Live Long and Prosper...

ANTI-FACT EDUCATION - AGAINST SCIENCE
We're used to ultra right-wing, anti-intellectuals screeching against schools teaching real science.

School boards, individual parents, and state legislators argue against teaching accepted science such as evolution, safety during the pandemic, and climate change. Indiana, as one of the reddest of the red states, is no slouch in that regard. For example, the National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund have published a report, Making the Grade: How State Public School Science Standards Address Climate Change. Indiana rated a D which may be a surprise because it's too high. Why isn't it an F?

One reviewer commented...

"Interestingly, there is a good deal of focus on science and engineering solution-oriented perspectives, and this is why I scored the ’there’s hope’ section higher. This ... focus could be very effective if it was used to address and ideate climate adaptation and mitigation solutions.”

Notice the "if." So, despite the poor showing for Indiana, "there's hope," though I doubt I'll live to see a positive outcome.

...AND HISTORY

The current insanity over Critical Race Theory has added history and social studies to the mix.

Many of the same science-denying activists and legislators who are trying their best to "protect" American school children from climate change, public health efforts, and evolution, are now trying to "protect" students from actual history which doesn't always present the "American Experience" in a good light.

Instead of teaching children that the freedoms so eloquently described in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution should be taken as goals, not reality...that such freedoms were not available to women, native people, and hundreds of thousands of Africans and their descendants enslaved throughout the entire country, they want us to focus on "American Exceptionalism" -- that the USA is somehow God-ordained to lead the world morally as well as militarily. Somehow, if we hide the ugly side of our history it will be ignored and forgotten.

Apparently, they don't want the next generation of Americans to learn...

• that the founding fathers included slave holders

• that Reconstruction ended when white supremacists in the former Confederacy decided that formerly enslaved people shouldn't have the right to vote despite the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments

• that racism existed in the Union states as well as the South

• that redlining was a thing

• that Black veterans weren't allowed to reap the benefits of the GI Bill

• that the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s was fueled because of the racism of white supremacists

• that we still need the 1965 Voting Rights Bill

Instead, their goal is to instill our children with "alternate facts."

But if we hide the true facts the goal of of the Declaration and the Constitution will never be achieved.

TEXAS LEADS THE WAY

Derek Black reported today that Texas is leading the charge to hide our history...

To be clear, it doesn’t ban discussions or readings on these people & topics, but it makes them optional. This begs the question of whether it is possible to teach civics w/o discussing the people & movements that expanded the civic body to include more than just white men. 2/2

— Derek W. Black (@DerekWBlack) July 18, 2021

Texas Senate Passes Bill to Remove Required Lessons on Civil Rights Movements from Public School Curriculums

It’s amazing how out of all the things to spend endless legislative time and energy on, hamstringing teachers from talking about the messy parts of American history solely because it makes white people uncomfortable is what gets the most attention and the fastest action from Republican lawmakers.

Well, both that and also speedily passing restrictive voting legislature because it’s the only way Republicans can stay in power.

In fact, this bill on teaching curriculum is currently stalled in the Texas House of Representatives because House Democrats are in Washington D.C. advocating on behalf of equitable voting rights. This is all in opposition to a voting bill that would place more restrictions on the state’s already restrictive voting process.

There is a concerted effort on behalf of many Americans to hide the truth from our children...the truth about science, and the truth about our history. How "exceptional" can America be when we're sending our children to school and encouraging them to remain ignorant?

🇺🇸⚗️🗽

Bye-bye!

SPOILER ALERT: DEVOS IS IGNORANT

Betsy DeVos Warns That Biden Will Pick Education Secretary with Background in Education

Andy Borowitz reminds us, in his own entertaining way, that Betsy DeVos hates public schools and knows nothing about education.

While Borowitz's article is satire, it sadly describes more than one of the nation's Secretaries of Education (and Bill Bennett probably hated public schools just as much as Betsy...and he was only barely better at keeping it hidden). In fact, knowing nothing about education seems to have been a prerequisite for most of the eleven secretaries. Only three of eleven Secretaries of Education have any experience in K-12 education. And, as far as I know, only one of those three, Terrel Bell, ever actually taught in a public K-12 classroom. John King Jr., who was President Obama's Secretary of Education for one year, taught in charter schools for three years.

We've had lawyers, scientists, political science majors, and athletes as Secretary of Education. Some of them, but certainly not all, attended public schools. Some of them, but certainly not all, sent their children to public schools. DeVos might have been the worst, but she was not the first who knew nothing about education nor the first who didn't care a hoot about public schools.

When was the last time we had someone without a law degree as Attorney General? When was the last time we had someone without a medical degree as Surgeon General?

Fifty-six million children attend schools in the United States. Ninety percent of those children attend public schools. It's time for someone who knows something about education, and public education specifically, to be Secretary of Education.

Calling the prospect a “nightmare scenario,” Betsy DeVos warned that President-elect Joe Biden will pick an Education Secretary with a background in education.

The outgoing Education Secretary warned that putting someone with a “pro-education bias” in her job would be like “naming a fox to be Secretary of Hens.”

“For the past four years, I have worked tirelessly to keep our schools free from education,” she said. “It deeply saddens me to think that all of my hard work will go to waste.”

TODAY'S STUDENTS ARE STILL LEARNING

Kids Are NOT Falling Behind. They Are Surviving a Pandemic

Imagine a time when education policy is developed and implemented by people who actually know something about child development and education.

