Archive for March 2009

Restructuring the automobile industry, reforming the schools

March 31, 2009

Efforts to restructure Detroit, specifically GM and Chrysler, are not too different from our efforts to reform the public schools. Both processes seem to go on forever, never coming to an end, never changing things for the better. (See today’s op ed piece by David Brooks in the NYTimes.)

At what do we most often direct our restructuring and reforming efforts? To failed states, companies, and schools. At what do we never direct such efforts? Successful states, companies, and schools.

How much do you read about efforts to restructure or reform Google or Amazon, Singapore or Finland, Stuyvesant High School or the MATCH Charter School?

This should tell us something. It should tell us that when one is about to play the reform or restructure card one ought not do so, and instead begin again, start over. For allowing poorly run schools and companies to fail is perhaps the very best thing we can do for them, and for ourselves.

Unfortunately this is not the prevailing view of the political establishment. Hold on at all costs the politicians seem to be saying. Avoid social disruptions that might threaten their own positions. Avoid massive job losses even though those jobs are producing products that fewer and fewer people want to buy.

This is surreal.

March 26, 2009

our-president

This is a picture of our president seated courtside at a Washington Wizards Chicago Bulls basketball game. Joe Clark, a corporate lawyer who sat near the president…, described the experience as “surreal.”

“I couldn’t believe that he was so accessible that I could literally shake his hand and heckle him about needing to suit up because his team was losing,” Mr. Clark said.  (The president was rooting for the Bulls, who lost.)

In the same newspaper we learn that Mullah Abdullah Zakir was at this same moment leading a delegation of Afghan Taliban fighters to a meeting in Waziristan with Pakistani Taliban fighters.

Mullah Zakir was captured in 2001 in northern Afghanistan and was held at Guantánamo until his release in 2007. The Pakistani fighters describe him as an impressive speaker and a trainer, and said that he was particularly energetic in working to unite the different Taliban groups.

Why was he released?

Also in the Times we read about the most recent suicide bombing in Pakistan, in a Bagiari mosque near Peshawar in a region bordering Afghanistan, resulting in some 50 deaths and three times as many wounded.

Why isn’t the country, Pakistan, waging an all out war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda extremists in their midst? Why aren’t we insisting that, in exchange for our substantial aid, they do so?

A bloody year coming up, predict the Taliban fighters in the region, as they busily prepare suicide bombers and roadside bombings to greet the additional American forces sent by President Obama.

Why do we continue to send our soldiers to become targets of an insurgency that so far our presence there seems only to encourage and make stronger?

Our president must ask himself all these questions and more. And he must know that there are no good answers. Attending basketball games courtside is perhaps one of the best, best that through all this and much more he is able to do that and root for the Bulls.

But surreal it is.

“Al Gore’s just an opportunist.” Freeman Dyson

March 25, 2009

Although I don’t know enough to say that he is right I’d like to agree with Freeman Dyson when he says, as he does in this week’s NYTimes Magazine, that

“… it all boils down to ‘a deeper disagreement about values’ between those who think ‘nature knows best’ and that ‘any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil,’ and ‘humanists,’ like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment.”

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The Whimsical Gaze Dyson still travels widely, giving talks at churches and colleges, reminding people how dangerous nuclear weapons are.

The Educational Experiment We Really Need?

March 22, 2009

Two recent op ed pieces, the one by Sara Mosle in Slate Magazine, The Educational Experiment We Really Need, and the other by Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times, Education’s Ground Zero might profitably have been placed side-by-side in the same publication.

Why? Well Mosle makes this judgment of KIPP or the Knowledge Is Power Program, (an educational experiment, by the way, that she greatly admires):

“Until KIPP tries to succeed within an entire, single community, it is, for all its remarkable rise and deserved praise, just another model program that has yet to prove it can succeed with all—or even most—disadvantaged children.”

And Kristof, while speaking about Michelle Rhee, the young, 39 years old, superintendent (the sixth in the past ten years) of the Washington DC public schools, has this to say:

“[Rhee's] aim is for Washington to become, in just six years, one of the best-performing urban school districts in the country, while drastically reducing the black-white achievement gap. ‘A byproduct of that,’ she added, ‘will be that we will take away from all the other school districts and schools across the country the excuse that because the kids are poor, minority, whatever it might be, that they can’t achieve at the same high levels.’”

