U of California starts cyber charter school

The University of California, which has offered individual online courses for high school students for the past seven years, is creating a full online high school in which selected students could take all of their courses online, The San Diego Union-Tribune. reported.

The UC Online Academy will open in August, with as many as 125 students starting the program in 9th grade. Like brick-and-mortar charter schools, cyber charters operate free of many public school regulations on staffing, curriculum and spending. In exchange, they pledge to meet specific academic goals. If a school doesn’t achieve the goals, its charter – the permission to operate – can be revoked.

B.C. First Nations sign agreement to control own education

An historic agreement among B.C. First Nations, the provinical and federal governments will allow First Nations to control their own education. First Nations will be allowed to set up their own school boards, certify teachers, and determine the curriculum to be taught from kindergarten through Grade 12 for tens of thousands of B.C. aboriginal children.

The deal is an important milestone that everyone hopes will be an important, positive development in improving educational outcomes for native children. First Nations leaders have been seeking jurisdiction over education since 1972. About 70 percent of aboriginal children living on reserves fail to graduate from high school and only 27 percent of the first nations population between 15 and 44 years old hold a post-secondary certificate, diploma, or degree (compared to 46 of the Canadian population).

Gaining control over schools is just a small step, however, alleviating the poverty and other deleterious social conditions that disproportionately affect First Nations people remain huge problems that must be addressed. And, as in any context, to expect that educational improvements can be had without improving the economical and social conditions is fool-hearty.

As Jean Anyon has said, trying to reform schools without reforming the social and economic situations the schools sit in is like cleaning the air on one side of a screen door.

B.C. First Nations sign agreement to Control Own Education
NORTH VANCOUVER, B.C. (CP) – After decades of abuse in native residential schools, B.C. First Nations are moving in the opposite direction to educate their children with a new agreement on aboriginal education.

“The purpose of (residential) schools was to take the Indian out of the kids,” said First Nations Summit Chief Ed John, who himself went to a residential school for seven years.

The framework agreement between the B.C. and federal governments and natives gives First Nations control over their children’s education.

After legislation has been changed by both governments natives would be able to certify teachers and schools and establish their own curriculum and exam standards.

John believes the changes will allow them to close the huge graduation gap between natives and non-natives.

“Anything has got to be better than what we have now,” he said.

“Our kids are dropping out like flies. What better message (is there) than having your communities taking the responsibility for (their) kids.”

Nathan Matthew, the negotiator with the First Nations education steering committee, told a news conference Wednesday the system is created on the ashes of the residential school system.
“The signing of this education agreement today will empower B.C. First Nations to deliver quality education on their own terms,” he said.

“Education that reflects First Nations culture, tradition and provides contemporary knowledge and skills.”

B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell believes the changes will increase graduation rates for native children, which hovers below 50 per cent.

“It’s very important to recognize people’s history and to show respect for their culture,” he said.

Campbell pointed out the Nisga’a nation in northwest B.C. improved its graduation rate to more than 60 per cent when it took over its education program.

He said the goal is to not only give young First Nations the education they need, but to ground them in their own culture and traditions, “so they have a sense of confidence they need to deal with the world.”

“In the past we have failed young First Nations students,” the premier said.

Federal Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice called the program a model for other provinces to follow.

“There are other provinces such as Nova Scotia and Alberta, Quebec, that are similarly interested in the concept,” he said.

Prentice said the education idea has been tested in the past.

“Everywhere where we’ve tried pilot projects. . .where the First Nations community has been heavily involved in the education system, we’ve had great success.”

Neither Prentice nor Premier Campbell would say what the program may cost, but said it would be funded with startup costs and on a per-student basis.

Squamish First Nations Chief Gibby Jacob, who hosted the news conference, said the importance of the announcement is underscored by the generations of system failures natives have tried to learn under.

Vancouver Sun: Natives to control own education

Natives to control own education
Historic pact between B.C. and Ottawa seeks to end high dropout rate for aboriginal kids

Miro Cernetig
Vancouver Sun

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

VICTORIA — British Columbia’s first nations will be given direct control over the education of their children in a historic agreement — more than three decades in the making — to be unveiled today by the federal and provincial governments.

