Lois Weiner in Monthly Review on Social Justice Teacher Unionism

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/06/01/when-teachers-want-what-children-need

When “Teachers Want What Children Need”: Reconciling Tensions in Teachers’ Work and Teacher Unionism :: Monthly Review

Lois Weiner more on Education , Labor

Lois Weiner is a member of the New Politics editorial board and is Professor of Education at New Jersey City University, where she coordinates a graduate program for experienced teachers. Her newest book, The Future of our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice, explains why and how teachers need to transform their unions to save public education.

“Teachers want what children need—or do they?” Questioning—and rejecting—the slogan used by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to fight for collective bargaining in the 1960s, David K. Cohen, a contributor to Socialist Revolution, in 1969 dismissed the progressive potential of teachers’ unions.1 This article revisits the AFT’s slogan and Cohen’s question, examining tensions between “what teachers want” and “what children need.” The history of U.S. teacher unionism supports the argument that when teachers’ unions adopt a “social movement” orientation and press against the confines of the scope of bargaining embedded in collective-bargaining agreements, the unions minimize tensions between teachers’ rights to organize as workers in defense of their material interests and the unique political and social responsibilities of their work.
Though not apparent from either the capitalist mass media or many critiques of what has come to be called “corporate school reform,” the fate of the world’s children depends in great part on resistance from teachers and their unions. We in the United States are experiencing a version of a global project that financial and political elites began forty years ago when they imposed school reform on Latin America, Africa, and Asia, first under brutal military dictatorships supported by U.S. imperialism and then as a quid pro quo for economic aid. Though well-documented by scholars and activists in the global South, the project (and resistance to it) is still not well-known in this country.2 Specifics differ from one country to another, yet its program has the same footprint and purpose of making schools fit neoliberalism’s vision of what the world needs: vocationalization of schooling, privatization of the educational sector, and deprofessionalization of teaching. All of this is tied to reliance on standardized tests as the exclusive measure of students, teachers, and schools.3
The powerful elites who share information and policies across international borders understand (unfortunately, better than do most teachers) that despite their all-too-glaring problems, teachers’ unions are the main impediment to the full realization of the neoliberal project. As is true for labor unions generally, teacher unionism’s principles of collective action and solidarity contradict neoliberalism’s key premises—individual initiative and competition. Neoliberalism pushes a “survival of the fittest” mentality. Labor unions presume people have to work together to protect their common interests. Another reason unions are a threat is that they can exercise institutional power: as organizations they have legal rights; because of their institutional roots, they are a stable force; and they are able to draw on membership dues, giving them a regular source of income. These characteristics give teachers’ unions an organizational capacity seldom acquired by advocacy groups or parents, who generally graduate from activity in schools along with their children. Yet, the very factors that make unions stable and potentially powerful also induce hierarchy and conservatism. Neither unions as organizations nor union members as individuals are immune to prejudices that infect a society, even when these prejudices contradict the union’s premises of equality in the workplace.
Though the popular media cast teachers’ unions as powerful, the unions are more often than not weak where it counts most, at the school site. Union officials and staff are often disoriented and confused. The well-orchestrated, extravagantly financed anti-teacher and anti-teachers’ union propaganda campaign has greatly undercut the credibility of unions and even the idea of teacher unionism, even among teachers. Unfortunately, teachers’ unions have disarmed themselves in combating their delegitimation because of their embrace of the “business” or “service” model of union organization. This model, dominant for decades in U.S. unions, configures them as a business that exists to provide services to members, including lower rates for auto insurance, benefits from a welfare fund, pension advice, negotiating a contract, and perhaps filing a grievance. Officers and staff make decisions on the members’ behalf. Other than voting on a contract and electing officers every few years, members are passive. They are obliged only to pay dues and accept the leadership’s expertise. Because the service model is predicated on the members relying on officials, participation is minimal, and so leaders easily evolve into a clique—often one that is defensive and insular.
In response to what was, in retrospect, the first iteration of the neoliberal education project in 1992, liberal academics, progressives, education activists, and some union officials argued that teachers’ unions should respond to the calls for “excellence” and “accountability” in education by spurning stances that made them resemble “industrial unions.” Teachers’ unions, they argued, needed to be more conciliatory about changes to schools that would benefit students. One camp, advocates of “professional unionism,” advocated eliminating collective bargaining agreements, replacing them with “trust agreements,” in order to jettison the contentiousness of labor-management struggle. Teachers should be professionals who assumed responsibility for educational outcomes.4 Another segment of teacher activists argued for “social justice teacher unionism” to replace the model of industrial unionism that had dominated the education sector.5
Unfortunately, progressives who endorsed the “new teacher unionism” forfeited their credibility among rank-and-file teachers who looked to their union to protect their interests on the job—in the schools. Moreover, advocates of social justice teacher unionism were often unclear about how their vision differed from that of the new teacher unionism and thought the unions had to jettison hard-fought contract protections to improve educational outcomes. While many U.S. education activists who advocated social justice teacher unionism hoped to build support for their unions among parents and community, they underestimated the peril of inviting into education the kind of management-labor collaboration being heralded in private industry.6 In contracts and trust agreements, unions ceded vital job protections, like seniority, for salary increases. Peer-evaluation schemes and new salary schedules that created status inequalities among teachers by creating “master teachers” gave teachers responsibility for school outcomes without authority for deciding the most fundamental aspects of school life. Ironically, the reforms progressive activists pressed the union to accept in the name of improving school outcomes opened the door to a work culture that assumes teachers would be on-call seven days a week, fourteen hours a day. Neoliberalism now insists on this school culture, which is lauded as essential to boosting students’ achievement.

Another limitation of social justice teacher unionism in the United States was its unwillingness to address how the diminution of teacher union power related to the atrophy of union internal life, in particular the absence of vibrant democracy. This limitation was illustrated by TURN (Teacher Union Reform Network), an alliance of teacher union officers in both the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) who presented themselves as advocates of progressive education reform.7 Canadian researcher Stephanie Ross observes that while a union that states a commitment to social justice “may mobilize members, they can do so in conditions largely defined by leaders…[that] can be easily accommodated within and could even reinforce top-down practices.” She notes that writers like Sam Gindin, Kim Moody, Michael Eisenscher, and Christopher Schenk “all make a distinction between mobilizational and democratizing approaches to union renewal, and in particular, how tactics are framed and utilized. They all suggest a variant of social unionism—most often referred to as social movement unionism—which combines an anti-economistic, anti-sectionalist, and transformative vision with new mobilizing repertoires and organizational forms. Here workers don’t just ‘participate’: they ‘actively lead’ and have democratic control over ‘the fight for everything that affects working people’ in their union, their communities and their country.”8
Ross indicates that in categorizing unions, it is essential to look at both a union’s stated purposes and the way it operationalizes those goals—looking beyond labels to actions. So, for example, we can see that while the British Colombia Teachers Federation calls itself a social justice union, it resembles much more closely the social movement teachers’ union that Ross describes.

Social Movement Teacher Unionism

Using the distinction Ross makes, I suggest that the term social movement unionism clarifies how the organizational form of the union (as a social movement) relates to the positions it takes (defense of social justice). Social movement unionism casts the union’s strength as a function of its ability to mobilize its members to struggle on their own behalf and to join, as an ally, with other social movements that aim to make our society more just and equal. Union power comes from the bottom-up, as it does in social movements. Members’ self-interest is defined broadly, as much more than immediate economic and contractual concerns. The union struggles for its members’ stake in creating a more democratic, equitable society, and the union allies itself with other movements that are working for social justice, peace, and equality.
Though elements of the social movement unionism I propose are new, many were present in teacher unionism’s birth in Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The movement’s most prominent spokesperson was Margaret Haley, an elementary school teacher and socialist, who had strong ties to socialists in the AFL, activists in the suffrage movement, and progressive educational reformers, most notably John Dewey and school superintendent Ella Flagg Young.9 The movement she was instrumental in organizing fought for the economic interests of teachers, embedding these demands for higher salary, pensions, and professional authority in a political and social program that aimed to democratize the schools and win economic and political emancipation for working people. With John Dewey, Haley advocated the centrality of public education and a professional teaching force in schooling citizens for a democracy.10 The Chicago union, Local 1 of the AFT, initiated militant campaigns to restore funding for public schools by taxing the corporations.
However, as was true of the union’s allies in organized labor, even among socialists, teacher unionism was blind to the injustice of racial segregation and inequality within both education and the society at large.11 Rereading Haley’s speech, “Why Teachers Should Organize,” with our understanding of the union’s acceptance of racial inequality complicates the claims she makes for the absolute correspondence between the needs of the teacher and the child. Haley first explains, “There is no possible conflict between the interest of the child and the interest of the teacher…. For both the child and the teacher freedom is the condition of development. The atmosphere in which it is easiest to teach is the atmosphere in which it is easiest to learn. The same things that are a burden to the teacher are a burden also to the child. The same things which restrict her powers restrict his powers also.” But then she follows with a cautionary note: “The element of danger in organization for self-protection is the predominance of the selfish motive. In the case of teachers a natural check is placed upon this motive by the necessity for professional organization. The closer the union between these two kinds of organization, the fuller and more effective is the activity possible to each.”12
Haley acknowledges the conservative influence of teachers organizing for their own self-interest, “the selfish motive.” She assumes that the existence of a professional organization—in her day, the NEA—serves as a “natural check.” But in teacher unionism’s reemergence in the 1960s, there was no mass socialist movement as there had been in Haley’s time to spur engagement in a militant confrontation with capitalism. In addition, the NEA had morphed into a rival teachers’ union. Hence the “natural check” on the “selfish motive” no longer existed for either the AFT or the NEA.
Teacher unionism was reborn as a political force in the 1960s, in the wake of the civil rights movement’s challenge to U.S. society. Political battles between white teachers in city schools and black parents and community activists made teacher unionism, which came to be personified by Albert Shanker, seem to many left activists and academics an inevitable opponent of challenges to existing (racist) power relations. By 1975, Shanker had jettisoned any pretense that teachers and children had identical interests, arguing instead that public and union interests converged “occasionally,” making these instances the “happiest of times.”13
Cohen’s critique, not unusual in the New Left, boiled down to this argument: the left could not justify white teachers in city schools fighting for better wages and pensions in school systems that were failing minority children. As had been true of the movement Haley helped organize, teacher unionism in its rebirth was blind to systemic racism. Teachers’ unions accepted the circumscribed limits of contract unionism, fighting for more voice for teachers within undemocratic schools and an undemocratic society. In doing so, the unions limited their capacity to develop respectful alliances with communities of color who viewed school reform as an extension of the civil rights struggle. Community activists intent on “owning” the schools had a similar blindspot, failing to see teacher unionism’s claims for teachers’ dignity as workers.14 While Haley pushed the union and movement she headed to struggle for a “democracy in education” that excluded people of color, Shanker shaped the apparatus and movement he headed to the “business union” approach, defining members’ interests as improved pay and benefits within a status quo defined by U.S. capitalism’s global desires.15 The political and financial stability of the union apparatus, expressed in the union leadership’s pursuit of legislation that gave the union’s agency fee (the right to charge non-members for costs in negotiating and enforcing the contract) and dues checkoff (having membership and agency fee deducted from paychecks automatically), was cast as synonymous with the health of the union and of public education itself.
The embrace by the teachers’ unions of business unionism’s narrow definition of teachers’ self-interest as workers and teachers has been self-destructive. It has paved the way for neoliberalism’s ideological victory in configuring teachers and their unions as a “special interest,” no different from the corporations entering the education “market.” Especially in schools serving students who are marginalized in our society, school organization and regulations can be inhumane. Partly because contracts severely limit the scope of bargaining and partly because of the embrace of “business union” thinking, teachers’ unions have pretty much accepted the school’s structure and organization as a given. The mis-fit between teaching as a personal, nurturing activity and schools’ hierarchical structures, culture, and organization (whether due to paternalism, bureaucracy, or a corporate ethos), has a corrosive impact on teachers’ morale and subsequently students’ learning. Teachers’ unions have a unique role in assuming leadership in working with parents, community, and labor—in coalitions, as respectful equals—to take on the way schools are organized. In this we have much to learn from Haley.
What we should not repeat is teacher unionism’s complicity in accepting racial oppression as society’s default setting. Tensions with parents are inescapable, especially when parents feel they are not respected by the union, as is often the case with groups who have experienced racial exclusion from labor unions. In cities throughout the United States, teachers’ unions confront the legacy of their failure to build authentic alliances with parents and community activists. Their failure to see beyond “bread and butter”—in particular, their unwillingness to put race and racism on the table as legitimate concerns of parents and students—has made them vulnerable to neoliberalism’s audacious and effective usurpation of the rhetoric of equal educational opportunity historically associated with progressive movements.

Teaching as Transformative Labor

A good teachers’ union has special moral and political responsibilities because of the unique nature of teachers’ work. From the point of view of the capitalist elite, teachers are to be controlled first and foremost because they are “idea workers,” that is, they play an ideological role in transmitting—or disrupting—social values and norms. This is a major reason the neoliberal project intends to remake teaching by destroying teachers’ autonomy and the space this creates in schools for critical thought, for ideas of freedom and social justice.16 Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell captures the special nature of teachers’ work this way: “Teaching is always transformative labour, bringing new social realities into existence; and is also fundamentally interactive, not individual. Teachers’ work is not social reproduction, but is creative and therefore a site of social struggle…. In a long historical perspective, the modern teaching workforce is unique, and has the possibility of shaping the learning capacities of the whole society; this may now be uniquely important.”17
Elsewhere Connell explains why the focus on individual teacher quality is misguided. Teaching, she notes, has to be understood as a collective effort of those at the school site: “Much of what happens in the daily life of a school involves the joint labour of the staff, and the staff’s collective relationship to the collective presence of the students…. The task of improving teaching, accordingly, cannot be understood only as a matter of motivating or re-skilling individuals.”18 In setting out the collective nature of teachers’ work, Connell explains why good teachers’ unions are essential for good schools. In this respect, teachers’ unions do want what children need, a collective voice for teachers who can defend conditions that support learning and teaching well.
Many teachers do not realize that they need a collective voice, nor that they are “idea workers” who do “transformative labour.” They enter the profession because they love being with children or the subject matter they want to teach. The architects of neoliberalism’s educational reforms know that regardless of conscious intent, teachers have the potential to affect social arrangements, challenging the authority of elites who have an interest in maintaining their power and privilege. For this reason, a union of teachers has a particular responsibility to safeguard teachers’ rights to help students think critically. Protecting teachers’ academic freedom is one of the union’s most essential tasks. That means fighting for tenure and the guarantee of fair, objective hearings when complaints are made about teachers’ professional conduct. What complicates the union’s defense of academic freedom and its members’ performance on the job is that laws requiring children’s compulsory attendance at school make them captive in classrooms. Therefore the union has an allegiance both to its members as workers and to the protection of students’ well-being. To satisfy its responsibility, teachers’ unions need to reject the quid pro quo that gives teachers collective-bargaining rights but limits the scope of bargaining.
Neoliberalism’s ideological success in equating “effective teaching” with improving student test scores has made defense of teaching’s civic and social functions all the more essential—and difficult. The stranglehold of standardized testing, having test scores linked to teachers’ pay and evaluations, has turned many schools that serve children of working and poor families into little more than training grounds for unemployment, low-wage labor, and prison. Both the AFT and NEA have capitulated to neoliberalism’s reduction of schooling’s purposes to its economic value. Yet, we cannot effectively defend teachers, teaching, and public education against neoliberalism without defending teaching’s non-economic functions, its role in educating people to think critically, and its socialization and nurturing responsibilities. Teaching is “women’s work,” and as Sara Freedman noted, presciently, improving the status of teaching is not possible “as long as one of the most important jobs of a teacher—that of understanding, working with, and emotionally supporting children—has little status outside of schools.”19
In its report on what students in Chicago deserve, the Chicago Teachers Union has inherited and improved on Haley’s vision of how teachers’ unions need to discuss teachers’ work and children’s well-being.20 While parents are worried about their children’s ability to compete for jobs, they also look to schools to safeguard their children. It is parents, not bankers or the politicians they bankroll, who are the constituency teachers and their unions need to move to our way of viewing school reform.
Haley’s warning about the “selfish motive” in organizing for self-protection suggests that teachers’ unions should try to create vehicles independent of the union, as exist in higher education in faculty senates, to protect teachers’ rights as “idea workers,” their ideological function, to develop courses of study, select books, materials, and teaching methods. Haley’s union supported creation of “teachers’ councils” that were organizationally independent of the union. Teachers elected representatives to the councils, which had an advisory role on educational decisions.21 At the same time, teachers’ unions need to respect the diversity of opinion among thoughtful teachers and parents about what works best in classrooms. Teachers who are closer to minority and immigrant communities can bring information and perspectives that are valuable in helping children learn.22 Too often the views of parents who lack formal education, especially when they are members of oppressed groups, are dismissed as being uninformed, when, in fact, these parents bring a much-needed critique of unfair and unequal treatment of minority students.23
Conventional (teacher-union) wisdom has it that collective bargaining improved teachers’ working conditions, and if we define teachers’ work primarily in terms of wages and hours, that is accurate. But in his historical examination of the NEA, Wayne Urban concludes that teachers in NEA affiliates actually had more voice in professional matters before the NEA engaged in collective bargaining.24 Because of the narrow scope of bargaining that unions accepted when they pressed for legislation giving teachers the right to bargain, teachers’ unions are generally precluded from addressing pedagogical concerns, like standardized testing and choice of teaching materials and methods.
Teachers and students are being damaged by union contracts that tie teacher evaluation and pay to standardized test scores—policies now endorsed by the AFT and NEA. The unions need to push back on teacher evaluation but cannot do so successfully unless they learn to build mutually respectful alliances with parents, community, and students. The unions must also engage in direct action, as Sam Gindin notes when he calls for a “complete revolution in everything about public-sector unions—from how they allocate resources, to how they train their staff and relate to their members, other unions, and the community, to (above all) making the level, quality and administration of services a prime bargaining issue.”25 Neoliberalism’s success in painting teachers’ unions as self-interested and selfish and the attack on the right to bargain contracts make this an opportune time to rethink the scope of bargaining—and even collective bargaining. The model of social movement unionism suggests that we need to understand our goal as being building a social movement of teachers who defend their professional and economic interests in a broader social movement to defend public education. The organizational form we adopt then supports the movement’s aims, rather than vice versa.

