Is the United States the best country in the world? Not even close. Among the 29 countries evaluated by UNICEF, the U.S. ranks from between 23rd to 27th in all six categories considered (the 27th being in education).

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UNICEF: U.S. kids worse off than many of their Western counterparts

Posted by Caitlin Dewey and Max Fisher on April 18, 2013 at 11:48 am

Data source: UNICEF

American children are on average worse off than children in Western Europe and barely better off than their counterparts in the Baltic states and the former Yugoslavia, according to a recent report from United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on the welfare of children in developed countries.

The report, which compares kids in 29 Western countries, measures well-being across five metrics: material well-being, health and safety, behaviors and risks, housing and environment, as well as education. It ranks the United States in the bottom third on all five measures of well-being and particularly low on education and poverty. The United States is joined at the bottom by “emerging” European economies, while the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands come out on top. The report notes that this latter group of countries tends to spend far more per capita on social welfare programs.

The countries with the best reported child well-being tend to invest in strong social safety nets. Norway, Iceland and Sweden sink nearly 7 percent of their GDP, according to an OECD report, into education. Countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which until the ‘90s had GDPs per capita of less than $5,000, have been able to put less money into such services. Though U.S. GDP per capita was more than $48,000 in 2012, that money is not spread evenly cross the unusually large U.S. population.

As we noted earlier, one of the report’s more alarming findings for the United States is the degree to which income inequality has increased the population of children who grow up in relative poverty, meaning that America’s famously abundant wealth does not equally benefit all children. Economists rate the U.S. economy as one of the most unequal in the Western world.

The low U.S. rating, then, does not mean that all American children are worse educated, less healthy and less well-off than all children in, for example, Greece and Slovakia. After all, many American kids are doing great. But the report, just as worryingly, means that significant numbers of American children are so much worse off than the average Greek or Slovakian child as to bring the overall U.S. average beneath those other, relatively less wealthy and developed countries.

Here’s a chart showing the rankings, overall and across the five key metrics, for all 29 countries:

Data: UNICEF

Still, the United States did do well on some comparative metrics. American kids get more exercise than almost any others studied in the report, but they’re still, by far, the most overweight. (Chalk that up to American calorie consumption, which is also one of the world’s highest.) American kids also are the least likely to drink alcohol — a finding that matches long-standing alcohol consumption patterns of American adults. According to the World Health Organization, Americans ages 15 and up have consumed far less alcohol than their counterparts abroad for decades.

Meanwhile, Canadian children smoke the most marijuana, with more than one in four reporting they’d lit up in the past year — a period when Canada continued its national debate on the country’s cannabis laws.

Here’s something that might surprise you: kids in high-achieving Finland attend preschool less than anyone else, which seems to buck research linking preschool to later educational and economic success. But, as the report explains, that statistic is somewhat misleading: preschool begins later in Finland than it does elsewhere, which throws off the numbers.

Finally, there are some interesting, if unpleasant, hints on how Europe’s recent economic crises could impact youth there. In Spain, Italy and Ireland, more than 10 percent of children ages 15 to 19 are not enrolled in education, employment or training — a frightening figure that might reflect post-recession unemployment numbers and which could, per UNICEF, augur “mental health problems, drug abuse, involvement in crime, and long-term unemployment and welfare dependence” in the future.

Some of those effects could be playing out in Spain already. More than half of the surveyed Spanish children said they’d been in a physical fight within the past year, a huge 15 percent jump from UNICEF’s 2001 survey. Greece reported a similar jump in the past decade. Both countries have suffered in the European financial crisis.

As the report notes, these types of statistics are interesting less as a snapshot of the present than a predictor of the future.

“At the heart of the case to be made is the fact that childhood is … a time in which future patterns and pathways of health and well-being are being laid down and in which disruption can have lifelong consequences,” the report concludes. “Protecting the years of childhood is therefore essential both for the well-being of those who are children today and for the well-being of the societies of tomorrow.”

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO TRULY UNDERSTAND TODAY'S ECONOMICS, STAY AWAY FROM OBSOLETE TEXT BOOKS AND TURN TO THE FEW "OUTSIDE-THE-BOX ECONOMISTS WHO ARE ADDRESSING REAL ISSUES." PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS LISTS THEM FOR YOU HERE.

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Escape From Economics

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By Paul Craig Roberts | July 29, 2012 | Original here

Readers ask me from time to time to recommend a book from which they can learn about economics.

