E Wayne Ross – Page 128 – Critical Theories in Education

“I don’t think y’all can contest any of the sentences”

Federal appeals court judges in Georgia gave a hostile reception Thursday to a lower court decision that ordered Cobb County to scrape off evolution disclaimer stickers from almost 35,000 science textbooks.

Judge Ed Carnes, who dominated the questioning, said the three-sentence disclaimer seemed to him to be “literally accurate.”

Carnes told the lawyer representing parents who filed suit against the stickers that since the US Supreme Court has previously referred to evolution as a theory that “I don’t think y’all can contest any of the sentences.”

Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper found that the stickers, which say evolution is a “theory, not a fact,” improperly endorsed religion.

In a 44-page decision released in January, Cooper agreed. He acknowledged that the disclaimers had a secular purpose, and avoided religious reference. But, he continued, “the sticker communicates to those who oppose evolution for religious reasons that they are favored members of the political community, while the sticker sends a message to those who believe in evolution that they are political outsiders.”

The Cobb school board adopted the 33-word stickers on March 28, 2002, amid a storm of protest from parents who disagreed with a new science curriculum that allowed evolution instruction. Since 1995, the board had curtailed the teaching of evolution, leading some teachers to rip sections on evolution from science textbooks.

The disclaimers were placed inside the front pages of Cobb science textbooks in the fall of 2002. The stickers read: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

A recent Washington Post profile of Cobb County traced its evolution from an ultra-conservative backwater into a 650,000 Metro Atlanta suburb where there people actually raise questions about governments that require warning stickers on science textbooks that contain science and laws requiring citizens to own a gun.

Of course, this is the county infamous as a key location in the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and where Leo Frank was lynched in 1915; it was also ground zero for the Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” of 1994. Cobb is certainly one of the most “liberal unfriendly” places in the USA, as I know from teaching high school in next door Fulton County.

Cobb County schools have not yet required that U.S. history textbooks carry a disclaimer sticker that reads: “This textbook contains material on democracy. Democracy is used as synonym for capitalism in this book and the material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

Bush’s propaganda war on Americans and Iraqis

Here are three good articles on Bush Administration’s propaganda war aimed at Americans and Iraqis:

Meet John Rendon, Bush’s general in the propaganda war, courtesy of Rolling Stone: The Man Who Sold the War

And

The New York Times (Sunday, December 11) ran a long story on Bush administration’s propaganda war in Iraq, which is run by the military. The story by Jeff Gerth, describes how a military media center in Fayetteville, NC prepares a daily mix of music and pro-US news for newspapers and magazines in Iraq. The Fourth Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg supplies “good news” articles written by US soldiers, which the Lincoln Group, a Pentagon contractor, then pays Iraqi media outlets to run!

And

Also in Sunday’s paper Frank Rich continues to attack the Bush administation’s homefront propapanda war, arguing that “since we don’t get honest information from this White House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers’ fictions to discern what’s really happening.”

Keep reading for Rich’s full column
It Takes a Potemkin Village

By FRANK RICH

12/11/05 “New York Times” — — WHEN a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village is all. Since we don’t get honest information from this White House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers’ fictions to discern what’s really happening. What we’re seeing now is the wheels coming off: As the administration’s stagecraft becomes more baroque, its credibility tanks further both at home and abroad. The propaganda techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they increasingly come off as pure Ali G.

The latest desperate shifts in White House showmanship say at least as much about our progress (or lack of same) in Iraq over the past 32 months as reports from the ground. When President Bush announced the end of “major combat operations” in May 2003, his Imagineers felt the need for only a single elegant banner declaring “Mission Accomplished.” Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest White House bumper sticker, “Plan for Victory,” multiplied by Orwellian mitosis over nearly every square inch of the rather “Queer Eye” stage set from which Mr. Bush delivered his oration at the Naval Academy.

And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics – and despite the repetition of the word “victory” 15 times in the speech itself – Americans believed “Plan for Victory” far less than they once did “Mission Accomplished.” The first New York Times-CBS News Poll since the Naval Academy pep talk, released last Thursday, found that only 25 percent of Americans say the president has “a clear plan for victory in Iraq.” Tom Cruise and evolution still have larger constituencies in America than that.