Seeking to end the high drop-out rate among native children on reserves, a failure often linked to the poverty in which many Canadian aboriginals live, the federal and provincial governments will allow first nations to set up their own school boards, certify teachers and set curriculum from kindergarten to Grade 12 for tens of thousands of aboriginal children in the province.

“It means that first nations parents and communities would have the right and the responsibility to determine how their children are educated and to determine the content of that education,” states one of the federal government’s background documents obtained by The Vancouver Sun.

The deal, to be announced in North Vancouver by federal Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice and Premier Gordon Campbell, is being hailed as a first in Canada and an “an important milestone” that could be emulated in other provinces, according to the draft agreement.

At least 40 of the almost 200 first nations in B.C., representing about 160,000 people, have already indicated they want to form school boards. They would be sanctioned to hand out provincial high-school graduation diplomas, known as the Dogwood.

The ground-breaking deal also stipulates that first nations school boards must agree to an oversight system, the details of which have yet to be spelled out, to ensure they meet provincial educational standards. In another surprise move, native parents will get the right to take the federal money allotted to each native child’s education and move it into the provincial school system if they choose.

For federal Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice the deal represents his first major policy move since the death of the Kelowna accord, the $5.2-billion deal that Premier Gordon Campbell and other premiers and native leaders signed with former Prime Minister Paul Martin in 2004. Prime Minister Stephen Harper distanced himself from that plan, promising he would still meet its goal of improving the lives of natives.

“I take my hat off to Minister Prentice,” said Campbell, who had warned Ottawa it risked tarnishing the Crown’s image if it bailed on the Kelowna accord’s poverty alleviation goals. “This has never been done before in Canada. It’s a historic step. It’s a first step.

“There may be times things don’t work as smoothly as we want … but the real spirit of the Kelowna accord, if you want to call it the Kelowna accord, is an open partnership with first nations to close the gap that has separated them from the rest of society for so long. It’s erasing the boundaries of the third solitude that first nations live in. And this is what this will do.”

The deal being offered today is voluntary and there is no unanimity on the part of B.C. first nations as to whether they will sign on. While most native leaders have been calling for greater autonomy and control of schools, others feel they aren’t ready or fear giving up their one-on-one relationship with the federal government.

Under today’s agreement, a first nation choosing to set up its own school board must opt out of parts of the Indian Act that allow the federal government to appoint third parties to run reserve schools. The federal government will be introducing legislation to make that possible in the next few months.

Education has been long seen by native leaders across Canada as one of the reasons for the chronic poverty and unemployment amongst the country’s approximately one million natives, who are twice as likely to be unemployed than other Canadians.

Since 1972, in a paper entitled Indian Control of Indian Education, native leaders have been “seeking recognition by the federal and provincial government of first nations’ jurisdiction over education,” Ottawa notes in its position paper.

But there has also long been a divisive debate about what is the best way for first nations to take control of schools.

There is no doubt that native children in reserve schools are faring poorly. According to the Assembly of First Nations, “there has been literally no progress over the last four years in closing the gap in high school graduation rates between first nations and other Canadians. At the current rate, it will take 28 years for first nations to catch up to the non-aboriginal population”

The statistics reveal a major disadvantage for young aboriginals. Abut 70 per cent of children living on reserve fail to graduate from high school. As well, the Assembly of First Nations estimates that 10,000 aboriginal students who are eligible and looking to attend post-secondary education are on waiting lists because of underfunding.

Only about “27 per cent of the first nations population between 15 and 44 years of age hold a post-secondary certificate, diploma, or degree, compared with 46 per cent of the Canadian population within the same age group,” the assembly says.

mcernetig@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

New evidence that exit exams increase dropout rates and exacerbate educational inequalities.

High-school exit examinations—which are becoming more widely adopted as a part of standards-based education reform—are correlated with increases in the dropout rate, according to research papers issued recently by two teams of scholars. One of the papers found that the dropout effect is especially strong among black male students.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today:

High-School Exit Exams Are Associated With Higher Dropout Rates, Researchers Find

By DAVID GLENN

Since 1979, a growing number of states have required high-school students to pass exit examinations before they can receive diplomas. For nearly as long, scholars and policy makers have debated whether such exams do more harm than good.