In other words Rhee’s reforms, targeting as they do the entire Washington DC school district, could be just that “educational experiment we really need,” and that, according to Mosle, so far we haven’t had. And in that sense the two pieces could profitably have been placed side by side.

We would like to believe this to be so, that we need the reform movement, or educational experiment she describes. And we would certainly like Rhee’s reform efforts to bear fruit.

However, the fact is that we don’t need still another reform movement of the kind that Sara Mosle is suggesting. Whole system reform movements ought to be things of the past.  And furthermore we don’t expect Michelle Rhee to be successful with hers. I know I don’t.

The obstacles in the way of Rhee’s reforms are just too great, the greatest of them being the teachers who rarely if ever go along with the reformers, and then there are the parents who probably don’t understand the reforms, let alone have the strength, knowledge and talent to support them.

And then there is this thought. The educational experiment we really need, to use Sara Mosle’s words, has in fact been with us from the very beginning, from that moment when we decided that everyone should be “educated,” the disadvantaged no less than the advantaged.

This educational experiment is the history of this nation’s public schools and the experiment is still going on, and has been since the time of Horace Mann’s “common school” more than 150 years ago.

And so far this experiment has failed. We are still not succeeding in educating all of our children, and especially the poor and disadvantaged among them. Endless reform efforts, going back to the mid 19th century, have never accomplished what they intended.

Why? Because the needs of the children, and probably even more so of the disadvantaged among them, have always been many, and no one, single effort, not even KIPP, and even less a system wide reform effort such as Michelle Rhee’s, could ever succeed with all the children.

KIPP may have sensed this from the beginning, that the whole nine yards of urban education was just too much to take on, and as a result chose to break pieces off from the system, to open a few schools (66 academies at present, in 19 states, or about 3 schools a state) in many different communities, and thereby, perhaps, were they successful.

No, we don’t need just one experiment. There can be no grand plan for educating everyone. We need rather to break up the largest school systems into many smaller parts. Where we have been and are successful that is what we have already been doing. Magnet schools, charter schools, independent schools, and many others, are all examples of our doing quite well by our children and their needs. These schools don’t need our reform efforts.

Rhee will succeed only if she breaks up the system, only if her reforms are multiple and many, reflecting the multiple and different needs of the children, for even when the children are all poor their educational needs are no less dissimilar for that. I don’t know if she understands this.

Nicholas Kristof doesn’t understand. When he talks about education he sees only one outcome. “Unless we succeed,” he says, “in that effort to get more students through high school and into college, no bank bailout or stimulus package will be enough to preserve America’s global leadership in the long run.”

If getting more students through high school and into college, if filling the ranks of America’s global leadership teams, if this sort of outcome was the overriding goal of our public schools, especially the inner city schools, as in Washington DC, failure for most of the children would go on being the inevitable result.

David Brooks, Rx for the Republicans

March 10, 2009

Today in an op-ed piece in the Times David Brooks’ prescribes a course of action for the Republicans. The good news is that David’s prescription offers the no longer grand old party a life preserver. The bad news is that, in David’s view, the Republicans probably won’t take it.

What David says is sensible, reasonable, in fact, Obama-like. The President’s own inclination, if he weren’t so closely allied with lesser lights such as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and all the entrenched leaders of the rapidly growing non-productive areas of our national economy, might be to listen to David and follow the gist of his prescriptions.

In fact, with just a few stylistic and even fewer substantive alterations his prescription might have been no less appropriate for the Democrats. Anyway, here in summary form is what David says:

First, that the Republicans begin to take the current economic crisis seriously. For now they don’t, and instead spend their tax supported time taking pot shots at what Obama and the Democratic Congress are proposing.

There is no doubt that the present crisis is serious and demands, not pot shots, but well directed responses. According to Lawrence Lindsey stock market declines have destroyed, or are destroying $23 trillion in wealth. Auto production and auto sales are down by two-thirds since 2005. Investment in developing countries has dropped from $929 billion in 2007 to $165 billion this year, probably in part accounting for the 20 million Chinese migrant laborers who have recently lost their jobs.

Second, make no new spending commitments such as those that Obama is proposing for education, health care, and energy, at least until the present situation is under control, if not understood. Concentrate on the management of the crisis.

