E Wayne Ross – Page 73 – Critical Theories in Education

Folksinger and storyteller Utah Phillips, a “national treasure” if there

Folksinger and storyteller Utah Phillips, a “national treasure” if there
ever was one, died last Friday, May 23.

His performances featured the songs, jokes and lore of hobos, tramps,
cowboys, migrant workers and Wobblies. Although he made a number of fine
recordings, he was most truly in his element in live performances, where he
knew how to draw the audience into a song or story and would leave us
cracking up with laughter at some outrageous punch line that would
unexpectedly pop up in the middle of his apparently rambling reminiscences.

Here is his famous “Moose Turd Pie” story —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSlPJOfnJZk

A few more video clips can be found here, along with various other
performers doing some of his songs —
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22utah+phillips%22

For more recordings and links, see http://www.utahphillips.org/
The obituary below is drawn from that site.

* * *

“Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73”
Nevada City, California:

Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed
extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years,
died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California, a small
town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years
with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the
son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early
life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips
demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working
people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World,
popularly known as “the Wobblies,” an organizational artifact of early
twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth
in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to
popularize it.

Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he
would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by
the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the
United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country.
His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning
combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips
was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got
off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a
homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the
Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.

Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his
“elders” with having provided a philosophical framework around which he
later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences
could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were
often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.

“He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the
ears,” said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.
In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from
influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers
Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas
Tyler.

A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips
the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy
of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and
carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious reader in a
surprising variety of fields.

Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy’s Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran
for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The
race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some
Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job with the
State of Utah, a process he described as “blacklisting.”

Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed
into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena,
operated by Lena Spencer.

“It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there. She fed
everybody,” said John “Che” Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.
Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in
what he referred to as “the Trade,” developing an audience of hundreds of
thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United
States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie
Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.

“He was like an alchemist,” said Sorrels, “He took the stories of working
people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by
writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language
so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still
owned them. He didn’t believe in stealing culture from the people it was
about.”

A single from Phillips’s first record, “Moose Turd Pie,” a rollicking story
about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973. From
then on, Phillips had work on the road. His extensive writing and recording
career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy
nomination. Phillips’s songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris,
Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a
Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.

Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage
fright before performances. He didn’t want to lose it, he said; it kept him
improving.

Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004,
and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally
syndicated folk-music radio show, “Loafer’s Glory,” produced at KVMR-FM,
and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where
down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at
the edge of town. Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25
to 30 guests a night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his
mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.

Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is
survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City;
son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington,
D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and
daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers
David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and
Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a
grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips
and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.

The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223,
Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144
www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org

Looks like I’ll be going with Nader/LaRouche/Sharpton/Ventura/Edwards after all

nightmare_article_large_redo.article_large.jpg
The Onion News Network: Obama, Clinton, McCain Join Forces To Form Nightmare Ticket

Stackley Cup Playoffs Underway

NEW YORK—The 2008 Stackley Cup Playoffs, a set of odd-number-of-games series that will determine the champion of the National Huckie League, are well underway, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman confirmed Monday. At press time,…

.onion_embed {background: rgb(256, 256, 256) !important;border: 4px solid rgb(65, 160, 65);border-width: 4px 0 1px 0;margin: 10px 30px !important;padding: 5px;overflow: hidden !important;zoom: 1;}.onion_embed img {border: 0 !important;}.onion_embed a {display: inline;}.onion_embed a.img {float: left !important;margin: 0 5px 0 0 !important;width: 66px;display: block;overflow: hidden !important;}.onion_embed a.img img {border: 1px solid #222 !important;;width: 64px;;padding: 0 !important;;}.onion_embed h2 {line-height: 2px;;clear: none;;margin: 0 !important;padding: 0 !important;}.onion_embed h3 {line-height: 16px;font: bold 16px arial, sans-serif !important;margin: 3px 0 0 0 !important;padding: 0 !important;}.onion_embed h3 a {line-height: 16px !important;;color: rgb(0, 51, 102) !important;font: bold 16px arial, sans-serif !important;text-decoration: none !important;display: inline !important;;float: none !important;;text-transform: capitalize !important;}.onion_embed h3 a:hover {text-decoration: underline !important;color: rgb(204, 51, 51) !important;}.onion_embed p {color: #000 !important;;font: normal 11px/ 11px arial, sans-serif !important;;margin: 2px 0 0 0 !important;;padding: 0 !important;}.onion_embed a {display: inline !important;;float: none !important;}

Tests ‘damaging’ to school system

BBC: Tests ‘damaging’ to school system

Tests ‘damaging’ to school system

The national testing system in English schools is being misused to the detriment of children’s education, says a report from a committee of MPs.

