“Supernatural”-meets-Lovecraft Contest
Paula R. Stiles April 15th, 2011 No CommentsWe’ve heard a rumour or two that CW show Supernatural is going Lovecraft this year. Since we’re a Lovecraft zine and we review Supernatural, we just couldn’t let that one go. So, we’re having ourselves a contest here at Innsmouth Free Press to commemorate that happy conjunction.
What you could win
Grand Prize: Two tickets to the Lovecraft Film Festival Festival in San Pedro, California (no travel, just the tickets) this September. Free print copies of our anthologies released this year: Historical Lovecraft, A Candle in the Attic Window and Future Lovecraft. Plus, a mug with the Innsmouth Free Press logo.
First prize: Free print copies of our anthologies released this year: Historical Lovecraft, A Candle in the Attic Window and Future Lovecraft. Plus, a magnet with the Innsmouth Free Press logo.
Second Prize: Free ebook copies of said anthologies. Plus, a magnet with the Innsmouth Free Press logo.
What you have to do to win
1. Buy one copy each of our micropress’ first published novel Fraterfamilias and our first anthology Historical Lovecraft. Can’t afford print? No problem. We’ve got both out as ebooks at a very nice price ($3.99!). Can’t stand ebooks? Well…they’re also out in print. The easiest way you can let us know you bought them is to do it directly from our site.
2. Send us an email at innsmouthfp(at)gmail(dot)com. Tell us how/where you bought the above books. Then write at least one paragraph telling us at least five examples of similarities between the show Supernatural and these two books. At least two examples need to come from each book and you can only take one each per story in Historical Lovecraft (except “If Only to Taste Her Again” or “Ahuizotl”, which don’t count). On the Supernatural side, you can choose only one example per episode and no more than two per season (because we want you read our stuff and watch the show). Be fun. Be creative. Be persuasive. There’s plenty of material for comparison.
Deadline: Monday, May 23 (so you can watch the two-hour season finale of the show, too). Winners to be announced on Friday, May 27.
You can watch Supernatural on Friday nights at nine from today until May 20 (except for the week of May 13). The two-hour finale on May 20 will start at eight. You can find our reviews of Supernatural – past, present and future – here.
“Supernatural”-meets-Lovecraft Contest
Paula R. Stiles April 15th, 2011 No CommentsWe’ve heard a rumour or two that CW show Supernatural is going Lovecraft this year. Since we’re a Lovecraft zine and we review Supernatural, we just couldn’t let that one go. So, we’re having ourselves a contest here at Innsmouth Free Press to commemorate that happy conjunction.
What you could win
Grand Prize: Two tickets to the Lovecraft Film Festival Festival in San Pedro, California (no travel, just the tickets) this September. Free print copies of our anthologies released this year: Historical Lovecraft, A Candle in the Attic Window and Future Lovecraft. Plus, a mug with the Innsmouth Free Press logo.
First prize: Free print copies of our anthologies released this year: Historical Lovecraft, A Candle in the Attic Window and Future Lovecraft. Plus, a magnet with the Innsmouth Free Press logo.
Second Prize: Free ebook copies of said anthologies. Plus, a magnet with the Innsmouth Free Press logo.
What you have to do to win
1. Buy one copy each of our micropress’ first published novel Fraterfamilias and our first anthology Historical Lovecraft. Can’t afford print? No problem. We’ve got both out as ebooks at a very nice price ($3.99!). Can’t stand ebooks? Well…they’re also out in print. The easiest way you can let us know you bought them is to do it directly from our site.
2. Send us an email at innsmouthfp(at)gmail(dot)com. Tell us how/where you bought the above books. Then write at least one paragraph telling us at least five examples of similarities between the show Supernatural and these two books. At least two examples need to come from each book and you can only take one each per story in Historical Lovecraft (except “If Only to Taste Her Again” or “Ahuizotl”, which don’t count). On the Supernatural side, you can choose only one example per episode and no more than two per season (because we want you read our stuff and watch the show). Be fun. Be creative. Be persuasive. There’s plenty of material for comparison.
Deadline: Monday, May 23 (so you can watch the two-hour season finale of the show, too). Winners to be announced on Friday, May 27.
You can watch Supernatural on Friday nights at nine from today until May 20 (except for the week of May 13). The two-hour finale on May 20 will start at eight. You can find our reviews of Supernatural – past, present and future – here.
submit
Update:
catch a fire prompts for June 2011:
cord, rumour, size, spirit, close
Deadline: May 15 2011
•••
Poems: Send 3-6 original poems and a bio of no more than 60 words to submitpoetry@tonguesoftheocean.org. No attachments, please. Paste the poems and the bio into the body of your email. If your poem requires special formatting, let us know that. If we like your work enough to consider it, we may ask you to send an attachment.
Spoken Word: Send one poem in audio or video format and a bio of no more than 50 words to submitword@tonguesoftheocean.org.