Mr. Bush’s “Plan for Victory” speech was, of course, the usual unadulterated nonsense. Its overarching theme – “We will never accept anything less than complete victory” – was being contradicted even as he spoke by rampant reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop withdrawals between next week’s Iraqi elections and the more important (for endangered Republicans) American Election Day of 2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating the readiness of Iraqi troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar “was primarily led by Iraqi security forces” – a fairy tale immediately unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle’s front lines, as “completely wrong.” No less an authority than the office of Iraq’s prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a 59-page report documenting his own military’s inadequate leadership, equipment and training.

But this variety of Bush balderdash is such old news that everyone except that ga-ga 25 percent instantaneously tunes it out. We routinely assume that the subtext (i.e., the omissions and deliberate factual errors) of his speeches and scripted town meetings will be more revealing than the texts themselves. What raised the “Plan for Victory” show to new heights of disinformation was the subsequent revelation that the administration’s main stated motive for the address – the release of a 35-page document laying out a “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” – was as much a theatrical prop as the stunt turkey the president posed with during his one furtive visit to Baghdad two Thanksgivings ago.

As breathlessly heralded by Scott McClellan, this glossy brochure was “an unclassified version” of the strategy in place since the war’s inception in “early 2003.” But Scott Shane of The New York Times told another story. Through a few keystrokes, the electronic version of the document at whitehouse.gov could be manipulated to reveal text “usually hidden from public view.” What turned up was the name of the document’s originating author: Peter Feaver, a Duke political scientist who started advising the National Security Council only this June. Dr. Feaver is an expert on public opinion about war, not war itself. Thus we now know that what Mr. McClellan billed as a 2003 strategy for military victory is in fact a P.R. strategy in place for no more than six months. That solves the mystery of why Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey of the Army, who is in charge of training Iraqi troops, told reporters that he had never seen this “National Strategy” before its public release last month.

In a perfect storm of revelations, the “Plan for Victory” speech fell on the same day that The Los Angeles Times exposed new doings on another front in the White House propaganda war. An obscure Defense Department contractor, the Lincoln Group, was caught paying off Iraqi journalists to run upbeat news articles secretly written by American Army personnel and translated into Arabic (at a time when American troops in harm’s way are desperate for Arabic translators of their own). One of the papers running the fake news is Al Mutamar, the Baghdad daily run by associates of Ahmad Chalabi. So now we know that at least one P.R. plan, if not a plan for victory, has been consistent since early 2003. As Mr. Chalabi helped feed spurious accounts of Saddam’s W.M.D. to American newspapers to gin up the war, so his minions now help disseminate happy talk to his own country’s press to further the illusion that the war is being won.

The Lincoln Group’s articles (e.g., “The Sands Are Blowing Toward a Democratic Iraq”) are not without their laughs – for us, if not for the Iraqis, whose intelligence is insulted and whose democratic aspirations are betrayed by them. But the texts are no more revealing than those of Mr. Bush’s speeches. Look instead at the cover-up that has followed the Los Angeles Times revelations. The administration and its frontmen at once started stonewalling from a single script. Mr. McClellan, Pentagon spokesmen, Senator John Warner and Donald Rumsfeld all give the identical answer to the many press queries. We don’t have the facts, they say, even as they maintain that the Lincoln Group articles themselves are factual.

The Pentagon earmarks more than $100 million in taxpayers’ money for various Lincoln Group operations, and it can’t get any facts? Though the 30-year-old prime mover in the shadowy outfit, one Christian Bailey, fled from Andrea Mitchell of NBC News when she pursued him on camera in Washington, certain facts are proving not at all elusive.