The problem with reading a book to learn economics that is taught in the universities and practiced in Washington is that economics is now a highly formalized subject based on abstract models and assumptions and has been mathematized. It is not that the subject is totally useless and without any applicability to real world problems. Rather, the problem is that the discipline both lags an ever-changing world and got some things wrong at the beginning. Consequently, learning economics places one inside a box where some of the tools and understanding provided are outdated and incorrect.

For example, every textbook will draw a picture of agriculture as the perfect example of competitive markets in which “no producer’s output is large enough to affect price.” This made sense when one-third of the US work force was on family farms. Today, American agriculture is dominated by corporations and agribusiness. Additionally, part of the disastrous financial deregulation pushed by no-think economists and special interests was the removal of position limits on speculators. Formerly, speculators smoothed agricultural and commodity markets by buying and selling in order to stabilize price over periods when supply and demand were out of balance. Now speculators can dominate markets and rig prices to the benefit of their profits.

There are many such examples where economics no longer speaks to the real world.

Two other examples will suffice:

Most intelligent people are aware that natural resources are finite, including the environment’s ability to absorb the wastes or pollution from productive activities (see for example, Jared Diamond, Collapse, 2005). But few economists are aware, because economists assume that man-made capital is a perfect substitute for nature’s capital. This assumption implies that there are no finite environmental limits to infinite economic growth. Lost in such a make-believe world, economists neglect the full cost of production and cannot tell if the value of the increases in GDP are greater or less than the full cost of producing it.

Economists have almost universally confused jobs offshoring with free trade. Economists have even managed to produce “studies” purporting to show that a domestic economy is benefitted by being turned into the GDP of some other country. Economists have managed to make this statement even while its absurdity is obvious to what remains of the US manufacturing, industrial, and professional skilled (software engineers, for example) workforce and to the cities and states whose tax bases have been devastated by the movement offshore of US jobs.

The few economists who have the intelligence to recognize that jobs offshoring is the antithesis of free trade are dismissed as “protectionists.” Economists are so dogmatic about free trade that they have even constructed a folk myth that the rise of the US economy was based on free trade. As Michael Hudson, an economist able to think outside the box has proven, there is not a scrap of evidence in behalf of this folk myth (see America’s Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914).

My advice to readers who wish to develop economic comprehension is to begin with the outside-the-box economists who are addressing real issues. For example, Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb’s For the Common Good is accessible to ordinary readers willing to take the effort to google the definitions of unfamiliar terms. However, the most important development in trade theory is not. Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests by Ralplh E. Gomory and William J. Baumol (MIT Press, 2000) is apparently even over the heads of professional economists, who prefer to babble on ignorantly about the “benefits of free trade” than to learn what they don’t know. Nevertheless, readers should understand that the case for free trade will never been the same after

its dissection by Gomory and Baumol.

With this preface to the column, I now turn to its subject: economist Michael Hudson. Hudson is totally outside the matrix in which economists imprison themselves. Hudson doesn’t live in the artificial reality of economists or shill for corporations and Wall Street.

A person can learn a lot from Hudson. His book, Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (2009) explains how foreign trade and economic development have been used to concentrate economic power in the hands of dominant nations. What is really going on is covered up with do-good verbiage and formal models. In reality, trade and development are ways to colonize countries that think they are independent. (Another good book on this subject is Michel Chossudovsky’s The Globalization of Poverty.)

Perhaps the best place to begin with Hudson is his latest book, The Bubble and Beyond, which should be available within a few days of the appearance of this column. In this book Hudson addresses the crisis in the economy and the crisis in the discipline of economics. From this book you can understand not only the crisis but also why economists have misdiagnosed the crisis and are applying incorrect remedies.

Hudson shows that a central problem is that economic theory ignores the role of debt in the economy. Economic theory also pretends that economic policy, such as the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, serves the public’s interest rather than the interests of powerful private interests.

As Lenin and others predicted, industrial capitalism has turned into finance capitalism. Finance capitalism does not finance or create new real investments such as manufacturing facilities. Instead, finance capitalism functions as a rentier. It leverages debt and extracts interest payments (and today taxpayer bailouts for its over-leveraged gambles). Finance capitalism flourishes by converting more and more of society’s resources into payments to itself.

One result is that markets cease to expand and economies cease to grow as austerity is imposed to service the build-up in debt. Austerity pushes economies down as consumption and investment are cut back in order to service debt. Hudson concludes that the result is that bankers now receive the rents (a form of unearned income) that once flowed to the landed aristocracy. Unlike the aristocracy, who were dispossessed of their rents, the bankers have not been.

Hudson knows the history of economic thought and economic history. Reading The Bubble and Beyond lets readers see how economic ideas developed in ways that leave economists unable to perceive the real character of the problems that are challenging them. Trapped in the matrix that they have constructed for themselves, economists are unable to devise solutions.

Hudson writes that western economies are at a turning point. GDP growth consists increasingly of the build-up of financial overhead. The wealth gains are paper gains, not gains from real plant and equipment, and are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the one percent. Financial earnings are extracted from the earnings of tangible capital and labor. Matt Taibbi captured the point with his imagery of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

My suggestion is that you read Hudson along with Taibbi’s Griftopia, Nomi Prins’ It Takes A Pillage, Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment, and Daly and Cobb’s For the Common Good. Then if you ever do study economics, you will be armored against being ensnared in the matrix that produces economists as shills for finance capitalism, environmental destruction, and the offshoring of the economy.

Everyone always wants a solution. Hudson offers suggestions how to reconstruct the economy in order that it serves the needs of the 99% instead only of the needs of the 1%.

Get busy. Reading these books will do you much greater good than playing video games, watching TV or hanging out in bars. Our country needs a larger informed younger generation to replace the smaller informed older generation.

Note to readers: Accompanying my column today is an article in the guest section by Herman Daly (titled: (Nationalize Money, Not Banks”). For those looking for solutions to the banking crisis, this astute and highly experienced economist tells you what can be done. 

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"LOUISIANA'S INCARCERATION RATE IS NEARLY TRIPLE IRAN'S, SEVEN TIMES CHINA'S AND 10 TIMES GERMANY'S." "LOUISIANA WAS ONE OF THE THREE STATES AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA TO RECEIVE AN F FOR K-12 ACHIEVEMENT IN 2012." GOT IT? KEEP PEOPLE SUFFICIENTLY UNEDUCATED AND POOR AND YOU HAVE A SOURCE OF (SLAVE) LABOR CHEAPER THAN CHINA'S.

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OP-ED COLUMNIST

Plantations, Prisons and Profits

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Published: May 25, 2012 |  Original here

Charles M. Blow

“Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.” 

That paragraph opens a devastating eight-part series published this month by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans about how the state’s largely private prison system profits from high incarceration rates and tough sentencing, and how many with the power to curtail the system actually have a financial incentive to perpetuate it.

The picture that emerges is one of convicts as chattel and a legal system essentially based on human commodification.

First, some facts from the series:

• One in 86 Louisiana adults is in the prison system, which is nearly double the national average.

• More than 50 percent of Louisiana’s inmates are in local prisons, which is more than any other state. The next highest state is Kentucky at 33 percent. The national average is 5 percent.

• Louisiana leads the nation in the percentage of its prisoners serving life without parole.

• Louisiana spends less on local inmates than any other state.

• Nearly two-thirds of Louisiana’s prisoners are nonviolent offenders. The national average is less than half.

In the early 1990s, the state was under a federal court order to reduce overcrowding, but instead of releasing prisoners or loosening sentencing guidelines, the state incentivized the building of private prisons. But, in what the newspaper called “a uniquely Louisiana twist,” most of the prison entrepreneurs were actually rural sheriffs. They saw a way to make a profit and did.

It also was a chance to employ local people, especially failed farmers forced into bankruptcy court by a severe drop in the crop prices.

But in order for the local prisons to remain profitable, the beds, which one prison operator in the series distastefully refers to as “honey holes,” must remain full. That means that on almost a daily basis, local prison officials are on the phones bartering for prisoners with overcrowded jails in the big cities.

It also means that criminal sentences must remain stiff, which the sheriff’s association has supported. This has meant that Louisiana has some of the stiffest sentencing guidelines in the country. Writing bad checks in Louisiana can earn you up to 10 years in prison. In California, by comparison, jail time would be no more than a year.

There is another problem with this unsavory system: prisoners who wind up in these local for-profit jails, where many of the inmates are short-timers, get fewer rehabilitative services than those in state institutions, where many of the prisoners are lifers. That is because the per-diem per prisoner in local prisons is half that of state prisons.

In short, the system is completely backward.