Prose Fiction/Creative Non-Fiction: Send one piece of no more than 5000 words and a bio of no more than 50 words to webmaster@tonguesoftheocean.org. Word attachments accepted.
catch a fire: Send up to 3 poems or a piece of flash fiction 300 words or less inspired by our issue-specific word prompts (you can find them at the top of this page) in the body of an email to webmaster@tonguesoftheocean.org.
Simultaneous submissions are welcome. Let us know the minute your work is accepted elsewhere.
Poems posted on blogs or online workshops are welcome, especially if they benefitted from their earlier showing.
Previously published poems may be considered, provided you let us know where and when they were published.
What we’re looking for: Pieces that excite. Pieces that move us, that make us laugh, or cry, or stop and say wow. Writing that presents familiar things in a fresh way, that makes old packages new. Poems that suggest you have some passing acquaintance with the greats of our region, or with the greats of the world. Stories that dance. Confessions that sing. Writing that tests the boundaries of our language, that shows its beauty. Poems that make us think; stories that make us go ooh.
What we don’t want: Stuff we’ve seen before, in countless different forms, that doesn’t bring anything new to the page. Stuff that was done better by e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Susan Wallace, Maya Angelou, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, or Gwendolyn Brooks. Stuff that really should have stayed on the pages of your journal. Stuff that isn’t ready. Stuff that makes us go eeuw.
Our region is a region of wonder, of celebration. It’s the region of Lord Kitchener and the Mighty Sparrow and Mikey Smith, of Kamau Brathwaite and Lorna Goodison and Derek Walcott, of Harris and Lovelace, Lamming and Kincaid. Our writers wrestle with the languages they inherit: European flesh on African and Asian bones. Our world surprises us with its vitality. Seeds tossed on our soils grow into big trees. We want your best trees.
Here are some resources to help you grow your trees.
We reserve the right to publish or not, as we see fit. We don’t owe you an explanation, but if we like your work we just might give you one.
•••
Second Flash Fiction Contest
The Dublin Review of Books is pleased to present it's Second Flash Fiction Contest. The prize will bring recognition to distinguished flash fiction writing from within Ireland and around the world. The winning entry will receive 1,000 Euros in addition to publication in The Dublin Review of Books. Second and third place winners will also see their work appear in The Dublin Review of Books.
Final judging will be made by authors James Ryan, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne and an editor from the Dublin Review of Books. GUIDELINES:
- Submit up to 3 flash fiction stories of no more than 500 words apiece. Work must be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are not accepted. Copyright will remain with winning authors. The drb reserves the rights to use winning entries up to one year after publication.
- Manuscripts must include a cover letter containing name, address, e-mail address and/or telephone number, and the title of each work.
- Entry fee is 10 Euro per story. Payment can be made through our PayPal account when submitting an entry.
- Deadline for submissions is June 5, 2011 at 5 pm Dublin time. Entries received after this date will not be read. Only winning authors will be contacted.
- Winning stories will be announced September 30, 2011.
- Writers may submit through our online form (see details at www.drb.ie) .
- Submissions may also be made via email. Please include surname and first name in the subject line. If submitting via email, please paste stories in the body of the email AND send as an attachment in one of the following formats:
.DOC (Microsoft Word)
.RTF (Rich Text Format)EMAIL ADDRESS
flash@drb.ie
via drb.ie
Modern Dance: Andanza
Posted by: ivetteromero
Xavier Valcárcel (Diálogo) writes, “At times like these, hope is also the body, its possible communication, its powerful ways of saying.” In this article, he praises the persistence of Puerto Rican contemporary dance company Andanza, which for 12 years, has been “producing a very important artistic, educational, and social activity in order to contribute to the cultural development of Puerto Rico.”
Under the artistic direction of Lolita Villanúa, Andanza is composed by Rebecca Canchani, Norberto Collazo, Vesna Lantigua, Roberto López, Cristina Lugo (apprentice), Eloy Ortiz, Marena Pérez (guest dancer), Steven Rodriguez, Ana Inés de la Rosa, and Maru Toro. The troupe had a recent find-raising show “S.O.S Andanza” in Santurce’s Francisco Arriví Theater.
Valcárcel describes the show as a provocative and sublime exaltation of the qualities and technical possibilities of the troupe. He stresses the creative capacity not only of its artistic director but also “the delicacy, ingenuity, and brilliant obsession of its choreographers for the construction of images and a body language that, natural or unnatural, is beautifully human.”
He writes, “There are not many things in life as beautiful as to witness the way in which artists build everything. Especially the dancers, whose perfectionism has no equal in the world of art. ‘Artists of lightness, inhabitants of the air,’ according to [writer] Luis Rafael Sánchez. And, as Ana Lydia Vega [a writer and the artistic director’s mother] points out in her essay ‘Dancers’ (2005), there are really ‘few professionals of other branches of art that can boast of such intense and prolonged preparation. Any extension of the leg, the more insignificant opening of the arm, the more modest head turn, everything that looks so obvious on the stage, represents infinite session of hard and sustained work.’”
Valcárcel’s beautiful critique of modern dance—and, specifically, this troupe—ends by calling for a more vehement appreciation of the genre on the island. After reading about what the Andanza troupe brings to the boards, I am eager to attend one of their performances.