Present to the public a realistic appraisal of the health of capitalism. Make it clear, in spite of the apparent market weaknesses that we are now witnessing, that global capitalism is an innovative and progressive force, still necessary to pull the world and all its peoples forward.

Get out in front of the crisis, in particular come up with ideas to support the wealth-creating parts of the economy, rather than merely propping up the fading parts (read General Motors). Come up with a banking plan (David says, don’t let City Group fail) rather than just whining about what the Democrats are offering.

Finally, make it clear that that the present emergency has to be followed by an era of balance, deficit spending brought down, public debt, which could be 80 percent of G.D.P. by the time the present crisis is over, reduced.

сто делатъ

March 8, 2009

In some ways nothing has changed. The overriding political issue of our time, as it was in the times of the French and Russian revolutions, is that the few have a lot, and the many a little. (And it’s probably even more true in Russia today.) We know that only when these two camps seem to be growing closer together, and we are at peace, do we have what most would call the good life.

At the present time the camps are not coming together, and we are not a peace. And the good life is not yet within the reach of most. We have instead, in the words of Frank Rich in today’s Times: “an obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s.” And Rich quotes the President in his budget message to Congress, “There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few.”

The President, according to Rich, was calling for fundamental fairness, not as in earlier times class warfare. In Rich’s words, “America hasn’t seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.”

And the question is still, que faire, сто делатъ, what to do? And as in the past there are only three answers, more government, more reliance on market forces and individual initiative, and more of something in between. And if we would be at peace the answer has to be number three.

But, alas, the loudest and most unruly voices are coming from one side or the other, and the voices of reason are not being heard. Instead we hear, “Bail out the banks and the automobile companies. Don’t bail them out.” “Launch expensive new health, education, and environmental protection programs. Don’t, at least until we we can pay, for them without raising taxes or going even further into debt.”

The U.S. economy, no less than the world economy, seems to be on its own trajectory, down, and all of our efforts to reverse its direction have been, so far, without effect. It’s a wife who has decided to do her own thing and a husband, whose efforts to reign her in, are totally without influence.

It seems all we can do is wait. The two camps are as far apart as ever. And the “gaping inequality” of which the President speaks is not about to be lessened by the actions of his team. We are, as were the inhabitants of New Orleans by Katrina, caught up in a destructive storm, the power of which is clearly beyond our ability to check.

Thornton Wilder’s “New Hampshire Boys”

March 8, 2009

Today in the New York times Frank Rich tells us that it’s impossible not to be moved by that Act III passage in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town where the Stage Manager comes upon the graves of Civil War veterans in the town cemetery and says: “New Hampshire boys had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than 50 miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends — the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”

But wonders how much of that “notion,” that the Union ought to be kept together, was theirs. Just as one wonders about the “patriotic” motives of those of our sons and daughters who have gone to fight, be it one generation ago in Vietnam for the notion that fighting would keep us free from Communism, or be it now in Iraq and Afghanistan for the notion that fighting would protect our way of life from those Islamic terrorists who, if they could, would destroy us.

People, and young people especially, go to war for all sorts of reasons. Probably only rarely, and perhaps only the well schooled and well behaved few among them, could they actually enunciate their leaders’ notions as to why the war was/is necessary.

The New Hamshire boys are now lying in the ground and are unable to reply to whatever notions we might have about them, about why they did what they did. Wilder’s notion is just one, one that Frank Rich would like to believe.

Paris Walk

March 7, 2009

It’s still cold in Paris, but bundled up we still do a lot of walking. Today it was lunch at home and then a walk across the Seine with Notre Dame on our left, stopping at a little café on l’île Saint-Louis before reaching the Saint Paul Metro station and from there taking la rue de Sévigné right up to number 23 and le Musée Carnavalet, where right up until her death in 1696 Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, la marquise de Sévigné, lived.

le-marais

Now the Museum, ancien hotel, or residence of the rich and famous during several hundred years, has some 100 rooms all dedicated to the history of Paris, a history which is for most of us, the history of France.

carnavalet

Walking through the rooms is walking through the history as told by brief texts attached to paintings, sculptures, and innumerable objects, many donated and many rescued from Parisian buildings that had been destroyed by war, revolution, or just time and the weather.