Proponents of exit exams say that they improve learning and future employment by giving both students and school districts better incentives to succeed. Skeptics say that the exams needlessly prevent decent students — who have otherwise completed all of their course work — from receiving diplomas. They also warn that the exams could prompt some students to drop out of high school as early as the 10th or 11th grade, if they foresee that they will fail the tests.

The latest battleground over the issue is California, where on July 25 an appeals court will consider a lawsuit that claims the introduction of the state’s new exit exam should be delayed because certain low-income districts allegedly do not teach much of the material on the exam.

Now two teams of scholars have written papers whose findings might provide support to those on the more-harm-than-good side. In a recent working paper, Thomas S. Dee, an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College, and Brian A. Jacob, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University, report that students in states with relatively easy exit exams are roughly 4 percent more likely to drop out of high school than similar students in states with no exams. In states with relatively difficult exit exams, students are 5.5 percent more likely to drop out than their counterparts in states with no exams.

The effects are stronger among African-American men, Mr. Dee and Mr. Jacob found. In states with easy exit exams, black male students are 5.2 percent more likely to drop out of high school than their counterparts in states with no exit exams. In states with more-rigorous exit exams, they are 7.3 percent more likely to drop out than are their counterparts in states with no exit exams. (On the other hand, Mr. Dee and Mr. Jacob found strongly positive results for native-born Hispanic women, who are significantly more likely to complete high school and to enter college if they live in states with exit exams.)”Our experience with this has been that it exacerbates achievement gaps,” Mr. Dee said in an interview last week. “The more stringent exams seem to have more-serious effects in terms of reducing educational attainment.”

Mr. Jacob added, however, that the jury is still out on whether exit exams have, over all, a positive effect on students’ learning or on their ability to find jobs. (In their study, Mr. Dee and Mr. Jacob found tentative evidence that African-Americans’ post-high-school wages are higher in states with exit exams, and that white workers’ wages are lower. They emphasize, however, that those patterns might apply only to workers whose wages are very close to the statewide average, and more study remains to be done.) “It’s possible that these policies are having beneficial effects that we just haven’t been able to detect,” Mr. Jacob said.

Mr. Dee and Mr. Jacob used data from the “long form” of the 2000 Census, which allowed them to work with an extensive amount of data. They looked at the experiences of nearly three million people who turned 18 between 1980 and 1998. The census data also allowed them to look at relatively recent high-school graduates; certain other recent studies of exit exams have been criticized because they rely on the National Education Longitudinal Study, which looked at students who were scheduled to graduate from high school in 1992 — a long time ago in terms of evaluating policy.

The second new paper, which appears in the summer issue of the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, reports that rates of high-school completion are lower in states with exit exams than in states without such exams. In what may be a consequence, states with exit exams have higher rates of General Educational Development test-taking.

“If exit exams are having an upside — if, on average, kids are learning more or earning higher wages — then they might be worthwhile despite causing dropouts,” said the paper’s lead author, John Robert Warren, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. (Mr. Warren wrote the paper with Krista N. Jenkins, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Rachael B. Kulick, a graduate student in sociology at Minnesota.)

By contrast, Mr. Warren continued, “if the upshot of this policy is only to deny diplomas to some kids, and there’s no real upside for anyone else, then we should realize that this is purely a punitive policy.” Mr. Warren is now studying exit exams’ effects on learning and future employment, and at this point he is skeptical that many strong positive effects exist.

Not everyone agrees. “How bad is it if there’s a 1½-percent reduction in the rate of people who get a regular high-school diploma?” asked John H. Bishop, an associate professor of human resource studies at Cornell University, in an interview on Friday. Mr. Bishop said that most students who fail to pass exit exams have such poor skills that they are not likely to do well in the labor market, with or without a diploma. He argued that the benefits of such exams outweigh the costs borne by students who do not win diplomas.

“What counts is, Do these policies result in more people learning more?” Mr. Bishop said. “In the long run, it’s knowing stuff, not having a high-school diploma, that will help you in the labor market.” In a 2005 study, Mr. Bishop found that, over a period of roughly a decade, states that began to use exit exams raised their eighth-grade mathematics scores significantly, whereas states that cruised along with no exit exams did not see such gains. That finding suggests, Mr. Bishop said, that introducing an exit exam can have far-reaching consequences on a school system’s effectiveness.