The Commons schools, children and families committee says teachers spend too much time “teaching to the test”.

“The inappropriate use of national testing could lead to damaging consequences,” warns the report.

Schools Minister Jim Knight welcomed MPs’ recognition that the “principle of national testing is sound”.

With hundreds of thousands of 11-year-olds in England taking “Sats” tests this week, the select committee report warns that the tests are being used in a way that does not benefit children or the schools system.

New type of test

“In an effort to drive up national standards, too much emphasis has been placed on a single set of tests and this has been to the detriment of some aspects of the curriculum and some students,” says committee chairman Barry Sheerman.

While supporting the idea of national tests, the report from MPs says that an “over-emphasis” on their results can distort how children are taught and “children’s access to a balanced education is being compromised”.

It also criticises the single-level tests which are being piloted as a possible alternative.

These tests, taken when teachers think pupils are ready to go up a level, are likely to perpetuate the drawbacks of the Sats, such as narrowing the curriculum, suggests the report.

And it warns that the single-level tests’ “one-way ratchet” system will lead to an “artificial” improvement in results, in which pupils will be “certified to have achieved a level of knowledge and understanding which they do not in truth possess”.

The report calls for a reform of the school performance tables, which for primary schools are based on the national test results.

It suggests that accountability should be based on a wider range of measures, including Ofsted reports.

Schools Minister Jim Knight defended the use of national tests as part of the process of assessing progress for pupils, schools and the education system.

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. “Along with teachers’ own judgements and Ofsted reports, tests are a tool which help pupils and their parents to understand how well they are doing, help parents and teachers to understand how well their school is doing, and help the public to scrutinise the performance of the schools system.

“That’s why they are here to stay. Parents don’t want to go back to a world where the achievements of schools are hidden from them.”

Mr Knight was asked on the Today programme on BBC Radio Four whether pupils were being put under too much stress at too early an age.

“If you don’t have the tests at 11 and 14 then there’s a danger that children then hit the very high stakes, high stress of GCSEs across the whole curriculum – not just English, maths and science – and the preparation that they get through sitting these Sats at 11 and 14 is in that respect good for them even though it might be a slight level of stress.”

‘Disapproval’

But Christine Blower, acting general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said the report identified the “poisonous effects of testing”.

“The government now stands isolated on the future of national curriculum testing. It has steadfastly resisted the mounting evidence of the damage caused by the tests to the curriculum and children’s learning,” said Ms Blower.

Chris Keates of the NASUWT teachers’ union said: “It is pleasing to note that some aspects of the report confirm what the NASUWT has been saying for years, that the root of the problem is not the system of national testing but the performance league tables and other aspects of the not-fit-for-purpose accountability regime into which the test results are fed.”

John Dunford, leader of the ASCL head teachers’ union, said that the government should now “finally take seriously this groundswell of disapproval of the current testing regime”.

“The original purpose of examinations, to assess students’ progress, has become confused with school accountability and the performance management of teachers,” said Dr Dunford.

The heads’ union calls for random sampling to monitor standards, rather than targets based on national tests.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/education/7396623.stm

Published: 2008/05/13 08:19:46 GMT

High-School Exit Tests Do Not Improve Academic Achievement, Study Finds

Here’s the bottom-line from these studies: the tests “produce adverse outcomes for educational attainment for a substantial minority of students while providing no estimable labor market or achievement benefits for others.”

The Chronicle: State High-School Exit Tests Do Not Improve Academic Achievement, Study Finds

A new study has found that state requirements that students pass exit tests to graduate from high school appear to do nothing to improve achievement on federal reading and mathematics tests.

The study, the results of which have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Educational Policy, compared the reading and math scores of children in states with exit examinations to the scores of children elsewhere in the United States and concluded that there was no evidence that requiring passage of such tests improved academic achievement in those subject areas.Even the most rigorous versions of the exit tests failed to produce significant improvements in the reading and math performance, according to the report on the study’s findings written by Eric Grodsky, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis, with Demetra Kalogrides, a graduate student in sociology at that campus, and John Robert Warren, an associate professor of sociology and a director of undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

The researchers derived their conclusions from an analysis of the scores of 13- and 17-year-olds on a version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress used to measure long-term trends in student achievement. In addition to looking at average scores on the federal tests, they examined trends at various score thresholds to make sure the state exit tests were not, for example, resulting in fewer students doing very poorly or very well on the national assessment.