For full review (in Spanish), see http://dialogodigital.com/index.php/Andanza-o-la-persistencia-del-cuerpo-posible.html
Al Jazeera: People & Power – Slaves to Football
March 6, 2011For many African youth, football is a dream, an escape from locales bereft of opportunities. The glamourous images on the TV contrast greatly with the grinding mundane of daily life and restless youth chase after those dream images. Many are talented footballers. Some are not. The fact remains that their dreams are the foothold of unscrupulous traffickers.
Yes, human trafficking and football are connected. It is a multi-billion dollar industry that feeds off of the dreams and aspirations of African youth. Football recruiters transport boys thousands of miles away in Europe (or even domestically) with the promise of training at football academies for budding talent. There they are forced to work in conditions of forced labor or indentured servitude- even abandoned to become beggars and unskilled laborers in a strange land.
Unscrupulous traffickers and coaches profit from the domestic, international and transnational trafficking of Africa’s aspiring football stars. In the video, you see the example of one man in Côte D’Ivoire, who housed boys in his house and “sold” them to traffickers masquerading as recruiters.” The report indicates that he was investigated by the Ivorian government.
Fatou Diome, Senegalese author, tells the story of Moussa in her book “The Belly of the Atlantic.” Moussa, a Senegalese youth who was trafficked to Italy under the pretense of receiving training in a football camp and gaining exposure to FIFA’s talent scouts, offers a cautionary tale to the other football-obsessed boys in his home village. Instead of meeting talent scouts, he is rejected and abandoned, forced to beg to get the money back home. In his home village, he is seen as a failure because he came back from the alleged ‘land of plenty’ with nothing in hand. The story has a tragic ending.
However, this is not to say that all stories end in tragedy. Instead, I’d like to raise awareness about this issue. I will be blogging more about the organization I work for- Free Generation International and their ground-breaking initiatives.
Smuggler, Forger, Writer, Spy
Anas Aremeyaw Anas is a Ghanaian investigative journalist with many disguises—from addict to imam—and one overriding mission: to force Ghana’s government to act against the lawbreakers he exposes.
By
Image credit: Stephen Voss
The Accra Psychiatric Hospital occupies a sprawling block in the heart of Ghana’s capital. Walls the color of aged parchment rim the compound, with coils of concertina wire balanced on top, making the hospital within appear more labor camp than home for the sick. Anas Aremeyaw Anas spent seven months last year casing it, posing first as a taxi driver and then as a baker. On the morning of November 20, 2009, Anas adopted yet another disguise, matting his hair into dreadlocks and pulling on a black button-up top. Three of his shirt buttons, along with his watch, contained hidden cameras. Escorted by a friend pretending to be his uncle, Anas shuffled through the black metal entrance gate and, feigning madness, into the mental hospital.
None of the doctors or nurses had any idea that this new patient, who called himself Musa Akolgo, was in fact Ghana’s most celebrated investigative journalist. Over the past 10 years, Anas has gone undercover dozens of times, playing everything from an imam to a crooked cop. Hardly anyone in the country knows his face. Photos of him on the Internet are either masked or digitally doctored. (He claims to own more than 30 wigs.) Once, while doing a story about child prostitution, he worked as a janitor inside a brothel, mopping floors, changing bedsheets, and picking up used condoms. Another time, on the trail of Chinese sex traffickers, he donned a tuxedo and delivered room service at a swanky hotel that the pimp frequented with his prostitutes.
Anas’s methods are more than narrative tricks. He gets results. The Chinese sex traffickers were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to a combined 41 years in prison. For that story and the child-prostitution one, the U.S. State Department commended Anas for “breaking two major trafficking rings” and in June 2008 gave him a Heroes Acting to End Modern-Day Slavery Award. Then he received the Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s Kurt Schork Award for “journalism that has brought about real change for the better.” Later that same year, a committee that included Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, and Desmond Tutu gave Anas the Every Human Has Rights Media Award. And when Barack Obama visited Ghana in July 2009 on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa, he singled out Anas in his address to the Ghanaian parliament for “risk[ing] his life to report the truth.”
Reporters have long sneaked into forbidding places. In 1887, Nellie Bly, on assignment for Joseph Pulitzer’s The World, acted insane and spent 10 days in the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, New York. She ate spoiled food and bathed with buckets of ice-cold water. She wrote later: “What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?” Bly’s articles prompted a boost in New York’s budget for prisons and mental hospitals.
But today, under pressure from shrinking budgets and professionalized ethics that developed over the 20th century, serious undercover journalism in the United States has nearly disappeared. When Ken Silverstein posed as a Capitol Hill consultant determined to polish Turkmenistan’s dismal international image, for a 2007 Harper’s cover story titled “Their Men in Washington: Undercover With D.C.’s Lobbyists for Hire,” Howard Kurtz, media columnist for The Washington Post, objected: “No matter how good the story, lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as [about] their subjects.” Pundits, bloggers, and the American Journalism Review chimed in to debate where the line stands between pursuing stories in the public interest and avoiding damage to the public trust.