History Under Construction in Florida

In the July 2 New York Times, Mary Beth Norton, a history professor at Cornell, points out the Florida legislature recent assertion that the U.S. history taught in the state’s schools “shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed” and “shall be viewed as knowable, teachable and testable” is not only a gross misunderstanding of the nature of history, but part of “a growing tendency in the United States to substitute easily grasped absolutes for messy and ambiguous realities.”

(Norton points to the quest of certain judges to capture the “original intent” of constitutional clauses as another example of this tendency.)

Norton rightly notes that “a stress on facts, not constructions, superficially appears to be ideologically neutral. Yet the choice of which facts to stress, and which to omit, is crucial. In the end, history can never be ‘

She also analyzes why Flordia legislators decided to emphasize the role of Declaration of Independence in the social studies curriculum rather that of the US Constitution:

“In short, a class learning about the drafting of the Constitution would confront the unpleasant reality of founding fathers who either owned slaves themselves or protected the right of others to own them. How much simpler and less troubling to present young people with a rosy picture based on modern understandings of the language of the Declaration of Independence! Under the guise of returning to a factual teaching of history in the state’s schools, Florida’s legislators have mandated an ahistorical construction that paradoxically distorts the very facts they purport to revere.”
July 2, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
History Under Construction in Florida

By MARY BETH NORTON
West Tisbury, Mass.

AS a historian, I love facts. I especially love facts about early America, the subject I have researched, taught and written about for more than 40 years. The Florida Legislature would seem to share my enthusiasm. An education law it recently enacted insists, “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed” and “shall be viewed as knowable, teachable and testable.” The statute places particular importance on the facts of the Declaration of Independence, which was adopted by the Second Continental Congress two days after its vote for independence on July 2, 1776 — 230 years ago today.

Yet the wording of the law befuddles me. Facts mean little or nothing without being interpreted — another word for “constructed.” All historians know that facts never speak for themselves.

Take an example from my own experience. Several years ago I was delighted to uncover proof in the British Public Record Office that an accused male “witch” in 1692 Salem, Mass., had been trading with enemy French and Indians, just as a young accuser had charged. That document confirmed my developing conviction that the Salem witch trials were linked to New England’s hostile relationships with the French and Indians. But to many other scholars who previously had encountered that document, it meant no such thing.

The Florida law, while claiming to eschew constructed interpretations, is itself an obvious construction. The statute specifically defines what the term “American history” includes: “the period of discovery, early colonies, the War for Independence, the Civil War, the expansion of the United States to its present boundaries, the world wars, and the civil rights movement to the present.”

Among the multitude of omissions from that list is any discussion of the religious development of the country or the transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The statute thus constructs an American past that values certain aspects — especially wars and the civil rights movement — more than others.

Nowhere is this construction more obvious than in the law’s emphasis on the Declaration of Independence as a key founding document. “The history of the United States,” it asserts, “shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” Elsewhere, it lists those principles: “national sovereignty, natural law, self-evident truth, equality of all persons, limited government, popular sovereignty and inalienable rights of life, liberty and property.”

Reading that made me wonder if Florida’s legislators had familiarized themselves with the Declaration and the context of its adoption. Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase, after all, was “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — not property.

The Declaration ended, rather than created, a government. It forcefully asserted the right of the people to alter or abolish a polity unresponsive to their needs, a “universal principle” overlooked by Florida’s legislators. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 — who drafted the document on which the nation is actually based — rarely mentioned the Declaration in debate. Indeed, as Pauline Maier, a historian, has pointed out, we owe the current interpretation of the Declaration to 19th-century commentators, especially Abraham Lincoln.

What, then, is to be made of the stress on the Declaration in the new Florida law? An earlier version of the law had emphasized study of the Constitution and the Declaration equally, describing each in general terms. In the new version, only the description of the Constitution retains its non-prescriptive character. The Constitution, after all, is an inconvenient vehicle for setting forth universal principles; it concerned itself with nitty-gritty details about federalism, separation of powers and the like. Further, the Constitution supported the continuation of slavery, thereby undermining the notion that the nation from its earliest days adhered to Florida’s list of universal principles, prominently including “equality of all persons.”

In short, a class learning about the drafting of the Constitution would confront the unpleasant reality of founding fathers who either owned slaves themselves or protected the right of others to own them. How much simpler and less troubling to present young people with a rosy picture based on modern understandings of the language of the Declaration of Independence! Under the guise of returning to a factual teaching of history in the state’s schools, Florida’s legislators have mandated an ahistorical construction that paradoxically distorts the very facts they purport to revere.

The Florida law highlights a growing tendency in the United States to substitute easily grasped absolutes for messy and ambiguous realities. (Another example of the same type of thinking is the quest of certain judges to capture the “original intent” of constitutional clauses.) A stress on facts, not constructions, superficially appears to be ideologically neutral. Yet the choice of which facts to stress, and which to omit, is crucial. In the end, history can never be “factual …not constructed,” as the language of the Florida statute itself demonstrates.

Mary Beth Norton, a professor of American history at Cornell, is the author of “In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Anti-war tunes are getting a hearing

From USA Today via Rock and Rap Confidential:

Anti-war tunes are getting a hearing
Updated 6/30/2006 9:28 AM ET

By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY

Anti-war songs are on the march. Artists of all stripes are rallying for a cause that many regarded as career kryptonite three years ago, when a patriotic fervor favored flag-waving anthems and punished naysayers.

As public frustration with the war mounted, so did the decibel level of music targeting the president and his policies. Last fall, the Rolling Stones dubbed Dubya a hypocrite on controversial Sweet Neo-Con, and System of a Down raged against “pathetic flag-waving ignorant geeks” on its Hypnotize album.

Today, the mood and the marketplace are accommodating Let’s Impeach the President, one of the most vitriolic titles on Neil Young’s Living with War album. It was delivered because the veteran felt that younger stars weren’t speaking up.

In fact, armies of musicians are churning out anti-war songs. Arriving Tuesday is The Diaries of Private Henry Hill by New York band Blow Up Hollywood, which mined a dead soldier’s journals for its searing anti-war concept album. Experimental art-rock trio TV on the Radio bashes Bush in Dry Drunk Emperor. Rising British singer Nerina Pallot dreads news of a soldier’s death in Everybody’s Gone to War.

James Blunt, Ben Harper, Merle Haggard and other brand-name artists are singing out as well. Just hitting airwaves is John Mayer’s Waiting on the World to Change, from his upcoming Continuum album. He ponders, “If we had the power to bring our neighbors home from war/They would have never missed a Christmas, no more ribbons on their door.”
The Pet Shop Boys’ new I’m with Stupid scripts a valentine from Tony Blair to Bush. Responding to Bush’s foreign policy, the Flaming Lips bellow in Haven’t Got a Clue, “Every time you state your case, the more I want to punch your face.” Todd Snider knocks Bush without naming him in wry waltz You Got Away With It (A Tale of Two Fraternity Brothers). And Billy Bragg has been singing Bush War Blues, an anti-war variation on Leadbelly’s Bourgeois Blues, on his Hope Not Hate tour.

More are in the pipeline. On its Game Theory album, due Aug. 29, The Roots examine war on False Media and the government’s domestic spying on New World. The title track of pop choir Polyphonic Spree’s upcoming album, The Fragile Army, attacks Bush.

In a literal throwback to the Vietnam era, P.F. Sloan’s Sailover, due Aug. 22, includes a freshly recorded Eve of Destruction. Sloan wrote the anti-war classic, a No. 1 hit for Barry McGuire in 1965.

Also reactivated from that year is Pete Seeger’s Bring Them Home, Bruce Springsteen’s apparent response to Bush’s refrain, “Bring ’em on.” The Boss is playing the anti-war tune on tour with his Seeger Sessions Band, along with the old Irish ballad Mrs. McGrath, which seethes, “All foreign wars, I do proclaim, live on blood and a mother’s pain.”

The crop ends a thaw imposed by a chill that settled over music after 9/11, when Clear Channel advised its 1,200 radio stations to suspend 150 “questionable” songs, from Black Sabbath’s Suicide Solution to John Lennon’s Imagine. The Dixie Chicks were tarred after Natalie Maines knocked Bush. And Madonna took a pounding for her anti-war American Life video. Country radio blared such patriotic fare as Darryl Worley’s Have You Forgotten? and Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.

Music’s conservative front is lying low as sentiments shift. The last support-the-war tune with significant reach was 2004’s The Bumper of My SUV by country singer Chely Wright (and it’s more of a support-the-troops song).

Though the ’60s generated popular and commercial protest songs by Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Pete Seeger, few modern examples are chart standouts, says Sean Ross, vice president of music and programming at Edison Media Research.

“It’s not that nobody’s stepped up, it’s that nobody made the hit record that’s also the definitive statement,” Ross says.

Since the Iraq invasion, only Green Day has racked up an anti-war blockbuster, selling 5.5 million copies of 2004’s American Idiot and shattering a barrier when Holiday (with its “zieg heil to the president” line) got play on adult contemporary stations. Rock radio embraced Incubus’ Megalomaniac (“You’re no Jesus/You’re not Elvis/ You’re no answer”) in 2004, and top 40 played the Black Eyed Peas’ Where Is the Love (“A war is goin’ on but the reason’s undercover”) in 2003. Pearl Jam saw its stinging Bushleaguer go ignored four years ago only to find current World Wide Suicide reach No. 1 on the modern-rock chart.

An uptick in lefty tunes doesn’t mean the country is on the brink of peace. Political songs preach to the converted, says rocker-turned-talker Johnny Wendell, a former punk musician and now a weekend host on progressive talk station KTLK-AM 1150 in Los Angeles.

“They’re a barometer of how people feel,” he says.

And when Bush ordered the Iraq invasion, the prevailing feeling among rockers was futility, he says. Artists held back “not just because it was a bad career move, but because it wouldn’t get any attention to buck the tide. The tide turned when it was obvious the mission wasn’t accomplished, reasons proffered for war were proven false and casualties started mounting. It isn’t that it became safe (to speak out), but the general mood in the country changed.”

Even if anti-war sentiment swells, Wendell doubts that one song will captivate the masses.

“One enormous difference between the ’60s and now is how the market is split into a million pieces,” he says. “I don’t think a single piece of protest music can galvanize the public the way Like a Rolling Stone did.”

And while he’s glad to hear agitprop noise, punkers and rappers don’t get points for taking risks.

“Neil Young isn’t breaking ground,” he says. “You expect it from Propagandhi. But the Dixie Chicks? That’s a revolution. Natalie Maines took an anti-war stance in the run-up to this atrocity, and it cost her big time.”

Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament believes post-9/11’s air of McCarthyism stifled rock’s rebellious nature.

“The country was going to hell and nobody was saying anything,” Ament says. “There is some solidarity out there now.”

Justin Sane of Anti-Flag says his snarling anti-war invective on For Blood and Empire is “speaking truth to power” and results from a strong belief in democracy, the Constitution and the duty to identify and confront injustice.

Airplay for Anti-Flag’s The Press Corpse, a modern-rock hit, “would have surprised me two years ago,” Sane says, “but as more body bags come home and as people decide Bush is not telling the truth, I’m not surprised. People who supported the invasion three years ago are feeling frustrated.”

Anti-Flag felt pressure to retreat after 9/11, when “there was a litany of insults, people told us to shut up, change our name,” Sane says, “Fear has been the best ally of this regime. So very few artists put their necks on the line after the right-wing talk-show network made an example of the Dixie Chicks. I feel honored to be part of a group that was unwilling to be bullied.”

The band, which registered 10,000 voters during the 2004 Warped tour, pushes its message on and off stage. Its recently launched Military Free Zone helps high school students opt out of government-imposed recruitment drives permitted under the No Child Left Behind Act.

What does this have to do with music? Everything, Sane says.

“I got involved in activism after listening to bands like The Clash,” he says. “Kids at our shows say they never cared about issues until they heard our band. Music can be an effective tool in the political arena.”

Political music helped shape his world view, and Sane is certain the band’s songs have swayed fans, including soldiers. Iraq is a high priority, largely because he feels impressionable youth are victimized.

“It’s simple logic for me,” he says. “If this war was not about WMD, then what was it about? Follow the money and you’ll see war profiteering like never before. I can’t see young kids fighting for the benefit of a few very powerful individuals.”

Longtime musician/activist Michael Franti says he also felt the sea change of 9/11, “when the whole nation had the wind knocked out of it, and a few in the government used this fear and pain to give us an ultimatum: ‘You’re either with us or with the terrorists. I thought, ‘Can’t there be somewhere in between those vast polar opposites before we go marching off to war?’ Those who tried to say that were pounded down like a nail.”

The anxiety plaguing artists began abating “after Katrina,” Franti says. “It lifted the wool off of the wolf. People said, ‘Wait, why are they literally starving in New Orleans when all the helicopters and resources are in Iraq?’ I don’t think it’s the responsibility of any artist to make political art. The responsibility is to make great art, and to find some truth. If you look at the truth today, you can’t be quiet.”

Two years ago, Franti went to Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories with a guitar and a video camera, a trip captured in a documentary, I Know I’m Not Alone, and Yell Fire!, an album of politically charged reggae, rock, rap and soul, both due July 25.

The music is pointedly anti-war “but also lets people know they’re not alone,” Franti says. “When I went to Iraq, I thought I’d come back with a whole notebook of stop-the-war protest songs, but what I found from every person I met over there was that they wanted to hear songs that got them dancing or tender songs about a person they loved.”

Franti doesn’t expect his songs to bring home the troops.

“I don’t know if music can change the world overnight,” he says, “but I know it can help us make it through a difficult night, and sometimes that’s what we need to keep up the tenacity to make large shifts happen.”

Any good anti-war song has to be a good song first, says Paul Simon, whose mournful Wartime Prayers steers clear of headlines.

“The songs that last have to do with some universal theme,” he says. “Those are always compassion, love, loss, sorrow, deep things that occur in the course of a lifetime. Really topical songs have their moment in time in proximity to the event, but after a while, as the event recedes, so do those songs.”

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British Columbia: Teachers settle at last minute for 16% over 5 years

Vancouver Sun: Teachers settle at last minute for 16% over 5 years

Contract agreement just before midnight deadline means BCTF members will get $4,000-a-person signing bonus from province

The B.C. Teachers’ Federation has signed a tentative contract giving its members a 16-per-cent salary hike over five years and holding out promise of labour peace this fall in public schools.

The deal also includes an enhanced signing bonus of $4,000 a teacher.

“It’s not everything we wanted for our members, but it’s a significant step,” said BCTF president Jinny Sims.

Sims said she would have preferred a shorter deal, but added, “Sometimes you have to make compromises.”

The deal was announced late Friday night, just hours before the government’s offer of a signing bonus was due to expire.

The teachers, like other public sector union workers, were eligible for $3,700 bonus if they inked a new contract before their old deal expired at midnight, although teachers negotiated a larger bonus.

Sims said she would have liked to address teacher workload and class size and composition in a more significant way, but suggested the union will continue working for those improvements.

“There are many ways to effect change besides the negotiating table,” she said.

Teachers will vote in September throughout the province to ratify the tentative agreement. The BCTF executive will recommend they accept it.

Hugh Finlayson, chief executive officer of the B.C. Public School Employers’ Association, said he thinks it is a good agreement for teachers and taxpayers.

“I think this is a very, very positive move for public education,” he said. “There was a lot of goodwill expressed on both sides, and we have something that we be used to build a strong and effective relationship between the BCTF and ourselves.”

Before Friday’s deal, the union had been asking for a 19-per-cent wage hike over three years while the employer had countered with 10 per cent over four years.

Teachers had given their union a strike mandate, and job action had been expected in September. Last fall, the BCTF shut down schools for 10 days in an illegal strike.

The two sides hadn’t negotiated an agreement since provincial bargaining was introduced for the education sector more than a dozen years ago.

Earlier Friday, Sims played down the importance of the signing bonus, although it was obviously a significant factor in the last-minute push to reach a deal before the union’s contract expired.

“We really would like to get a settlement done by tonight because I think the students, the parents, the teachers — everybody — wants to have a sense of stability as they go into the fall,” she said outside negotiations at a downtown Vancouver hotel.

The main sticking point in the dispute was wages. The employers’ association, the bargaining agent for school boards, had said the BCTF proposal for a 19-per-cent salary increase and improved benefits would increase education costs by 38 per cent — or $2 billion — over three years. The union disputed that calculation but did not provide its own figures.

Before the settlement with teachers, B.C. Finance Minister Carole Taylor said a total of 136 agreements had been reached with public sector unions, covering 261,798 employees. The contracts, which extend to 2010, include settlements with support staff in all 69 school districts.