Lifers at state prisons can learn to be welders, plumbers or auto mechanics — trades many will never practice as free men — while prisoners housed in local prisons, and are certain to be released, gain no skills and leave jail with nothing more than “$10 and a bus ticket.”

These ex-convicts, with almost no rehabilitation and little prospect for supporting themselves, return to the already-struggling communities that were rendered that way in part because so many men are being extracted on such a massive scale. There the cycle of crime often begins again, with innocent people caught in the middle and impressionable young eyes looking on.

According to The Times-Picayune: “In five years, about half of the state’s ex-convicts end up behind bars again.”

This suits the prison operators just fine. They need them to come back to the “honey holes.”

Furthermore, the more money the state spends on incarceration, the less it can spend on preventive measures like education. (According to Education Week’s State Report Cards, Louisiana was one of three states and the District of Columbia to receive an F for K-12 achievement in 2012, and, this year, the state, over all, is facing a $220 million deficit in its $25 billion budget.)

Louisiana is the starkest, most glaring example of how our prison policies have failed. It showcases how private prisons do not serve the public interest and how the mass incarceration as a form of job creation is an abomination of justice and civility and creates a long-term crisis by trying to create a short-term solution.

As the paper put it: “A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.”

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I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS IS RIGHT THAT THE DISINFORMATION PROMULGATED BY THE U.S. MAINSTREAM MEDIA DOES NOT EMANATE FROM THE REPUBLICAN PARTY OR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. RATHER IT IS PROPAGANDA ORGINATED BY THE SAME MILITARY/INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX THAT PRESIDENT EISENHOWER WARNED US ABOUT ...PLUS THE TOO-BIG-FAIL BANKS WISHING TO BE SHIELDED FROM FROM THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR OWN MISTAKES.

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Disinformation On Every Front

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May 4, 2012 | Original here 

Some readers have come to the erroneous conclusion that the Matrix consists of Republican Party disinformation as if there is no disinformation from the left. Others think that propaganda is the business of Obama and the Democrats. In fact, propaganda from the right, the left and the middle are all part of the disinformation fed to americans.

If I may give some examples: The other day Chuck Colson, one of the Nixon officials imprisoned for Watergate crimes, died. This gave NPR the opportunity to relive the Nixon horror.

What precisely was the Nixon horror? Essentially, there was no such thing. Watergate was about President Nixon lying about when he learned about the Watergate burglary.

When Nixon learned about the burglary, he did not act on it prior to his reelection, because he reasoned, rightly, that the Washington Post would blame him for the burglary, although he had nothing to do with it, in the hopes of preventing his reelection.

By going along with a cover-up, Nixon enabled the Washington Post to make an issue of the precise date on which Nixon learned of the burglary. White House tapes indicated that Nixon had learned of the burglary before he said he learned of it. So Nixon had permitted a cover-up and had to go, but what was the real reason?

What was the Watergate burglary? We don’t really know. A group of men including former CIA operatives were hired by the Committee to Re-elect the President to break into a Democratic campaign office in the Watergate complex. We don’t know the purpose of the burglary. Some claim it was to wire-tap the telephones in the belief that the Democratic Party was getting re-election money from communists in Cuba or elsewhere. Others claim that the burglars were looking for a list of call girls, that compromised a White House official, as his fiancee was allegedly one of the call girls.

Looking back from our time during which Bush and Obama have deep-sixed the US Constitution, violated numerous US and international laws, and behaved as if they were caesars unconstrained by any law or any morality, Nixon’s “crimes” appear so trivial as to be unremarkable. Yet, Nixon was driven from office and is regarded as a criminal.

What was Watergate really about?

I doubt we will ever know. But I can offer one possible explanation. Nixon, like John F. Kennedy before him, alarmed the military/security complex with his plans to withdraw US troops from Vietnam (Vietnamization) and his determination to open communication with communist China and improve relations.

As President Eisenhower warned in his last address to the American people, conflict brings power and profit to interest groups that benefit from conflict. Nixon, like Kennedy before him, was perceived as a threat by these powerful interests, because he was working to reduce conflict.

James W. Douglass in his documented book, JFK and the Unspeakable, attributes the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service. Douglas reports that these powerful government institutions were concerned by Kennedy’s refusal to approve Operation Northwoods, to back the CIA’s invasion of Cuba, and to confront the Soviets militarily over the Cuban missile crisis and by Kennedy’s plans to end US military intervention in Vietnam. JFK also told his brother Robert that after his re-election he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces.

The right-wing view that Kennedy was too soft to stand up to communism was intensified when it was learned that Kennedy was working with Nikita Khrushchev through back channels to defuse the Cold War. In his “A Strategy of Peace” speech (June 1963), Kennedy announced the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the suspension of atmospheric nuclear testing.

“What kind of a peace do we seek?,” Kennedy asked. “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” With his words and deeds, President Kennedy made himself into a threat against the interests of the military/security complex.

There was enough suspicion of JFK’s assassination that yet another president assassinated by another “unhinged lone gunman” might raise more eyebrows. Nixon was disliked by the media, which made him a good candidate for political assassination. The Watergate burglary provided the opportunity. The Washington Post did the job with reports of “Deep Throat” meeting with reporters in spooky underground parking lots after midnight. Little, if any, information of consequence was contained in these reports. Instead, the newspaper’s reporting transferred the spooky danger of the deserted parking garages to Nixon and an aura of evil was attached to Nixon that eroded his support.

It is interesting that it is only presidents who work to reduce conflict who become targets for assassination. Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric was strong enough to fool the left-wing, but the military-security complex knew of Reagan’s intention to end the Cold War. The CIA, formerly headed by Reagan’s vice president, opposed Reagan’s plan to put the pressure of an arms race on the creaking Soviet economy. The CIA argued that the centrally planned Soviet economy allowed the Kremlin to control investment and that the Communist Party could allocate whatever percentage of Soviet GDP to the military as was needed to win the arms race. In other words, the CIA argued that the US would lose the arms race if Reagan raised the stakes as a means of bringing the Soviets to negotiate the end of the Cold War. Did the CIA really believe this, or was the military/security complex trying to keep the profitable Cold War stalemate going?

Washington cannot exist without conflict. Now that the “Muslim threat” is wearing thin, Washington is stirring up a conflict with China. Washington is sticking its nose into every dispute China has with its neighbors and building up its military presence in the Asian-Pacific. As I wrote in my previous column, a China threat is being created as a long-term threat to take the place of the former Soviet threat.

Moving on to another topic, americans are told that education is the answer to unemployment. Get that university degree and live happily every after.

As RT recently reported, the truth is that more than half of recent US university graduates are unemployed or very underemployed. So much for the mantra that “education is the answer.”

“Education is the answer” serves the colleges and universities who want the tuition payments. It serves the companies who make student loans. It helps the offshoring corporations disguise that they are the main cause of unemployment.

Education is not the answer when high value-added, high wage manufacturing and professional service jobs, such as software engineering, are moved offshore in order to enhance short-term profits for shareholders and multi-million dollar bonuses for CEOs, while domestic employment and purchasing power are destroyed. Unless American university graduates can emigrate to China and India, there is no one to employ them. Yet, we still hear the call to run up student loan debts beyond the ability of salaries to repay the loans.

Professional tradable service employment in the US is so scarce that the University of Florida has abolished its computer science department. As few of the graduates can find employment, the university has reallocated the department’s budget to football, a paying sport.

Americans plugged into the Matrix are programmed to believe that they have correct information provided by a varied and “independent media.” In fact the media is owned by 5 or 6 mega-media companies run by corporate advertising executives and Washington.

Recently, Bloomberg gave us the report that “Japan, Denmark and Switzerland are among the countries to rally this week to [IMF chief] Lagarde’s call for a bigger lending capacity beyond the current $380 billion to shield the world economy against any deepening of Europe’s debt turmoil.”

This Bloomberg report is nonsensical. The loans are not shielding the world economy. The loans are shielding the private banks from their own mistakes at the expense of the world economy. The Bloomberg report shows how completely the Western media is involved in forcing ordinary peoples to subsidize private bankers. It could not be more clear; yet, there is no embarrassment at Bloomberg for serving as the bankers’ propagandist.

Indeed, there is only honor. Serving the Matrix is where lie the rewards. Those who oppose the Matrix are the outcasts whose efforts might, as in the film, save the race of humans from the domination of evil, or else, if they lose, confine the outcasts to prosecution and death.

Across every front Americans are fed lies. The official media line is that the Japanese Fukushima nuclear threat from the earthquake and aftermath is well contained and over. However, the fact of the matter appears to be that an amazing radioactive inventory of both spent and unused fuel rods is in damaged cooling pools that could suffer collapse at any time (especially if there is another earthquake), thus releasing enormous radioactivity (reference link). This possibility presents a greater threat than the initial molten cores of the reactors themselves. Michael Chossudovsky points out that the media is yet to acknowledge the widespread contamination resulting from the Fukushima disaster, and there may be worse to come.

But who cares? Back to the Matrix and the “reality show.”

BREAKING : LAST SURVIVING NEANDERTHALS MANAGE TO GET THEIR REVENGE ON HOMO SAPIENS BY BECOMING ELECTED OFFICIALS IN ARIZONA

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Posted by jeffbiggers at 12:39 am
April 11, 2012

Defying Community, Split Tucson School Board Sacks Mexican American Studies Director Amid Confusion

After more than two and half hours of a “call to audience” open mike, where passionate Tucson students, alumni, teachers, parents and community members exclusively praised the Mexican American Studies program’s achievements, values and rootedness in the city and dressed down the Tucson Unified School District”s (TUSD) disconnection from the community, a bedraggled school board emerged from chanting and protests to quickly manipulate a 3-2 vote to dismiss the MAS director Sean Arce tonight.

Despite an exhausting 2-year-long witch hunt (dating back to 2006, in truth) against the acclaimed Mexican American Studies program by the Tea Party-led state legislature, tonight’s school board meeting in Tucson was possibly one of the most bizarre and confusing in an already demoralized school district. Yet, not a single person, among scores of tireless speakers, spoke against the program. Nor did a single school board member opt to respond to any questions–including a local academic’s query on why his own writing was banned from the District’s classes, as part of the canceling of Mexican American Studies curriculum.

“I might as well be speaking to the wall,” said one student. “But we’re not going anywhere.”

Then, as the chants erupted of “No justice, no peace, no racist TUSD,” and students and community members cuffed themselves with hard plastic handcuffs, board president Mark Stegemen, who had deemed the Mexican American Studies a “cult” and served as one of the state’s leading witnesses in a state administrative hearing last year, called for a recess. Within ten minutes, Stegemen and his board members re-emerged and managed to ram through an awkward vote over the chamber’s mass confusion, with a rambling 25-year-old school board member Miguel Cuevas casting the deciding vote to deal the final blow to the nation’s only high school Mexican American Studies program.

Among numerous students who testified to the program’s impact on their lives, alumni Selina Rodriguez recalled how Mexican American Studies had provided the academic and personal tools to go to college, obtain a master’s degree, and now work as a youth counselor in Santa Monica, California, where the local California district is investigating ways of replicating Tucson’s outlawed program. Tanya Alvarez, a mother of a TUSD student, spoke of her family’s four generations of Chicano military veterans and the importance of recognizing her children’s heritage. Alumni and current University of Arizona student Angelica Penaran reminded the board of Arce’s beloved role as a mentor, teacher and father figure. Long-time educator, school board member and civil rights activist Sylvia Campoy detailed TUSD’s violation of a federal desegregation order.

The dramatic protests inside and outside the chambers sought to advert the Tucson Unified School District’s death knell of the Mexican American Studies program–the firing or refusal to renew the annual contract of director Sean Arce–only days after Arce was honored with a national award from the celebrated Zinn Education Project for leading “one of the most significant and successful public school initiatives on the teaching of history in the U.S.”

 Earlier today, the UNIDOS student organization, which carried out the historic occupation of the school board chambers last year, warned of the community’s response to such a crackdown:

First they came for our classes. Then they came for our books. Now they’re coming for us—our teachers and staff, including program director Sean Arce. We will not comply, we will resist until Mexican-American Studies is put back in our schools.

We want (TUSD board member Michael) Hicks out. In fact, we want a new school board—one that will fight for our education and not squelch it. We want a school board that is representative of its students, that will regard its students as human beings and will no longer embarrass our community through ignorance and hate.

TUSD board members, in service of the AZ state government’s relentless attack on Ethnic Studies, have underestimated the stamina and fervor of MAS students and community before. They’ve seen what we’re capable of—but they haven’t seen anything yet.

Michael Hicks poster at TUSD board meeting

Outraged by the blatantly racist overtones and embarrassing spectacle of TUSD board member Michael Hicks on the Daily Show last week, along with a growing national response to TUSD superintendent John Pedicone’s increasingly repressive and indiscriminate book bans and confiscations, censorship and retributions, tonight’s action marks a broader community effort to defend the Mexican American Studies program and the respected role of Arce, who has been with the district for 16 years. Pedicone drew wide condemnation last year for excessive police force, including ordering the arrest of elderly Chicano activists and educators.

Calling the board’s move “irresponsible, unlawful and reflects yet another step in TUSD’s descent into abysmal discrimination,” Arce’s attorney Richard Martinez warned in a letter today that the non-renewal notice sent to the former MAS director also failed to follow proper legal procedures. “The Pedicone era at TUSD,” Martinez added, “has proven to be a complete disaster, one that has allowed racism to prevail over the educational needs and rights of our students.”

In an unprecedented appeal today, key state legislators expressed their support for Arce and noted his dismissal “would be a tremendous disappointment and detriment to the students of TUSD, the people of Tucson, and the state of Arizona. We urge you to reconsider the impact Mr. Arce has made on many students’ lives in his work in TUSD and consider renewing his contract.” Last week, US Rep. Raul Grijalva from Tucson lauded Arce for his national award and called the embattled director the “key to the success of the program and to the very necessary ongoing effort to save it. He has helped lead the program to a standard of excellence that we all continue to admire, and he will help lead it back to that same standard when these politically motivated attacks on students and education are just a bad memory.”

Writing in Education Week, in fact, renowned scholar Christine Sleeter noted 5,726 Mexican American and 712 non-Latino students had been served under Arce’s leadership, adding: “On Arizona’s achievement tests in reading, writing, and math, its students also outscore students of all racial and ethnic groups in the same schools but not in that program—a remarkable record. As schools nationwide struggle to close racial achievement gaps, Tucson’s Mexican-American studies program should be one from which we are learning.”

As stunned and demoralized Tucsonans filed out of the school board chambers amid the rings of police and aftermath of smoke bombs and protest, the TUSD board and superintendent John Pedicone made one thing clear: Closing the achievement gap and learning from the Mexican American Studies success will remain an endeavor for a different administration and school board to undertake in the future .

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Jeff Biggers is the American Book Award-winning author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (Nation/Basic Books), among other books. Visit his website: www.jeffbiggers.com

TUCSON UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT BOARD MEMBER MICHAEL HICKS GOES ON THE DAILY SHOW TO EXPLAIN WHY THE BOARD FOUND IT NECESSARY TO CANCEL TUCSON'S NATIONAL AWARD WINNING MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM. IF RACE HAD ANY MEANING, THIS PERFORMANCE WOULD HAVE MADE ME ASHAMED TO BE A MEMBER OF THE WHITE ONE. HOWEVER, WE ALL DECENDED FROM AN AFRICAN "EVE" WHO LIVED ABOUT 200,000 YEARS AGO.

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The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Monday April 2, 2012

Tucson's Mexican-American Studies Ban

Al Madrigal travels to Arizona, where the powerful evidence of hearsay convinced the Tucson school board to ban Mexican-American studies programs.

Original here

PUBLIC EDUCATION IN U.S. SLASHED AND TRASHED BY HEARTLESS/BRAINLESS RIGHT-WING LAW MAKERS, STUDENTS AND TEACHERS PUSH BACK

  theREALnews

Students and Teachers Fight Education Cuts in North Carolina

Thousands of North Carolina students and teachers take to the streets opposing Republican controlled State assembly bill to cut education


Original, including transcript, here.

May 3, 2011

Tucson Students Occupy School Board Meeting to Defend Ethnic Studies

Students in Tucson, Arizona take over school board meeting to prevent controversial vote


Original, including transcript, here.

Bio

Elisa Meza is a student at the University of Arizona studying English and Mexican American Studies. She is currently a youth organizer with UNIDOS in Tucson, Arizona and an editorial writer for her university's paper, the Arizona Daily Wildcat.

FUKUSHIMA-ING THE U.S. EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

Blogger's Note: This is a "MUST READ" for all of you who fondly remember the many K-12 teachers who taught us to understand the world around us, think for ourselves, and thereby develop our own moral compass. What will it be like for our grandchildren?

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Chris Hedges' Columns

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

Posted on Apr 10, 2011

Photo illustration by PZS based on an image by Lin Pernille Photography

By Chris Hedges

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”

Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.  

“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”

“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”

The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.

“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”

“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.

“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.

Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.

“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”

Click here to check out Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges’ new Truthdig book, “The World As It Is: Dispatches On the Myth of Human Progress.”

Keep up with Chris Hedges’ latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges.