Americans are less likely than residents in many wealthy countries to believe children in their country have daily opportunities to learn and grow and are treated with dignity and respect. UNICEF agrees.
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: The War on Teacher Tenure
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This week:
My mother retired recently from teaching under pretty much the best possible working conditions one could expect in an American high school: she taught high school French in an Ohio suburb whose demographics are at least 90% white, ranging from middle to upper-middle class. By the end of her career, she was relatively decently paid. Her students weren’t hobbled by poverty or challenged due to not having mastered English. Since French was an elective, her kids pretty much wanted to be there (though getting cut due to low enrollment was a worry).
Still, it was a tough job. Sure, class is 8 to 3 and she got those long summer vacations. But I remember watching her get up at 5:45 so she could prepare for class during the calm before the morning bell. She rarely got home before 5 — there’s always some meeting to attend — and then she had to grade papers and prepare the next day’s classes. Teaching is a performance. You’ve got roughly six hours to fill, keeping the kids entertained and engaged enough to get them to pay attention to what they need to learn. It’s exhausting, especially when you were up until 11 the night before correcting tests and averaging grades.
The summers were nice, but my mom spent the last half of June and the better part of July crashed out, recuperating. As for the last half, it wasn’t like we could afford to go on any trips. Not on a crummy teacher’s salary. For the first few decades of a teacher’s career, the pay is crap.
Raises don’t keep up with inflation. Parents constantly complain, often without cause. Administrators constantly lard on more responsibility, more paperwork, more rules, always more stuff to do on the same crummy salary. Moreover, budgets are always being cut. Even in lily-white districts like my mom’s, teachers find themselves hitting the office supply store to buy stuff for their students — out of that crummy paycheck.
During the last few decades, particularly since Reagan, the Right has waged war on teachers and their unions. From No Child Left Behind to the sneakily anti-unon, anti-professionalization outfit Teach for America to the Common Core, conservatives are holding teachers accountable for their kids’ academic performance. Sometimes it’s fair. Sometimes it’s not. Even the smartest and hardest-working teacher is going to have trouble getting good state test scores out of a classroom full of kids brutalized by abuse at home, poverty, crime and neglect.
The latest skirmish in the edu-culture war is over tenure, and it’s unfolding this week in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Superintendent John Deasy of the Los Angeles Unified School District is supporting a lawsuit, backed by a right-wing front group called Students Matter, that would eliminate teacher tenure as we know it in California. Tenure, say nine students recruited as plaintiffs, makes it too hard to fire bad teachers.
Not so fast, counter the unions. “Tenure is an amenity, just like salary and vacation, that allows districts to recruit and retain teachers despite harder working conditions, pay that hasn’t kept pace and larger class sizes,” James Finberg, a union lawyer, told the court. It also protects workers/teachers from being fired over their political beliefs, gender and religion — or just being too “mouthy,” i.e., speaking out against budget cuts.
As a parent, it’s easy to see why it would be good to make it easier to fire bad teachers. As the son of a hard-working teacher, it’s easier to see why teachers would need tenure. As in any other workplace, which teachers are judged “good” or “bad” falls to the boss — in this case, usually the school principal — who may or may not render a fair judgment free of personal bias based on personality or philosophy. Accusations of wrongdoing or incompetence levied by parents may or may not be fair.
Until my mom got tenure, she was afraid of disciplining students. She didn’t dare be active in her union. She didn’t want to reveal, in a Republican town, that she was a Democrat. Tenure didn’t make her lazy after she got it, but it did make her more relaxed, less terrified of her boss. Which made her a better, wiser, smarter teacher.
Tenure doesn’t prevent districts from firing teachers. It makes it hard. (Not impossible: two percent of teachers get fired for poor performance annually.) Which, frankly, is something that every worker who has ever experienced an unfair review should be able to empathize with. If anything, the only thing wrong with tenure is that only teachers can get it.
Justice watch
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Man Paralyzed in Porta Potty Prank Gets $5 Million
http://nation.time.com/2014/02/06/man-paralyzed-in-porta-potty-prank-gets-5-million
SYNDICATED COLUMN: “90 Days” of BS, “90 Days” to Sell Out
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IN WHICH I CALL OUT HIPSTERS AND CELEBRITIES FOR THE RIDICULOUS ARGUMENTS THEY GAVE FOR VOTING FOR OBAMA
Politicians get called to account for their broken promises. So too should their celebrity supporters. When boldface names convince the hoi polloi to punch the chads that put their favorite candidates into positions of power, they must assume responsibility when their pitches and talking points turn out to be low-grade bullshit.
One of the most notable pairings of electoral politics and celebrity of the 2012 presidential campaign was the website/happening “90 Days, 90 Reasons.” Each day during the last three months running up to Election Day, one liberal Democratic actor, writer or musician recruited by Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s literary empire supplied an essay urging us to reelect Obama along with a reason to do so.
Disclosure: Eggers and I were friends during the 1990s, when I was a contributing editor to his Might magazine.
From New York Times esoterica compiler/”Bored to Death” actor John Hodgman to children’s author Lemony Snicket to “Mr. Show” comedian David Cross, the contributors to “90 Days” reads like a who’s-who of Gen X-meets-Millennial NPR-safe middlin’ liberalism. Which is fine — them’s Obama’s people.
What’s a little not fine is that so many of the arguments given in favor of The One are redundant: gay marriage, jobs for veterans, and abortion rights come up over and over. What’s a lot not OK is that so many of these pro-Obama talking points turn out, with a little hindsight (and in many cases none whatsoever), to be lies.
Lies lies. Not in-my-opinion lies.
Reason 24 to give Obama a second term in 2012, according to “The Kite Runner” author Khaled Hosseini, was that “Obama demonstrated prudent and effective leadership in helping bring about the fall of Muammar Gadhafi.” I…wow.
It’s not much in the news these days (gee, I wonder why?), but Libya is pretty much universally regarded as a failed state in the mold of Somalia or Afghanistan during the 1990s. Libya’s government is so weak as to be useless, there’s a civil war going on, and it has basically stopped producing oil. What Bush did to Afghanistan, replacing an oppressive regime with anarchy and lawlessness that was even worse, Obama did to Libya.
Obama doesn’t brag about Libya, and with good reasons that don’t include Benghazi.
Yet here you have Hosseini claiming “President Obama proceeded wisely, in allowing the U.S. to be a key player in a multi-national effort to support the rebels without committing to American air strikes.” Wisely. How does that include U.S. backing of radical Islamists? No airstrikes? Except for the most important one, ordering the airstrike that killed the Libyan leader, who might have met a different fate had he not been stupid enough to dismantle his nuclear weapons program.
Anything Hosseini says about politics should henceforth be regarded as fiction.
Then there’s Win Butler, singer for the band Arcade Fire. “Barack Obama is perhaps the greatest president of modern times at communicating directly with foreign populations,” Butler writes in Reason 86. I love that phrase “foreign populations.” File it next to that British imperialist classic “the natives” and the more contemporary “the locals.”
The thing is, even when Butler wrote that, it was the exact opposite of true. “Global approval of President Barack Obama’s policies has declined significantly since he first took office, while overall confidence in him and attitudes toward the U.S. have slipped modestly as a consequence,” Pew Research’s widely respected Global Attitudes Project, which measures global public opinion, reported in (cough) June 2012, about four months before Butler’s essay appeared. Approval of Obama’s foreign policies plunged between 2009 and 2012: down 15% in Europe, down 19% in Muslim countries, down 30% in China, down 17% in Mexico. No increase anywhere on the planet. Sorry, “foreign populations.”
The fact that the world hates us more under Obama than it did under Bush is not hard-to-come-by info. It was widely and repeatedly reported. If Butler didn’t know, he was a Google search away — as were his editors at McSweeney’s.
Many of the “90 Reasons” are so vague as to be hilarious. “President Obama is steady at the helm,” said ex-comedian/silent senator Al Franken. So was Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic. Shepard Fairey, the plagiarizing poster artist responsible for the 2008 Hope and Change posters, said he was “voting for Barack Obama because I believe evolution is real and possible. I want to see this country move forward, not backward.” “Forward, not backward” was Obama’s infamous soundbyte announcing his amnesty for CIA torturers. We are paying attention to these vacuous celebs, um, why?
Most unforgiveable are those who count on their readers’ ignorance to con them. Democrats worried in 2012 that the Democrats’ progressive base wouldn’t turn up at the polls. Lefties were pissed off that Obama hadn’t fought for traditional Democratic values. So Obama and his supporters tried to recast him as a fighter, a kicker of GOP ass, to counter the wuss prez problem.
Toward this end, several of the celebrity Obama bootlickers posted brazenly misleading essays to “90 Reasons.”
Novelist Mona Simpson claimed that “Barack Obama would reinstate the 1994 assault weapons ban.” Would, could, should…but not really. As of July 2012, it was clear that the ban was dead. Hindsight: Obama never pushed for it after he won again. Another writer, Karen Fowler, urged you to support Obama because he “opposes the Supreme Court’s Citizens United Decision.” Alas, Fowler’s implication — that he’d actually try to reverse it by proposing legislation — was based on exactly nothing.
It would be nice if Simpson, Fowler and the actress Molly Shannon, who wrote the words “President Obama’s actions remind me of the words of the great Roman philosopher, Cicero,” were to keep their political word-farts to themselves forevermore.
John Sayles’ contribution pains me most. I love that man’s movies. But he wrote this sentence, and it means he is politically dead to me: “Obama still has some respect for the truth.” Ahem: “If you like your current healthcare plan, you can keep it.”
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COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
More proof the worst show ever on HBO sucks
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Quotes hyping how awesome “Girls” is adds to evidence it fucking sucks
http://nyp.st/1fRO3Ee
Cartoon: CVS Runs Scared, Stops Selling Cigs
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Today CVS announced its plans to stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products. Here is a freelance cartoon commissioned by an individual reader (yes! you can do that) that he had been shopping around to various media outlets without success for the last month.
Philip Seymour Hoffman RIP
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I am saddened by the loss of one of our most prolific and talented actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman. In 2011 I was asked to produce political cartoons for the George Clooney film “The Ides of March” and several of them included depictions of the character played by Hoffman. From what I hear, he got a kick out of it. Here it is:
ANewDomainCartoon: Why the NSA Spies on Angry Birds
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My cartoon for ANewDomain muses how NSA spying on #AngryBirds may have begun.
People don’t want TPP, but Congress pushes it anyway
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Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, admits Obama is pushing free-trade pacts Americans don’t want because they take away jobs: “The country has always been ahead of Congress on trade agreements. The country has never wanted these very much.” http://nyti.ms/1jNAvxs
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Nick Lowe Ruined My Summer. Then He Changed My Life.
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Overplaying is a crime.
It is as tragic and as wrong as the contempt that lovers sometimes allow to transform their partner from an object of passion into a monster whom they behold only with scorn.
As a tween I couldn’t get enough of the Beatles; now I can’t run fast enough from any speaker spewing their music. What changed? Not Ringo plus those three other lads — if anything, they sound cleaner and crackle-pop-free and remastered through the sound equipment I can afford as a middle-aged adult. Objectively, they’re still a great band.
It’s all me.
Mostly to blame are countless DJs and their corporate masters at the hundreds of radio stations I’ve heard play the Beatles thousands of times. Add the breathless hype with which every unearthing of an alternative version of a lost demo is greeted — there was a reason those versions weren’t originally released.
As with chocolate and water and everything except sex, repetition begins as obsessive joy and ultimately turns everything sour.
But I’m guilty too. When I discovered the Beatles, I played them over and over until I knew every note and every word. As I did when I found out about Blondie. Did the same thing to the Ramones. And the Dead Kennedys. And Barcelona. And Ganymede.
But it’s different with the Beatles. You can overplay a song or a band without dead-ing them to yourself. I still feel happy when I hear the Ramones.
Overplaying is a zillion times worse when someone else does it to you. Free will is what makes it different. There’s a big gap between self-indulgence and — there’s no better word — torture carried out by others.
I have suffered two epic episodes of Being Overplayed To.
The first took place Thanksgiving weekend of 1982, when I was a sophomore at Columbia. Most students went home to their families; since I was a broke scholarship kid, I stayed at school. I shared a two-bedroom one-bathroom suite with an Israeli guy who, before he took off Wednesday afternoon, left a 45-rpm single of Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come On Eileen” on auto-repeat. He locked his door, and left.
My solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine was never fiercer.
As though it happened yesterday and hot oil were dripping on my eyes, I recall every note and every word of that accursed song as though it were Thanksgiving 1982 all over again: “Come on Eileen / Oh, I swear what he means / At this moment you mean everything / You in that dress / My thoughts I confess / Verge on dirty / Oh, come on Eileen.”
Objectively a great song. A great song that makes me want to die.
I made it all night Wednesday, all day Thursday and all night Thursday. By Friday morning, having heard “Come On Eileen” more than 600 times (“Come on Eileen / Oh, I swear what he means”), a crazy idea presented itself. There was no other way: I climbed down to the steam tunnels beneath the building, found the circuit breakers for my dorm, killed the power for a minute, and turned it back on again.
Song over. Years of recovery began.
A second, worse musical trauma was vested upon me by two roommates during the summer of 1984. We were fans of, among other things, the British pub rockers Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe. So when Lowe — to the extent that he is known in the States, people may recall “Cruel to be Kind,” and the Elvis Costello track “(What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding” was originally his) released the most raucous LP of his career, “Nick Lowe and His Cowboy Outfit,” it was occasion for celebration at our various short-term sublets.
Unfortunately for me, I was the only one in the apartment with a job. The lion’s share of celebrating therefore fell to Dan and Chris, who stayed up until three or four in the morning, drinking and smoking and blasting Lowe’s Tex-Mex-meets-?-and-the-Mysterians apocalypse “Half a Boy and Half a Man” you guessed it, over and over.
Rarely if ever did we they ever make it to side one, track three, “Maureen,” a paean to a “skinny little hill of beans.” Another objectively great song.
Dan and Chris had an understanding. I would go through the motions of going to sleep at midnight, setting the alarm for six am. Dan and Chris would blare “Half a Boy and Half a Man” for an hour. I’d go out and yell at them. They’d turn it down. Ten minutes later, back to full volume.
This was our life.
Over the last three decades, I have continued to hold the work of Nick Lowe dear. I have replaced my vinyl LPs with CDs. I have seen him live. I have even tolerated Lowe’s current, late-period, slow (i.e. dull) lounge period. But there was one LP I never replaced. One CD I never bought. The thought of hearing “Half a Boy and Half a Man” again triggered the same feeling as reading one of those Facebook messages from an ex-girlfriend who wonders if you’re divorced yet, as though you had broken up by accident.
Until a few weeks ago. I was at Amoeba Records, the best music store in the U.S. There it was: a used copy of “Cowboy Outfit” for $24.99. (It’s out of print and hard to find.)
I hesitated. Was I ready? Finally, I decided that this was one of those existential “what kind of person am I?” dilemmas. Am I someone stuck in the past, who allows the traumas of the first Reagan Administration to scar me for life? Or someone ready to move on?
I bought the CD.
It sat on my stereo cabinet. Then, last night, I put it on.
Damn it’s good.
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COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
