Word: "Now or Never" by Tim Flannery

Subtitle: "Why we must act now to end climate change and create a sustainable future"

A very short, fast read, with a surprising degree of optimism -- IF we act fast.

Should be available in Salem from Tea Party Bookshop, or Joanne will order it for you.

Chuck Bennett's got a website

One Fair World & the $250 Shopping Spree Contest

Image by flydown via Flickr

If you go here and register to win a $250 Fair Trade shopping spree at One Fair World, you might win $250 worth of beautiful handcrafted goods from artisans all over the world who are feeding their families, building their communities, and educating their children with the proceeds. What's not to like?

Check out One Fair World @ 474 Court St. in Salem (just next to Grand Vines) too -- or visit the website at http://onefairworld.org/ (note no www.)

Two more interesting pieces on schools

Image via Wikipedia

The saddest part is that the morans who are pushing the No Child Left Behind nonsense and 99.99% of the critics are both arguing about which camp has the better model for training kids for a future that is not going to happen at all.

Neither group has thought about how we're going to manage rapid descaling of all large institutions as militarism, peak oil, and economic reversals caused by climate destabilization become progressively more intense. If ever the metaphor about deck chairs on the Titanic applied it's to the discussion about how we're going to continue to fund the factory models of public education (K-16).

A great question here: "Suppose we give a high school test to everyone in Congress, with scores listed in rank order and serious penalties--including deselecting the bottom 10 percent?" -- Deborah Meier

OUR DYING PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM

BOSTON GLOBE - The news says we are watching the death of public education before our eyes. Detroit is closing more than 40 schools, Kansas City wants to close more than 40 percent of its school buildings. Other cities have been closing schools over the last decade. Boston avoided closings in its most recent budget deliberations, but still must slash custodial staff and postpone building repairs.

It is no secret that American education is at a great divide, unrivaled in most of the developed world. The United States spends $9,800 per public primary and secondary education student, which is technically high by global standards.

But meanwhile, children of the wealthy are being trained at private schools at more than triple the expenditures. In the Boston area, day school tuition rates are closing in on $35,000.

Our investment in public school teachers is paltry for the wealthiest country in the world. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the United States ranks in some measures behind England, Italy, Japan, Scotland and way behind Germany in starting teacher pay. The average expenditure on college students in the United States amounts to $24,400 per college student, two and a half times more than the $9,800 per-pupil spending in the public schools.

Beneath the numbers is the resegregation of children on the basis of class, race and immigration status. Prison spending soared so much, that by 2007, five states spent as much or more on corrections than on higher education, according to the Pew Center on the States.

In monetary terms, we have given up on millions of children. 'I don't think necessarily that public education is dead, but certain parts of it are dying," said Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor who headed President Barack Obama's education transition team. 'The programs of the 1960s and 1970s that helped make education more equitable were mostly eliminated in the 1980s and never put back.

'We're disinvesting in a significant way. With the huge decline in America of manual labor jobs that are being off- shored or digitalized, the vast majority of jobs are knowledge based. If we do not invest that way, we really can't survive as a nation. To deeply underfund public education as we are doing does not make any sense."

Author of the 2009 book, 'The Flat World and Education," Darling-Hammond says neither poverty, nor the diverse nature of the American population are excuses not to educate everyone. Several countries were behind the United States decades ago in education and now have passed us.

She cites the example of Korea, which 'in the space of one generation . . . moved from a nation that educated less than a quarter of its citizens through high school to one that now ranks third in college-educated adults."

She noted how Singapore, where 80 percent of families live in public housing, was tops in the world in fourth-grade and eighth-grade math assessments in 2003. 'When children leave the tiny, spare apartments they occupy in high-rises throughout the city," she wrote of Singapore, 'they arrive at colorful, airy school buildings where student artwork, papers, projects, and awards are displayed throughout, libraries and classrooms are well-stocked, instructional technology is plentiful, and teachers are well trained."

CHILD ABUSE: RACE TO THE TOP

Delaware was one of the winners in Arne Duncan's so-called 'race to the top' contest, which is to say, his bizarre idea of what a school system should look like. Here are a few excerpts from the Delaware submission uncovered by Susan O'Hanian. If you are a parent in Delaware you might want to move, unless you want your child talking like this instead of using conventional English:


With the implementation of a new testing system, Delaware's teachers will have a wealth of data and information available to them. This data is only useful, however, if teachers can translate the information into classroom solutions and use it to inform their teaching. To make sure that each teacher has those skills, Delaware will deploy data coaches to all [local education authorities]. The State will provide 4.5 hours of data coaching per month to each professional learning community (of 6-7 teachers) for two years. The coaches will be contractual in nature and work on a full time basis. 15 data coaches will be provided to the first waive of schools beginning in January 2011. At the peak of the program, 35 data coaches will cover all schools in 2011-12. In sum, each school will have access to a data coach for two years with State support. These data coaches will be fully funded for non high-need schools at a rate of $104,000 per data coach annually ($54 hourly rate). Because of the importance of this initiative, high-need schools will be required to contribute 50% of the cost for data coaches. This will help ensure that these schools have a high level of engagement and investment in the successful use of the data coaches and the influx of funds that high-need schools will receive through the Title I allocation formula will ensure that they have sufficient resources to contribute to this initiative.

For all LEAs/charters, the State will. . . Create the technological base for instructional improvement systems1 (e.g., reports based on formative assessments) and integrate into the Educational Dashboard Portal--Appendix A-7

For all LEAs/charters, the State will. . . Review and adopt CCSSO standards by August 2010, as appropriate, and align grade-level expectations to guide curriculum

For all LEAs/charters, the State will. . .

- Build an Educational Dashboard Portal that Makes State longitudinal data easily accessible to stakeholders

- Provides differentiated "dashboards" based on stakeholder role, with data of interest to the stakeholder (as determined by research), full longitudinal and trend information, and correlations between key statistics

Build the capacity to use data to inform instruction by implementing instructional improvement systems and providing support from data coaches The state will. . .

- Create the technological base for instructional improvement systems (e.g., reports based on formative assessments) and integrate into the Educational Dashboard Portal

- Define criteria and quality standards for instructional improvement systems

- Pre-approve methods and/or providers of instructional improvement systems meeting these expectations

Data coaches will facilitate collaborative planning time to help teachers and leaders develop the technical skills to analyze data and the pedagogical skills to adjust instruction based on data

For all LEAs/charters, the State will. . . revise DPASII to meet regulations requiring student growth for effective and highly effective ratings. . . define rigorous and comparable measures of student growth in consultation with stakeholder groups

The State will. . .provide high-quality training to assessors on conducting evaluations and providing specific and actionable feedback using the State's 4- level rubric. . . define the teacher leader role and responsibilities (which will include daily teaching time) and create an evaluation supplement for DPAS II for teacher leaders. . . propose legislation requiring teachers to show appropriate levels of student growth prior to offering continuing licenses and tenure protections

Improve the coherence, quality, and impact of support for teachers and leaders through more rigorous certification and prioritization of instructional leadership

Identify schools to turn around through the State Partnership Zone, give the State authority to intervene in reform plan following collective bargaining, and provide support with a strong turnaround office.

Why budgetary hard times are going to be much harder than you think

One of the very few economists worth reading. Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The always-excellent Paul Krugman of the NY Times and the Swedish-Bank-Prize-That-is-Often-Wrongly-Described-as-the-Nobel-Prize-in-Economics Fame describes, at the federal level, exactly what is happening in Oregon and Salem: people urging cuts in government based on a fantasy about what government actually is and does.

Fiscal Fantasies

. . . The basic picture of the federal government you should have in mind is that it’s essentially a huge insurance company with an army; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — all of which spend the great bulk of their funds on making payments, not on administration — plus defense are the big items. Salaries aren’t.

But the Kudlow picture is nonetheless a key part of conservative imagery; the idea of vast rooms full of government employees doing nothing productive is central to their vision of painless spending cuts. The fact that it’s not remotely true is irrelevant; they want it to be true, and that’s enough.

P.S. Krugman has a long piece in the NY Times Magazine about greening the economy. Haven't read it yet but it's here, and he's one of the few growth-oriented economists who has the intellectual honesty to confront the contradictions between a sustainable planet and our currently dominant incomplete capitalism (that ignores environmental capital and focuses only on cash flow, not net worth).

Digital bookmobile @ Lancaster Sprawl, 4/14, 12-6 p.m.

Image via WikipediaDigital Bookmobile National Tour event

One of the interesting things about the event below is the realization that it's being funded by the makers of these digital toys, because they have to create some demand to get our little cash-strapped library to spend money on their ephemera instead of honest-to-God books, which endure much better and don't require the user to have spent hundreds of dollars to use. Still, if you like that sort of thing, you might want to know about this:

Hosted by Salem Public Library
12 noon-6 p.m. Wednesday, April 14
at Lancaster Mall, 831 Lancaster Dr. NE

Salem Public Library is hosting an April visit from the Digital Bookmobile, an interactive download experience inside a 74-foot, high-tech tractor-trailer. The Digital Bookmobile offers interactive learning stations where visitors have an opportunity to search the library’s digital media collection, use supported mobile devices, and sample eBooks, audiobooks, and video, all available locally through the Library2Go digital download service, which is available at Salem Public Library and all area libraries in the Chemeketa Cooperative Regional Library System.

Readers of all ages are invited to stop by and learn about digital downloads, visit the Salem Public Library resource table, and even sign up for a library card on site.

The Digital Bookmobile is a service of Salem Public Library and is operated by OverDrive, Inc. Information about all aspects of the Library2Go download service is available from the Salem Public Library Information/Reference Desk at 503-588-6052 or www.salemlibrary.org.

Sonja Somerville
Community Relations Coordinator
Salem Public Library

Phone: 503-588-6083
E-mail: ssomerville@cityofsalem.net

Now is the Time for All Good Citizens to Come to the Aid of Their Heritage Center

Image via Wikipedia

The new thing, the Willamette Heritage Center ... i.e., Mission Mill Museum married to the Marion County Historical Society and given an unfortunately colorless name ... needs all our help.

The good folks running the show have a survey about how you use the place and what you think the priorities are. Check it out -- doesn't take long, and the more people from Salem and surroundings who complete it, the better.

Groups like the historical society and the folks who have worked so hard to preserve the mill have done something very, very important. Salem is very, very young in a historical sense -- yet, we are preserving less of our history than ever, thanks in large part to our own American sense of "history is bunk" but also because technology is sweeping things aside. If we're not careful, we're going to have more newspapers from 17th and 18th C. Philadelphia than from 19th and 20th Century Salem.

The public library should be the great archive of all county newspapers and should be working tirelessly to get them all rescued from the destroyers (the people who thought we should microfiche everything and then pulp it) -- but the library budget is imploding. So we're left with the county historical society, so we need to support them and help them thrive. To be ignorant of history is to remain a child forever, as the saying goes. We're going to face some hard, hard times in years to come -- it's important that we have access to the knowledge of how other people faced prior hard times here.

WORD: Don't support any candidates who won't fix the kicker

Subject: Oregon needs to plan for a rainy day now!

Hi,

Due to a still-weak economy and there being little chance of significant financial help from the federal government, Oregon is predicted to face another huge deficit. Because we started this recession without a well-funded Rainy Day Fund, we have almost no savings left to cushion us.

Our next governor must finally end Oregon's roller-coaster budgeting process. In most states, when revenues exceed expenses, the surplus can be saved for a rainy day. However, due to the flawed “kicker" provisions in the state constitution, we can't act prudently and put unanticipated revenue into an “emergency reserve fund.”

We need to do more to pressure politicians in Salem to start getting serious about revenue stability. Vigorous support for a real Rainy Day Fund via kicker reform should be a litmus test for any candidate who wants your support.

Please join me in signing the petition to each and every gubernatorial candidate to endorse and campaign for a strong Rainy Day Fund to help us weather future economic storms.

http://www.taxfirnessoregon.org/RainyDayGov

Thank you!

One very good reason to support Chuck Bennett

They got rid of city hall and gave us a parking lot -- what a perfect image for Salem. Image by Jason McHuff via Flickr

I don't know why anyone wants to be mayor of Salem much for the years to come -- it's like signing up to be Captain of the Willamette Queen -- you've got very little room to maneuver, you're constantly about a foot or two from running aground, you often face strong currents against you, you don't control your costs, and your only real hope is that institutions you don't control will decide, for whatever reason, to make your success happen.

But one thing I know is that, when times are tough, the better the communicator, the better the result. And, right now, official Salem is a terrible communicator. The city would do better with a team of teens from each high school competing to do public information than it has now.

Take the current snoozefest letter, dated March 30, 2010, and attractively headlined in that oh-so-alluring military style SUBJECT: Flood Hazards in the City of Salem. It goes on, for page after crashingly boring page, without ever quite managing to explain why any reader would get past the first paragraph. It should be a case study in "How not to waste public money in public information products." The "overview" doesn't tell you what's in the letter or why you might want to spend precious minutes of your life trying to decipher what it's saying. Rather, the overview is like the "overview" sections of the textbooks you didn't read when you were a kid -- "The City of Salem features the Willamette River and smaller tributaries ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz before finishing with the sizzling news that something called the "Pineapple Express" plus development -- which Salem often approves at a break neck pace -- equals flood risk.

Not a single picture in the whole letter. Not a damn one.

Chuck Bennett was a newspaper guy. And now he's a lobbyist. And some people criticize him for it, but God love a duck, if there's anything Salem needs right now it's someone who actually thinks about how to deliver a message in a way that makes people listen. Because the hard fact is that we. are. in. trouble. Jackson County closing government level trouble. When Oregon faces annual budget deficits -- as we fly over Governor Ted's cliff that he mentioned -- Salem doesn't just get its share of the pounding as a city, we also get a double shot of pain because all economies aimed at government at any level hit us in Salem extra hard.

Anna Peterson appears to be running a campaign to win office as a jobs builder, following in the footsteps of Janet Taylor, following in the footsteps of all the other politicians who campaign on the platform of "getting government out of the way of business so it can ________" (create jobs, cure cancer and psoriasis, clean up the environment, etc.). Got news for you -- being mayor IS a government job, even if we're so cheap that we don't pay for it. And the mayor won't be creating any jobs, no matter who it is, because the revenue won't be there. The only people who can create jobs are those who find a way to make money off making a job, and there's very little that Salem does to discourage that now, if you don't count being a bipolar town with a shrinking middle class as a discouragement to jobs.

One reason we can hope that Chuck wins the booby prize is that, if Peterson actually has any ideas for creating jobs, then she'd be wasted in the mayor's seat. The more likely reason is that all the jobs talk is just code for the SEDCOR and Chamber of Commerce types "Look, I'm not Mike Swaim, I'll do whatever you want and never, never, never suggest that businesses have to help pay the freight around here." But, either way, the bottom line is that neither Bennett nor Peterson are going to have much more control on jobs than does one of the Honorary Captains on the Willamette Queen (the kids who get to spin the wheel around while Capt. C. operates the thrusters that determine where the thing actually goes).

Me, I'd settle for having a good communicator in the mayor's office. And that's Chuck Bennett.

Book of the Year to 3/31: IOU: Why everybody owes everybody and no one can pay

Cover via Amazon

If you want to understand why the City of Salem's budget is collapsing faster than a Minnesota freeway bridge -- and to get a really good, crisp, clear and even witty education in the arcana of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and all the other mumbo jumbo terms that you've heard about -- you can not possibly do better than with John Lanchester's excellent book.

Lanchester does an outstanding job revealing the complete intellectual bankruptcy of economics, which has been taken over by the kind borderline autism that we associate with pimply teens just discovering Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, and Ayn Rand ... who makes a footnote appearance as a Charlie's Angels devotee in IOU.

This is a great book for the person who is allergic to financial stories, because he keeps bringing it back to how and why people in places like Salem are going to suffer for the sins of the SOBs, and how taking trillions of dollars from the victims of skullduggery and giving it to the crooks who victimized the rest of us in the first place came to be thought necessary, for example.

Publisher Comments:

Part economic primer, part fiscal and historical analysis, New Yorker and London Review of Books contributor John Lanchester offers his brilliantly witty, succinct overview of the current financial crisis.

For most people, the reasons for the sudden collapse of our economy remain obscure. I.O.U. is the story of how we came to experience such a complete and devastating financial implosion, and how the decisions and actions of a select group of individuals had profound consequences for America, Europe, and the global economy overall. John Lanchester begins with The ATM Moment, that seemingly magical proliferation of cheap credit that led to an explosion of lending, and then deftly outlines the global and local landscapes of banking and finance. Viewing the crisis through the lens of politics, culture, and contemporary history — from the invention and widespread misuse of financial instruments to the culpability of subprime mortgages — Lanchester draws perceptive conclusions on the limitations of financial and governmental regulation, capitalism's deepest flaw, and, most important, on the plain and simple facts of human nature where cash is concerned.

Weaving together firsthand research and superbly written reportage, Lanchester delivers a shrewd perspective and a digestible, comprehensive analysis that connects the dots for the expert and casual reader alike. I.O.U. is an eye-opener of a book — it may well provoke anger, amazement, or rueful disbelief — and, as the author clearly reveals, we've only just begun to get ourselves back on track.

Review:

"With clarity and a conversational style often (sometimes deliberately) lacking in the financial industry and its coverage, British journalist Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) takes readers on a comprehensive global tour of 2008's economic meltdown, focusing on each guilty parties' contributions to-and missed opportunities to halt-the worldwide crisis. Starting with the political buildup and then marching through the field of 'banksters,' regulators, mortgage companies and everyone else in a position to know better, Lanchester illustrates exactly how loans from predatory and incompetent players wound up being sold as triple-A investments, and how a subsequent housing market dip toppled the financial system. By prioritizing the financial sector and tenets of laissez-faire capitalism (to the point that it 'became a kind of secular religion'), those in charge of the markets failed to identify the growing systemic dangers; meanwhile, those responsible to the public acted as if benefits for financial institutions also benefited every economic participant, no matter how small. Laypeople seeking to understand the crisis, and what it means for their own bank account, will find Lanchester's volume an oasis of understanding in a sea of partisan spin and convoluted financial language." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)