Anas doesn’t let such heady intellectual arguments slow him down. As he told me without apology in his office in Accra earlier this year, he had never heard of Nellie Bly—much less Howard Kurtz. When I asked him about his role models, he named only one, Günter Wallraff, a German undercover reporter with more than four decades of muckraking experience. But despite his admiration for Wallraff, Anas is certain that undercover reporting is more difficult in Accra than it is in, say, Berlin or New York. “I cannot just do a story and go to sleep, when I know my country’s institutions won’t take care of it,” said Anas, who is surprisingly soft-spoken, to the point of being inaudible at times. “I cannot give the government an opportunity to say this or that is a lie. They love to hide and say, ‘Show me the evidence.’ So I show it to them. If I say, ‘This man stole the money,’ I give you the picture from the day he stole it and show what he was wearing when he stole it. And because of my legal background”—Anas finished law school in 2008 but hasn’t taken the bar exam—“I follow up to ensure there’s prosecution.”
Over lunch one day at an upscale Accra hotel, I asked David Asante-Apeatu whether Anas had ever interfered with police work. Asante-Apeatu, who previously directed the criminal-investigations division for the national police and was now stationed at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, shook his head. He told me that Anas often “feels that it’s better to do things all by himself,” because he, like many Ghanaians, doesn’t trust the police. “I don’t blame him” for acting on his own, said the cop. “Anas is a hero.”
Anas was born in 1978 in Accra, a coastal city with about 2 million inhabitants, and raised by a career soldier and a nurse. He is tall, with bony elbows and a droopy posture. He boasts of having a “very innocent face” and told me that, without his glasses, “no one will ever suspect me.” From a young age, Anas thrived on theatrics and disguises. Kojo Asante, the president of the National Association of Pan- African Clubs, remembers Anas, who presided over the club at his school, reenacting major events in African history. “You had these plays, it was pretty casual, but Anas took it very seriously,” he told me. “If you wanted him to play the role of the rebel, he would go out and look for costumes, and then come in full regalia, ready to play the part.”
Anas later went to the Ghana Institute of Journalism. When it came time for his internship, he joined a weekday newspaper published in Accra, The Crusading Guide, as the paper was called until early 2009, and he has never left. (Today he is a co-owner of The New Crusading Guide.) His internship duties consisted of office work and milquetoast reporting assignments. “He was a student journalist; I didn’t want to stress him,” says Kweku Baaku, the editor in chief and Anas’s co-owner.
Unbeknownst to Baaku, or anyone else in the newsroom, Anas was spending his free time in the company of street hawkers, running up and down a stretch of highway on the outskirts of Accra, selling peanuts to gridlocked motorists. Street hawking is illegal. But the police, Anas discovered, cracked down only when VIP motorcades came through. Otherwise, the hawkers gave a cut of their sales to the cops, and everyone was happy. Baaku was amazed when he read the story. As he told me, “Being so young and able to craft this kind of reporting strategy? After that, I encouraged him to take over the paper’s investigative branch.”
In 2006, Anas wrote two stories that burnished his reputation as a “social crusader,” in the words of one Ghanaian working at a foreign embassy in Accra. First, he worked the assembly line at a cookie factory and caught the company using flour infested with termites and maggots. After the story ran, the factory was shut down. Then he exposed corruption inside the passport agency, going so far as to fabricate phony documents for the president and chief of police. “There was chaos in the country after that came out,” Anas recalled with a smug grin. The Ghana Journalists Association subsequently named him Journalist of the Year. (He has won the group’s Investigative Journalist of the Year award three times.) Meanwhile, the government set about transitioning to biometric passports.
The demand for Anas’s services soon outstripped his capacity at the newspaper. Some of the requests he received for investigations didn’t quite qualify as journalism. So last year Anas created a private investigative agency called Tiger Eye. He rents an unmarked space across town on the top floor of a four-story building where a handful of his newspaper’s best reporters work alongside several Tiger Eye employees. It’s difficult to know where one operation ends and the other begins. But they’re all part of Anas’s investigative fiefdom. The work space is divided into two sections: a war room of sorts, with a bank of computers against one wall and a wide table in the middle where the team hammers out strategy; and Anas’s office, decorated with framed awards, oversize checks (including one for $11,700 for Journalist of the Year), and snapshots of himself in disguise. Anas appeared uneasy when I asked him about Tiger Eye, partly because he realizes that its commercial aspect puts him in ethically dangerous territory. Yet it also constitutes a major source of the budget he relies on for long-term newspaper assignments. During the two weeks I spent with him in January, Anas fielded calls from the BBC and 60 Minutes, as well as private security companies, asking if he could conduct investigations for them. All offered generous compensation.
