this respect, no, I don't buy Walsh's argument on Clinton's electoral strategy in 2016 - Clinton has done absolutely nothing in my view to command a decisive advantage against Sanders with African-American voters.  As such, I cannot help but say that when I saw the results of voting in South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, notwithstanding the pronouncements of political analysts, I could not help but question why so many African-American voters would have instinctively thrown their support to Hillary Clinton with nothing at least palpably suggested as a possible return to their support.
               In the end, two propositions seem clear to explain why Clinton has, to date, run away with African-American support in the Democratic primaries.  First, working-class African-American voters seem even less inclined than working-class White voters, especially in Southern states, to cast votes for a self-described "democratic socialist."  Second, working-class White voters, especially in Southern states, seem much more inclined to cross party lines to vote for Trump, Cruz, or other Republican primary candidates than to stick around to decide whether they want to choose between a corrupt Washington veteran from a Democratic political dynasty and an out-in-left-field radical socialist.  Either way, there is something to Walsh's notion that a working-class White strategy, at least in the Democratic primaries, is a dead end, but not as much as she seems to want to make of it.  Emphatically, African-American voters, especially in Southern Democratic primaries, are voting for Clinton because they perceive that they have no where else to go - what good is it ever going to do to listen to the promises of socialist?!  On the other hand, no one on the other side of the two-party divide is, in any way, singing their tune, even if Hillary Clinton isn't exactly Aretha Franklin!  In the end, I am not prepared to make a big deal about the racial dynamics of the 2016 Democratic primaries - Bernie Sanders might be the Democratic Socialist candidate in the race, but he is by no means the definitively White candidate, at least with respect to the positions embodied either on the Clinton or Sanders side of the contest.  There are other sources readily evident for the racial divide between the Democratic candidates, especially in the Southern primaries.    

On Terror in Brussels

Very briefly, it is extremely difficult to reiterate the point that the only short term ameliorative to Sunni Salafist terrorism by groups like the Islamic State (IS) and Al Qaeda is good police work to maintain surveillance on suspected violent extremists and, as much as possible, break up plots before their realization.  Such amelioratives are imperfect - some plots will not be stopped.  The prosecution of armed violence by sufficiently well-organized, financed, and secretive networks of individuals and groups, militantly committed to a particular vision of the world and willing to pursue its realization by all means necessary may, on occasion, yield extreme instances of carnage, despite the best efforts of law enforcement and civil defense authorities to prevent them.  There are, of course, more proactive alternatives, like aggressive military action in Southwest Asia, especially in Syria and Iraq but also in the Sinai peninsula and Libya, to breakup the emergent safe havens of IS and other groups.  And there are the extreme alternatives of closed borders and aggressive restrictions on the civil and religious freedoms of Muslims in Western societies, as if Islam, as a theological generality, is to blame for current patterns of violent extremism.  Evidently, the populations of every Western state, the U.S. included, are eager to specify an appropriate scapegoat for transnational violent extremism in order to prosecute its successful excision from the world, by isolation or prophylactic annihilation.  In this manner, it is difficult but necessary to argue that violence begets further violence, and selective exclusion in closed borders breeds internal xenophobia and external jealousy and enmity.  In Western society, we've spent two hundred years building a culture grounded in liberal internationalism, anticipating a borderless world of indiscriminate, free human civilization.  Western Europe is enduring a dark chapter in its history of standing as one under the principle that open borders and open democratic societies best realize economic development and nurture cultural heterogeneity and exuberance.  As a defender of such principles, I hope that we are not watching the Salafists win in destroying the light of open, liberal, pluralist democracy in a unified Europe, or even replacing such high values with unity on the perverted principle of a war against Islam.  Grieve the dead, pursue and prosecute the perpetrators, but leave the freedoms of peaceful believers intact and the borders open to refugees seeking a brighter future in a sphere of cultural and economic liberty and pluralist democracy.      

Mitch McConnell Doubling Down on the Republican Base: Why the GOP is racing for an utter train wreck

Apparently Mitch McConnell told CNN this morning that this Senate will not even consider approving Merrick Garland for a seat on the Supreme Court in its lame duck session after the general election.  Moreover, he stated unequivocally that he would support the GOP Presidential nominee whoever that nominee turned out to be, implying that he would be OK weathering the fortunes of a Trump nomination against Hillary Clinton.  To the extent that he and Paul Ryan stand as the GOP's two most obvious federal stand bearers in an election year when the Republican Party base has seemed determined in state level primary and caucus fights to buck national leadership, it is worth considering why someone of Mitch McConnell's stature would be so dogmatically determined to set the national GOP on a course for certain self-demolition!  Either McConnell senses that he and his party may discover an opportunity to veer off from a catastrophe and save face before the general election or, in view of his ostentatiously bellicose and aristocratic ethos and doctrinaire faith in the conservative mindset of a rapidly dissolving White, Anglo national electoral majority, he somehow cannot comprehend that his party stands preciously little chance of winning in November.  The third possibility, obviously commanding significant attention among incumbent Republicans in Washington, is that the persistent nurturing of a radically participatory rightist base, most recently with the development of the Tea Parties, has institutionally driven federal Republican leadership to a position where they recognize that it will be impossible to secure the reelection of incumbent Congressional office holders if they do not curry favor to the most intransigent views of the radical right, opposing any measure of compromise and bipartisanship with Congressional Democrats and Obama administration.  Succinctly, to the extent that this certainly seems to be the gist of McConnell's strategizing, it seems certain to be a losing strategy for the GOP - their base cannot deliver the Presidency in the general election and they may not even be able to secure contested Senate seats in Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Hampshire.  As many other political analysts have astutely noted, the GOP is becoming its own self-contained, myopic political universe, where American ethnicity/race, politics, and culture remain suspended in the 1950s and where the effects of unrestrained government retraction on economic policy, manifest as an unremitting deepening of inequality in opportunity and income, are occluded by an absolutely faith that governmental intervention is the single greatest source hindering American economic growth.  In the latter respect, Trump's opposition to free trade, however simplistically articulated, may constitute the first step of a Republican Party Presidential candidate to challenge neoliberal economic orthodoxy on the politics of the global economy.  Indisputably, McConnell is signing himself onto a partisan slate that cannot win, even among its most adamant Wall Street supporters.  A Republican Party that succeeds in assuming its destiny of becoming the party of an older, rural, White, isolationist America is ultimately consigning itself the fate of becoming virtually irrelevant in determining the course of the country as we continue to venture against the challenges of the early Twenty-first century.  In the absence of any true alternative to Clinton's version of the Democratic Party, we need to ask what direction politics will take across the American political mainstream as we become more global, more ethnically diverse, more economically liberal/neoliberal, less religious, and, generally, less demographically and politically homogeneous.  I feel certain that there is no future for the GOP in its current form in this burgeoning America, but I await a better alternative than Clinton and her party!    

Grandpa Bernie will fix everything!! Reflections from Super Tuesday 2016 in Massachusetts

Very briefly, I want to convey a set of hopeful, if mildly cynical and irreverent reflections on the Super Tuesday primaries and the state of both parties.

1.  At least from the looks of things in Hampshire County and the reflections of younger co-workers in Greater Springfield, Bernie Sanders will take the Massachusetts Democratic primary, if by a razor thin margin, against Secretary Clinton.  The Massachusetts Democratic primaries should be thoroughly irrelevant to the larger conclusion of the Democratic primary season - Hillary Clinton is going to win her nomination off the backs of African-American voters in the South and elderly voters in the coming weeks in Florida, even if she has to struggle for working class Whites in razor thin margins for Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin against Bernie in the coming weeks!  I don't know how Minnesota is going to vote today, but the caucus structure does not seem to be in Bernie's favor (I could be wrong).  Colorado could slide Bernie's way if Boulder has its way (don't count on it!).  Either way, Clinton will cruise out of today's primaries and caucuses with a heavy lead.  She'll run away with Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas, a brutal enough beating for Bernie to crawl into the Midwest primaries wounded, clear victories in Massachusetts and Vermont, notwithstanding.  (OK, from the morning after, no such luck for Grandpa Bernie in the Bay State!  Wrong again; just too many Democratic insiders in metropolitan Boston pulling for Hillary.)  

2.  Trump will run away with the Deep South, Cruz will squeeze out Texas, Rubio will look very respectable in Georgia and Virginia, Kasich will eek out second place in Vermont and Massachusetts, and every Republican insider will spend the next week, like they spent the last week, wondering how the hell to defeat Trump in order to save the party!  Once again from the morning after, who knew Rubio would win the Minnesota caucuses, and what does it tell us about Trump's appeal within the GOP?  Why are things different in Michelle Bachmann's backyard?  Just the nature of the caucus process?  Trump ignore the Minnesota electorate in the run up to Super Tuesday?  Or do Republican voters in Minnesota possess a strange foresight, comprehending that there is no way that a Trump nomination can win the Presidency for the GOP?  Ben Carson is now, apparently, officially gone.  Kasich might as well be - he may be able to hold out for the Michigan primary, but he stands no chance of winning it.  Rubio had better hope to win his home state.  Cruz needs to make a dent in the Plain states and the Rockies.  Outside of these states, Cruz stands no chance against Trump.  

3.  No candidate that has to take time to figure out whether he wants to play footsy with acknowledged racist, White supremacists in order to curry favor with the radical right wing is ever going to be elected President of the United States in this period of our history!  Trump is winning by summoning a particular angry, anti-establishment dynamic within the Republican Party.  Effectively, he is pulling in the Tea Party crowd, denying these supporters to Cruz and Rubio, who might otherwise split the super-conservative vote.  Oddly, however, Trump is appealing to groups within the White population that Sanders is appealing to on the Democratic side, notwithstanding the radical degree of difference between the messages conveyed by the two campaigns.  Sanders appeals to the hopes of poor, working class White Democrats who look wistfully at the promise of a return to the New Deal and the Great Society.  Trump appeals to the fear and hatred of Republicans in the same economic dynamic, looking for someone to blame for their economic woes and anxieties, to which they resist the notion that governmental action might improve their lives.  The problem is that, when you pull this crowd in on this sort of a message, with nuanced racial imageries in tow, you end up also attracting the out-of-the-closet racists from the Deep South and Midwest.  If someone like Trump has to take a few minutes to realize that an endorsement from David Duke, telling all red blooded Anglo-Saxons to go out and cast your fortunes with the Republican front runner, is an endorsement that he needs to renounce, then he cannot expect to win a general election with an electorate that is looking exceedingly less White by the day.

4.  Acknowledging when I'm wrong! Bloomberg is going to stay out of the Presidential race if Hillary Clinton comes out in complete control of the Democratic nomination process from Super Tuesday - a Bloomberg run will only help a tragically absurd and immoderately insane Trump nomination on the Republican side, and Michael Bloomberg is too smart and too patriotic to risk a national catastrophe!!