Ms. Mitchell and other reporters have learned that Mr. Bailey has had at least four companies since 2002, most of them interlocking, short-lived and under phantom names. Government Executive magazine also discovered that Mr. Bailey “was a founder and active participant in Lead21,” a Republican “fund-raising and networking operation” – which has since scrubbed his name from its Web site – and that he and a partner in his ventures once listed a business address identical to their Washington residence. This curious tale, with its trail of cash payoffs, trading in commercial Iraqi real estate and murky bidding procedures for lucrative U.S. government contracts, could have been lifted from “Syriana” or “Glengarry Glen Ross.” While Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. McClellan valiantly continue their search for “the facts,” what we know so far can safely be filed under the general heading of “Lay, DeLay and Abramoff.”

The more we learn about such sleaze in the propaganda war, the more we see it’s failing for the same reason as the real war: incompetence. Much as the disastrous Bremer regime botched the occupation of Iraq with bad decisions made by its array of administration cronies and relatives (among them Ari Fleischer’s brother), so the White House doesn’t exactly get the biggest bang for the bucks it shells out to cronies for fake news.

Until he was unmasked as an administration shill, Armstrong Williams was less known for journalism than for striking a deal to dismiss a messy sexual-harassment suit against him in 1999. When an Army commander had troops sign 500 identical good-news form letters to local newspapers throughout America in 2003, the fraud was so transparent it was almost instantly debunked. The fictional scenarios concocted for Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman also unraveled quickly, as did last weekend’s Pentagon account of 10 marines killed outside Falluja on a “routine foot patrol.” As the NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski told Don Imus last week, he received calls within hours from the fallen’s loved ones about how the marines had been slaughtered after being recklessly sent to an unprotected site for a promotion ceremony.

Though the White House doesn’t know that its jig is up, everyone else does. Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it was under Brownie three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners confirm that homeland security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice’s daily clarifications of her clarifications about American torture policies are contradicted by new reports of horrors before her latest circumlocutions leave her mouth. And the president’s latest Iraq speeches – most recently about the “success” stories of Najaf and Mosul – still don’t stand up to the most rudimentary fact checking.

This is why the most revealing poll number in the Times/CBS survey released last week was Mr. Bush’s approval rating for the one area where things are going relatively well, the economy: 38 percent, only 2 points higher than his rating on Iraq. It’s a measure of the national cynicism bequeathed by the Bush culture that seeing anything, even falling prices at the pump, is no longer believing.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Overcoming Obstacles to Progress

The Washington Post sought an analysis of the ninth-grade hurdle to student progress from Walter Haney, professor at the Lynch School of Education and director of the Ford Foundation-funded Education Pipeline project in the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Public Policy at Boston College:

Overcoming Obstacles to Progress:

Thirty years ago, only about 4 percent of students had to repeat ninth grade. Now, it is about 12 percent. In such states as Florida, South Carolina and New York, the ninth-grade hurdle, or bulge, is even worse, with more than 20 percent more students enrolled in ninth grade than were in eighth grade the previous year.

What is causing the grade 9 hurdle, what are its consequences, and what can be done?Historically the ninth-grade bulge has been associated with three waves of education reform. First, the so-called minimum-competency testing movement in the late 1970s and then the push for more academic requirements in the late 1980s. . . . A greater increase occurred in the 1990s with the rise of the so-called “standards-based reform” and “high stakes-testing” movements. The grade 9 hurdle is also associated with a structural change in how students typically reach high school. The movement from junior high schools to middle schools shifted a grade 7 bulge to grade 9, which is now the critical choke point in the education pipeline.

The consequences have been severe. A majority of students (as high as 80 percent) who are ordered to repeat grade 9 will not stay in school through graduation. This has led to a falling graduation rate in the last decade or so. According to a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics, the graduation rate nationally for the classes of 2002 and 2003 was less than 75 percent, and even lower in such states as South Carolina, Georgia, New York and Mississippi, where it hovered at about 60 percent.

Even more troubling than such appallingly low graduation rates – far lower than the graduation rate of 90% set out as a national education goal in 1994 – is this: Under the pressure of high stakes testing to raise grade 10 test averages, high school administrators in some states (such as New York, Alabama and Texas), have actually been pushing at-risk students out of school.

What can be done? Making high schools smaller and less impersonal and connecting schoolwork with students’ lives outside of school is one approach. Probably more important would be changes in policies — specifically providing schools with tangible incentives for keeping children in school and abandoning high-stakes testing used to make important decisions about students and schools based on test results in isolation. After all, test results can never cover all the broad goals of public education — academic, social and vocational.

Rates of keeping kids in school represent a more powerful measure for the simple reason that they reflect a host of factors affecting student progress, including performance in courses, attendance and citizenship, together with scores on standardized tests.

Rouge Forum Update (December 12, 2005)

From Rich Gibson:

We continue to have so many visitors to our RougeForum.org web site that the server is shutting it down. Apologies to those visitors who have seen delays. The No Blood For Oil page is updated, however, and worth reviewing. This is one of the more widely circulated articles.

This week, though, we focus on the recent book by Robert Fisk, who is becoming to the wars in the Middle East what Wilfred Burchette was to the wars on Vietnam, one of the few sources of courage and truth. His book is The Great War for Civilization, The Conquest of the Middle East.

Much of Fisk’s work is posted on the Rouge Forum web site, and he has urged readers to use the site as a reference page.

A recent interview with Fisk by the journalist, Justin Podur, is here

During this week, a Yale professor, David Graeber, an extraordinarily well-credentialed anarchist was forced to resign, or chose to leave. We will have more on the continuing repression in the k12 and university worlds next week.

File-share plaintiff plans own defense against record industry shakedown

From The Journal News (Westchester County, NY): File-share plaintiff plans own defense

The soccer mom who has become the face of the recording industry’s lawsuits against alleged online music pirates has decided to act as her own lawyer after racking up more than $20,000 in legal fees in her ongoing fight with several record companies.

Patricia Santangelo, the 42-year-old former Yorktown resident who now lives in Wappingers Falls, was sued in February by record companies that accused her of illegally trading copyrighted songs online. The recording industry has filed more than 16,000 lawsuits against individual Internet users since launching the federal lawsuit campaign in September 2003.

Record companies charge that the trading of copyrighted songs online through such computer programs as Kazaa and Grokster is a threat to the industry’s survival. Critics have decried the lawsuit campaign as a heavy-handed bullying effort by deep-pocketed multinational corporations against ordinary people.

Santangelo had hired a New York City law firm to defend her in the case in U.S. District Court in White Plains. Santangelo said she has never traded songs online and should not be held accountable if anyone else used her computer to do so. The divorced mother of five children, ranging in age from 7 to 19, works as a property manager for a real estate company.

She said she was in church on the Easter Sunday morning in 2004 when the lawsuit charges that songs were illegally traded through her Internet account. She could have settled the lawsuit for about $7,500 several months ago but said that she decided against that because “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

She recently lost a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. After that ruling by U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon, Santangelo said, she looked at her mounting legal bills, now above $22,000, and was left with two options: settle the case or continue on as her own attorney.

“I thought about settling for a split second,” she said. “But I can’t. I can’t let it go. I have to see this through.”

More than 3,000 of the lawsuits have been settled with individual defendants agreeing to pay about $5,000 each to close the cases.

The prohibitive cost of fighting the suits makes settling an attractive option for most people, leaving the legality of the lawsuits unchallenged, said Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group that opposes the lawsuits.

“The recording industry has basically been able to run this operation like a shakedown,” he said.

A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, the umbrella group that represents the record companies, said the companies are within their rights to protect their business.

“We’re working to help protect the future of music, including the ability of record labels to invest in the bands of tomorrow,” Jonathan Lamy said in an e-mail. “Downloading songs without permission is just as illegal as shoplifting, and it is every bit as wrong.”

Santangelo and the record companies are due back in court Dec. 22. That will be her first taste of lawyering. She said she was nervous about being her own attorney while untrained in the law.

“I think about it often. It’s a little scary,” Santangelo said. “But I can’t give in, no.”

Western Canada Labor Battles Show Need for Solidarity

MR Zine: Western Canada Labor Battles Show Need for Solidarity

Roger Annis’s article for MR Zine describes what might be signs of a working-class social movement in Western Canada. Annis describes recent strikes—including B. C. teachers, hospital workers, telecommunications workers and meatpackers—and outlines issues that must be confronted if broader labor solidarity is to be achieved.