Their report is one of a series in which Mr. Grodsky and Mr. Warren have questioned the benefits of the high-school exit examinations that have been adopted by 23 states, accounting for about two-thirds of the nation’s high-school seniors.

In study results published in January in the journal Sociology of Education, the two researchers and Jennifer C. Lee, an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University at Bloomington, found that people who earned their diplomas in states with high-school exit tests did not earn higher incomes than people who earned their diplomas elsewhere, and were no more likely to complete college or be employed. The analysis was weighted to exclude the effects of class, race, state education spending, and other potentially confounding variables.

Taking that study into account, along with other research finding that such tests result in declines in high-school graduation rates, the latest report takes the bottom-line view that the tests “produce adverse outcomes for educational attainment for a substantial minority of students while providing no estimable labor market or achievement benefits for others.”

The report says, “The cumulative evidence on these policies is clear: They should either be substantially revised to provide the benefits supporters claim they provide, or they should be abandoned.”

In a videotaped interview distributed on Monday along with his latest studies’ findings, Mr. Warren says the failure of the tests to produce marked increases in learning may be due the states’ decisions to make the tests easier in response to the political resistance triggered by high failure rates.

“It is a double-edge sword,” Mr. Warren says. “If you raise the standards, you risk lots and lots of kids not getting diplomas. If you don’t raise the standards, you risk kids not learning much more.”

Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a Washington-based group that promotes high academic achievement, said in an interview on Monday that high-school exit exams have never really been widely regarded as “good vehicles to promote high achievement or college-ready achievement.”

Barry Bonds the Leon Trotsky of Baseball?

David Zirin, the best sportwriter in the USA, on the Barry Bonds boycott:
Boss’s Boycott: The Bonds Vanishes
By Dave Zirin

The Commissar Vanishes is a coffee table book for only the dourest of coffee tables. The hard-covered volume is a photographic compilation of the way that Josef Stalin systematically erased his chief political opponents, Leon Trotsky and his followers, from the history of the Russian Revolution.

Page after glossy page plainly displays the desecration of memory at the service of dictatorship. It shows before-and-after photos of people either airbrushed to invisibility or crudely vandalized, their faces blacked out with an ugly scribble.

Meet Barry Bonds, the Leon Trotsky of Major League Baseball. In 2007 Bonds broke the most hallowed record in sports, passing Henry Aaron’s record for home runs. When he wasn’t injured, this maestro of the batter’s box packed San Francisco’s ballpark, despite a team that stank like cottage cheese left on a radiator. At season’s end, the Giants refused to re-sign him, with owner Peter Magowan saying, “We’re going in a new direction; that would not be going in a new direction. The time has come to turn the page.” That is surely his right, but the page hasn’t just been turned, it’s been raggedly erased.

All traces of Bonds, the greatest player in baseball history, have vanished from the Bay. The left-field wall no longer carries an image of Bonds chasing Hank Aaron for the crown. There is no marker of where Bonds hit home run number 756. There is no reminder that Bonds ever even wore a Giants uniform.

But it’s not just Magowan trying to “disappear” Barry Bonds. He has been blackballed in a blatant and illegal act of Major League collusion, a bosses’ boycott. Yes, Bonds’ fielding has become painful to watch in recent years, as the seven time gold glover limped around the outfield on knees grinding together without cartilage. But despite the agony of movement most of us take for granted, Bonds still hit 28 home runs in 340 at bats, led the NL in walks, and had an on base percentage of .480. Since 1950, only Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Norm Cash, and Bonds himself have recorded higher OBP’s. [Cash’s epic season was an anomaly in an otherwise middling career. That a player could have a brilliant year out of nowhere, used to be one of the charms of baseball. Today they would be accused of sprinkling steroids on their corn flakes.]

Maybe Bonds can no longer roam the outfield, but there are at least a dozen AL teams that could use a designated hitter with a .480 OBP, not to mention a player whose every game would sell tickets and every at-bat would provoke baited breaths and empty bathrooms.

In this case of blackballing so obvious it would shame a Dartmouth frat house, one would think the media would be raising hell. But they have largely been yipping collusion lackeys. Bill Simmons, ESPN.com’s Sports Guy, wrote,

“Opening Day came and went without Bonds for the first time in 22 years, and nobody seemed to notice. I didn’t think about him for more than two seconds all spring. Did anyone? Can you remember being a part of a single “I wonder where Bonds is going to end up?” conversation? Did you refresh ESPN.com incessantly in hopes of a Bonds update?…Of course not. No one cared. The best hitter since Ted Williams is gone and forgotten. We wanted him to go away, and he did.”