Three days after checking in to the mental ward, Anas identified an orderly, named Carter, who supplemented his income by selling cocaine, heroin, and marijuana to patients. The two met secretly behind the dining hall. Carter brimmed with confidence and assured Anas that while other dealers could be caught or arrested anytime, “with me, you are safe.” According to Carter, customers paid extra “because of [his] personality.” Anas bought some coke, recording the transaction on his button camera. He did this several times. But he worried that Carter would grow suspicious if he was buying, but never using, the drugs. So for the sake of the investigation, Anas, who normally doesn’t even drink, began injecting drugs into his arm. That created a problem. Anas knew, going in, that he would be prescribed sedatives; he had consulted four friendly doctors on how to neutralize their effects. “If I go in and sleep the whole time, I will come out with no story,” he told them. One doctor suggested that a regular dosage of caffeine pills might do the trick, albeit for a limited amount of time. But he never considered how pot, smack, and coke would factor into the mix.
Five days after checking in, Anas sent a distressed text message to his doctors. His body had begun to shut down: his tongue went numb and he sat, fixed and immobile, for hours. “There have been stories I’ve done where there are guns,” he told me later. “But with this one, I felt the threat in my body. It’s an experience I have never had before, when everything you are looking at no longer appears normal. You come to believe that you are even a mad person yourself.” He got himself discharged, on the pretext of having to attend a funeral up-country. He stumbled out through the black metal gate into a waiting car driven by one of the doctors, who whisked Anas off to a safe house and hooked him up to an IV. He regained his strength and after three days returned to the hospital.
On December 21, the story appeared in The New Crusading Guide, under the headline “Undercover Inside Ghana’s ‘Mad House.’” The paper was sold out by lunchtime. (TheGuide publishes, on average, 8,000 copies a day, Monday through Friday.) A 30-minute documentary was later broadcast on TV3, a private Ghanaian channel, fueling the uproar with footage showing orderlies selling drugs inside the hospital, unattended patients fishing food from dumpsters, and a dead patient lying in a ditch for days before employees finally carted the corpse away—in the van used to transport food. Anas appeared in disguise on several television and radio shows. The chief justice of Ghana’s supreme court sent him a letter of congratulations, and the country’s vice president phoned Baaku, Anas’s editor, with praise. A presidential aide sent Anas a note with 1,000 cedis (roughly $700) tucked inside.
Some reactions were more tempered. George Sarpong, the executive director of Ghana’s National Media Commission, told me that while he and his organization generally commended Anas’s work, they had some “concerns about his methods.” Kwesi Pratt, the editor of Insight, a left-leaning daily paper, questioned whether Anas had become enamored of being a superhero, with all its trappings, instead of a humble scribe. “We are not police investigators. We are not secret-service agents,” Pratt told me. “We are plain journalists. We are recording the first draft of history. Our work involves some investigation, but there’s a limit, after which it becomes reckless adventure. Journalism is not some kind of James Bond enterprise.”
Back in his office, I asked Anas whether he focused more on catching villains or on stopping villainy. Sure, Carter would lose his job as an orderly, but wasn’t the hospital director, or even the country’s health minister, responsible?
“The decision to take out the top ones is not mine,” Anas replied. Our conversation turned to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. “Nobody was ever going to get Rumsfeld beating anybody in Abu Ghraib. So you show the young ones,” Anas said. Then let the public outcry determine who ultimately takes the blame.
+++++++++++++++++Nicholas Schmidle is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of To Live or to Perish Forever.
via theatlantic.com
Ravitch: Standardized Testing Undermines Teaching
April 28, 2011
Courtesy of Basic Books/Basic BooksDiane Ravitch is a historian of education and the former United States assistant secretary of education. She currently teaches at New York University.
Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch was once an early advocate of No Child Left Behind, school vouchers and charter schools.
In 2005, she wrote, "We should thank President George W. Bush and Congress for passing the No Child Left Behind Act. ... All this attention and focus is paying off for younger students, who are reading and solving mathematics problems better than their parents' generation."
But four years later, Ravitch changed her mind.
"I came to the conclusion ... that No Child Left Behind has turned into a timetable for the destruction of American public education," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools — or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not — because I always knew children's test scores are far more complicated than the way they're being received today."
No Child Left Behind required schools to administer yearly state standardized tests. Student progress on those tests was measured to see if the schools met their Adequate Yearly Progress goals. or AYP. Schools missing those goals for several years in a row could be restructured, replaced or shut down.
"The whole purpose of federal law and state law should be to help schools improve, not to come in and close them down and say, 'We're going to start with a clean slate,' because there's no guarantee that the clean slate's going to be better than the old slate," says Ravitch. "Most of the schools that will be closed are in poor or minority communities where large numbers of children are very poor and large numbers of children don't speak English. They have high needs. They come from all kinds of difficult circumstances and they need help — they don't need their school closed."
In her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Ravitch criticizes the emphasis on standardized testing and closing schools as well as the practice to replace public schools with charter schools. One reason, she says, is the increasing emphasis on privatization.
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
By Diane Ravitch
Hardcover, 296 pages
Basic Books
List price: $26.95"What has happened ... is that [charter schools have] become an enormous entrepreneurial activity and the private sector has moved in," she says. "So there are now charter chains where the heads are paying themselves $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 a year. They compete with regular public schools. They do not see themselves as collaborators with public schools but business competitors and in some cases, they actually want to take away the public school space and take away the public school business."
Ravitch says that charter schools undercut the opportunities for public schools, making public school students feel like "second-class citizens."
"Regular public school parents are angry because they no longer have an art room, they no longer have a computer room — whatever space they had for extra activities gets given to the charters and then they have better facilities. They have a lot of philanthropic money behind them — Wall Street hedge fund managers have made this their favorite cause. So at least in [New York City] they are better-funded ... so they have better everything."
But change in the public schools is possible, says Ravitch, if parents work together.
"In the neighborhood where I live in Brooklyn, there was a school that was considered a bad public school and it enrolled many children from a local public housing project," she says. "But parents in the neighborhood who were middle-class parents and were educated people banded together and decided, 'Well, if we all send our child to the local public school, it will get better.' And it did get better and it's now one of the best schools in the city. So yes, you can change the neighborhood school. ... But school officials have a particular responsibility to make sure there's a good school in every neighborhood. And handing the schools in low-income neighborhoods over to entrepreneurs does not, in itself, improve them. It's simply a way of avoiding the public responsibility to provide good education."
Interview Highlights
On the Obama administration's Race to the Top program
"Race to the Top is an extension of No Child Left Behind. It contains all of the punitive features. It encourages states to have more charter schools. It said, when it invited proposals from states, that you needed to have more charter schools, you needed to have merit pay — which is a terrible idea — you needed to judge teachers by test scores, which is even a worse idea. And you need to be prepared to turn around low-performing schools. So this is what many state legislators adopted hoping to get money from Race to the Top. Only 11 states and the District of Columbia did get that money. These were all bad ideas. They were terrible ideas that won't help schools. They're all schools that work on the free-market model that with more incentives and competition, schools will somehow get better. And the turnaround idea is a particularly noxious idea because it usually means close the school, fire the principal, fire the staff, and then it sets off a game of musical chairs where teachers from one low-performing school are hired at another low-performing school."
On teachers unions
"They're not the problem. The state with the highest scores on the national test, that state is Massachusetts — which is 100 percent union. The nation with the highest scores in the world is Finland, which is 100 percent union. Management and labor can always work together around the needs of children if they're willing to. I think what's happening in Wisconsin and Ohio and Florida and Indiana is very, very conservative right-wing governors want to break the unions because the unions provide support to the Democratic Party. But the unions really aren't the problem in education."
On the film Waiting for Superman
"Waiting for Superman is a pro-privatization propaganda film. I reviewed it in The New York Review of Books and its statistics were wrong, its charges were wrong, it made claims that were unsustainable. One of the charter schools it featured as being a miracle school has an attrition rate of 75 percent. And it made the claim that 70 percent of American eighth-graders read below grade level and that's simply false. ... And the producers of the film are very supportive of vouchers and free-market strategies and everything else. So I think that film has to be taken not just with a grain of salt, but understood to be a pro-privatization film."
Excerpt: 'The Death and Life of the Great American School System'
In the fall of 2007, I reluctantly decided to have my office repainted. It was inconvenient. I work at home, on the top floor of a nineteenth-century brownstone in Brooklyn. Not only did I have to stop working for three weeks, but I had the additional burden of packing up and removing everything in my office. I had to relocate fifty boxes of books and files to other rooms in the house until the painting job was complete.
After the patching, plastering, and painting was done, I began unpacking twenty years of papers and books, discarding those I no longer wanted, and placing articles into scrapbooks. You may wonder what all this mundane stuff has to do with my life in the education field. I found that the chore of reorganizing the artifacts of my professional life was pleasantly ruminative. It had a tonic effect, because it allowed me to reflect on the changes in my views over the years.
At the very time that I was packing up my books and belongings, I was going through an intellectual crisis. I was aware that I had undergone a wrenching transformation in my perspective on school reform. Where once I had been hopeful, even enthusiastic, about the potential benefits of testing, accountability, choice, and markets, I now found myself experiencing profound skepticism about these same ideas. I was trying to sort through the evidence about what was working and what was not. I was trying to understand why I was increasingly skeptical about these reforms, reforms that I had supported enthusiastically. I was trying to see my way through the blinding assumptions of ideology and politics, including my own. I kept asking myself why I was losing confidence in these reforms. My answer: I have a right to change my mind. Fair enough. But why, I kept wondering, why had I changed my mind? What was the compelling evidence that prompted me to reevaluate the policies I had endorsed many times over the previous decade? Why did I now doubt ideas I once had advocated?
The short answer is that my views changed as I saw how these ideas were working out in reality. The long answer is what will follow in the rest of this book. When someone chastised John Maynard Keynes for reversing himself about a particular economic policy he had previously endorsed, he replied, 'When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?' This comment may or may not be apocryphal, but I admire the thought behind it. It is the mark of a sentient human being to learn from experience, to pay close attention to how theories work out when put into practice.
What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.
The task of sorting my articles gave me the opportunity to review what I had written at different times, beginning in the mid-1960s. As I flipped from article to article, I kept asking myself, how far had I strayed from where I started? Was it like me to shuffle off ideas like an ill-fitting coat? As I read and skimmed and remembered, I began to see two themes at the center of what I have been writing for more than four decades. One constant has been my skepticism about ill-considered fads, enthusiasms, movements, and theories. The other has been a deep belief in the value of a rich, coherent school curriculum, especially in history and literature, both of which are so frequently ignored, trivialized, or politicized.
Over the years, I have consistently warned against the lure of 'the royal road to learning,' the notion that some savant or organization has found an easy solution to the problems of American education. As a historian of education, I have often studied the rise and fall of grand ideas that were promoted as the sure cure for whatever ills were afflicting our schools and students. In 1907, William Chandler Bagley complained about the 'fads and reforms that sweep through the educational system at periodic intervals.' A few years later, William Henry Maxwell, the esteemed superintendent of schools in New York City, heaped scorn on educational theorists who promoted their panaceas to gullible teachers; one, he said, insisted that 'vertical penmanship' was the answer to all problems; another maintained that recess was a 'relic of barbarism.' Still others wanted to ban spelling and grammar to make school more fun. I have tried to show in my work the persistence of our national infatuation with fads, movements, and reforms, which invariably distract us from the steadiness of purpose needed to improve our schools. In our own day, policymakers and business leaders have eagerly enlisted in a movement launched by free-market advocates, with the support of major foundations. Many educators have their doubts about the slogans and cure-alls of our time, but they are required to follow the mandates of federal law (such as No Child Left Behind) despite their doubts.
In our day, school reformers sometimes resemble the characters in Dr. Seuss's Solla Sollew, who are always searching for that mythical land 'where they never have troubles, at least very few.' Or like Dumbo, they are convinced they could fly if only they had a magic feather. In my writings, I have consistently warned that, in education, there are no shortcuts, no utopias, and no silver bullets. For certain, there are no magic feathers that enable elephants to fly.
As I flipped through the yellowing pages in my scrapbooks, I started to understand the recent redirection of my thinking, my growing doubt regarding popular proposals for choice and accountability. Once again, I realized, I was turning skeptical in response to panaceas and miracle cures. The only difference was that in this case, I too had fallen for the latest panaceas and miracle cures; I too had drunk deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix to intractable problems. I too had jumped aboard a bandwagon, one festooned with banners celebrating the power of accountability, incentives, and markets. I too was captivated by these ideas. They promised to end bureaucracy, to ensure that poor children were not neglected, to empower poor parents, to enable poor children to escape failing schools, and to close the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white. Testing would shine a spotlight on low-performing schools, and choice would create opportunities for poor kids to leave for better schools. All of this seemed to make sense, but there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope. I wanted to share the promise and the hope. I wanted to believe that choice and accountability would produce great results. But over time, I was persuaded by accumulating evidence that the latest reforms were not likely to live up to their promise. The more I saw, the more I lost the faith.
From The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch. Copyright 2010. Excerpted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
via npr.org
__________________________
Rotherham:
Don't Discount Charter School Model
Courtesy of Andrew Rotherham
Andrew Rotherham is a co-founder of Bellwether Education. He also writes the weekly "School of Thought" column for Time.com.
April 28, 2011
"They are intentional about who is in the building, who is teaching, how they use data, what's happening for students, the support for students, the curriculum, how progress is assessed," he says. "Everything is intentional and nothing is left to chance."The best schools — whether they're charter schools, public schools or private schools — are intentional about everything they do, says educational analyst Andrew Rotherham.
On Thursday's Fresh Air, Rotherham explains why he supports strategies that will redesign American public education with the help of charter schools, public sector choices and teacher accountability.
Rotherham is a partner at Bellwether Education, a nonprofit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. Bellwether advises grant-making organizations like The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, educational nonprofits and charter school networks on their operational and public policy issues.
Rotherham, who served in the Clinton administration as a special assistant of domestic policy, now spends his days thinking about how to make public and charter schools work for more kids. The public school system worked for him, he says, but only because he grew up in a nice suburb outside Washington, D.C.
"If I had been born just a few miles away, I would have had a very different public education experience," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "So that's the challenge. It's not about giving up on public schools but it is about acknowledging that right now, when you step back, [only] 8 percent of low-income kids can expect to get a bachelor's degree by the time they're 24. ... [And] when you have a system that produces 8 percent of the low-income kids getting out of college by the time they're 24, something is wrong."
Rotherham cites several character schools he'd like to see used as models around the country, including The Match School in Boston, which focuses on getting kids into college, and the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, a network of 99 schools in 20 states and Washington, D.C., whose students consistently perform well on state assessments.
"But more than anything else, what I would like to see replicated is that sense of possibility," he says. "These are good schools — there are technical things they do whether it's the way they hire teachers, evaluate performance [or] use data. But I think more than anything else that I'd like to see replicated is that ethos of possibility and thinking differently about what's possible for kids who have been failed by public schools for a very long time."
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How The United States Can Improve Education
If the United States is going to get serious about improving academic achievements, Rotherham says, schools need to be intentional about everything they do.
"They can be intentional about making sure the kids who come to the school with the least are getting the most," he says. "So they're getting the most effective teachers, they're getting a rich, high-quality curriculum [and] they are supported in school."
But that model, he says, is often the exact opposite of what happens today in most schools.
"From everything like how much money is spent on these schools to staff, these kids tend to get the least and that's why we see the outcomes that we see," he says "And underneath all of the rhetoric about these various things, that's the problem that we need to solve if we're serious about improving equity."
Interview Highlights
On charter schools that have been successful
"The Match School in Boston is a really terrific school focused on getting kids into college. There's networks of schools like Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, obviously KIPP is sort of a household name in the debate. And then there's a school here in Washington, D.C., called the Seed School. It's a public boarding school where the kids come in on Sunday nights and they leave on Fridays. ... It's been operating in Washington; they're opening a new one in Maryland and thinking about expanding elsewhere. And that's what I would like to see replicated — the ethos of possibility about what's possible for kids failed by public schools; that sense of thinking big and really doing things differently."
On educational testing
"What we're seeing [is] that a lot of schools struggle to produce a really powerful instructional program for kids and they struggled to do that before No Child Left Behind. Educational history in this country didn't start in 2001. So what you see is a lot of anxiety about the test, you see a lot of counterproductive strategies like drilling kids, cutting out subjects like social studies to focus on reading when research actually shows that the best way to really teach kids in a rich way is to teach kids in a rich way. The schools that don't worry about the test — that actually focus on delivering a powerful curriculum and a powerful instruction to kids — it shows up in the test scores and they do OK."
On teachers unions
"Teacher unions get blamed for a lot of things that aren't their fault. It's not the fault of the teachers unions that funding is so inequitable within states, for instance. In many ways, it would be worse without them. I think if you really want to lay blame at their feet today, it would be, 'Are they doing enough to help us address this challenge and are they out in front enough to address this challenge?' And I would say right now the answer is no, but I would say they get blamed disproportionately to their influence and I think if they were to go away tomorrow, there would be a lot of people disappointed in the changes that would actually bring."
On teacher salaries
"We have pursued a strategy in education over the last 30 years or more. We've hired more and more teachers rather than thinking do you potentially think of hiring fewer and paying more. So we're in somewhat of a box of our own creation. Teachers do need to be paid more. They also need to be paid differently. We have to start differentiating salary much more, and performance pay sort of takes on this outsized-placed in this debate. When we talk about differentiation, it's about, 'What subjects do you teach?' It is easier to find teachers in some subjects than others — we have acute shortages in math, science, special education, foreign languages. ... Some schools are harder to staff than other schools. How can we differentiate and reward that? ... Professionals are rewarded in other fields in non-monetary ways too — opportunities for professional growth, different opportunities for training and so forth. We don't do any of those things at any scale for teachers."
China v America:
how do the two countries compare?
How do China and America compare on the internet? We add this to our facts about the powers each country yields
China v the US: how the countries match up. Illustration: Mark McCormick for the GuardianWhen Hu Jintao visited the White House earlier this year, we picked some key facts about China and the USA to compare the two superpowers.
Since then the people over at Pingdom have put together their own fact comparison of China and the US, this time with an emphasis on internet usage and the online industry.
Like us, they picked some of their figures from the CIA World factbook, but they also drew from the Internet World Stats website.
We have collected all the statistics from the Pingdom report into a spreadsheet on in the data section below.In addition the Pingdom team summarise their findings as:
- China's Internet user base is bigger, much bigger (1.76x that of the United States).
The US Internet infrastructure is still way ahead of China's, at least for end users.
China has much more potential for growth in spite of already being the largest country on the Internet.
China's Internet users run older versions of software than the US Internet users are, at least when it comes to operating systems and web browsers.
The strong hosting industry in the United States keeps the nation ahead, especially since Internet users from all over the world use its services. (One might ask how long that will last, though.) We also spotted the great potential of China in our figures. Perhaps the most extreme contrast we found was in the current account balance of the two countries, which showed that the US has been growing the world's largest deficit burden, while China has been running with the world's greatest budget surplus.
The GDP growth was another big contrast, the GPD growth of China is 9.6% compared to just 2.6% for the 3rd quarter of 2010.
Despite these big differences showing China's power for growing, the domestic market capitatlisation given by the world federation of exchanges was still $15tn for the US compared to only $3.6 tn for China.
We have covered before the amount of US stock that China owns, which gives an indication of country power.
So it seems our findings fit with those of Pingdom, that the balance power looks set to be shifting. What other facts would you like to know about America and China?
Data summary
Download the data
• DATA: download the full spreadsheet
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via guardian.co.uk
GOD HELP US SAVE FLINT27Apr2011
Reginald Kaigler (DEMCAD) meets author Ted McClelland to discuss the history of Flint, Michigan, urban decay, de-industrialization and the decline of the auto industry. Kaigler is a Flint native and popular video blogger.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3: