E Wayne Ross – Page 107 – Critical Theories in Education

Why ARE Students Fleeing the Detroit Public Schools?

Published in Detroit Free Press on September 13, 2006
Why ARE Students Fleeing the Detroit Public Schools?
Judge Borman Made A Grevious Error

By: Michael Peterson, PhD, Director
Whole Schooling Consortium
Division of Teacher Education
College of Education
Wayne State University
September 9, 2006

Judge Borman made a great mistake in this decision. She should have continued to insist that the district negotiate and reach a settlement. Now they have little incentive to do so. It also appears clear that they have not been negotiating in good faith all along (note Brian Dickerson’s quote by Jerome Watson of DPS that “There’s no substantial progress,” he scoffed. “There’s not going to be a deal today”). This should have been cause for a ruling of contempt of court. Both the action of the judge and that of DPS administration will serve in the fairly short run to make worse what they say they want to avoid increasing the number of students leaving Detroit Public Schools.

With all the discussion of ‘great harm’ to the school district caused by the strike which, it is said will cause the district to lose more students, it’s interesting that I’ve seen literally no discussion regarding this question: “Why ARE parents and students leaving the Detroit Public Schools?” You’d think, with the loss of tens of thousands of students over the last ten years that the DPS administration would have sought to ask parents and students who have left why they did so and use this information to make changes in the district. I know of no effort to do this. One must wonder: “Why?”.

Over the last 15 years, as a faculty member at Wayne State University and Director of it’s Whole Schooling Consortium, I worked with a dozen elementary and high schools to help facilitate school improvement and have taught some 1,200 Detroit teachers in my classes at the University. These experiences have led me to some tentative conclusions regarding why students and parents seek to leave Detroit schools. Let me share those and suggest actions that may make a difference in the medium to long run. Please note that the statements below are certainly not true of every school and teacher in Detroit. I know some amazing, competent, courageous, caring teachers, among the best anywhere, who work in the City. But a culture and way of being has been built that provides a heavy tide against which these wonderful people must swim to help their students survive. It is that culture that must change.

Most fundamental, neither parents nor students feel respected in too many schools and classrooms. Neither do teachers feel respected and supported by the administration. The present conflict is typical and expected in virtually every school in Detroit the administration treating teachers with disrespect, making commands rather than engaging teachers in collaborative decision-making. Go to a gathering of parents in virtually any school in Detroit and listen and you’ll hear an amazing string of stories of contempt and disregard that often border on psychological abuse. The request by the Detroit Federation of Teachers itself for automatic transfer of students with substantial behavioral problems illustrates the problem. Anyone familiar with the district knows of these ‘administrative transfers’ that do nothing but ship kids with problems from place to place without attempting to deal with their needs and problems.
This fundamental issue of lack of respect and collaborative engagement among adults leads to many other problems. Detroit tests students with standardized tests many times per year using valuable resources of time and money on testing rather than teaching. It has invested in quick-fix attempts at teaching by installing programs such as Open Court that literally tell teachers what to say and do. Creative teachers are not able to pull on their student’s interest and use their own judgment to deal with needs of children. The system literally punishes teachers for engaging students in thoughtful learning and inquiry outside the established rigid system, thus seeking to create both teachers and students who don’t think but simply regurgitate what has been presented to them. Students in such classes lose interest, become angry, bored. Students who have special learning needs, from gifted to students with disabilities, fall through the cracks since they don’t respond well to a one size fits all process of teaching. Detroit’s solution to this is to segregate such students in special programs, a practice that produces poor learning outcomes.

It’s a bit like upper administration in Detroit for the last 20 years has sat in offices and asked: “How can we create schools that will insure that students and parents will leave?” As we are seeing, their plan is working quite well.

Which brings us back to teachers and the present strike. If anything is clear about good schooling it is this: it is about having good teachers who are treated with respect who can, in return, treat students and parents with respect and create classrooms and schools where a sense of care and community are fundamental, where students of great differences learn together about subjects that interest them and connect to their lives.

If Detroit is to survive as a school system it MUST seek to create such schools. And the first step is to create a working partnership with teachers, to recruit a cadre of truly quality teachers, to create a new culture of care and learning in schools.

In the short run, we can expect the number of students leaving Detroit Public Schools to substantially increase unless different directions are taken by the administration. Given how teachers are being treated, who would want to teach there? Who would go to work in a district where they freeze pay for 3 years, ‘borrow’ part of your salary to meet a budget deficit and then give administrators a large salary increase, threaten to fine and put you in jail if you protest? Who would do this? They include: a number of wonderful, committed people who believe they have a calling to urban children; teachers who have so many years in the system that they would lose much money by changing districts; and a growing cadre of individuals who can’t get work elsewhere. Given this reality, who would want to send their children to Detroit schools?

What’s needed? A long-term effort to build classrooms and schools based on practices and a culture of respect and engagement described above that engage teachers in an ongoing partnership with administrative leaders, parents, and the community.

However, if the administration continues to ram concessions down the throat of teachers they will create their worst nightmare.

Note: The website of the Whole Schooling Consortium has much information regarding what such classrooms and schools look like and how to go about creating them. Go to: www.wholeschooling.net

Hollywood’s attempts to mark the 2001 attacks ignore their political context and the return to history they symbolise

The Guardian: On 9/11, New Yorkers faced the fire in the minds of men
Hollywood’s attempts to mark the 2001 attacks ignore their political context and the return to history they symbolise

Slavoj Zizek
Monday September 11, 2006
The Guardian

Two Hollywood films mark 9/11’s fifth anniversary: Paul Greengrass’s United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. Both adopt a terse, realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. There is undoubtedly a touch of authenticity to them and most critics have praised their sober styles and avoidance of sensationalism. But it is the touch of authenticity that raises some disturbing questions.

The realism means that both films are restrained from taking a political stance and depicting the wider context of the events. Neither the passengers on United 93 nor the policemen in WTC grasp the full picture. All of a sudden they find themselves in a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it.

This lack of “cognitive mapping” is crucial. All we see are the disastrous effects, with their cause so abstract that, in the case of WTC, one can easily imagine exactly the same film in which the twin towers would have collapsed as the result of an earthquake. What if the same film took place in a bombed high-rise building in Beirut? That’s the point: it cannot take place there. Such a film would have been dismissed as “subtle pro-Hizbullah terrorist propaganda”. The result is that the political message of the two films resides in their abstention from delivering a direct political message. It is the message of an implicit trust in one’s government: when under attack, one just has to do one’s duty.

This is where the problem begins. The omnipresent invisible threat of terror legitimises the all-too-visible protective measures of defence. The difference of the war on terror from previous 20th-century struggles, such as the cold war, is that while the enemy was once clearly identified as the actually existing communist system, the terrorist threat is spectral. It is like the characterisation of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: most people have a dark side, she had nothing else. Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side, the terrorist threat has nothing else.
The power that presents itself as being constantly under threat and thus merely defending itself against an invisible enemy is in danger of becoming a manipulative one. Can we really trust those in power, or are they evoking the threat to discipline and control us? Thus, the lesson is that, in combating terror, it is more crucial than ever for state politics to be democratically transparent. Unfortunately, we are now paying the price for the cobweb of lies and manipulations by the US and UK governments in the past decade that reached a climax in the tragicomedy of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Recall August’s alert and the thwarted attempt to blow up a dozen planes on their way from London to the US. No doubt the alert was not a fake; to claim otherwise would be paranoiac. But a suspicion remains that it was a self-serving spectacle to accustom us to a permanent state of emergency. What space for manipulation do such events – where all that is publicly visible are the anti-terrorist measures themselves – open up? Is it not that they simply demand too much from us, the ordinary citizen: a degree of trust that those in power lost long ago? This is the sin for which Bush and Blair should never be forgiven.

What, then, is the historical meaning of 9/11? Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell. The collapse of communism was perceived as the collapse of political utopias. Today, we live in a post-utopian period of pragmatic administration, since we have learned the hard lesson of how noble political utopias can end in totalitarian terror. But this collapse of utopias was followed by 10 years of the big utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy. November 9 thus announced the “happy 90s”, the Francis Fukuyama dream of the “end of history”, the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal community was around the corner, that the obstacles to this Hollywood happy ending are merely local pockets of resistance where the leaders have not yet grasped that their time is over.

September 11 is the symbol of the end of this utopia, a return to real history. A new era is here with new walls everywhere, between Israel and Palestine, around the EU, on the US-Mexico and Spain-Morocco borders. It is an era with new forms of apartheid and legalised torture. As President Bush said after September 11, America is in a state of war. But the problem is that the US is not in a state of war. For the large majority, daily life goes on and war remains the business of state agencies. The distinction between the state of war and peace is blurred. We are entering a time in which a state of peace itself can be at the same time a state of emergency.

When Bush celebrated the thirst for freedom in post-communist countries as a “fire in the minds of men”, the unintended irony was that he used a phrase from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, where it designates the ruthless activity of radical anarchists who burned a village: “The fire is in the minds of men, not on the roofs of houses.” What Bush didn’t grasp is that on September 11, five years ago, New Yorkers saw and smelled the smoke from this fire.

· Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, szizek@yahoo.com

Rouge Forum Update: Detroit Teachers Strike/EMU Profs on Strike

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil page is updated.

It is a remarkable week by week collection of radical interpretations of the events since the US ruling classes chose to attempt to invade the world for oil, cheap, labor, markets, other raw materials, and global domination—leading to the developing emergence of fascism inside the US, an economy in deep crisis, a military exposed as incompetent and cowardly, and the contempt of nearly the entire world.

People have resisted. Right now, in the US, Eastern Michigan University’s AAUP profs are on strike, for the survival of their union. Please show support.

Detroit’s Teachers’ Strike is Still On!
Monday September 11 2006

Detroit school workers are still on strike, under signs saying, “No Contract No Work!” However, the DFT web site which streamed that call for two weeks has been replaced with a judicial order to return to work.

On Sunday at 4 p.m. in Cobo Hall, the site where the 1999 wildcat strike was initiated, the DFT leadership held a mass meeting, under the judicial order to do so, and filmed all the speakers, also pursuant to the order.

The DFT bosses simply read the judge’s order, then shut the meeting down, leaving many teachers who were still arriving due to a closure on I-94, wondering what happened, while others shouted, “No Contract No Work,” and others still called out, “What do we do now?” The DFT leadership simply left.

Only 3000 school workers attended the meeting, according to the DFT, a turnout which the School Board has to read as a serious sign of weakness. According to people in the meeting, many educators are weary, while others are absolutely determined to win a no-concessions contract.

Schools are to open again on Monday morning for a prep day. An administrator, called “Lekan the Alienator” by some educators, announced the strike was at an end. However, administrators who were laid off last week were not told to return to work for either Monday or Tuesday (once again, the purported first day with kids) as of 5 p.m. Sunday. The “CEO” announced schools would open with kids on Tuesday.

The press started to beat its drums against the strike, claiming the shutdown would not only damage the district irreparably, but cause drops in MEAP scores, the state test. Detroit schools routinely fail the racist MEAP at record numbers, while rich suburbanites boycott it, knowing the frantic test-prep for an exam written by incompetents and scored by a stock company, only makes their kids stupid.

The judge ordered the DFT and the Detroit Public Schools administrators to continue to bargain, and the governor called in a fact finder, looking for facts which will only be illuminated by which side has more power.

The DFT bureaucrats, led by President Janna Garrison, who had opposed the 1999 wildcat, claimed that the question of health care was settled in the negotiations already. Much remains on the table as DPS demands $89 million worth of concessions from a 9000 member work force which has already given up at least $65 million in concessions in the last five years, proving the dictum: Making concessions to bosses is like giving blood to sharks; they only demand more.

Fact finding, administrators who were laid off last week were not told to return either Monday or Tuesday, as of about 5 pm on Sunday.

]The DFT bosses did all they could not to have mass meetings anymore, not ones that would, for example, ratify a contract. They moved that to mail and in school ballots, so, most likely, a TA would send teachers back to work, where they would vote, and anyone who knows teachers knows that once they are back to work the chances for ratification of even a very bad contract are high.

President Garrison could have earned big props as a union boss if she had then torn the court order to shreds, said, “we are going to defy this court order because we have the power to do it, and if they throw me in jail they will only make our strike stronger.” Indeed, Garrison could have catapulted herself to the highest levels of the AFT, and maybe even the AFL-CIO as did the corrupt Al Shanker, back in 1968. But Garrison just read the order and shut down the meeting. No guts, no glory.

It is rueful that Garrison had no back-up person who is not on the DFT Executive Board, maybe not even connected to DFT, take the mike and say,” We should stay on strike. We will open day care centers in the following churches and other locations. We can open x number of centers and we need you to walk to the x number of stations we have set up here so you can volunteer to work there.”

“And, since we are on strike still, we need people to walk door to door in the communities with THIS FLYER we have printed up not in the name of the DFT but in the name of the INJURYTOONEISANINJURYTOALLCOALITION, and we want you all to explain, in person, just exactly why we are staying on strike, why the strike is in the interest of kids and parents, and why we must stick this through. So, if you cannot work the day care center, you can do door to door work, and therefore you are to walk to THIS station over here and sign up.”

“We must have solidarity from the suburbs. Even though the huge Michigan Education Association has done nothing about this strike, we have to go to the rank and file of the teachers unions in the suburbs and urge them to come to the demonstration we have scheduled at x place on y day at z time and we will march from 9 mile to 7 mile down Woodward across the city boundary, and we must have suburban teachers in that in mass, so here is the station for people to get to work on that right now. We will use this march to build for a massive NO CONTRACT NO WORK DAY TO INVOLVE EVERYONE IN DETROIT and shut this city down, demonstrating that nothing moves without labor. ”

“Last, we have set up an open bulletin board for all school workers to talk to each other, to share ideas, and even criticize us, the leaders, as we know we must learn from each other, and the rank and file must learn to run the union if we are ever to have a contract we can defend.”

(NO UNION, of course, puts up a www site where members can just discuss anything they want. NEA did that for about a week, before their attempted move into the AFT-AFL-CIO, but people who opposed that rotten move used the www site to help stop it, which they did).

That is just the beginning of what the DFT leadership could have done, without even threatening themselves or the union treasury or the new $5 million building they just bought for themselves– with union membership at about 3/5s of what it was a decade ago–at all.

What is needed is a worker council that would operate outside the confines of the unions, that would unite, say, hospital workers, school workers, transport workers (in at least Detroit and LA, they are largely immigrants) and anyone else inside. And, of course, an organization of honest rank and file school workers inside the DFT.

Anyway, now the 9000 members of the DFT are largely on their own. That could be bad or good. But many teachers in the Cobo meeting were grumbling that they need to get back to work, that they want to get with the kids, etc, and with the DFT systematically disorganizing them, that may happen. No crystal ball is claimed here. Organization, outside of the bounds of the union, seems key.

Rouge Forum leaders have worked closely with some strikers, and have taken action to file Department of Human Services complaints against the DPS leadership, charging that opening the schools threatens the health and safety of children. You can fax DPS bosses here.

More information on the school strike and the crisis in Detroit can be found here.

Detroit and Oaxaca Battles Continue, What Can We Do?

From Rich Gibson:

Dear Friends,

The massive social uprising in Oaxaca demonstrates the Rouge Forum thesis that struggles initiated in schools can become uprisings that begin real social change. It proves the centripetal role of schooling in today’s society. That fight is best documented on NarcoNews.

The Detroit school workers, on strike for 12 days, were enjoined from continuing the strike on Friday afternoon, and the union was ordered to hold a mass meeting to tell the teachers to return to work. That meeting will be on Sunday at 4 pm at Cobo Hall, the same place where the spontaneous 1999 vote was taken to start a wildcat strike, opposed by the union, declared illegal by the government, fought by business. The wildcat was a success in proving that workers who create political reality can defy unjust laws.

The Detroit Federation of Teachers is on strike because rank and file educators are in a position similar to the California grocery strikers. They must fight back because they have little choice. Educators have made more than $65 million in concessions in the last five years. Conditions in schools are often deplorable. Respect from top administrators, clearly absent. Shortly after teachers made concessions last year, the administrators took 10% pay raises.

In the wildcat, Detroit educators learned they could strike, violate the law, and do it without their union leaders, a fact the leaders probably heard more clearly than the teachers. Irrelevance is a big fear of union bureaucrats.

Many forces collide in Detroit. The local Detroit ruling classes believe they are completely cornered. If the schools are constantly in crisis, no one is going to gentrify Detroit. So they must fight. The union leaders are trapped between a habit of selling out, concessions, and a rank and file that cannot take more sellouts. The judge is trapped by an electorate which might be sympathetic to the strike, and higher-ups who are certainly not. The Mayor and others argue the strike could demolish what is left of the city.

What settles this is connecting reason to power, the task of every educator every day. Power, for school workers, lies in the ability to build close ties with kids, parents, community people, on a rank and file basis, and to take independent direct action, as the AFL-CIO is going to fight against this strike just as it ruined the grocery strike, and the Detroit Newspaper strike, where union goons attacked rank and filers on picket lines, turning people in to the police, to protect social peace for the Clinton vote.

The DFT leadership did all it could to prevent another mass meeting of teachers, like the one ordered for Sunday. The DFT leadership changed the ratification process for contracts, so teachers would not have a chance to see each other in a mass meeting and vote thumbs up or down in a public vote, but that they would vote back in the schools, or by mail—probably meaning that they would return to work before a vote was finished.

Detroit teachers should tell the judge the same thing that John L. Lewis said about the Taft-Hartley injunction that was handed to his coal miners’ union, “Let Taft mine it, and Hartley haul it.”

A court order cannot teach kids, nor even warehouse them. 9000 teachers are not going to be fired and jailed. Detroit is not Crestwood, where the Michigan Education Association betrayed a militant strike in a tiny district, all the teachers fired and permanently replaced. Detroit educators can defend this strike.

It would have been much easier to defend if the DFT had planned freedom schools for Detroit kids and parents during the strike, schools that taught outside the bounds of scripted curricula, and if the DFT had demanded an end to racist, high-stakes testing which is pivotal in the wreckage of schooling today.

But the DFT cannot do that since the DFT opposes free schooling and the examination of why things are as they are, because the DFT leadership is part of the problem, and, moreover, it was the DFT-AFT that initiated the high stakes tests along with the US Chambers of Commerce, and others. So, the ties in the community that could win this strike are not yet there, but it is not impossible for rank and filers to forge them.

Many possibilities exist. The strike could collapse under the injunction, and a real sellout come out later, but Rouge Forum members say that it may well not. A deal could be cut between this writing and the Sunday meeting, but if it is a concession contract, the educators will be in an uproar. It might be that the DFT leadership would look back to the corrupt legacy of Al Shanker and realize that they themselves could make careers of a judge’s jail sentence for continuing the strike, and in jail they could get some rest.

But the key to the strike is whether or not the rank and file teachers, perhaps walking door to door, can build solidarity with their communities.

In any case, Detroit and Oaxaca school workers have offered working people many invaluable lessons. Their courage and perseverance is to be applauded, right now. An injury to one really does just go before an injury to all. Tell the DPS bosses to give they will lose, that we will never forget.

Why Are The Detroit Teachers Striking?

{For news updates on the Detroit teachers’ strike see The Workplace Blog

From the “Push Back the MEAP, Bring Forward Real Learning” listserv:

Why Are The Teachers Striking? A Letter to Our Parents

Don’t think for a moment that it doesn’t hurt us when we see your children clean and pressed and ready for the first day of school, only to find none of us inside the school building. We want to be in our classrooms ready to begin the new year. But this year, we cannot. We want you to know this strike is about more than raises in teacher salaries and benefits (although that is part of it). It is about standing up for your children’s rights to a free and appropriate education. It is about drawing a line in the sand and telling the district that we won’t stand for substandard school conditions that don’t afford our urban children the same opportunities as children who attend public school in other school districts.

We are standing behind this line because we believe in your children, and we are committed to providing a quality education with the tools they need to grow into successful adults. To do our jobs well, we need certain things that the district is not providing. The district is making poor choices about how to spend the $7,600 per child that the State gives each year. The district has been making poor choices for a long time, and that is why we are in the situation we are in The district should change the way they manage the money, rethink their spending priorities and not ask the teachers or students to make any more sacrifices to cover their negligent spending.

The teachers’ issues are:

Money being spent on high-priced leased office buildings with high-priced, fancy furniture and computers for administrators.
Spending thousands per student on five standardized tests. If one could be eliminated, much money and time could be spent more wisely to help our neighborhood school have the basics.
A drinking fountain that works on each floor, repaired ceilings, clean and painted walls, lights that work in each classroom and hallways, clean bathrooms with doors, toilets and sinks working. Floors that are not buckled from water, a school library for the students and staff, classrooms wired for the internet, a computer that works in each classroom, a computer lab, a safe and clean playground, safe sidewalks with curbs—not cracks and holes, and adequate cleaning staff to meet the demands of the overcrowded classrooms.
Forty students in a classroom is unacceptable. Uncertified substitutes being placed in classrooms to fill teacher vacancies is inexcusable. Our classroom aides and noon hour aides are being cut. They are greatly needed to support the staff and students.

We are standing for your children and hope that you will stand with us too. Other cities are looking at how this will turn out, and we are standing for those children and those teachers, too. We think there is enough money to teach our children well, if it is spent wisely in the school and not in the administration building. When we say no contract; no work we are asking for conditions that are equitable for children and teachers alike. If you have ANY QUESTIONS, please don’t hesitate to ask. We want you to understand the reasons we are standing outside the school, away from our classrooms because of the problems we are faced with and we hope you will stand with us for the children because NO CHILD SHOULD BE LEFT BEHIND.

Respectfully yours,

The teachers at Neinas Elementary School, September 5, 2006

Utimate Frisbee rankings more accurate than SATs in predicting level of academic success at universities

A study of all private universities in the US, released by a psychiatrist at Washington State University, shows that their ranking in Ultimate Frisbee edges out both SATs and grades as a predictor of academic performance!

Those ranked in the top half for Ultimate have a graduation rate of over 85%, while those in the bottom half just 60%. The top seven have nearly as many Rhodes scholars and Marshall scholars as all others combined.

The son of the study’s author, who helped with research, is on a U.S. national Ultimate Frisbee team.

Zinn: War Is Not A Solution For Terrorism

Znet Commentary: War Is Not A Solution For Terrorism By Howard Zinn

THERE IS SOMETHING important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.

The United States, in three years of war, which began with shock-and-awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, has been an utter failure in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel; indeed it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups.

I remember John Hersey’s novel, “The War Lover,” in which a macho American pilot, who loves to drop bombs on people and also to boast about his sexual conquests, turns out to be impotent. President Bush, strutting in his flight jacket on an aircraft carrier and announcing victory in Iraq, has turned out to be much like the Hersey character, his words equally boastful, his military machine impotent.

The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations — the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan — and were forced to withdraw.
Even the “victories” of great military powers turn out to be elusive. Presumably, after attacking and invading Afghanistan, the president was able to declare that the Taliban were defeated. But more than four years later, Afghanistan is rife with violence, and the Taliban are active in much of the country.

The two most powerful nations after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union, with all their military might, have not been able to control events in countries that they considered to be in their sphere of influence — the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in Latin America.

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a “war on terrorism” is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.

The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

This is a false distinction, quickly refuted with a bit of thought. If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a “suspected terrorist” is inside (note the frequent use of the word suspected as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding targets), the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is “inevitable.”

So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of innocent people dying inevitably in “accidental” events has been far, far greater than all the deaths deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reject war as a solution for terrorism.

For instance, more than a million civilians in Vietnam were killed by US bombs, presumably by “accident.” Add up all the terrorist attacks throughout the world in the 20th century and they do not equal that awful toll.

If reacting to terrorist attacks by war is inevitably immoral, then we must look for ways other than war to end terrorism, including the terrorism of war. And if military retaliation for terrorism is not only immoral but futile, then political leaders, however cold-blooded their calculations, may have to reconsider their policies.

Howard Zinn is a professor emeritus at Boston University and the author of the forthcoming book, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress to be published by City Lights Books (www.citylights.com) this winter.