The key is providing people with the opportunities and the circumstances that maximize the likelihood of learning. Not pedantically checking off skills and benchmarks.

None of this is new.

I am not putting forward a radical theory of cognitive development.

Every teacher with an education degree is taught this in their developmental psychology courses. That’s why so many educational leaders don’t know anything about it.

Policymakers rarely have actual education degrees. In fact, many of them have never taught a day in their lives – especially at the K-12 level.

For example, Teach for America takes graduates from other fields of study (often business), gives them a couple weeks crash course in basic schoolology before throwing them in the classroom for a few years. Then they leave pretending to know everything there is about education, ready to advise lawmakers, work at think tanks, or otherwise set policy.

Imagine how things would change if we expected our educational leaders to actually comprehend the field of study they’re pretending to steer.

END WASTEFUL TESTING

Testing Students This Spring Would Be a Mistake: Especially now, high-stakes tests tell us very little we can’t know in other ways

Dr. Shepard has spent more than fifty years working and researching education topics. She's much more qualified in the field of education than the "reformers" who insist on yearly national testing. She's more qualified than the politicians and policy-makers who lobby for high stakes "accountability" in public education. She knows that there's no reason to give wasteful and unreliable tests to students who have been traumatized by a pandemic for the better part of two school years.

Even under normal circumstances, high-stakes testing has negative consequences. State assessment programs co-opt valuable instructional time, both for weeklong test administration and for test preparation. Accountability pressures often distort curriculum, emphasizing testlike worksheets and focusing only on tested subjects.

Recent studies of data-driven decisionmaking warn us that test-score interpretations can lead to deficit narratives—blaming children and their families—instead of prompting instructional improvements. High-stakes tests can also lead to stigmatizing labels and ineffective remedial interventions, as documented by decades of research.

Most significantly, teachers report that they and their students experience high degrees of anxiety, even shame, when test scores are publicly reported. These stressors would undoubtedly be heightened when many students will not yet have had the opportunity to learn all of what is covered on state tests. A high proportion of teachers are already feeling burnt-out.

CHILDREN ARE PEOPLE

Children are not our future

Children will become adults. In future years they will be the leaders and policy-makers of our society. It's our job to teach them now, and raise them now, so that they grow and develop into compassionate, rational, competent human beings.

In the meantime, we need to treat them like people.

Plenty of adults act as if children are a mystery, as if nobody can know how to talk to this alien species. There is no mystery. Children are people. People who haven't yet developed some physiological and psychological aspects, people without limited experience in the world, but people all the same. Not future people. People right now, today.

This "children are the future" talk makes it easy to justify the kinds of bad policy we've seen in the last few decades. Sure, let's start sitting them down to study academic subjects earlier and earlier because there's nothing about what's going on in a four-year-old's life right now that could possibly be as important as getting her packed full of employer-desired skills for the future. It's easy to deny childhood when you think that all of a child's Real Life is in the future.

"Children are the future" is often used as a motivational nudge for funding and/or supporting education and can feel like part of a larger conversation that started with "We don't need to spend money on that--they're just children." It's a conversation one would expect from people who measure a person's worth in their utility (in particular, their utility to employers). It's a hard conversation, because if you don't know that you should care about, look after, cherish and hold close our children, I don't know how to explain it to you. They are bundles of raw humanity, undiluted and unvarnished. That ought to be good enough.

THE DOCTOR IS IN

“Dr.” Jill Biden Is Fine with Me.

Anti-intellectualism continues to rear its ugly head in the U.S. The Wall Street Journal article and other articles denouncing Jill Biden as somehow fraudulent for using the title "Doctor" (see here, here, and here) are just the most recent indications that ignorance is "in" -- knowledge, experience, and competency is "out."

Last month Marco Rubio denigrated President-elect Biden's choice of "Ivy League" graduates for his cabinet because they were "normal." I assume he, like the leader of his party, prefers the "poorly educated."

That trend against education and competency has been clear in the current federal administration. Take a look at the Secretary of Education (a political science major) and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (a neurosurgeon), for example. Neither has any experience or training in the field that their government department oversees. They might be intelligent in their own way (and you have no idea how hard it was for me to type that!), but that doesn't mean that they are competent at what they have been charged to do over the last four years.

My hunch is, however, that the uproar about Dr. Biden's degree has more to do with the low opinion the academically snobbish have for teachers than whether non-medical doctors deserve the title "Doctor." It has more to do with her field of study than with insulting people who are educated. Why is there a lower opinion of the field of education in academia? In the US, at least in the last one-hundred years, teaching has been a job for women. Two-thirds of America's teachers are women, and the male-dominated culture can't imagine that a "woman's job" takes any skill.

I know people with Ed.D degrees. I know people with Ph.D. degrees. They have all earned the title "Doctor."

Biden is headed for the White House, and given her newly-heightened profile, I am not surprised that someone rose to the ugly occasion of trying to cheapen her educational achievement, not because Biden herself was using her title to market herself or some ed-reform product, nor because she was using the title to leverage some other personal gain, but just because an opportunity to show oneself to be a horse’s posterior presented itself.

Jill Biden is widely known as an educator; therefore, her use of the title, “Dr.,” is reasonably associated with that well-known context, even on Twitter. There is no “MD” confusion, and therefore, no problem.

As for her dissertation, I read it. Given the criticism levied against Biden for her Ed.D., I wanted to gauge the effort she had to expend in writing her dissertation and whether her work might be considered a useful contribution to her field (i.e., whether someone might use the findings to inform either practice or future research). After examining her work, I see her effort on its pages, and I believe what she has to offer does indeed contribute to the knowledge base of student experience at the community college level.

A VACCINE FOR CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Conspiracy Theories

The internet has opened the door for Americans to gain wide-ranging expanded knowledge...but, as Isaac Asimov wrote, "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

With that expanded knowledge comes expanded falsehood...conspiracy theories. Teachers are tasked with teaching students how to read critically...to sift through massive amounts of information and learn how to tell truth from falsehood. The state of the nation today would indicate that we have failed. Conspiracy theories abound.

Take the current worldwide health crisis. According to conspiracy theories...

• the virus is spread by 5G towers, 

• masks will starve your body of oxygen,

• Bill Gates is going to use the coronavirus vaccine to inject us with microchips,

• coronavirus is a Chinese bio-weapon

[For debunking information see Debunking COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories]

The National Center for Science Education offers a way to combat conspiracy theories with critical thinking...with the help of an acronym CONSPIR.

John Cook, a frequent NCSE collaborator who focuses on combating misconceptions, recently co-authored The Conspiracy Theory Handbook. During a recent conversation with Cook, he noted: “While we do not have a vaccine for COVID-19 at this time, we do have a vaccine for misinformation and conspiracy theories — critical thinking."

So how do we guide our students to critically think? Isn’t that the million-dollar question? In the case of conspiracy theories, just remember the acronym CONSPIR.

By analyzing information using these seven traits, students — or any concerned citizen — can easily pick out the red flags of conspiratorial thinking. If you can answer yes to any of the following questions when reading articles about COVID-19, chances are you have stumbled across an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory or intentional disinformation...

THE TROUBLE WITH MASKS

Palm Beach County residents express outrage over mask requirement: 'Devil's laws'

Even though medical professionals wear masks for hours at a time (think of a heart or brain surgeon performing an 8- to 10-hour surgery...as well as the doctors and nurses who assist) mask-wearing as a preventative for passing the coronavirus is being accused of "killing people" for lack of oxygen. Others claim that having a municipal ordinance requiring mask-wearing is a violation of our constitutional rights -- even though many of those folks accept the laws requiring wearing seat belts in cars, car seats for children, and protective helmets while motorcycling.

Witness...

A Palm Beach County Board of County Commissioners public comment session went viral Wednesday after residents denounced mandatory masking laws as “devil’s laws” that would “throw God’s wonderful breathing system out the door.”

One attendee, Sylvia Ball, said she was “very sad to see the authorities stomping on our constitutional rights,” adding, “They want to throw God's wonderful breathing system out the door.

NO MORE TESTS?

New coronavirus spike alarms Republicans, but not Trump

Does the President's statement below mean that the U.S. Education Department will no longer require annual achievement tests for children?

"If we didn't have standardized reading tests, we wouldn't have poor readers. We only have poor readers because we test..."

“If we didn’t test, we wouldn’t have cases,” he said later at a shipyard in Marinette, Wis. “But we have cases because we test...”

TYSON ON SCIENTIFIC LITERACY

Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Why Science Matters During COVID-19

In this episode of Star Talk, Neil deGrasse Tyson reminds us that science matters...

There comes a time when really the public needs to listen to scientists, in this case, to medical professionals...not only people in public, but people in power of legislation and policy, had the ear of scientists and elected not to take the warnings seriously.

K-12 SCHOOLS AS CHILD-CARE CENTERS

“Parents Need to Go to Work” Does Not Stop COVID at the School Door.

Side note...one of the reasons politicians are so anxious for children to return to school is for babysitting.

When I hear discussions about schools reopening in the fall, I already know what two chief reasons will be offered.

One is that students need to be educated. Of course they do, and as a career teacher, I desire to educate. I have dedicated my professional life to educating generations of children, and I miss being at school, in my classroom, with my students.

The second reason, which seems to follow quickly on the heels of the first, is that “parents need to get back to work”– the implication being that schools need to open so that parents once again have the built-in child care that the K12 school day (and its auxiliary programs) offers.

ANTI-SCIENCE AS ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM

Franklin Graham Thinks Science And Religion Must Fight. As Usual, He’s Wrong

Anthony Fauci has the credentials and experience. We ought to listen to him.

“One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are – for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable – they just don’t believe science and they don’t believe authority.”

Fauci added, “So when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it, who’s talking about science, that there are some people who just don’t believe that, and that’s unfortunate because, you know, science is truth.”

Americans need to learn that science is a process, not a list of facts. It involves continuing observation and exploration, multiple hypotheses, and then more observation and exploration. Rarely does it end. For example, the Germ Theory of Disease (just a theory?) can be traced back to the 11th Century A.D. and was updated in the 14th, 16th, 18th and 19th centuries. We're still learning about the "germs" that infect us...today.

Scientists are the original fact-checkers. If you claim you have made a scientific discovery, dozens of your scientist colleagues will try to prove you wrong.  Sometimes, even when there's a scientific consensus, someone comes along and changes everything. The fact that scientific information changes is a feature, not a bug.

Finally, the fact that scientists sometimes disagree about a certain topic is a sign of health and vitality in that discipline, not a weakness. Eventually, the scientific method, including the use of double-blind experiments, leads to a consensus. It’s all right for a scientist to challenge a prevailing theory, but he or she had better be able to produce some research and back it up with experiments that can be replicated by others under the same conditions – or those ideas will fall by the wayside.

Fauci is right about resistance to science being an undercurrent in American society...

SAGAN: WE'VE BEEN BAMBOOZLED

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM

The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education

In 2012 53% of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents in the U.S. believed that higher education was a net positive for the nation and 35% had a negative view. Now, in 2019, those numbers have reversed. 59% of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents have a negative view of higher education while 33% have a positive view. Over the same time period, the results for Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents have been consistent -- about 66% positive and about 20% negative.

Ed Brayton, who blogs at Dispatches from the Culture Wars "is not at all" surprised by this.

Most Republicans Reject Higher Education

This is not at all surprising. The right, and Trump in particular, have made rejection of expertise and knowledge almost an article of faith. They look at university faculty that leans liberal, decide they’re the enemy and demonize them in every way possible. Trump embodies this with his constant rejection of science, learning and experience. No one knows anything about anything but him, so he doesn’t need no fancy schmancy liberal eggheads telling him that global warming is real or that perhaps he should listen to our career civil servants in the diplomatic corps, who might just know something he doesn’t about the countries they’ve been deeply involved with for decades.

Not only is this not surprising, but, as the surveys have shown, it's not new either. In 2012 more than a third of America's Republicans thought that a post-secondary education had a net negative impact on our society. While that's less than in 2019, it's still a lot.


QUICK HISTORY

This strain of popular anti-intellectualism has been part of American life since the beginning of the Republic. It was present in the religious objections to the Constitution, and according to Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, is at least in part, the result of the particular strain of Protestantism which set the tone for the development of the country.

In more modern times...

• Vice-Presidential candidate Richard Nixon called former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson an "egghead"

• Republican Vice-President Spiro Agnew railed against an "effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals"

• the current President claimed to love "the poorly educated"

However, the fact that the percentage of Republican Americans who disdain expertise has risen is more reflective of the direction of the Republican Party under its current leadership than any change in the number of Americans who would like their children to go to college.

By the way, it's still true that the more education one has, the higher one's income prospects...and the difference is growing. In 1970 the difference in average income between those with a college degree and those with just a high school diploma was $14,400 per year. By 2018 that difference had nearly doubled to $25,000.

Majorities of both Republicans and Democrats don't like the post-secondary impact of high tuition costs, but nearly 80% of Republicans include the so-called left-leaning tendency of college professors in their reasons for their negative view of colleges and universities. Interestingly, this further divides by age. 96% of Republicans over 65 think liberal professors impose their beliefs on the young, whereas slightly over half (56%) of Republicans between the ages of 18 and 34 feel that way. While that's still a majority, it implies that a large number of young Republicans don't see post-secondary liberal professorial indoctrination as a problem. One would think that the younger sample rather than the older, would have a better handle on what is going on in colleges and universities today.

FIGHTING BACK

In the meantime, the current administration ignores scientific (and other) expertise when making decisions which affect us all.

The Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in their report, The State of Science in the Trump Era (2019),

Scientists—whether agency staff, experts in leadership positions, or nongovernmental scientists on advisory committees—have long advised policymakers when good decisions depend on scientific evidence. The Trump administration is excluding this expertise from decisionmaking...

Our nation's landmark public health and environmental laws require the use of science to set standards that protect people and preserve our natural resources. The Trump administration has ignored or sidestepped many of these processes...

In fact, the administration is not just ignoring expertise, but actually censoring science that doesn't fit its pro-profit or political agenda.

Who does President Trump treat worse than anyone else? Scientists.

In 2017, Interior Department officials — including then-Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt — blocked the release of a comprehensive analysis about the threat that three widely used pesticides pose to endangered species, requiring the report’s authors to use a narrower standard for determining the risk of the chemicals. That year, the government also halted a study by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine on the health risks of mountaintop removal mining in Appalachian states, wasting $455,110 that had already been spent on the process.

We could go on: The administration has suppressed, blocked or ignored scientific research on the environmental effects of mining in national forests, the dangers of asbestos, the status of endangered species, the effect a citizenship question would have on the U.S. Census, the safety of children’s products and countless other issues.

The education community must step up. We must prepare tomorrow's leaders to repair the intellectual damage coming from the current administration.

This is the intellectual rot of the Trump era. It’s more than just an anti-big government ideology; it’s a systematic assault on science across the federal government. These actions will reverberate in our government for years to come, even after the Trump administration is gone, in the form of policy decisions we make without the benefit of the best evidence available. And worse, Americans may not even be aware of how they are being deceived and deprived.

That’s the true scandal of Trump’s war on scientists. No other group is so pervasively targeted and so thoroughly ignored. Yet it is their voices, more than any other, that our nation needs in this disturbing political moment.

CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE

Reversing the anti-science direction of the country will take time and won't be easy. We can do it if we focus on today's students...tomorrow's leaders.

In his last interview (go to 3:55 for this quote), Carl Sagan warned (1996),

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.

If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes ambling along.

It's a thing that Jefferson lay great stress on. It wasn't enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in a constitution or a bill of rights. The people had to be educated and they had to practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise we don't run the government. The government runs us.

What can we do? The charlatans are here...it's time to step up.

WTF! Some days are like that.


DEAR LIFE: WTF

A lifelong teacher

Everyone who knows me or reads this blog knows by now that our BFD of NEIFPE, Phyllis Bush, passed away last week. Last year Phyllis gave me a tee shirt that said, "DEAR LIFE: WTF."

I agree. The children of Indiana have lost a champion in the fight to save public education.

You can read some of the many tributes to Phyllis HERE.

“Whether it is taking a kid to the zoo or to Zesto for ice cream, whether it is writing a letter to your legislators, whether it is running for office, whether it is supporting your favorite charity, DO IT! Monday morning quarterbacks are of little use to anyone. Whatever you do, live your life to the fullest. Do what matters to you.”

Godspeed, Phyllis. You were a teacher. You did what matters.

SHOOTING TEACHERS AS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: WTF

Teachers were ‘shot’ with fake bullets ‘execution style’ during active shooter training, ISTA says

There aren't enough WTF's for this news. The idea that teachers need to "learn" how terrifying it is to be in an active shooter situation is just WTF insane.

The problem is not that teachers (and students) don't know how to react in an "active shooter" situation...the problem is that there are too many f#%@ing weapons in the hands of lunatics.

During active shooter training, some Indiana teachers were “shot execution style” with “projectiles” that caused welts and blood, according to the Indiana State Teachers Association (ISTA).

The ISTA addressed their concerns about these drills in a series of tweets on Wednesday as members of the association testified in front of the Senate Education Committee.

“The teachers were terrified but were told not to tell anyone what happened. Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time, and the shooting process was repeated,” the ISTA said.

Teachers Union: No Teacher Should Be Shot at As Part of Training

This comment should not have to be said...WTF is wrong with people?

"Our view is that no teacher, no educator should be put in a small room and shot at as part of a training process for active shooter training," said Dan Holub, executive director of the ISTA, talking to WISH-TV.

THE CURRENT WORLDWIDE EXTINCTION: WTF

Let the children strike as a lesson to all who live on this planet

Instead of ignoring nearly all the scientists in the world and continuing to do damage to the only home in the universe humans can inhabit, one would think that an entire species of intelligent beings would understand that fouling your own home is simply stupid.

The children who marched last week -- all over the world -- trying to get the adults in their lives to pay attention are the ones who are going to have to pay the price.

...young people enjoy similar rights and freedoms as we all do. Therefore, we should listen to children carefully when they speak to us about their lives. In fact, increased depression and anxiety that have led to dramatic erosion of children’s mental health and well-being around the world is, at least partly, due to their worries about the state of our planet. Active citizenship means having a voice about things that affect their lives.

Trump once again requests deep cuts in U.S. science spending

WTF!

At the Environmental Protection Agency, the administration is again proposing to take an ax to climate and research programs. Overall, the agency’s budget would shrink by nearly one-third, from about $8.8 billion to $6.1 billion. Its science and technology programs would be funded at about $440 million, nearly 40% below the current level of $718 million. The budget line for air and energy research, which includes climate change science, would drop by more than $60 million, from about $95 million to $32 million. Congress has repeatedly rejected such proposed cuts.

FYI

The Constitution of the United States
Article. I. Section. 8.

The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN ACTION

Pete Buttigieg is smart, but if you like him you won’t dwell on it

Ok...so when there is someone who is intelligent we need to pretend that he's not so smart because intelligence will lose him votes! WTF!

...I cringed a bit when I saw a tweet making the rounds talking about how he’d learned Norwegian to read more books by a Norwegian author for whom he could not find translations. I mean, that’s obviously very impressive, but talking about how smart he is doesn’t do him any political favors.

In a blog post about him I wrote about nine years ago when he was running for Treasurer, I mentioned, “we have an anti-intellectual streak a mile wide in this country where we want politicians to go with their gut and not any silly book-learnin’.”

...I suppose it’s some sort of progress that I think his educational achievements are likely to cost him more votes than the fact that he’s gay.

With about a dozen Democrats running for president (and a few more still "undecided"), there's no doubt that the race for the 2020 presidency has begun. What are their goals for public education? What are their goals for returning us to science-based policies? Before we look to the future, however, let's take a quick look at the past...

THE CAMPAIGN: 2016

During the last presidential election campaign, the candidates rarely discussed science and education beyond, a few topics; The Republican candidates were in favor of school choice and didn't "believe in" climate change; The Democratic candidates were in favor of expanded early childhood education, ending the student debt crisis, and gave lip service to "doing something" about climate change. Once the candidates were chosen, however, this discussion effectively stopped, and we were treated to a daily media deluge of insults and invective.

SCIENCE AND EDUCATION: NO CHANGE

Just like in 2016, the positions of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates on America's public schools and climate change are vague, though supportive. The Republican incumbent, along with his party-mates, is continuing to call for school privatization and to take an anti-science position on nearly everything except the "space force."

In his 2019 State of the Union Speech, the President was too concerned with investigations and with ignoring U.S. intelligence organizations to even mention climate change.

More Trump fantasyland as the world fries

Just as scientists are raising alarms about the disintegration of Antarctica’s massive ice shelves and ice sheets, Trump said nothing about global warming. Maybe that’s for the better: Whenever he addresses the issue, it is usually to mock those who care about the planet’s already well-documented, rapid environmental changes. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is dying before the world’s eyes, and the leader of the Earth’s most powerful nation has nothing helpful to say about modern society’s complicity in the catastrophes to come, let alone how to lower climate risks.

He did, however, discuss education -- for all of about 10 seconds. He spoke a mere 15 words about education, and used those words to call for school "choice." He said, 

To help support working parents, the time has come to pass school choice for America’s children.

[For an excellent discussion of how the "reformers" have co-opted the word "choice" see Curmudgucation's Reclaiming Choice]

THE WAR ON SCIENCE EDUCATION

The current administration's anti-science policies are nothing new and have emboldened and strengthened the decades-old attack on science education.

Florida, for example, is just one of several states where an attack on science education is strong. [See also Indiana, Arizona, and elsewhere.] The Florida Citizens' Alliance is working to bring "conservative values" to public schools. It is interesting that among those "conservative values" is the denial of anthropogenic climate change. One would think that "conservation" of our planet would be a value that "conservatives" support.

Florida Citizens’ Alliance Is Brainwashing Kids to Think Climate Science Is Fake

Prominent on the group’s expanded menu of concerns was climate change, and humanity’s presumed role in driving it. The Alliance’s members began line-reading school textbooks for violations of their beliefs, creating carefully detailed reports on how many times, and in what context, elementary and high school students were learning about rising seas, or melting ice in Antarctica. “Unfortunately, what it’s become is indoctrination and not education. That’s our major problem,” Vernon said, echoing a prevailing concern among members of the Alliance and like-minded conservatives everywhere: the unchecked power and control over social institutions by perceived liberal elites. “We’re really concerned,” he added, “that our kids are not being educated, [but] simply indoctrinated in the philosophy of the academic aristocracy.”

With the ascension of the Alliance, the Sunshine State has become ground zero for an intensifying ideological battle taking place across the nation—one that has conservative groups wrestling for control over how climate science will be taught to American students. The science classroom, after all, remains the dominant venue in which those students first encounter the topic, and it greatly informs how students eventually square-up to the veracity of climate change—either as something they believe to be happening and worth responding to politically, or as a phenomenon of nature, undeserving of public funds and political action.

Two members of the Alliance have been chosen by Florida's new governor to serve on his education advisory team.


[Take a look at the above video's YouTube page for additional links.]

The video above makes passing reference to the idea that humans used to believe that the Earth is flat. Sadly, the belief in a flat Earth has been growing lately...

Science Behind the Fiction: the Flat Earth Movement is Growing. It's Very Scary.

It might be tempting to dismiss globe skeptics as a lunatic fringe, supporters of an idea as antiquated as ancient Mesopotamia, where belief in a disk Earth covered in a dome was common. But the documentary makes a compelling case — not for their ideas, but for compassion and calm discussion. The subjects on screen are painted, not as charlatans or kooks, but as genuinely inquisitive folks who have been misled either by themselves or others. And, according to a recent study, they may not be as fringe as you might think.

Published on April 2, 2018, the study asked more than 8,000 adults in the United States whether or not they believed in a flat or globular Earth. A surprising 16 percent expressed some degree of skepticism. If these results are representative of the U.S. population as a whole, then nearly one in six adults are, at the very least, unsure about the nature of our world.

It's clear that science education based on actual science has a challenging future.

LONG TERM GOALS

With the help of Mitch McConnell and the current White House, the right-wing has successfully reshaped America's federal courts. This has been a long term goal of conservatives and the Religious Right. They have framed elections in terms of America's judicial system while liberals have generally been oblivious to the takeover. This tranformed judicial system will shape our national policies for decades to come.

Meanwhile, some of the same members of the right-wing have set their sights on the future of America...our school-aged children...and their knowledge of science.

Voucher programs in dozens of states allow public funds to go to schools teaching fake science. Legislatures are adopting anti-science curricula (often without the help of education professionals). Informational articles such as Revamped 'anti-science' education bills in United States find success, New wave of anti-evolution bills hit states, and What the latest assaults on science education look like, have documented the attack on science education. [See also A Baker's-Dozen-Plus-One of Half-Baked Measures.]

The long term goal of anti-science supporters is to raise up a citizenry ignorant about how our world works. Instead, some of them want voters who won't question the appointment of cabinet members in the pay of the fossil fuel industry. Others want to train a generation of taxpayers who are so ignorant they won't complain when entire ecosystems are destroyed in the search for more gas...more coal...more oil. And still others fear that the truth of science will destroy their religious world view and postpone their dreams of theocracy.

To ensure our future, our children need real science instead of misinformation. To do otherwise is to risk the economic, cultural, and environmental losses such ignorance will bring.

Humanity Needs Science To Survive And Thrive

Science is what's led our society to the present day, where food is plentiful, abundant and safe. Where diseases can be treated, cured or even prevented outright before you ever get sick. Where we can quantify the threat that dirty air, contaminated water or a hole in the ozone layer has on humanity. And where new advances lead to new technologies, enhancing our quality of life to levels that humans, even just a hundred years ago, couldn't possibly have foreseen. If we want this to continue, we absolutely need to listen to, accept, and value what science has to offer in all of these regards.

Those of us who understand the importance of science must focus our attention on a long term goal as well. We have to teach science truth to the next generation of Americans.

I added a number to the title of this post because I read the latest by Nancy Flanagan, an education blogger who is ending her tenure at Education Week to go out on her own. Read her stuff...

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Kolbert shows us, without a shadow of a doubt, that the Earth is warming. Our food supplies and oxygen supply are at risk.

Simply put...There is just one country in the entire world – the United States, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry – which refuses to accept the truth. The ecosystem which has allowed humans to survive and thrive is dying; we're killing it. We need to pay attention to the world's scientists before it's too late.

...having freed ourselves from the constraints of evolution, humans nevertheless remain dependent on the earth's biological and geochemical systems. By disrupting these systems – cutting down tropical rainforests, altering the composition of the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans – we're putting our own survival in danger. Among the many lessons that emerge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results. When a mass extinction occurs, it takes out the weak and also lays low the strong. V-shaped graptolites were everywhere, and then they were nowhere. Ammonites swam around for hundreds of millions of years, and then they were gone. Richard Leakey has warned that

"Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction but also risks being one of its victims."

THE PAY GAP

Teacher Pay Gap Reaches a Record High

Teachers are compensated at a lower rate than other professionals. Ironically, the teacher pay gap is approximately the same as the gender pay gap. Women earn less than men for the same work. The teaching profession, which is traditionally filled by women, receives less than those professions traditionally filled by men.

When adjusting only for inflation, the researchers found that teachers, compared to other college graduates, are paid nearly $350 less per week in salary in 2017, or 23 percent less.

When they adjusted for education, experience, and demographic factors, the gap had barely shrunk – 18.7 percent, up from 17 percent in 2015.

While benefits such as health insurance and retirement improved for teachers relative to other professionals during that period, the total compensation (wage and benefit) penalty for public school teachers grew from 10.5 percent to 11.1 percent in 2017.

VOUCHERS DIVERT PUBLIC MONEY TO RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS

The False Promise Of School Vouchers

Schools which accept vouchers in Indiana have a choice. They can either accept or reject your child. They don't have to justify their choice. They can reject your child because of your family's religious beliefs, your child's sexual or gender preference, your child's academic achievement level, or his or her behavior problems. The only "choice" parents have is whether or not to fill out an application for a private school. After that, it's up to the school to choose the child.

Vouchers do not improve school achievement. Voucher schools are not subject to public oversight as are public schools.

...new studies have shown, not only do the claims made by voucher supporters fail to withstand closer scrutiny, these programs also allow private, often religious, schools to receive a skyrocketing volume of taxpayer funds without oversight. These facts should be enough to dissuade anyone from the notion that private school voucher programs are what’s best for America’s students.

First, public schools are under legal obligation to be open and nondiscriminatory in their acceptance of all students, regardless of race, sexual orientation or ability. Voucher programs, on the other hand, are governed by different laws in different states, but most allow private schools to accept taxpayer dollars but reject students with vouchers for a variety of reasons, ranging from disability to ability to pay.

That’s right: voucher programs actually fund discrimination. According to an analysis by the Huffington Post of the Florida Hope Scholarship Program—a voucher program aimed at public school students who have undergone bullying—10 percent of the schools participating in the program have “zero tolerance policies” for LGBTQ students. And nearly 20 percent of participating schools have dress-code policies that lead to disproportionately punish students of color.

CHARTER SCHOOLS: PRIVATE SCHOOLS DIVERTING PUBLIC MONEY TO PRIVATE WALLETS

Charter School Corruption Is Changing Education Policy And Politics

Lack of public oversight has yielded a charter industry full of corruption and cheating. Public money should go to public schools...and all schools accepting public funds ought to subject to the same oversight, restrictions, and requirements.

As scandalous news stories and scathing reviews of the charter industry continue to emerge, the negative impacts these schools have on families and communities will prompt more to question the wisdom of expanding these schools and draw more attention to the need to ratchet up regulations for the charters already in existence.

THE U.S. DOESN'T VALUE AN EDUCATED CITIZENRY

Let’s fund education like we value it

In OECD nations, funding for education increased an average of 4% from 2010 to 2014. In the U.S. it dropped by 3%.

The United States has always had a national undercurrent of suspicion with respect to education. During the 2016 campaign, then Candidate Trump even went so far as to claim that "I love the poorly educated." What he meant to say was that he loved everyone who supported him, but the implication, which has been borne out in his administration's attitude towards public education, is that there was no need to improve the education of those who needed it the most -- as long as they voted for him.

And Trump wasn't the first to bring in the education level of voters to the campaign. In the 1952 campaign, Adlai Stevenson was branded an "egghead" by V-P candidate Richard Nixon. Richard Hofstadter, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, wrote that the term was coined because "the country seemed to be in need of some term to express that disdain for intellectuals."

School teachers have frequently been accused of being agents who disrupted tradition and taught children politics. A school board member (and local Eagle Forum member) in my district once accused staff members of exercising "mind-control" over students (something many of the teachers wished they could actually do in order to increase student attention to their assignments!). In another example, a Texas state school board member once proclaimed that "Somebody's gotta stand up to experts" when educated people tried to explain why actual science needed to be included in the state science curriculum.

The title of this piece hits the nail on the head. We, as a nation, don't value education and we don't want to pay for it.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a conservative think tank focused on education policy issues. One of their frequent contributors is a person named Dale Chu...

• Chu: Finally, there are those who argue that the system as it currently exists works perfectly fine for the era it was designed for (think the G.I. Bill and universal high school). In this view, education is wrongly perceived as broken. Moreover, the thinking goes, we won’t make any headway unless we solve larger societal issues like poverty or institutional racism—though for better or for worse, reformers tend to part ways when it comes to race.

VOTE YOUR INTEREST

Why Politics Matters

Why do the poorest, sickest Americans vote for candidates who promise to take away their health-insurance? Why do struggling workers vote for candidates who promise to move their jobs overseas? Why do middle-class taxpayers vote for candidates who give tax breaks to the wealthy, reducing services for those who need it?

That was the astonishing conclusion of a study reported by Inc. The study ranked life expectancy in all 50 states, and came to some truly eye-opening conclusions. Among them: residents of Mississippi have the same life expectancy as residents of Bangladesh.

LABELS AND ETHNICITY

Disowning the Lie of Whiteness

"Nazis march unmasked in our streets...too many of our police use murder and atrocity to ensure the social order."

Labels reduce us to one thing: black, Hispanic, Jewish, Socialist. We're all much more complicated than that.

I don’t want to live in a world where human beings are tattooed and numbered and sent to their deaths.

Because the Holocaust is not over.

American slavery is not over.

Neither is Jim Crow or lynching or a thousand other marks of hatred and bigotry.

Nazis march unmasked in our streets. Our prisons are the new plantation. And too many of our police use murder and atrocity to ensure the social order.

As long as we allow ourselves to be white, there will be no justice for both ourselves and others.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

Please. Education is not a horserace.

We Americans are selfish and self-centered. Peter Greene's tweet about DACA elsewhere in this post expresses it well...as does this quote from Jim Wright in his Stonekettle Station post, Ship of Fools, where he says,

“F*** you, I got mine” is a lousy ideology to build civilization on.

PZ Myers, a curmudgeonly biology professor/blogger from Minnesota, discusses education...and how it should NOT divide winners and losers. Education he says, is a process by which everyone should gain knowledge.

When we make education a competition, we resign some students to the "loser" category. What would be better for the long-term health of our society...to have a large group of "losers" trying to survive under the heel of the winners? or a society where everyone is educated with greater knowledge, where everyone grows up a winner?

From PZ Myers

The mistake is to think of education as a game where there are winners and losers rather than an experience in which we try to make sure every single student comes out at the end with more knowledge. It’s not a competition.

TEACHER SHORTAGES

Where have all the teachers gone?

The so-called "education reform" movement has been successful at making the teaching profession unattractive. We are losing teachers at an alarming rate, and some schools are forced to fill classrooms with unqualified adults. Schools with more resources can afford to hire actual teachers, and schools with fewer resources - commonly those schools which serve low-income, high-minority populations - end up staffing classrooms with untrained teachers.

In order to overcome the shortage (as well as strike a blow against teachers unions) states, like Indiana, are adding pathways to teaching so unqualified adults can get into the classroom quicker.

What kind of future are we building for ourselves?

From Linda Darling-Hammond in The Answer Sheet

...even with intensive recruiting both in and outside of the country, more than 100,000 classrooms are being staffed this year by instructors who are unqualified for their jobs. These classrooms are disproportionately in low-income, high-minority schools, although in some key subjects, every kind of district has been hit. This is a serious problem for the children they serve and for the country as a whole.

DEVOS

8 Powerful Voices in Defense of Public Education – Diane Ravitch

The Network for Public Education (NPE) is producing a series of videos in support of public education and against the movement to privatize our schools. NPE President, Diane Ravitch, is one of the strongest voices in support of public education today.

From Diane Ravitch

[Betsy DeVos] is the first Secretary of Education in our history, who is actively hostile to public education. We've never had this before.

SEGREGATION

School Segregation, An Ever-Present Problem Across America

Humanity's past is littered with wars, murders, assassinations, conquests, and other horrible events caused by our narrow, selfish, racist, and tribal, impulses. If we want to survive into the next century, we'll need to overcome those baser characteristics of our species...and learn to accept that we are one, diverse, human race.

From Jan Resseger

Hannah-Jones concludes: “What the Gardendale case demonstrates with unusual clarity is that changes in the law have not changed the hearts of many white Americans.” These articles—Felton’s and Hannah-Jones’—are worth reading together. They are a sobering update on America’s long struggle with racism and the unresolved and very current issue of school segregation which is always accompanied by educational inequity. Quality education is supposed to be a right for all of our children, but we are a long way from having achieved justice.

Integrating Little Rock Central High School, September 25, 1957

PERSONALIZED LEARNING

Teacher Appreciation As School Starts

A personal relationship with another human being is an important part of "personalized" learning.

From Nancy Bailey

While the focus appears to be on transforming teaching into digital competency-based instruction, or personalized learning, real human teachers are what make learning for every child personalized. That title was stolen from them.

LIBRARIANS AND LIBRARIES

Credentialed school librarians: What the research says

From Stephen Krashen

We cheerfully spend billions on unvalidated tests and untested technology, yet we ignore the impressive research on libraries and librarians, and are unwilling to make the modest investments that will ensure that school libraries are well supplied with books and are staffed with credentialed librarians.

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICA

A Confederacy of Dunces

The Roman philosopher, Epictetus, wrote,

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.

That is a concept which Americans would do well to learn. We are living at a time where people are proud of their ignorance.

From Shiela Kennedy

There’s a saying to the effect that the only foes that truly threaten America are the enemies at home: ignorance, superstition and incompetence. Trump is the trifecta.