Charter schools, education, SAT

New SAT, but Same Old Problems

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New SAT, but Same Old Problems (The Greenville News)

P.L. Thomas, professor of Education, Furman University

While South Carolina has joined several states in rejecting Common Core for public school standards and testing, one powerful legacy remains, the revised SAT.

An original architect of the Common Core, David Coleman, now heads the College Board and has championed the new SAT, partly as more aligned with the Common Core.

Paul Hyde’s recent coverage of Greenville high schools’ scores on the revised test as well as a piece on charter schools and the SC Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities offers a prime opportunity to address a new test but the same old problems.

Many advocating the new SAT have suggested that changing the test could address the large and persistent score gaps along race, social class, and gender lines.

However, reporting in Education Week, Catherine Gewertz reveals: “The 2017 SAT scores show inequities similar to those of earlier years. Asian (1181), white (1118), and multiracial (1103) students score far above the average composite score of 1060, while Hispanic (990) and African-American (941) students score significantly below it.”

For Greenville county as we consider the newest data and our urge to rank high schools by average SAT scores, we must once again confront some important facts that simple ranking tends to mask:

  • SAT average scores should never be used to rank schools, districts, or states in terms of academic quality; this caution, in fact, comes from the College Board itself.
  • SAT scores remain most strongly correlated with parental income, parental levels of education, gender (average male scores are higher than female scores), race, and access to courses.
  • SAT scores are designed solely to be predictive for college success (not to measure academic quality of any school or state); however, high school GPA has long been a better predictor than the test.

Therefore, we should not rush to interpret rankings of Greenville county schools by SAT scores that correlate primarily with the poverty index (PI) of each school as well as a careful analysis of which students in each school take the test.

For example, praising Riverside (PI 21.46) along with Greenville Tech Charter (PI 25.50), Greer Middle College Charter (PI 18.83), Brashier Middle College Charter (PI 16.55), and SCGSAH (PI 14.59) without acknowledging that high SAT scores are mostly a reflection of incredibly low poverty rates is a misleading suggestion of achievement being linked to school quality.

Not ranking and judging our schools by SAT data, however, is not enough. Instead we need to end entirely our toxic relationship with high-stakes testing because that process remains deeply inequitable.

Too many students are spending far too much time in and out of school mired in test-prep and test taking. In that context, we take the test scores far too seriously, typically misinterpreting them.

High-stakes test scores are mostly markers for race, social class, and gender; and are in only small ways reflections of achievement. Most standardized test data are 60% or more correlated with factors outside the schools, teachers, and students.

Test-prep and test taking are detracting from time better spent addressing the inequity of access most students suffer in terms of high-quality teachers and challenging courses. In SC and across the U.S., impoverished students, black and brown students, and English language learners are cheated with larger class sizes, inexperienced and uncertified teachers, and remedial (test-prep) courses.

By identifying the top high schools and bottom high schools according to average SAT scores, we are masking that all schools in the county tend to house social and community differences embodied by the students that attend those schools.

This does not mean we do not need education reform; but it does mean we need to reform our approaches to reform. Throughout the state, we need the political will to address crippling social issues related to food insecurity, stable work and housing, and healthcare, but we also need the political will to stop changing standards and tests every few years and, instead, confront directly the inequities of our schools (such as tracking and teacher assignments) that mirror the inequities of our communities.

And thus, the SAT is one part of the larger standards and testing era that inordinately drains our schools of time and funding that should be better spent elsewhere, notably in ways that address the inequity of access noted above.

We have much to praise and much to lament in Greenville county schools. SAT scores are not in either category since the new test brings with it the same old problems we refuse to name and then address.

Coda

Highlighted in red above, the point I made needs a bit more explanation.

I considered posting a separate blog titled “The Politics of Lazy Data Analysis,” but opt instead to expand on that briefly here.

The essential flaw in reporting average SAT scores and then using them to rank schools is that such reporting is simultaneously factual and misleading. As the chart below shows, ranking a group of high schools is doable and not essentially false since the scores are accurate.