Do Teachers Want What Children Need?

Both Cohen’s question and the AFT slogan configure the issue as an either/or, but it should be understood as contingent: When do teachers and teachers’ unions want what children need? Like all workers, everywhere, teachers have the right to form unions to bargain collectively. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that teachers’ rights are hard to defend when unions cast their members’ interests as being separate from needs of students, parents, and community. While the union can and should broaden its goals, there is a tension we must learn to live with. Teachers’ unions are almost never strong enough to determine the contours of struggles, and especially now when both the unions and public education are under such sustained, brutal attack, very often union activists and supporters in the community must confront hard choices about how long and how hard to fight—and for what. Unions must be pressed to win parent and community trust and continue to earn it—while we all recognize that unions are subject to limitations (legal and internal) that advocacy groups are not.
Yes, teachers do want what children need, most of the time. However, the vision we should project for our movement—and the slogan we adopt—must embed the needs of teachers within a vision for democratic, quality schools and a society that is just.

Notes

1. ↩ David K. Cohen, “ Teachers Want What Children Need—Or Do They?,” The Urban Review 2 (1968): 25–29.
2. ↩ Our Schools / Our Selves, Breaking the Iron Cage: Resistance to the Schooling of Global Capitalism (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2008).
3. ↩ Mary Compton and Lois Weiner, eds., The Global Assault on Teaching, Teachers and Their Unions: Stories for Resistance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
4. ↩ Charles Kerchner and Julia Koppich, A Union of Professionals: Labor Relations and Educational Reform (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993).
5. ↩ Bob Petersen, “We Need a New Vision of Teacher Unions,” Rethinking Schools 11, no. 4 (Summer 1997), http:// rethinkingschools.org.
6. ↩ Lois Weiner, “Teacher Unions Not ‘Too Industrial,’” letter to the editor in “Readers Speak Out on Teacher Unions,” Rethinking Schools 13, no. 1 (1998), http://rethinkingschools.org.
7. ↩ Adam Urbanski, “TURNing unions around,” http://turnexchange.net. Originally published 1998.
8. ↩ Stephanie Ross, “Varieties of Social Unionism: Towards a Framework for Comparison,” Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society 11 (Autumn 2007), 28, http://justlabour.yorku.ca. The quotes inside Ross’s excerpt are from Sam Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers: The Birth and Transformation of a Union (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1995), 268.
9. ↩ Lois Weiner, The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012).
10. ↩ Lois Weiner, “Teacher Unions and Professional Organization: Re-examining Margaret Haley’s Counsel on Councils,” paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, 1992, http://eric.ed.gov.
11. ↩ Kate Rousmaniere, “White Silence: A Racial Biography of Margaret Haley,” Equity and Excellence in Education 34, no. 2 (2001): 7–15.
12. ↩ Margaret Haley, “Why Teachers Should Organize,” in the National Education Association of the United States, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Forty-Third Annual Meeting Held at St. Louis, Missouri (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904), 146, http://babel.hathitrust.org.
13. ↩ Weiner, The Future of Our Schools, 104. Originally in “Cracks in Shanker’s Empire,” New Politics 11, no. 4 (1976).
14. ↩ Steve Golin, The Newark Teacher Strikes: Hopes on the Line (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
15. ↩ Weiner, The Future of Our Schools, 104.
16. ↩ Howard Stevenson, “Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K–12 Teacher Unions,” Workplace 17 (2010): 1–10. This special issue of Workplace: A Journal of Academic Laborcontains other contributions by international group of researchers in the Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association, http://prophet.library.ubc.ca.
17. ↩ Raewyn Connell, “The Work of Teaching,” History of Education Review 38 no. 2 (2009): 9.
18. ↩ Raewyn Connell, “Good Teachers on Dangerous Ground: Towards a New View of Teacher Quality and Professionalism,” Critical Studies in Education 50, no. 3 (2009): 221, 222, http://revistas.usp.br.
19. ↩ Sara Freedman, “Weeding Women Out of ‘Woman’s True Profession’: The Effects of the Reforms on Teaching and Teachers,” in Joyce Antler and Sari Knopp Biklen, eds., Changing Education: Women as Radicals and Conservators (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 256.
20. ↩ Chicago Teachers Union, The Schools Chicago Students Deserve, 2012, http://ctunet.com.
21. ↩ Geoffrey G. Tegnell, Democracy in Education: A Comparative Study of the Teachers’ Council Movement, 1895–1968 (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Education,1997).
22. ↩ Michele Foster,”The Role of Community and Culture in School Reform Efforts: Examining the Views of African-American Teachers,” Educational Foundations 8 , no. 2 (Spring 1994): 5–26.
23. ↩ Community Asset Development Re-defining Education (CADRE) and Justice Matters Institute (JMI), We Interrupt This Crisis—With Our Side of the Story: Relationships Between South Los Angeles Parents and Schools(Los Angeles, October 2004), http://educationjustice.org.
24. ↩ Wayne J. Urban , Gender, Race, and the National Education Association (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000).
25. ↩ Sam Gindin, “Marx’s Proletariat: What Can Today’s Labor Movement Learn from Marx?,” New Labor Forum 21, no. 2 (June 2012): 20.

THE ONGOING, NEVER-ENDING JFK MYTHOLOGY

http://www.ctpost.com/opinion/article/Kennedy-s-never-ending-cult-5076200.php

 

            

                                                                                    by Andy Piascik

 

            The latest eruption of John Kennedy hysteria, bordering on deification, seems safely behind us now that the 50^th anniversary of his assassination has passed. Though there is much disinformation about JFK’s legacy that could and should be discussed, two areas stand out: his relationship to the Black Liberation Movement and his actions in Southeast Asia.

            Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Kennedy has come to be seen as an ally of - even a hero of - the Black Liberation Movement. In fact, he opposed both the goals and actions of that movement from early in his term when terrorists were beating unarmed and vastly outnumbered Freedom Riders, to the final months of his life when four young girls were blown up in an Alabama church. When black moderates announced plans for an action in Washington in 1963, Kennedy worked overtime to derail it, with significant success, mainly by strong arming black moderates eager to remain in good with the White House. As a result, the planned direct action protest with civil disobedience morphed into a march and the moderates went so far as to force the day’s most radical speaker, John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to drop portions of his speech critical of the administration.

            As for Southeast Asia, many in the mainstream have argued that Kennedy was about to withdraw U.S. troops and leave the Indochinese to fight their own battles when he was assassinated. This fixation on what he might have done is understandable, for the historical record – what JFK actually did – is quite horrifying and laid the groundwork for the decade of slaughter that followed.

            First was the escalation of U.S. aggression in Laos, accompanied by diplomatic shenanigans that undermined coalition governments that included the Pathet Lao revolutionaries despite their being the most popular force in the country.  The goal, as always with empire, was all out victory and the annihilation of anyone who favored national liberation.

            In Vietnam, a similar approach led to massive devastation. In the winter of 1961-62, Kennedy initiated the full-scale bombing of those parts of South Vietnam controlled by the National Liberation Front (all but Saigon and its immediate surroundings). The justification that bombing was needed to defeat the revolution masked the indiscriminate nature of the aerial assault, which resulted in casualties that were overwhelmingly civilian. And so the tone was set for the next eleven years of war.

            It was also Kennedy who authorized the first use of Chemicals of Mass Destruction in Southeast Asia, with napalm the best-known and most deadly. Never had chemical warfare been used so extensively, though the U.S. had also used napalm in Korea in the early 1950’s. Again, the tone was established as massive amounts of phosphorous, Agent Orange and other chemicals were used for the rest of the war, chemicals the deadly affects of which are being felt to this day throughout Indochina.

            And it was under Kennedy that the notorious strategic hamlets were set up throughout South Vietnam. “Strategic Hamlets” is a term worthy of Orwell at his best or Madison Avenue at its worst, designed to induce thoughts of happy, grateful peasants gathered around a campfire. The more accurate phrase would be Concentration Camps, as Vietnamese by the thousands were rounded up at gunpoint and forced to live behind barbed wire. Anyone who resisted was beaten or worse; anyone attempting to escape was shot. The aim was to separate the people from the NLF though the result, not surprisingly, as with the bombing and the chemical weapons, was the opposite, as ever larger segments of the population became supporters of the revolution.

As each of these moves failed and the NLF grew stronger, Kennedy ordered ground troops to Southeast Asia in the spring of 1962, the number of which he gradually increased until his death. There is no evidence to indicate any plan for withdrawal short of victory, the myth-making of Oliver Stone, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and so many others notwithstanding.

            One way to get a handle on the JFK withdrawal myth is to recall another assassination in November of 1963, that of South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem. For much of 1963, Diem threatened to undermine empire’s goals by pushing for a negotiated peace with the NLF and a U.S. withdrawal. In response, Kennedy did what his kind frequently do in such circumstances: he ordered a hit on Diem and replaced him with generals willing to follow orders.  

For all the wishful thinking about what Kennedy would have done in Indochina had he lived, the inescapable truth, as opposed to the fantasy, is that he escalated the war and initiated increasing levels of terror that eventually resulted in the deaths of millions. Significantly, there is no mention of withdrawal short of victory in the many Camelot memoirs, biographies and histories until after the tide had turned dramatically against U.S. aggression. Only then did the myth of “Kennedy the Peacemaker” emerge.      

            Perhaps the JFK cult can be explained by the odious legacies of his two immediate successors, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom massively escalated the carnage in Indochina and ultimately abdicated in disgrace. Odious their legacies may be but there’s no way around the fact that Kennedy’s legacy smells just as foul. Such an explanation also obscures the fact that it was Kennedy who established the terms for the domestic conflict that would rage throughout the 1960’s – outraged hostility on the part of the ruling class to the democracy movements that shook the empire to its foundations. It is those movements that will be remembered and celebrated long after the JFK cult hopefully, eventually, finally, finds its rightful resting place in the proverbial dustbin of history.

 

Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author who writes for Z, Counterpunch  and many other publications and websites. He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com.

Kennedy, The Illusive President

Interesting piece on Kennedy with a lot of good links.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/books/review/the-elusive-president.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20131025&pagewanted=all&

Kennedy, the Elusive President

Abramson and Tanenhaus on J.F.K.: Jill Abramson, The Times’s executive editor, and Sam Tanenhaus discuss the many books devoted to John F. Kennedy, how his presidency changed the news media and the effect the assassination had on her.

By JILL ABRAMSON

Published: October 22, 2013

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As the 50th anniversary of his assassination nears, John F. Kennedy remains all but impossible to pin down. One reason is that his martyrdom — for a generation of Americans still the most traumatic public event of their lives, 9/11 notwithstanding — has obscured much about the man and his accomplishments.

Related

• Sunday Book Review: J.F.K.: A Sampler (October 27, 2013)

• The Shortlist: J.F.K. (October 27, 2013)

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Matt Dorfman

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Associated Press

The Kennedys on vacation in Hyannis Port, Mass.

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Reuters

The presidential motorcade in Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.

Was Kennedy a great president, as many continue to think? Or was he a reckless and charming lightweight or, worse still, the first of our celebrities-in-chief? To what extent do his numerous personal failings, barely reported during his lifetime but amply documented since, overshadow or undermine his policy achievements? And what of those achievements — in civil rights and poverty, to name two issues his administration embraced. Weren’t the breakthroughs actually the doing of his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson?

Even the basic facts of Kennedy’s death are still subject to heated argument. The historical consensus seems to have settled on Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin, but conspiracy speculation abounds — involving Johnson, the C.I.A., the mob, Fidel Castro or a baroque combination of all of them. Many of the theories have been circulating for decades and have now found new life on the Internet, in Web sites febrile with unfiltered and at times unhinged musings.

Of course the Kennedy fixation is hardly limited to the digital world. An estimated 40,000 books about him have been published since his death, and this anniversary year has loosed another vast outpouring. Yet to explore the enormous literature is to be struck not by what’s there but by what’s missing. Readers can choose from many books but surprisingly few good ones, and not one really outstanding one.

It is a curious state of affairs, and some of the nation’s leading historians wonder about it. “There is such fascination in the country about the anniversary, but there is no great book about Kennedy,” Robert Caro lamented when I spoke to him not long ago. The situation is all the stranger, he added, since Kennedy’s life and death form “one of the great American stories.” Caro should know. His epic life of Johnson (four volumes and counting) brilliantly captures parts of the Kennedy saga, especially the assassination in Dallas, revisited in the latest installment, “The Passage of Power.”

Robert Dallek, the author of “An Unfinished Life,” probably the best single-volume Kennedy biography, suggests that the cultish atmosphere surrounding, and perhaps smothering, the actual man may be the reason for the deficit of good writing about him. “The mass audience has turned Kennedy into a celebrity, so historians are not really impressed by him,” Dallek told me. “Historians see him more as a celebrity who didn’t accomplish very much.” Dallek also pointed to a second inhibiting factor, the commercial pressure authors feel to come up with sensational new material. His own book, as it happens, included a good deal of fresh information on Kennedy’s severe health problems and their cover-up by those closest to him. And yet Dallek is careful not to let these revelations overwhelm the larger story.

Dallek is also good on the fairy-tale aspects of the Kennedy family history, and he closely examines the workings of the Kennedy White House. So enthralled was he by this last topic that he has written a follow-up, “Camelot’s Court,” which profiles members of Kennedy’s famous brain trust and is being released for the 50th anniversary. This time, however, it is Dallek who doesn’t offer much fresh material.

This in turn raises another question: How much is left to say about Kennedy’s presidency? The signature legislative accomplishments he and his advisers envisioned were not enacted until after his death. Then there is the Vietnam conundrum. Some maintain that Kennedy would not have escalated the war as Johnson did. But the belief that he would have limited the American presence in Vietnam is rooted as much in the romance of “what might have been” as in the documented record.

Indeed, a dolorous mood of “what might have been” hangs over a good deal of writing about Kennedy. Arriving in time for Nov. 22 is the loathsomely titled “If Kennedy Lived. The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History,” by the television commentator Jeff Greenfield, who imagines a completed first Kennedy term and then a second. This isn’t new territory for Greenfield, who worked for Kennedy’s brother Robert and is the author of a previous book of presidential “what ifs” called “Then Everything Changed.” (Dallek’s “Camelot’s Court” and Greenfield’s “If Kennedy Lived” are reviewed here.)

Thurston Clarke, the author of two previous and quite serviceable books on the Kennedys, also dwells on fanciful “what might have beens” in “JFK’s Last Hundred Days,” suggesting that the death of the presidential couple’s last child, Patrick, brought the grieving parents closer together and may have signaled the end of Kennedy’s compulsive womanizing. What’s more, Clarke makes a giant (and dubious) leap about Kennedy as leader, arguing that in the final 100 days he was becoming a great president. One example, according to Clarke, was his persuading the conservative Republicans Charles Halleck, the House minority leader, and Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader, to support a civil rights bill. Once re-elected, Kennedy would have pushed the bill through Congress.

Kennedy as Arthurian hero is also a feature of what has been called “pundit lit” by the historian and journalist David Greenberg. The purpose of this genre (books by writers who themselves are famous) is, in Greenberg’s words, “to extend their authors’ brands — to make money, to be sure, and to express some set of ideas, however vague, but mainly to keep their celebrity creators in the media spotlight.” The champion in this growing field is Bill O’Reilly, who has milked the Kennedy assassination with unique efficiency.

O’Reilly’s latest contribution, “Kennedy’s Last Days,” is an illustrated recycling, for children, of his mega-best seller “Killing Kennedy.” This new version, it must be said, distinctly improves on the original, whose choppy sentences, many written in the present tense, lose nothing when recast for younger readers. “He is on a collision course with evil,” O’Reilly declares. No less elevated is his discussion of Kennedy’s decision to visit Dallas despite warnings of roiling violence, including the physical assault on his United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, who had given a speech in the city in October 1963. “J.F.K. has decided to visit Big D,” O’Reilly writes. “There is no backing down.” Happily, the wooden prose is offset by the many illustrations. My favorite is a spread on the first family’s pets, including puppies and a pony.

Bad books by celebrity authors shouldn’t surprise us, even when the subject is an American president. The true mystery in Kennedy’s case is why, 50 years after his death, highly accomplished writers seem unable to fix him on the page.

For some, the trouble has been idolatry. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who wrote three magisterial volumes on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, attempted a similar history in “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House.” Published in 1965, it has the virtues of immediacy, since Schlesinger, Kennedy’s Harvard contemporary, had been on the White House staff, brought in as court historian. He witnessed many of the events he describes. But in his admiration for Kennedy, he became a chief architect of the Camelot myth and so failed, in the end, to give a persuasive account of the actual presidency.

In 1993, the political journalist Richard Reeves did better. “President Kennedy: Profile of Power” is a minutely detailed chronicle of the Kennedy White House. As a primer on Kennedy’s decision-making, like his handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis, the book is fascinating. What’s missing is a picture of Kennedy’s personal life, though Reeves includes a passing mention of Marilyn Monroe being sewn into the $5,000 flesh-colored, skintight dress she wore to celebrate the president’s birthday at Madison Square Garden in 1962. (This is the place to note that Reeves edited “The Kennedy Years,” The New York Times’s own addition to the ever-­expanding Kennedy cosmos, and I wrote the foreword.)

Balancing out, or warring with, the Kennedy claque are the Kennedy haters, like Seymour M. Hersh and Garry Wills. In “The Dark Side of Camelot,” Hersh wildly posits connections between the Kennedys and the mob, while Wills, though he offers any number of brilliant insights into Kennedy and his circle of courtiers, fixates on the Kennedy brothers’ (and father’s) sexual escapades in “The Kennedy Imprisonment.”

The sum total of this oddly polarized literature is a kind of void. Other presidents, good and bad, have been served well by biographers and historians. We have first-rate books on Jefferson, on Lincoln, on Wilson, on both Roosevelts. Even unloved presidents have received major books: Johnson (Caro) and Richard Nixon (Wills, among others). Kennedy, the odd man out, still seeks his true biographer.

Why is this the case? One reason is that even during his lifetime, Kennedy defeated or outwitted the most powerfully analytic and intuitive minds.

In 1960, Esquire magazine commissioned Norman Mailer’s first major piece of political journalism, asking him to report on the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that nominated Kennedy. Mailer’s long virtuoso article, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” came as close as any book or essay ever has to capturing Kennedy’s essence, though that essence, Mailer candidly acknowledged, was enigmatic. Here was a 43-year-old man whose irony and grace were keyed to the national temper in 1960. Kennedy’s presence, youthful and light, was at once soothing and disruptive, with a touch of brusqueness. He carried himself “with a cool grace which seemed indifferent to applause, his manner somehow similar to the poise of a fine boxer, quick with his hands, neat in his timing, and two feet away from his corner when the bell ended the round.” Finally, however, “there was an elusive detachment to everything he did. One did not have the feeling of a man present in the room with all his weight and all his mind.”

Mailer himself doesn’t know “whether to value this elusiveness, or to beware of it. One could be witnessing the fortitude of a superior sensitivity or the detachment of a man who was not quite real to himself.”

And yet Kennedy’s unreality, in Mailer’s view, may have answered the particular craving of a particular historical moment. “It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradiction and mysteries which could reach into the alienated circuits of the underground, because only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation.” Those words seemed to prophesy the Kennedy mystique that was to come, reinforced by the whisker-thin victory over Nixon in the general election, by the romantic excitements of Camelot and then by the horror of Dallas.

Fifty years later we are still sifting through the facts of the assassination. The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Kennedy had been killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. Edward Jay Epstein and Mark Lane were among the first writers to challenge that finding, and their skepticism loosed a tide of investigations. The 50th anniversary has washed in some new ones. Among the more ambitious is “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination,” a work of more than 500 pages. Its author, Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter, uncovered a new lead, in the person of a heretofore overlooked woman who may have had suspicious ties to the assassin. But when Shenon finds the woman, now in her 70s, in Mexico, she denies having had a relationship with Oswald, and Shenon’s encounters with her prove more mysterious than illuminating.

Kennedy’s murder was bound to attract novelists, and some have approached the subject inventively, if with strange results. Stephen King’s “11/22/63,” a best seller published in 2011, takes the form of a time-travel romp involving a high school English teacher who finds romance in Texas while keeping tabs on Oswald. At more than 800 pages, the novel demands a commitment that exceeds its entertainment value.

I rather like Mailer’s “Oswald’s Tale,” published in 1995. It is, like his earlier masterpiece “The Executioner’s Song,” a work of “faction,” which is Mailer’s term for his hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration. Mailer and his colleague, Lawrence Schiller, spent six months in Russia examining Oswald’s K.G.B. files, and the huge quasi novel that came out of it contains a good deal of engrossing material about Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, as well as the odd assortment of people the couple mixed with in Texas. Mailer’s narrative skills are prodigious, but in the end he has little to tell us that wasn’t already uncovered by Priscilla Johnson McMillan in “Marina and Lee,” her nonfiction portrait of the troubled couple from 1977. (Mailer properly credits McMillan’s book.)

Most critics seem to think the outstanding example of Kennedy assassination fiction is “Libra,” Don DeLillo’s postmodern novel, published in 1988. The narrative is indeed taut and bracing. But the challenge DeLillo set for himself, to provide readers with “a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years,” exceeds even his lavish gifts.

It is telling that DeLillo reverts to the shadowy realm of “half-facts.” Their persistence raises the question of just how many secrets remain, not only about Kennedy’s death but also about his life. And if there are secrets, who is guarding them, and why?

One clue has been furnished by the historian Nigel Hamilton, whose book “JFK: Reckless Youth,” published in 1992, was the first in a planned multivolume biography that promised to be a valuable addition to the current literature. (He has since dropped the project.) While the book was gossipy, especially on the subject of the young Kennedy’s sexual adventures, Hamilton also provided a vivid and lively account of Kennedy’s successful 1946 campaign for Congress. But when Hamilton began work on the next volumes, he said he came under a sustained barrage by Kennedy loyalists. “The family leaned upon well-known historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Doris Goodwin to write protest letters to the press,” Hamilton wrote in 2011 in The Huffington Post. “I was warned that no Kennedy-era official or friend would be ‘allowed’ to speak to me for my proposed sequel.”

Kennedy may have enjoyed the company of writers, but the long history of secrecy and mythmaking has surely contributed to the paucity of good books. The Kennedys — especially Jackie and Bobby — were notoriously hard on authors whose books they didn’t like. And they enlisted Schlesinger, Theodore Sorensen and other intimates to act as a kind of history police, not only withholding primary materials but also bullying writers. A prominent historian recently told me he was once warned by Schlesinger, with whom he had been friendly, that because he had invited Hamilton to a meeting of the American Historical Association he might himself be banished from the organization. In recent years, the protective seal seems to have loosened. The Kennedy family, including Edward Kennedy and his sister Jean Kennedy Smith, gave unfettered access to their father’s papers to David Nasaw, the author of “The Patriarch,” a well-received biography of Joseph P. Kennedy that appeared last year.

Caroline Kennedy has been even more open to the claims of history. She herself was involved in the publication of two books and the release of accompanying tapes. One of them, “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy,” contains the transcripts of the first lady’s interviews about her husband with Schlesinger, conducted in 1964 but kept secret until 2011. They are revealing and mesmerizing. The other, “Listening In,” offers White House conversations captured in a secretly installed taping system in the Oval Office. Since Kennedy controlled the device, these conversations are more guarded, but the book includes at least one memorable moment, when the president hilariously loses his temper over unflattering press about the $5,000 cost of Mrs. Kennedy’s hospital maternity suite — “Are they crazy up there? Now you know what that’s gonna do? Any congressman is going to get up and say, ‘Christ, if they can throw $5,000 away on this, let’s cut ’em another billion dollars.’ You just sank the Air Force budget!”

The most disturbing case of the family’s attempts to control history came early on, and it involved William Manchester, the historian chosen by the Kennedys a few weeks after the assassination to write the authorized account, “The Death of a President.” Manchester was selected because of a previous, and fawning, book he had written about Kennedy, “Portrait of a President.” (In a bizarre twist, this was one of the books Lee Harvey Oswald checked out of a New Orleans public library just months before the assassination.) Manchester was given sole access to almost all the president’s men as well as to his widow and virtually every principal figure. (Lyndon Johnson submitted answers in writing through his staff.) It seemed the ideal arrangement — until Manchester presented a manuscript to the Kennedys.

In a gripping piece from his 1976 collection of essays, “Controversy,” Manchester described what happened next. First there were the many insertions and deletions made by various Kennedy minions, who applied so much pressure that Manchester became a nervous wreck. An especially low point came when Robert Kennedy hunted Manchester down in a New York hotel room and banged on the door, demanding to be let in to argue for still more changes. Next, Jackie Kennedy, who had not bothered to read the manuscript, accepted the view of her factotums that many of its details, like the fact that she carried cigarettes in her purse, were too personal. Further angered by the $665,000 Manchester had received from Look magazine for serial rights, Mrs. Kennedy went to court to enjoin the author from publishing the book. Eventually, she settled out of court and finally read “The Death of a President” when it was published in 1967. She deemed it “fascinating.”

Nevertheless, the Kennedy family, which controlled publication rights to “The Death of a President,” allowed it to go out of print, and for a number of years copies could be found only online or at rummage sales. The good news, maybe the best, of the 50th anniversary is that Little, Brown has now reissued paperback and e-book editions.

It’s good news because, remarkably, and against all odds, Manchester (who died in 2004) wrote an extraordinary book. There are obvious defects. Predictably, he blares the trumpets of Camelot, and he has a weakness for melodrama. It’s hard to believe, even at the time of Kennedy’s murder, that to the world it was “as though the Axis powers had surrendered and Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt had died in the hours between noon and midafternoon in Washington of a single day in 1945.” But these excesses don’t really matter, thanks to Manchester’s vivid reporting, masterly narrative and authentically poetic touches.

It is in small, quiet scenes that Manchester’s chronicle accumulates its greatest force. When it is time for Dave Powers, the slain president’s aide and sidekick, to pick out the clothes Kennedy will wear to his grave, he selects from eight suits and four pairs of shoes brought out by Kennedy’s valet, George Thomas. Powers settles on a blue-gray suit, black shoes and “a blue tie with a slight pattern of light dots.” An embroidered “JFK” on the white silk shirt is hidden from view. The valet remembered that Kennedy’s “dislike of flamboyant monograms had extended to handkerchiefs,” Manchester writes. The president “had carefully folded them so that the initials would not show, and Thomas did it for him now, slipping the handkerchief into his coat pocket.”

Of all that has been written and that will be read on this 50th anniversary, it is the last paragraphs of “The Death of a President” that deserve to stand out from everything else. Manchester describes viewing the bloodstained pink suit Jackie Kennedy wore on Nov. 22, 1963, which had since been stowed in a Georgetown attic:

Unknown to her, the clothes Mrs. Kennedy wore into the bright midday glare of Dallas lie in an attic not far from 3017 N Street. In Bethesda that night those closest to her had vowed that from the moment she shed them she should never see them again. She hasn’t. Yet they are still there, in one of two long brown paper cartons thrust between roof rafters. The first is marked “September 12, 1953,” the date of her marriage; it contains her wedding gown. The block-printed label on the other is “Worn by Jackie, November 22, 1963.” Inside, neatly arranged, are the pink wool suit, the black shift, the low-heeled shoes and, wrapped in a white towel, the stockings. Were the box to be opened by an intruder from some land so remote that the name, the date and photographs of the ensemble had not been published and republished until they had been graven upon his memory, he might conclude that these were merely stylish garments which had passed out of fashion and which, because they were associated with some pleasant occasion, had not been discarded.

If the trespasser looked closer, however, he would be momentarily baffled. The memento of a happy time would be cleaned before storing. Obviously this costume has not been. There are ugly splotches along the front and hem of the skirt. The handbag’s leather and the inside of each shoe are caked dark red. And the stockings are quite odd. Once the same substance streaked them in mad scribbly patterns, but time and the sheerness of the fabric have altered it. The rusty clots have flaked off; they lie in tiny brittle grains on the nap of the towel. Examining them closely, the intruder would see his error. This clothing, he would perceive, had not been kept out of sentiment. He would realize that it had been worn by a slender young woman who had met with some dreadful accident. He might ponder whether she had survived. He might even wonder who had been to blame.

Unfortunately, the tapes of Manchester’s two five-hour interviews with Jackie Kennedy, who seems to have regretted her frankness, remain under seal at the Kennedy Library until 2067. This is a final sadness for a reader sifting through these many books. Taken together, they tell us all too little about this president, now gone 50 years, who remains as elusive in death as he was in life.

Jill Abramson is the executive editor of The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on October 27, 2013, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Elusive President.

“Are Kids too Coddled?” Challenging Bruni’s Opinion with Scientific Data and Evidence

http://garnpress.com/2013/12/garn-press-editorial-are-kids-too-coddled-challenging-brunis-opinion-with-scientific-data-and-evidence/

Posted by Garn Press on Dec 13, 2013 in Editorial Features, News

“Are Kids too Coddled?”

Challenging Bruni’s Opinion with Scientific Data and Evidence

Denny Taylor, 2013
“Are kids too coddled?” Frank Bruni asks in The New York Times, November 24, 2013.
Bruni wants parents to stop whining and kids to toughen up. It’s a predictable piece of writing, the kind that second career students, who have opted-out of journalism or investment banking, often write in graduate classes when their careers have been interrupted by the technological or economic squeeze that has left them scrambling for an easy alternative.
In the piece Bruni denigrates parents, dismisses the concerns of teachers, and does not understand that the testimony of the social worker is factual testimony and not uninformed opinion as he professes. Bruni dismisses parents, teachers, and social workers, and he genders moral authority when he quotes David Coleman’s simplistic and fundamentally flawed proposition that rigorous standards “redefine self-esteem as something achieved through hard work”.
In the US there are many people who have worked hard all their lives and are looking for work. Similarly, there are many children in public schools who work hard and are failing for reasons over which they have no control. In many public schools kids have had the self esteem knocked out of them by the developmentally inappropriate curriculum known as the Common Core.
If Bruni handed me his opinion piece of writing in a graduate literacy course that I was teaching, I would hand it back to him and give him the opportunity to rewrite it. If he chose not to rewrite, he would receive an inflated C for the piece and his final grade would be impacted by the choice he had made. He would need A’s in all his other assignments to squeak by with a B.
At the meeting that would follow the return of his paper we would discuss the meaning of “opinion” – whether it be in journalism or in a graduate course in education. I would probably say something about the Supreme Court – that while US Supreme Court Justices render opinions, they are opinions informed by deep knowledge of Constitutional Law, by a lifetime of experience in the legal profession, and by rigorous legal research as it pertains to the cases that require the Supreme Court Justices to express their collective opinion.
Given that Bruni criticizes “coddling”, I would not “coddle” him. I would tell him that his off-­the-cuff piece was opportunistic, filled with writing contrivances, written at the expense of others, and lacking in any substantive understanding of the topic on which he had chosen to write. I would tell Bruni to do his homework, which he clearly has not, and to rewrite and resubmit the essay.
I would explain that I expect him to work to the best of his ability, and that I expect rigorous scholarship, even though in more than four decades in education I have never administered a test, standardized or otherwise. I would tell him that my job as a teacher is to ensure he has every opportunity to think deeply about his scholarship, and to produce a piece of writing that is imaginative and creative, as well as firmly grounded in disciplined and systematic research.
“Don’t tell me to think,” a graduate student once told me. “Just tell me what you want me to do!”
“What I want you to do,” I replied, “is think.”
I would ask Bruni to think. I would ask him to consider whether tacked together anecdotes actually constitute an opinion piece, and then take the anecdotes one by one and help him to really think about them.
I would begin with his statement about the “welling hysteria from right wing alarmists, who hallucinate a federal takeover of education and the indoctrination of a next generation of government-loving liberals”.
I would advise him to read “Whose Knowledge Counts in Government Literacy Policies: How the Federal Government Used Science to Take Over Public Schools” by the renowned reading scholar Robert Calfee.
“In January 2002, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Let Behind Act (NCLB; PL 107-110) instituting a major federal encroachment on public education in the United States,” Calfee writes. “The focus is on literacy, but the implications are far reaching, and go to the core of the intersections of science and politics, of knowledge and power, and of the balance between federal and local control, as these affect the education of young children.”
I would urge Bruni to drop the gratuitous rhetoric of “welling hysteria”, and do his homework. An opinion piece on the loss of local control of public education has very serious implications that he has either missed or ignored.
Similarly, Bruni’s “from left-wing paranoiacs, who imagine some conspiracy to ultimately privatize education and create a new frontier of profits for money-mad plutocrats” could be a critical site for inquiry. He could start with Pearson.
“Global education is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” Pearson’s CEO, John Fallon, stressed in explaining the company’s strategy for the educational market in Pearson’s 2012 annual report. “We think education will turn out to be the great growth industry of the 21st Century.” He states, “As the world’s leading learning company, Pearson has a once-in-a generation opportunity. To seize it, we must transform the company again. Our strategy is sound; we are now accelerating.”
In the 2012 annual report, Pearson states that  “North American education is Pearson’s largest business, with 2012 sales of ₤2,7 bn and operating profit of ₤536 m” ($4.34 billion and $862 million respectively, as of 11-7-13)”. The annual report also notes that, “In the US we actively monitor changes through participation in advisory boards and representation on standard setting committees. Our customer relationships teams have detailed knowledge of each state market.”
Moreover, Pearson states that the company works “through our own government relations team,” and that the company is also “monitoring municipal funding and the impact on our education receivables.”
I would advise Bruni to be cautious in creating dualisms, and advise him to adopt a position that relies on scientific research and not on political ideology. Many scholars take a third position that is transdisciplinary, combining insights from research in the physical, social, and biological sciences, with systematic documentation of human experience.
I would encourage Bruni to unpackage his unquestioning acceptance of the claim that the Common Core is a “laudable set of guidelines”.
On a daily basis I receive emails from researchers and educators on specific aspects of the Common Core that are problematic. It is an ill thought out, poorly constructed, inadequately researched national experiment, in which public school children are the mandated experimental subjects. It is an experiment that is being conducted without parental permission and without institutional human subject review.
Given the tenor of Bruni’s “opinion” piece it is unlikely that the last statement would sit well with him. I would encourage him to take up the challenge, resist the pressures of policy makers, ditch the pundits and talking heads, and conduct a thorough, data driven analysis.
He could start by visiting the website of the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University where he would find a link, among many others, to a recently published scientific paper by the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. The paper focuses on the importance of young children developing, as the Scientific Council states, “in an environment of relationships”.
Bruni would find that this eminent group of child psychiatrists, pediatricians, neuroscientists, and professors of child development, working in the interface between science and public policy, draw attention to the connections between young children’s social experiences and the developing architecture of the brain: “healthy development depends on the quality and reliability of a young child’s relationships with the important people in his or her life, both within and outside the family. Even the development of a child’s brain architecture depends on the establishment of these relationships”.
The idea that children’s social environments can impact their brain architecture is a significant scientific finding of which Bruni does not seem to be aware. Given the high stress educational environments that are a direct result of the Common Core experiment, the implications of this scientific fact are potentially devastating for young children, their families, and US society
At my meeting with Bruni I would encourage him to reflect on these scientific findings, and on his disparaging remarks about the father who spoke at the Poughkeepsie meeting with New York State Education Commissioner John King. Putting the father on the spot was not only unwarranted but also wrongheaded. The dad gets it. Bruni doesn’t. It is a scientific fact that the higher the stress levels caused by developmentally inappropriate classroom instruction, the less children achieve in school.
I would also suggest to Bruni that if a social worker testifies that elementary school children say they feel stupid and that school is too hard, that they are throwing temper tantrums and begging to stay home, that they are so upset they are vomiting, or if they say they are having suicidal thoughts and they are self mutilating (cutting), no New York Times reporter or public official should so glibly dismiss such testimony.
If Bruni were in my graduate class I would tell him in no uncertain terms that I regard his opinion with regard to the testimony of the social worker to be grossly irresponsible. He states, “If children are unraveling to this extent, it’s a grave problem”, but cautions that “we need to ask ourselves how much panic is trickling down to kids from their parents and whether we’re paying the price of having insulated kids from blows to their egos”.
I would tell Bruni the implication of his “opinion” is that the social worker is lying. She is not. I would advise him to take her testimony seriously, and to give up the idea that kids in the US are “insulated” from “blows to their ego”. I would point out to him that the scientific evidence, both in the US and from international comparative studies, leaves no doubt that children in the US are negative outliers on every measure of health and well being of children in the developed world.
I would give Bruni a copy of The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and encourage him to visit the website of Equality Trust. I would put in his hands the Eleventh Innocenti Report Card, Child well-being in rich countries: A comparative overview, produced by the UNICEF Office of Research, and point out to him that the bottom four places in the league tables on child well-being are occupied by three of the poorest countries in the survey, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania, and by one of the richest, the United States of America.

(Photo Credit: Ben James Taylor)
Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake

Simply put, the high stress environments in which children in the US are raised are unhealthy, detrimental to their well being, and have a negative impact on their academic development. This is not opinion. It is fact. Wilkinson and Pickett provide the epidemiological analysis based on medical research as well as social science that they link to poor academic achievement. These rankings correspond with the international rankings of children’s health and well-being reported in the Eleventh Innocenti Report Card, and in other similar international comparative studies.
None of these negative findings should surprise Bruni. If you write opinions in the New York Times, many readers will ascribe to you both the authority and integrity of the press. Given that this is the case, readers, especially parents and teachers, should know that government officials have openly admitted that to bring about unpopular educational reform  “astute use of media and communications have a proven ability to effect changes in mindsets and actions”.
The quote is taken from an infamous report entitled “US Education Reform and National Security”. Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State for the George W. Bush Administration, and Joel Klein, CEO and Executive VP of News Corporation, who was once Chancellor of New York City’s school system, co-chaired the committee that produced the report. The report was written in support of the Common Core.
Rice and Klein write, “This public awareness campaign should be managed by a coalition of government, business, and military leaders. It should aim to keep everyone in the country focused on the national goal of improving education to safeguard America’s security today and in the future”. They state “The group believes that a targeted, annual campaign, led by the Department of Education in collaboration with the U.S. States, the Department of Defense and State, and the intelligence agencies could have this impact.”
Parents, teachers, and the public are not “coddling” kids, they are trying to protect them. There is much in the report that is rational and reasonable, but in a democratic society the overall tenor of the report is chilling.
I would encourage Bruni to disaggregate the TIMSS-R data as David Berliner did as far back as 2001. Berliner said then, as he has since with the data from 2009, that the “critics were misreading those scores”.
“TIMSS-R confirms a point many of us have long believed,” Berliner wrote in 2001. “Not all our schools district should change. Despite the doomsayers, some of our schools are doing fine. The U. S. average masks the scores of students from terrific public schools and hides the scores of students attending shamefully inadequate schools.”
“The moral is clear,” Berliner is decisive. “Average scores mislead completely in a country as heterogeneous as ours. We have many excellent public schools, and many that are not nearly as good. Those who want to undermine our public schools often condemn the whole system rather than face the inequities within it. They should focus their attention instead on rescuing the underfunded and ill-equipped schools that are failing children in our poorest neighborhoods.”
The bottom line is that there is a bifurcation of the US data in the international league tables, and the indisputable problem is the high rate of poverty and gross inequality that needs to be fixed.
To ensure that Bruni has the most recent data I would point him in the direction of the results from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which were released on December 3, 2013. These latest PISA test results add to previous extensive evidence that extreme inequality in the US is the most damaging factor impacting the educational achievement of US students.
“Get the data,” I would tell Bruni. “And do your own research.”
To get him started I’d suggest he take a look at Commissioner Jack Buckley’s Briefing Slides, which were attached to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) December 3, 2013 “NCES Statement on PISA 2012”, that presents the PISA data without any political spin. I would also make sure that he knows that OECD is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and that ESCS stands for Economic, Social and Cultural Status.
“The ESCS is a critical factor in any analysis of US students,” I would explain, “because of the extreme inequality that we tolerate in America.”
With a little digging Bruni would find that US fifteen year old students in the high poverty group, who were in bottom quarter on the OECD scale of ESCS, had low scores in math, science and reading. Thus we can state that US students who are the recipients of America’s extreme inequality in the US scored significantly below the US and OECD average scores. Furthermore, these US students, who are deprived of the fundamental right to a public education comparable with US students in well funded school districts, had scores comparable to students in high poverty countries such as Kazakhstan, Romania and Cyprus.
In contrast, US fifteen year old students in the top quarter on the OECD ESCS scale had average scores that would rank around second in reading, fourth in math, and ninth in science when compared to the worldwide country averages. The “score gaps” between the top and bottom quarter ESCS groups of US fifteen year olds were found to be significant in all three areas – math, science and reading.
It is also important to note that three US states, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Florida opted to have the PISA tests administered to additional students so that they could receive their own ratings. The analysis of the disaggregated data revealed that Massachusetts and Connecticut students achieved outstanding results on a worldwide basis in reading and science and solid scores in math. However, Florida students scored significantly lower in math and science than the US average and only average in reading. This is critical data for Bruni to consider, given that Florida, which has higher rates of poverty, has also been a leader of the educational reform movement that has lead to the establishment of the Common Core.
Could it be that the Common Core is now a critical factor in what Education Secretary Arne Duncan has stated is “a picture of education stagnation”?
Whatever the argument that is presented by policy makers and pundits, US policy makers can no longer state that the current educational reforms are “evidence based”. To the contrary, there is overwhelming scientific evidence that they are not.
Helen Ladd states that current educational reforms “have the potential to do serious harm” in her presidential address, Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence, to the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), November, 2011. Ladd writes, “Because these policy initiatives do not directly address the educational challenges experienced by disadvantaged students, they have contributed little –  and are not likely to contribute much in the future – to raising overall students achievement or to reducing achievement and educational attainment gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students”.
At my meeting with Bruni I would urge him to reconsider his opinion based on the evidence. I would encourage him to read the Rice-Klein report and to take seriously the three M’s – the politically sanctioned monetization, marketization and militarization of public education.
I would suggest that he juxtapose this documentation with the research presented by Wilkinson and Pickett, and ask himself why it is that children in the US are a negative statistical outlier on every international comparative analysis of health, well-being, and academic development. If he needs more evidence of the depth of the problem, I would add one more data set for him to study, the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) research.
I would put it to him that the situation is very grave indeed, that we are in the middle of a national emergency, and that the people who are speaking up have been so disenfranchised that no public official or newspaper reporter is listening to them.
I would tell him I stand with the father of the eight year old who spoke up. His son isn’t “bubble wrapped”, he is “fill-in-the-bubble trapped”. I stand with all the teachers and parents in Poughkeepsie who were brave enough to stand up to John King, even though they knew he would denigrate them, as he did.
I stand against the real negative outliers, who are the architects of the Common Core, the policy makers who have mandated it, and the multinational corporations who profit from it.
I stand for a new government mandate that no child shall come to school hungry, that every child shall have a bed to sleep on at night and a place to call “home”, that no child shall be left behind riding the subways or buses at night or sleeping in hospital emergency waiting rooms, as they do in New York City, and that no child shall be called “human capital” in any official report on educational reform and national security, as they are in the Rice-Klein report.
If America’s children are not safe then how can the nation be safe?
I stand with the social worker who testified that elementary school children are distressed to the point of having suicidal thoughts and who reported that children are self mutilating. I stand with the principals, teachers, and parents who are vocal in this struggle, with the Save Our Schools Movement, and with the OPT Out Movement. I stand with the teachers in Garfield High School in Seattle who refused to test the children in their school. .
I stand for a cessation of the developmentally inappropriate testing of young children, and for no tests to be administered before fourth grade. I stand for school districts to be allowed to reallocate the vast amounts of money they are presently forced to spend on testing so the money can be a funding source for developmentally appropriate curricular practices to ensure the health and well being of children as well as their academic development.
I stand for a nationwide emergency relief effort for children in high poverty schools, including a first response mobilization of the public to fill the classrooms of children who are poor with children’s books and all other essential school supplies.
Our schools should be filled with children who are not hungry, who are not among the most anxious children in the world, who participate in learning activities enhanced by technology, who conduct science experiments, participate in math projects, play musical instruments in bands and orchestras, sing in choirs, collaborate in art projects, actively engage in reading fiction and nonfiction paper and virtual books, and write on paper and tablets.
This is what it will take to nurture children’s imagination and creativity and enhance their scholarship, nothing less.
School can be and often is hard work, but it does not have to be “mirthless”, as Bruni would have us believe. Learning is quite literally and metaphorically about minds and hearts, and it can actually be joyful.
Let’s hope Bruni stands up for the nation’s children, and that the New York Times rethinks the editorial stance the newspaper has taken on public education, and does some investigative reporting first, to uncover why the scientific evidence is being obfuscated, and second, why the national emergency that is currently taking place in America’s public schools is not being reported.

Postscript

The street art on the Garn Press Website accompanying this response to Frank Bruni is a line from Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake:
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.