There is one problem. Bonds doesn’t want to go gently into that good night and is pushing his union to fight back. He has asked the Players Association to file collusion charges on his behalf and the union has served Commissioner Bud Selig with papers. [There is a certain irony here as Bonds was hardly Big Bill Haywood during his career. In 2003, he became the first player in thirty years to not sign the Player’s Association’s group licensing agreement.]

The Player’s Association’s efforts on Bonds behalf have also met with high profile derision. Newsweek’s Mark Starr wrote “The union approaches new heights of absurdity when it bothers to investigate whether collusion has ended the career of baseball’s all-time home run king, Barry Bonds, who can’t attract an offer to play anywhere this 2008 season. What the union sees as possible collusion, once an honored practice among ownership, I see as a rare display of common sense.”

Bonds, according to Starr, is “widely regarded as a cancer in the clubhouse.”

This is moralistic spew. The idea that baseball owners would ruin their own team’s chances because they have collectively agreed to “turn the page” is a violation of Bonds’ rights and the unwritten social contract they have with fans. And when one considers the absence of saints on Major League Baseball teams, even on the God Squad in Colorado, it is all the more drenched in hypocrisy.

Mike Gimbel, who is a former adviser on player trades and acquisitions to the GM’s of the Boston Red Sox and the Montreal Expos, wrote it well.

“Bonds has been accused of not telling the truth to a grand jury investigating BALCO [the Bay Area Lab Company, implicated in steroid distribution]. He does not own BALCO and does not distribute steroids on behalf of BALCO. Why was the grand jury investigating Bonds? Weren’t they supposed to be investigating BALCO? How did that ‘investigation’ of BALCO turn into a witch hunt directed against MLB players?”

Good questions. Bonds deserves far better than to be forced into retirement and have his history coarsely expunged. The overriding ethos of the sports world is that of the meritocracy. If you are good enough, then you get to play. Yet a man who can get on base 48% of the time, has been told to go home and a new generation of fans will never see the Mozart of the batting cage. This is about more than a baseball player. It’s about people in power deciding on utterly unjust grounds, who gets to take the field, who gets to be heard, and even who gets to be remembered. Somewhere, Stalin smiles.

Rouge Forum Update—Happy Birthday Karl Marx

Dear Friends,

Can you teach about Marx? If not, why not?

Karl Marx: (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883)

Here are some images of Marx.

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach can be found here.

Marx still stands far above his inheritors, all of them. And, per Lenin, one cannot fully understand Marx without understanding Hegel, especially the “Science of Logic,” but the entire body of work. Lukacs’, “The Young Hegel,” is a good pathway back to Hegel himself.

Here is Lenin writing on Hegel’s Science of Logic, a vast improvement over Lenin’s earlier Materialism and Empiro Criticism.

And, given the current election spectacle, we might remember what Marx and Engels wrote on the question of capitalist democracy, “The state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another–no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.”

The crux of Marxism, if there can be such a thing, is revolution, the negation of the negation: abolishing, retaining, moving to a higher level. Things change.

The question of class consciousness remains largely unresolved. Here is Bertell Ollman addressing the problem of why it is so many people are so easily turned into instruments of their own oppression, while others do resist

A podcast of Michael Baker’s radio interview with Seattle test resister Carl Chew can be found here: http://www.kzum.org/. You can also read a full interview with Chew by subscribing to Substance News.

We note, without envy, that Randi Weingarten, soon to be president of the American Federation of Teachers, will hold two jobs inside the AFT, and make about $600,000 a year, representing people being laid off in droves, people who often live in house trailers. NEA”s Reg Weaver, soon to be replaced by Dennis Van Roekel, makes about $450,000 a year and can live on his expense account.

School workers hold terrific potential power. In late April, 200,000 educators in the UK shut down the nation’s school system in protest against the government’s wage cutting plans. They were joined by 100,000 other workers striking in solidarity. More than a million people missed school.

Ken Goodman writes on the corrupt Reading First Phonics Education project, now clearly failed, at SusanOhanian.org.

We are still in the process of notifying nominees for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee, and awaiting word from others. That should be finalized by next week. We will also offer an analysis of why it is the anti-war, immigration rights, and anti-high-stakes testing movements are losing ground, despite a rise of apparent resistance.

Thanks to Melissa, Ido, Amber, Wayne, Sean, Tommie, Bob, Karen. Betty, Ann, Della, Candace, Erin, Beau, Sherry, Susan, Ken, Gerry, Georgia, Terry Ray, Elvira, Tony, Sandy, Sally, Adam, and Gina. Break up the Padres (sic)!

all the best