This history, much more than school history, comes alive through the hundreds of representations of people and events that one stops to look at among the tens of thousands of objects that fill the hundred rooms, and one finishes one visit with plans, resolutions even, to read up on Lutèce, le serment du Jeu de Paume, la Commune, and Juliette Greco, among the many other subjects and objects that have caught one’s attention.

The room dedicated to pre-history and Lutèce, or the Roman Paris, was particularly interesting. Because the Roman Paris, or the bits that remain of it, in particular the baths (thermae) of Cluny, named after the 16th century Hôtel de Cluny built around them, and les Arènes de Lutèce. Both “ruins,” now city parks, are within a few minutes walk of our apartment.

Here is Roman Paris.

roman-paris

And here is a description of the Roman Arènes or amphitheatre:

Erigées au premier siècle de notre ère, les Arènes de Lutèce sont aujourd’hui un oasis d’histoire gallo-romaine au milieu des immeubles haussmanniens qui l’entourent. Typique de l’architecture gallo-romaine, l’amphithéâtre était un haut lieu de combats de gladiateurs contre des fauves, pouvant accueillir près de 15.000 spectateurs. Le chaland peut d’ailleurs apercevoir des cages qui retenaient les bêtes antiques sur le côté de l’amphithéâtre. Comme tous les autres bâtiments de la ville, les arènes furent détruites lors des invasions barbares. Enfouies pendant des siècles dans le sous-sol parisien, elles furent redécouvertes lors du percement de la rue Monge au cours des grands travaux des années 1860.

Here is a model of what the stadium might have looked like in Roman times:

arenes_de_lutece

And here is what you will see today, if you visit there now, some 2000 years later. (You won’t see “les combats de gladiateurs contre des fauves,” although perhaps a game of boules, and certainly kids kicking a ball around.)

arenes1

I often ask myself this question, “can we find in the history of Paris (France) a satisfactory explanation of why France is the way it is today?” And as I strolled slowly through the rooms and up and down the stairs of the museum I wondered what if any was the connection between what I was looking at and what France is today.

One famous exhibit in the museum does seem to have absolutely no connection to Paris before or Paris (France) afterwards. And in fact there are always those people and events that quickly assume a place for themselves, outside of the continuum of history, allowing one to directly experience them with little or no knowledge of the times in which they lived.

The greatest writers and artists certainly belong to this category. Less so the famous men and women who in this museum have only a part to play in the history of this city. Taken out of that context we would not know them at all.

The famous exhibit is the bedroom of Marcel Proust. There is absolutely no connection to be made between this and France today, or with the France of any time.

Proust did live and write in Paris, in fact he wrote much of his Remembrance of Things Past while sitting up (or lying down) in the bed shown below. But other than being this famous writer’s bedroom this exhibit has no special interest. Proust’s achievement stands no less out of the times in which he lived, out of the bedroom here exhibited, than out of the much, much earlier Roman Paris or Lutèce.

proustbed
However, there are many people and events exhibited in the museum that are in a line taking us right up to today. The Serment dans la salle du Jeu de paume, à Versailles, that took place on January 20, 1789, is one. Here the tiers état, or what we would call the people, made a solemn vow “to never separate and to assemble together wherever the circumstances demanded it, right up until the time when the Constitution would be firmly established in the realm.”

david_jeu_de_paume
“Les députés se réunissent” … [and swear] « de ne jamais se séparer, et de se rassembler partout où les circonstances l’exigeront, jusqu’à ce que la Constitution du royaume soit établie et affermie sur des fondements solides.» (The painter is Jacques Louis-David)

The connection with today is clear. For today the people are still swearing not to separate, not to stop demonstrating, not to stop striking, until their wishes are met. Evidently their wishes have not been met, and the “Constitution” is not yet on solid foundations.

In fact the Serment du Jeu de Paume has, wthin just 250 years, resulted in a state where forward movement, where progress, seem no longer possible. For the country, France, is divided, not between clergy, nobility, and the tiers état, but between and among the people themselves.

Todoay in the country, France, as in the countries of most of the developed world, there are only tiers état or people. The clergy and the nobility are no longer players on the scene.

In France in particular, and in other countries to a lesser extent, the divisions among the people, right from left, liberal from conservative, those with more from those with less, prevent them from working together. And instead they only fight with one another over the spoils, those spoils left behind by their former masters.

mascaronpontneuf


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