While discussing the reporting with a friend who is a nurse and only knows about educational debates through mainstream media, my friend said that he noticed newspapers love charter schools, and from what he reads and hears, he believes charter schools are better than traditional schools.

And so, with the follow-up article on charter schools and the SCGSAH, we confront again that lazy data analysis combined with the aggressive self-promotion of charter schools produces a false narrative about charter schools somehow being superior than traditional public schools.

Instead, another just slightly less lazy analysis of the data below could be presented as “Local Low-Poverty High School Outperforms Low-Poverty Charter Schools on SAT.”

But even adding the Poverty Index to average SAT scores ignores that we are still not necessarily comparing equal populations of test takers: What about English language learner percentages and which students have taken college-level courses better aligned with SAT questions? What about percentages of test takers who have paid for SAT-prep training outside of school?

Finally, however, as noted above, the great flaw with any analysis of SAT data is grounded in the unavoidable fact that the SAT is not designed to measure school or teacher quality and that SAT scores mostly reflect factors other than academic achievement.

The politics of lazy data analysis, then, often uses actual facts while misrepresenting important topics: The implication that charter schools are outperforming traditional schools is simply not true. If we can or should try to determine what schools are academically effective, then using SAT data is a deeply misguided venture.

SAT PI Greenville
memoir, race, racism

black & white

My parents were 1950s plain-white-people pretty throughout my childhood in the 60s.

My dad wore a crewcut and Buddy Holly glasses. My mom with Mary Tyler Moore hair like they were always playing dress-up for a Weezer song.

I remember them and then in black and white.

The only 1960s hippies for me were my mother’s much younger sisters and brother. All of them animated in my mind on faded 8 mm color film, and they were always a little dirty.

And they all smoked—although my aunts and uncle probably indulged also in something illegal, pot—but old black and white photographs and the shaky 8 mm films my parents took allowed all that offensive smoke to look cool, harmless, romantic.

•

It has been five decades since then.

A few days ago, I bought my mother a new pair of shoes. She has two pairs in assisted living—one too small and the other too narrow.

And then just yesterday, I took her the new shoes before I drove her to a doctor’s appointment.

After her stroke, my mother is no longer her full self, having lost most of her language abilities and sounding more like my 3-year-old granddaughter than the very bright woman my mother was before.

She fretted to tears on the drive about needing to go by her house—I had no idea why—and about how to pay for the doctor’s visit—I explained as I have hundreds of time since the stroke that I have money. The trip was not unlike “Are we there yet?” round trips that most parents must suffer through, except in this case I was the parent to my mother as child.

My mother has seen the same doctors for many years, Indians who served my small rural hometown before moving their practice to the larger town hear-by. The nurses and staff have also known my parents for many years.

After a nurse conducted an ultrasound on my mother to check on the clots found in her leg after the stroke, they appeared out of the examination room. The nurse asked what happened to my father.

I hesitated as I often do now when people appear eager to discuss my father’s death with my infirm mother right there. I know she knows, but the act of discussing my father’s death, my father dead with her listening makes me want to say, “You do know my mother is right here?”

In the gap of my pause, the nurse added, “Rosie said he was killed?”

And I realized the nurse and my mom had already had a conversation, and my mother’s much reduced communication had likely caused more confusion for the nurse.

“No, he passed away,” I uttered euphemistically. “His heart.”

The nurse offered a cavalier “Oh” signaling that his death made perfect sense—more so than his being killed.

Although the visit with the nurse practitioner went well, my mother refused adamantly any further medication, even though it could help with her regaining the ability to talk. She has had a lifelong struggle with worrying about her health but refusing prescription medications.

I did run by her home on the way back to assisted living, but that simply sparked even more crying and incoherent ramblings, building on her struggling all day with simply going to the doctor.

Once in the house, she was unable to look through a closet because my nephews had been cleaning out and packing away much of my parents’ belongings. Eventually, exhausted and frantic, she gave up and demanded a couple pillows off a bed in that room, finally urging that we leave.

After my mother was once again in her recliner at assisted living, near tears and rambling further, I suggested she sit back and rest before dinner—and I left nearly as wrenched to exhaustion as she was.

For more than forty years, interacting with my parents had been mostly tension, a moral, intellectual, and emotional battle between my obligations as a son and my true self. Nothing was as simple as black and white.

Later that evening, my nephew texted that my mother was complaining to him about her neck hurting. I replied that we had just sat at the doctor’s office, and when the nurse practitioner asked my mother if she had any pain, my mother had responded with an assertive “no.”

I felt myself responding beyond the limits of patience or love.

•

Like many people enamored with image-based social media such as Instagram, I often choose to post pictures in black and white, usually of my granddaughter, alone and with me.

I also have an affinity for black and white movies made intentionally in black and white well into the era of color film.

As I psychoanalyze myself, I wonder if this romanticizing of black and white—few images move me more now that black and white versions of my granddaughter—is nested in pictures of my parents, 1950s plain-white-people pretty.

My dad with a crewcut and Buddy Holly glasses. My mom with Mary Tyler Moore hair like they were always playing dress-up for a Weezer song.

Some times with cigarettes gently between two fingers and the smoke static and odorless.

They often look happy and harmless, especially in staged family portraits.

Them there in black and white—I can pretend nothing existed in either of them or our future lives that would make their being alive, dead, or infirm almost unbearable.

Nothing is as simple as black and white.

Not being parent or child, not being in some important way fully human.

Anxiety

A Love Letter to the Anxious

I’m sorry, and I love you.

I’m sorry. I love you.

I’m sorry I love you.

October of 1999—I was forced to confront that I have lived nearly four decades with anxiety and had been suffering panic attacks in silence, closeted, that entire time.

Living inside the protective silence I had manufactured was a sense of extreme alienation from almost everyone and a persistent feeling of being an imposter.

After the panic attacks of that October, I then went on a four-year journey with anxiety medication, gaining weight and begining to understand my anxiety and its relationship to my world, people I had hurt and experiences I inevitably either avoided or ruined for myself and others.

Not long into those four years, I was with a dear friend cycling who experienced a panic attack, which I missed entirely and failed miserably to support because her panic attacks were nothing like mine.

Sitting here now almost 20 years into awareness about anxiety, I am nearly expert about my anxiety; I am off medication, but I managed the anxiety in a variety of healthy and not-so-healthy ways—and I still routinely fail myself and others, especially the people I care most deeply about.

We manage anxiety—I suppose like alcoholism—but I think we are never cured of anxiety. That, I fear, would require a full removal of our bones, or at least a thorough cleaning of those skeletons.

But here are some things I do know—although these are not promises.

Anxiety is mostly when our inner selves are out of joint with the outer world. Often because we perceive there is an outer world of expectations, judgment; and thus, we are haunted with “Am I doing the right thing?”

Won’t someone please tell us we are doing the right thing.

This will not help, but let me assure you there is no right thing and there is no one except you who can confirm if you are being the you that you should be.

And that makes me anxious—to acknowledge that we are ultimately alone in all this; that is the human condition people without anxiety can ignore and the anxious cannot set aside.

Even for a second.

Here is something else that I know: Two people who are anxious and friends or intimates want desperately to be someone soothing for the other’s anxiety, and that makes each of you anxious, and then guarantees that you will not be soothing, cannot be soothing.

And that makes me anxious because in true existential reality, our passions are our sufferings. Nothing can make us more anxious than to care, to love, to desire.

Although feeling nothing comes pretty damn close—like being on anxiety medication.

Maybe the only thing we have is “I wish I could have done better by you because I love you in a way that makes me incapable of being the one who doesn’t need to apologize.”

I’m sorry, and I love you.

I’m sorry. I love you.

I’m sorry I love you.

Childhood, sexism

Women and Children Last

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I am always hesitant to suggest anything is unique to now, as if history isn’t right there for us to recognize our enduring human failures. So I will refrain from evoking “unique,” but I am convinced this is distinctly relevant for the now of 2017: In the U.S., the real and the satirical seem nearly indistinguishable.

Take for example Monologue: Dad of Newborn Girl Explains the Importance of Women’s Issues to a Table of Women at a Coffee Shop, a piece as brilliantly satirical as it is disturbing when revisited in the wake of revelations about Harvey Weinstein among a people who elected Donald Trump president.

On social media, I witnessed some misread the McSweeney’s article, missing the satire, and concurrently watched as many confronted the exact phenomenon occur in response to Weinstein’s sexual violence grounded in his wealth and power: Men expressing how they understand women’s issues because they are sons, fathers, or husbands.

Possibly my greatest existential angst as a white man is grounded in the weight of how often men have failed women and children through physical violence and sexual coercion and assault.

Weinstein has triggered my own discomfort and anger at Hollywood, personified for me by Woody Allen, and a powerful problem I have been wrestling with my entire adult life: the tension between the work of art (Can it still be “great”?) and the horribly flawed artist.

Several films, for example, remain burned into my soul because of this:

Cinematic rape and the killing of children—these films are nearly unwatchable for me, even when I appreciate their artistic value.

I have written about a similar tension when watching True Detective (HBO).

And I anticipate the same sort of discomfort I feel each time I watch Blade Runner (the aggressive kissing scene) when I eventually watch Blade Runner 2049, confronted for whether or not it portrays futuristic sexism or simply is sexist.

But this tension about art and artist as a problem, a question, is in no way concurrent in the reality of men as violent, as sexual predators.

There simply is no room for equivocation, as Allen and Oliver Stone, among many others, have offered.

There simply is no room to suggest these abuses are more about power than the men who are abusers.

The fact is that men have a default position of power over women and children; men as violent, as sexual predators and rapists, exist regardless of social status of those men.

Poor men hit their children, abuse their women partners, and poor men rape.

Only two facts exist with any credibility here.

First, as Arundhati Roy has explained, “We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

Therefore, the voices of women and children matter first, foremost, as the targets of violence by men.

Second, this is a problem nested in men and perpetuated by the social norms created by and maintained by men.

Therefore, only men can end rape culture, toxic masculinity, and the abuse of children.

Laurie Penny, in a piece that should be read fully, confronts the ways in which terms such as “consent” as well as a woman’s right to her sexuality are used in ways that are themselves oppressive even when they appear to be otherwise:

The first thing you need to understand about consent is that consent is not, strictly speaking, a thing. Not in the same way that teleportation isn’t a thing. Consent is not a thing because it is not an item, nor a possession. Consent is not an object you can hold in your hand. It is not a gift that can be given and then rudely requisitioned. Consent is a state of being. Giving someone your consent — sexually, politically, socially — is a little like giving them your attention. It’s a continuous process. It’s an interaction between two human creatures. I believe that a great many men and boys don’t understand this. I believe that lack of understanding is causing unspeakable trauma for women, men, and everyone else who is sick of how much human sexuality still hurts.

And while I have examined the importance of intimacy, privacy, and consent—not as well as Penny, however—I am more fully aware of the inherent flaws with the seeming chivalry of “women and children first,” a concept grounded in paternalism that acknowledges a sort of comparative vulnerability between women/children and men.

The real world, however, paints a different picture—women and children last.

Men who view the world, including women and children, as their spoils, to do with as they please.

Again, speaking as a man, we are the problem, and we must be the solution.

See Also

Hollywood and Academia: Is the problem the same?

The Horizon of Desire

Intimacy, Privacy, and Consent

education, literacy, Media

The Universal Lie

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Education and journalism often are similar windows into the power of bias in the U.S.

Consider first a somewhat innocuous media report about sports:

BREAKING: United States misses first World Cup since 1986.

— The Associated Press (@AP) October 11, 2017

Much more disturbing, also consider the media coverage of the Las Vegas mass shooting:

As the news broke, major outlets across the country wrote headlines that humanized [Stephen] Paddock…

Past mass shooters who were nonwhite or Muslim have been depicted quite differently ― and so have people of color who were victims of gun violence.

“There’s a clear difference in the way this kind of incident is treated and the way it would be treated if it were actually associated with Islam or Muslims,” Ibrahim Hooper, spokesperson at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told HuffPost. “It would be instantly called an act of domestic or even international terrorism; it wouldn’t be individualized, but collectivized to the entire Muslim community or faith of Islam.”

The seemingly harmless report about U.S. soccer and the mainstream coverage of Paddock expose how the media works in ways that establish men and whiteness as the norms, the given, and thus somehow the most important (or only) statuses.

As many noted, U.S. soccer has had tremendous success in the women’s team—essentially rendered invisible by the coverage of the failure of the men’s squad this year. Paddock, as white man, floats above corrosive myths about Muslim terrorists and violent black men—both of which are statistically far more rare than violent and abusive white men, who constitute the largest percentage of mass shooters.

Now, let’s consider education.

Sarah Donovan, who blogs at Ethical ELA, posted a question on social media: “Teachers, scholars, authors, please weigh in. What is the value of the plot diagram in literature instruction? Is the language of rising action, etc. relevant, important?”

My first response to Donovan’s question was to point to Kurt Vonnegut’s mostly satirical but also illuminating “Shapes of Stories”[1]:

Vonnegut is an interesting and contradictory steward of both the modernist and post-modernist periods of so-called “Great Literature”:

Instead, the female characters [in his short fiction] are furniture or bouncing, pink operators. Of course you can’t blame Vonnegut for society’s sexism (in the 1950s, or now) but if these are indeed moral stories, it’s a male, white, affluent morality. Vonnegut himself, as Wakefield writes, puzzled over his inability to “do women well.”

Similarly, the dialects of some black waiters and soldiers and the poor will induce groans. As for the five stories from the archives, “City” has a lovely back-and-forth alternating point of view between a boy and a girl meeting on a bus, but the rest might have stayed lost.

As a white male, Vonnegut was afforded gender and race privileges that likely allowed him to be a somewhat rebellious writer who flaunted and broke the rules handed down by the New Criticism gods, blurring fiction and non-fiction as well as making himself a primary character of his genre-defying narratives.

Since I have examined before the power of mechanical evaluations of literature, often about New Criticism, and how the canon is mostly a white, male mythology, I next turned to a recent examination of the Nobel Prize in literature, awarded in 2017 to Kazuo Ishiguro:

The Nobel is the premier institution of elite literary prestige, conferring authority on what is already taken to be worthy of acclaim within the literary field….Conferring the Nobel also solidifies Euro-American cultural power (members of the adjudication committee often have American graduate degrees), as the Nobel institution positions itself as naturally authorizing and emboldening, in its own dispassionate assessment, what is inherently worthy of commendation. It’s a classic case: an institution of elite cultural power that hides its biases in claims to universality.

So if we consider plot diagrams as “dispassionate assessment,” we can begin to unpack how the concurrent concept of universality is, in fact, a lie—a sort of god creating “man” in “his” own image.

Like the flawed five-paragraph essay template that induces both bad writing and bad thinking in students, mechanical scripts for how fiction (or poetry, or any form) works are misleading but also perpetuate the inherent biases of the formulas.

The fathers of New Criticism were in many ways self-serving—arguing for prescriptions and structures that they themselves then followed in order to create the circular reasoning of “Great Literature.” Along the way, of course, mechanistic traditional education—mostly in English courses—provided a powerful ally in that process.

From plot diagrams to the literary technique hunt, mechanical approaches to texts are reductive and thus fail the critical literacy test: How is this text positioning the reader and in whose interest is the text working?

Let me close by nudging a bit beyond the narrow question about plot diagrams for fiction (usually the short story), and ask that we consider how the universal functions to mask and distort through W.B. Yeats “Leda and the Swan” and Adrienne Rich’s “Rape.”

Correggio - Leda and the Swan - Google Art Project.jpg
Public domain

In most traditional English/literature courses, Yeats likely is taught far more often than Rich, and then, his poem retelling a classic myth carries the heft of being a praised structured form (sonnet) and by an oft-anthologized white male Great Poet.

Rich, however, tends to be swept aside as a free verse poet who is too political, often code for “just a woman” (see Anne Sexton).

Yeats’s poem uses rape as a plot element, seemingly “dispassionate,” while rape in Rich’s poem is a confrontation about the physical terror women face in a man’s world (is that not universal?) and the concurrent metaphorical assault women must suffer to seek justice for the actual rape.

Ultimately, there is something insidious about allowing the normalization of the powerful to sit beside the marginalization of the powerless—calling the experiences of one (white men) “universal” and the experiences of the other (women), “political.”

So what do we do with Donovan’s question?

Critical literacy guides us here as we must be diligent in making our students aware of traditional structures and approaches to literature and writing, but also we must go beyond that awareness and invite them to unpack critically why those structures exist—again, in whose interest do they work?

[1] See also Vonnegut’s essay included in Chapter 3 (“Here is a lesson in creative writing”) of A Man without a Country.

Trumplandia

Humanity Has a Serious White Man Problem

Have you ever watched reality TV shows such as Hoarders? A disgusting but all-too-common urge to both glamorize and demonize, all in the name of entertainment and celebrity?

Have you ever wondered why pop culture often turns our gaze on these people (or any group deemed profitable fodder for such filth)—and thus, turning our gaze away from other groups?

This didn’t take much effort, but let me try my hand at a similar technique, although I am merely working here in words. Consider the following:

Feel free to let me do the heavy lifting here, but also, I invite you to wade into the above for yourself: The thread running through these pieces gathered quickly and easily the day after Columbus Day is the violent, rapacious white man who hoards money and power at the expense of and on the backs of others and then uses that money and power too often to abuse and even kill those deemed weaker or lesser than these white men.

That we have failed to address the white man disease in humanity is not some great accident, however. Once with power, white men have carefully orchestrated how we view the world through keeping our gaze elsewhere, such as our manufactured fear of Muslim terrorists and centuries-long narratives of violent black men.

This slight of hand has mesmerized us into worshipping these horrible, often soulless men—Hugh Hefner, Christopher Columbus, Donald Trump—because of their bravado, wealth, and power.

White men, often themselves mediocre, have parleyed their amassed wealth (typically begun in eras characterized by the very worst of human nature) into assuring that the general public has developed a skewed system for evaluating self-worth: white men are forgiven any and every flaw because “he built this,” but everyone else cannot survive even one flaw, unless s/he is conveniently associated with the right white man.

The power of the arrogant white man is so intense, so capable of charming a people, that in the U.S. many excuse Trump minute by minute for the deplorable human he proves himself to be while following his Pied Piper lead to demonize Colin Kaepernick.

And while the rise of Trump is one of the most disgusting and oft-repeated narratives of U.S. history, it is a slow-boil story, and we are the willing lobsters who gleefully offer ourselves up for the pot.

More catastrophic—and all the more hard to understand as worthy of our disregard—is Stephen Paddock, murderous white man who is the most recent recipient of the inordinate passes white men receive: media headlines never offering his race and refusing to call him “terrorist,” family and friends shocked and confirming he was just your Average Joe, and the ultimate tone-deaf claim that there was simply nothing to tip us off about his reign of horror (because a certain kind of white man can walk through this world without any sort of scrutiny, even as he amasses an arsenal—or systematically sexually abuses women).

So let’s turn here to thinking carefully about this world built by white men—because the architects have insured this world protects them and as a consequence it works against everyone else.

While these rapacious white men use “I built this” as their shield, we must recognize it as supreme distraction; they are hiding something very insidious behind that shield, in fact: their mediocrity, their soullessness, their monstrosity.

As a white man, I speak from experience; the shield is powerful, more powerful than we tend to admit.

But also as a white man who believes to my marrow in a better world where equity and justice are achieved for every human, I am left with a disturbing quandary.

I have a fantasy that one day every worker in the service industry simply refuses to work; this act of resistance would highlight the inherent scam that is capitalism (the white man’s paradise), the false narrative that the owners and bosses are worth more than the workers.

That fantasy has a new version—one in which every black athlete in the NFL takes a knee and refuses to play a down of any NFL game so that the league and our so-called political leaders are forced to eat their words, called on their bluffs as the blow-hard balloons they are.

But these fantasies are the musings of a white man who recognizes that it is not the responsibility of the oppressed to end such inequities. yet, this system built by white men is a trap: workers are enslaved by hourly wages and tethered to work-bound insurance and retirement so that those workers have no real humanity left, no option to assert their dignity, their voices.

Even very wealthy black NFL athletes who are taking ethical positions are being cast as the bad guy—a perverse rebooting of the white hat/black hat Hollywood whitewashing of cowboys and Indians:

It’s the propaganda that irks [James Baldwin] most, the betrayal of the imagination. Baldwin has predictable issues with John Wayne, but the squeaky-clean Gary Cooper puts the most deceptive face on the killing of Indians. If you’re black, Baldwin says, you identify with Coop until you realize that the Indians are you, and that Coop, and Wayne, is a symptom of a culture that won’t “grow up” and face a history that has “no moral justification.” It’s “the lie of pretended humanism.” It’s Coop and it’s — wait for it — Doris Day.

Like Baldwin, we need this moment of recognition—that we have been duped, conned, hypnotized.

It no easy thing to admit that we are patsies, but we are being used.

Now, there is no question about white men being outnumbered, but there remains a question about whether or not everyone else is really any better than these mediocre white men ruling us.

That question terrifies me nearly as much as all the Trump-hoarders ruling this world.

Paulo Freire

Fatalism Ate Our Democracy: “Today. Tomorrow. Always”

Forget it, nothing I change changes anything

“Walk It Back,” The National

On social media and in real life (IRL), I am experiencing a pattern.

For more than three decades now, mainstream education reformers have told me that there is nothing we can do about childhood poverty, racism, sexism, etc., so we must “fix” our schools and those students struggling because of all those inequities we simply cannot change.

Every time a mass shooting happens, people wave their arms and tell me that gun laws won’t stop violence; there simply is nothing we can do.

Over the last several months as I have witnessed my mother suffering in the wake of a stroke exponentially worsened by the U.S. healthcare and medical insurance monstrosities, even healthcare professionals respond to arguments for single-payer universal healthcare with “Good luck with that!” Never going to happen.

Fatalism appears more pervasive that the new national hobby of staring at a smart phone—joined only by the long-standing practice of most people existing as a heaping mound of contradiction.

The “nothing we can do about guns” crowd tends to be the same people who do want to regulate a woman’s ability to choose her reproduction options, do want demand that people show proper types of uniform patriotism, do staunchly advocate for the death penalty, mass incarceration, and militarized policing—but there is *sigh* just nothing we can do about gun violence because of that darn Second Amendment and, you know, people would still kill each other with knives and baseball bats.

Fatalism, then, is a convenient cover for those seeking ways to impose their political will on others; and thus, Paul Freire asserts: “I have always rejected fatalism. I prefer rebelliousness because it affirms my status as a person who has never given in to the manipulations and strategies designed to reduce the human person to nothing.”

Fatalism’s mantra—”Don’t bother!”—”reduce[s] the human person to nothing”—it de-democratizes, dehumanizes.

Like Freire, James Baldwin, then, expresses the antithesis to fatalism, hope: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually” (Notes of a Native Son, 1955).

“[T]o criticize…perpetually” is to cast off “Don’t bother,” to recognize that our ideals have merit but that we have failed to reach those ideals—and then we still have the capacity to do so.

And so I come back to the U.S. as a disturbing outlier in gun violence. These gruesome realities are not about the enormity of how a people can at least decrease the senseless loss of life that comes with our gun-lust; but this debate is about political and cultural will.

For a people seemingly obsessed with choice, we are far too willing to choose fatalism when it suits us, to become passive and “o, well” when the consequences somehow seem to be in someone else’s interest.

And for a people so eager to shout “American exceptionalism!” I wonder how we can ignore that many other countries insure all their citizens, have reduced their gun violence, and have created a culture that genuinely seeks to honor the meek and weak and vulnerable.

Freire recognized that the “freedom that moves us, that makes us take risks”—risks for a better world—is in fact a threat to those who believe the status quo is worth maintaining. Those beholden to the status quo—good for some, unfair to many—call for “conformity in the face of situations considered to be irreversible because of destiny”—thus, gun laws won’t change anything, or we’ll never have universal healthcare.

And a cousin to our fostered fatalism is our ahistorical mind, one that clings to traditional history but somehow rejects “revisionist” history:

To the degree that the historical part if not “problematized” so as to be critically understood, tomorrow becomes simply the perpetuation of today. Something that will be because it will be, inevitably. To that degree, there is no room for choice. There is only room for well-behaved submission to fate. Today. Tomorrow. Always.

Our fatalism has eroded our souls as a people, consumed our democracy.

We are a people more offended by black athletes kneeling during the national anthem than free people slaughtered while attending a music concert, children slaughtered while attending school.

Today. Tomorrow. Always?

education, Gun Control

Gun-Lust: This Is America. This Is Who We Are. Pt. II

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I was neither surprised or even disappointed when comments on my Facebook page were shallow, insensitive, and simply ridiculous in response to my post against the gun-lust that defines the U.S.: Know guns, know violence; no guns, no violence.

The most ridiculous was the counter argument that if we had no guns people would still be violent with ball bats.

Not kidding. That was a rebuttal.

For the record, I am in full support for a complete exchange in the U.S.—all gun owners swapping those weapons for bats.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, and I was disappointed, however, when I waded into the Las Vegas shooting with my college students. My university population is skewed socially and politically conservative as well as traditionally Christian. Although the college was once affiliated with the Southern Baptist church, that ended decades ago and the school was never a religious college.

I always die a little on the inside when I share the research base solidly refuting corporal punishment, prompting several students to respond angrily in favor of spanking: “I was spanked and I turned out fine,” the typical rebuttal as hollow as the bat argument above.

Three first year students were more than bothered and eager to challenge the concerns I raised in our first-year seminar about access to guns in the U.S. and the uniquely violent culture of our country when compared internationally.

Their arguments fell into three categories: adamant commitments to owning guns for self defense (with the undercurrent that home invasions are somehow an ever-present danger), a belief that the Second Amendment was in part designed to allow U.S. citizens to defend themselves against a rogue U.S. government (and that remains relevant in 2017), and the recognition that many in the U.S. cling to gun ownership as a symbol for individual freedom (one student noted that his family owns several guns but they never use them in any way).

One similarity to my students’ arguments and the push-back on Facebook has been the sense of fatalism—there simply is no way to end all gun violence or all violence so let’s not restrict our freedom, again represented by merely owning a gun.

In class, I found data on international comparisons showing that the U.S. is an extreme outlier for rates of gun violence, and I posed the idea that wouldn’t we all take the rates of next highest nation (a much lower rate) if that were possible through policy change.

30 yrs mass shootings.png
Six things to know about mass shootings in America (The Conversation)

And with that, I argued that we are all complicit in our violent nation, our gun-lust: This is America. This is who we are.

My students who defended gun rights immediately balked at the carnage of LasVegas is something the citizens of the U.S. have chosen.

Facebook ignorance has become nearly as commonplace as mass shootings in the U.S. But I have tried to remain hopeful about young people, that the future can hold a better us: “This place could be beautiful,/right? You could make this place beautiful.”

As my students demonstrate, young people have been engrained with irrational but compelling beliefs that are not supported by evidence; entrenched symbolism remains powerful in the U.S. well beyond the origins of those symbols.

The practical and very real importance of guns in the founding and expansion of the U.S. certainly contrasts significantly with today—but the symbolism (guns equal freedom) endures.

Symbolism and the resulting fatalism are the death of us as a people—unless somehow we are able to make facts matter. Otherwise, our future is as dim as our past and our present.

Suggested Readings

How dangerous people get their weapons in America

Six things to know about mass shootings in America

When gun control makes a difference: 4 essential reads

1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days: America’s gun crisis – in one chart

America’s unique gun violence problem, explained in 17 maps and charts

Visualizing gun deaths: Comparing the U.S. to rest of the world

@JamesFallows offers two dark American truths from Las Vegas

In the U.S., Where the Female Nipple Is More Dangerous Than a Gun

educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free