Lily Salter's Blog, page 114

12 ideas that explain what’s so wrong with American schooling today

(Credit: Shutterstock)

George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan was quoted by the Atlantic as saying the following while pitching his new book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money: “From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market.”

Caplan is right about kids spending time on subjects seemingly irrelevant to the modern labor market, but he’s wrong about it being a problem. What’s wrong with most schooling today isn’t its failure to meet the demands of the job market, but its failure to meet deep personal and societal needs.

Of those needs, none is more important than improving the ability of the young to think for themselves, for the obvious reason that today’s solutions won’t solve tomorrow’s problems. The accelerating rate of environmental, demographic and technological change is creating planet-wrecking stresses and generating problems that existing knowledge can’t solve. Long-term survival is possible only if each generation is smarter than the one that preceded it.

Education policies and procedures put in place beginning with the 2002 No Child Left Behind law haven’t simply failed. They, along with the Common Core State Standards and high-stakes standardized tests, have tightened the screws on a curricular platform that’s headed toward a cliff.

Respected thinkers have long waved warning flags. The general education curriculum — traditional schooling’s attempt to prepare the young for life — is at odds with the nature of knowledge. Nearly all of my 70 contributions to The Answer Sheet over nearly 10 years have been attempts to show that the subjects in the core curriculum are working parts of a holistic structure of knowledge, that adolescents of every ability level can construct useful versions of that whole, and in so doing better equip themselves for whatever the future may bring.

What follows is a summary and links to free, illustrative instructional materials assembled from projects my brother, educator Howard Brady, and I undertook for three publishers who saw potential in ideas I had advanced in academic journals beginning with a 1966 article in the Phi Delta Kappan.

1. We agree with many others that poverty is a major contributor to the achievement gap, but blame generation after generation of basically flat academic performance on the disconnect between experienced professional educators and state and federal education policymakers.

2. We believe poor academic performance is primarily a consequence of information overload. The traditional core curriculum dumps poorly organized, often useless information on learners in unreasonable volumes at unreasonable rates.

3. We believe standardized tests, and the simplistic assumptions about learning which they reflect, perpetuate merely the appearance of learning. Learners “cram”— store enough information into short-term memory to recite and pass quizzes and examinations. But when those threats no longer loom, most of what was “taught and learned” at great cost in money and time quickly disappears. In no other institution would such inefficiency be tolerated.

4. We believe an effective general education curriculum must have an agreed-upon aim, and that “maximize learner ability to make sense of perceived experience” is that aim. It puts schooling’s emphasis where it belongs; respects the myriad implications attending personhood; is essential to the success of all legitimate aims of general education, and the inherent complexity of reality and of how the human brain perceives and processes information shuts down simplistic, attention-diverting “reforms.”

5. The arguments of defenders of direct instruction and teaching scripts notwithstanding, we believe useful levels of understanding of big ideas can’t be delivered by text, teacher talk or technology. Firsthand experience isn’t just the best teacher of complex ideas, it’s the only teacher. Meaningful learning is assembled firsthand and gradually from sequenced experiences, a process labeled variously as active, discovery, inquiry or constructivist learning.

6. Big idea: Knowledge is created by organized human groups — civilizations, societies, ethnicities and so on, from which it follows that organized human groups are the phenomenon most needing to be studied and understood.

7. Big idea: From shared experience, groups’ cognitive systems emerge — distinctive structures of knowledge or “worldviews.” Assumptions about the nature of reality, self, others, the supernatural, time, “the good life,” causation, and a few other matters shape everything important that groups think and do — their arts, sciences, institutions, religions, norms, values — everything.

8. Big idea: Nothing a group can know is more useful than an understanding of itself, but the “fish would be the last to discover water” phenomenon makes acquiring that understanding difficult, and the information, when called to attention, seems too obvious and mundane to teach.

9. Big idea: Understanding other groups’ worldviews is even more difficult. Most of the content of world histories has been generated by differences in worldviews, as has any randomly chosen day’s news. Earth and its people suffer catastrophic consequences from ignorance of self and others.

10. Big idea: Human groups are systems—integrated wholes—and must be studied as such. Academic disciplines and school subjects focus attention on myriad parts of those wholes—their environments, populations, patterns of action, and so on—but failing to treat those as studies of system components blocks the basic knowledge-relating process by means of which knowledge expands.

11. Big idea: Studying these big ideas is best begun by using close-at-hand reality as the main learning resource. Every school, its contents, and its immediate environs, is a functioning, systemically integrated whole sufficiently coherent, comprehensive, and complex to serve as a laboratory. That laboratory’s concreteness and accessibility make it ideal, its comprehensiveness makes it an inexhaustible source of data, and its relevance and importance to the young assures engagement long enough for the familiar to become “strange enough to see.”

12. Big idea: Every human, consciously and unconsciously, seeks answers to the questions, “What’s going on here, and what should I therefore do?” Lifting that process into consciousness turns information into knowledge, and sometimes turns knowledge into wisdom.

It should go without saying that #6 through #12 require learners to hypothesize, generalize, infer, synthesize, relate, correlate, extrapolate, value, imagine, and so on—thought processes too complex and idiosyncratic for their quality to be evaluated by standardized tests. Useful evaluations of meaningful learner work will inevitably be subjective, a fact which, when understood, helps explain why thoughtful teachers believe grading that work is counterproductive.

As the curricular screw-tightening of the Common Core State Standards and high-stakes standardized tests makes clear, education policymakers routinely underestimate both the complexity of teaching and the ability of the young to think.

If we change nothing and continue to assume that the core curriculum does the job that needs doing, that teacher experience isn’t worth its cost, that class size makes no difference, that incompetent institutional leadership has no serious consequences, that H.G. Wells was wrong in arguing that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe, then going over the educational catastrophe cliff isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable.

Instructional Materials

To encourage experimentation and dialogue, instructional materials using core-subject content in ways consistent with #6 through #12 can be downloaded from the internet and used free of cost and obligation. The lessons, and a small e-book arguing the merit of systems theory as the primary organizer of knowledge (and school subjects as secondary organizers), have been downloaded tens of thousands of times, suggesting an unmet need and the potential of bottom-up change and word of mouth to call attention to noncommercial, unadvertised teaching resources.

(a) EBook, What’s Worth Learning? 

(b) Systems-based course of study

(c) American history

(d) World history

(e) World cultures

Reminder: “Roseanne” is not the only “real” American sitcom

One zinger embedded in Tuesday’s episode of “Roseanne”  flew by so quickly and was delivered with enough casual ease to downplay its significance. Then again, maybe you noticed it: Dan and Roseanne Conner (John Goodman and Roseanne Barr) are seen waking up from a nap on the couch. Groggily Dan asks what time it, and Roseanne informs him that they’ve slept from “Wheel” to “Kimmel.”

“We missed all the shows about black and Asian families,” Dan notes. In response Roseanne curtly grabs the remote, turns off the television and quips, “They’re just like us. There. Now you’re all caught up.”

The episode in question centered upon Roseanne’s fatigue with cleaning up after Darlene (Sara Gilbert) and her kids, who have moved back in after Darlene lost her job. Well that, and Roseanne’s stubborn refusal to use a stair-climbing chair Dan has installed to ease the pain of her bad knee. But that line was a none-too-subtle wink at the slice of “Roseanne” viewers riled by television’s conscious and relatively recent focus on inclusive storytelling.

ABC is home to a number of sitcoms, but only “black-ish” and “Fresh Off the Boat” fit the description of “the shows about black and Asian families.” I suppose the episode’s writer, Sid Youngers, would respond to this critique by pointing out that at least that means they’re watching them.

Then again, the reductive nature of the joke goes against that excuse, especially in a season that is the production of the pilot-season that on the heels of the 2016 presidential election. Then, the story went, the search was on to find new TV series that reflected the day-to-day struggles of the disgruntled white working-class viewer incorrectly credited for electing Donald Trump.

Now, a week and a half after season 10 of “Roseanne” debuted to 18 million viewers, we have Trump crowing that the show is “about us” at a recent rally in Ohio.

There are questions about who his version of “us” really is in light of numerous post-election analyses of voter demographic data. The short version is that branding Trumpism as a product of an angry white working class, which Barr continues to perpetuate in the reboots debut and in press statements, is a myth. Roxane Gay got into specifics in her widely-read breakdown on the reboot in the New York Times:

Forty-one percent of voters earning less than $50,000 voted for Mr. Trump while 53 percent voted for Hillary Clinton. Forty-nine percent of voters earning between $50,000 and $100,000 voted for Mr. Trump while 47 percent voted for Mrs. Clinton. The median income of these voters was $72,000, while the median income of Hillary Clinton voters was $61,000. A significant number of middle-class and wealthy white people contributed to Trump’s election.

Disregarding these truths also dismisses the fact that the working class also consists of many families who aren’t white, and who may be invested in watching a few series featuring families that look like them.

Long before the resurrected “Roseanne” debuted, a number of half-hours played with the same issues of economic struggle and class division “Roseanne” knits through its narrative in ways that aren’t divisive or insulting. You may have heard of them, but might not be watching them even though they certainly deserve notice.

NBC’s “Superstore,” for example. It’s a brightly humored single-camera sitcom featuring a cast that looks like workers who would be employed at a big box store called “Cloud 9.” Only a few weeks ago “Superstore” aired an episode titled “Health Fund,” wringing humor out of the very serious reality that most workers in the U.S. have to forgo doctor visits for treatable conditions because they can’t afford the insanely priced deductible. Past arcs involved failed efforts to unionize and the crazed contortions employees have to engage in to appease efforts and keep jobs that don’t pay a livable wage. The situation is far from hilarious; despite that, this show manages to be.

CBS’s “Mom” attracts higher ratings, as one would expect of a show airing on a dominant network, but deserves more praise and critical attention than it receives. Its main characters (one played by recent Oscar winner Allison Janney) are recovering addicts, mother and daughter, living together and barely scraping by. Like “Roseanne,” “Mom” features contending with a headstrong daughter making questionable decisions. And it too traffics in humor that doesn’t insult or belittle the people it portrays, or anyone in their orbit.

Fifteen million viewers tuned into Tuesday’s “Roseanne” episode. Yet the creators of Netflix’s “One Day at a Time,” perhaps the most extraordinary example of a top-shelf multi-camera sitcom, had to publicly plead to get enough viewers to persuade the service to grant it a third season.  Eventually Netflix announced its renewal, prompting a great deal among critics and the show’s devoted viewership, with good reason.

This reboot of Norman Lear’s late 70s classic updates the family structure to feature a Cuban American mother who is a military veteran, raising two kids on her own and taking care of her aging mother on the salary of a physician’s assistant. Health care and health issues played a prominent role in season 2, as did the crushing weight of being a single parent with limited resources. People who watch this series love it for the way that it juggles these heavyweight issues with panache and never dropping its smile all the while.

As for the show about the Asian family, a recent “Fresh Off the Boat” explored the all-American challenge of friend break-ups and conflicts between adults couples at different stages in their lives. They, too, live with an overbearing but loving grandmother, and the kids in the family have a knack for ruin the furniture.

Somehow, though, these comedies do not adequately speak to Trump’s or Barr’s vision of “us.”

When “Roseanne” first aired its creator was aware of the need for a show that speaks to the precarious  financial state most of American lives in.

“I honestly think ‘Roseanne’ is even more ahead of its time today, when Americans are, to use a technical term from classical economics, screwed,” Barr observed in a first-person piece she wrote that ran in a 2011 issue of New York magazine.

We had our fun; it was a sitcom. But it also wasn’t ‘The Brady Bunch’; the kids were wiseasses, and so were the parents. I and the mostly great writers in charge of crafting the show ­every week never forgot that we needed to make people laugh, but the struggle to survive, and to break taboos, was equally important. And that was my goal from the beginning.

Putting this statement in the context of the era in which it was written, in 2011 ABC’s sitcom pool consisted of Tim Allen’s “Last Man Standing,” a forgettable misfire known as “Man Up!,” and a two-episodes-and-done horror titled titled “Work It!,” a horrific attempt to recapture the magic of “Bosom Buddies.”  ABC also had “The Middle” back then, as well as critical darlings “Suburgatory” and “Happy Endings” and “Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23,” but its best performer then and up until “Roseanne” returned was “Modern Family.”

If you know anything about these sitcoms you may notice a theme. Most featured main characters who were either young or affluent or single or childless or some combination of these. “Modern Family” represented ABC’s standard in terms of diversity. Even the “Last Man Standing” family lived in a nice home.

Barr was right. With the exception of “The Middle,” families struggling to make ends meet didn’t see much of themselves on broadcast television. And it wasn’t just ABC ignoring economically-strapped families in prime time. Across the board broadcast networks pumped up white-collar humor, drawing the laughs from workplace dynamics or the comedy of living single in a fabulous apartment in the big city.

Somewhere between then and now, the portrait of an ABC sitcom shifted. “Modern Family” remained ABC’s greatest success, and a popular sitcom during seasons where other networks who weren’t CBS struggled to get noticed. But it also welcomed in “Black-ish” and “Fresh Off the Boat,” as well as “Speechless” and “The Goldbergs.”

Last season’s ABC sitcom success “American Housewife” owes a huge debt to “Roseanne”; the locus of its humor is in the main character’s unwillingness to assimilate to the norms of the upper-class white enclave of Westport, Connecticut where her family  — also white, but not as rich or stuck-up — exist on the lowest social rung.

Still: that family can afford to live in on the richest suburbs in the United States. All of its other families can, in fact. That everybody in “Modern Family” lives in gigantic houses and can afford opulent vacations and ridiculous birthday bashes is a running joke among viewers.

During that same time period, between 2011 and today, Barr’s politics made a stark shift that barks, not merely dog-whistles, at the long-simmering racial resentment boiling over in 2018. Her network and culture analysts would like to remind us to separate the art from the artist, but that tossed-off punchline in an episode that’s decidedly not about politics — anyone’s politics — makes that tough to do.

Within that snippet of dialogue also lurks the meat of the TV industry’s low-key ruminations about the class divide. Conversations about what the success of “Roseanne” tells us about what the audience wants imply that portraying diversity is slowly but surely becoming a minus instead of a bonus.

And yet, no other series on TV poignantly does what “Black-ish” recently achieved in its Easter-themed episode “North Star,” which captured the veneer of politeness and discomfort that comes to the table even in mixed-race families who tolerate one another as opposed to embracing each other. What began as an episode poking at the merits of black holiday food versus white special occasion, however, became a meditation on how family holiday meals connect us to our personal histories as well as each other.

The “Roseanne” swipe, you see, is not simply a glancing blow. Barris and the writers on “Black-ish” have spent the entirety of the show’s run writing to entertain the broadest audience. And they’ve done this while speaking to concerns and anxieties Black Americans are experiencing right now, and in a way that invites white viewers into the conversation.

As an aside, a recent Hollywood Reporter article stated that “Black-ish” creator Kenya Barris may be in conversations about jumping ship to Netflix. ABC already has lost Shonda Rhimes to the streaming service.

Watching his current network’s new hit refer to his work as the butt of a joke probably won’t make Barris more amenable to sticking around. But ABC needs his view, and Khan’s and others.

“The Middle,” a creation of former “Roseanne” writers Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline, is in the midst of its ninth and final season and enjoying a “Roseanne” bump right now – as is “Black-ish,” which currently airs later on Tuesdays. “Black-ish” is widely expected to be renewed for another season, and ABC picked up an 11th season of “Roseanne” soon after its monstrous debut.

It’s still early days yet, but perhaps its success will provide the tentpole ABC’s comedy line-up needs to bring attention to many voices. But its not unreasonable to be concerned that one show’s honking cackle could wash the variety of storytelling out of the broadcast schedule, as network chase one skewed view of what America is, and how it wants to be portrayed.

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John Kasich keeps trying really, really hard to reach millennials

John Kasich (Credit: Getty/Mark Wilson)

John Kasich looks to be eying another presidential run. Rather than playing the role of the responsible dad of the Republican party, like he did during his failed 2016 run, it appears as if Kasich is trying a different strategy: cozying up to millennials.

Kasich is once again positioning himself as the cool, moderate Republican, this time vying directly for the millennial vote. In an interview with BuzzFeed, the incumbent Ohio Governor and failed GOP presidential candidate, revealed his fondness of the cohort of adults born between 1981 and 1996, raising speculation that he’s hoping to win the next presidential election with the help of millennials.

“You know, age is actually a number, and it’s a state of mind,” Kasich told BuzzFeed during his visit to New Hampshire. “Because I happen to like popular music, people think, Well, that’s because of your daughters. That’s not true. The reason why I do certain things is I have a young mind, and my mind is always working and finding new things to talk about and think about and explore, and that’s how you stay young. I admire the young people because I feel they’re idealists, and I’m an idealist.”

He even went on to throw a small diss at his fellow baby boomers — calling them “cynical,” and praising millennials for their infamous optimism.

“It seems as though we’ve all become so cynical now,” he said. “Nobody does anything because it might be the right thing to do. If you help a woman get across the street, it must be you want something. That’s a dangerous place to be. The millennials, I don’t believe, are cynical. We are cynical. Grown-ups. Older people. Cynical. Bad.”

Any smart politician will try and reach millennials in the 2020 presidential election, a generation that’s predicted to surpass baby boomers in population by 2019. Millennial voter turnout for the 2016 presidential election was higher than previous years, but still relatively low, which leaves room for more millennials to show up to the polls this year. As a Pew Research survey explained, millennials are also on their way to hold more sway in the electorate. According to a separate analysis, 58 percent of millennials identify with the democratic party, or lean towards it; 34 percent lean right or Republican.

“I think I’m increasingly viewed now as not just a Republican but as something different, kind of a hybrid,” he told the New York Times recently.

If anything, this confusion underscores Kasich’s fear of leaving the Republican party — and that’s the last thing a majority of millennials want. If Kasich’s team had done any diligent research on this generation, they’d know how important transparency and authenticity are to millennials. Thus, any attempt to pretend to be something that’s he not is unlikely to win Kasich points with twenty and thirty-somethings. Plus, it doesn’t help when he appears to be unsure how to identify himself.

As BuzzFeed pointed out, Kasich has talked a lot about Justin Bieber, social media and YouTube star Logan Paul lately. But if Kasich thinks that’s all millennials care about (which news flash: those aren’t even prime topics of interest) he’d be bound to have a short run.

As the sitting Ohio governor, Kasich’s positions and previous moves haven’t exactly aligned with millennials’ social views either. Case in point: Kasich signed into law one of the strictest restrictions on abortion access in the nation. The former president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, once said that a Kasich presidency would be “a complete and utter disaster.”

“He’s signed 17 separate bills to restrict reproductive access in the state,” Richards said. “It’s really rivaling Texas as the worst place for women to get access to healthcare and so we’ve got a lot of work to do to make sure folks know about his record and where he really stands.”

But Kasich is focusing on stricter gun control laws as part of his pre-presidential candidacy promo tour.

“Has this stuff that’s been happening all over the country — whether it’s Las Vegas, whether it’s Parkland, has it influenced me? Hell yes, it has,” Kasich told BuzzFeed, adding that he “cannot believe” how some adults have attacked the Parkland teens who advocated for increased gun control.

Millennials don’t want a candidate who tries to understand their generation, they want someone who actually does. Perhaps that’s why many millennials grew fond of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 election. Sanders’ outspokenness on reducing corporate profits resonated with a generation that has more people living in poverty than the baby boomers did at their age in the 1980s. His support for healthcare for all struck a chord with a generation who can’t always afford healthcare.

If Kasich wants to connect with millennials, he should just try following Sanders’ lead and stop trying so hard.

Al Pacino brings the Penn State coach to life in “Paterno,” a painfully appropriate film for our era

Kathy Baker as Sue Paterno and Al Pacino as Joe Paterno in "Paterno" (Credit: HBO/Atsushi Nishijima)

Near the end of “Paterno,” one character chides another for asking about how the alleged cover up of Jerry Sandusky’s pedophilic predations will impact the legacy of Penn State’s iconic head coach, Joe Paterno. The man dismisses the question as “spectacularly unworthy of conversation” — a noble enough sentiment, given the countless children whose lives were ruined by Sandusky, but also a tad disingenuous coming from the filmmakers. After all, if the question of Paterno’s legacy is spectacularly unworthy of conversation, then why did HBO make a movie that justifies its existence by stirring up talk about precisely that topic?

While I can’t answer that question for the filmmakers, I can say that “Paterno” is one of the quintessential movies of the 2010s. It tells a tale that has become depressingly familiar in this decade: A revered celebrity is revealed to have done something unconscionable that not only changes our opinion of him or her, but ultimately destroys their reputation. It is easy to think of this in the context of The Weinstein Effect, but the Paterno scandal didn’t simply precede the post-Weinstein allegations by more than half a decade. It also destroyed a man who had been a central figure in Pennsylvania’s culture for half a century, so much so that even people in the state who don’t follow college football were familiar with (and usually had at least a casual respect for) both the man and what he represented.

Of course, you can’t separate the reverence for Paterno from the obsessive football culture that made it possible — one that has recently reached a new fever pitch in Pennsylvania due to the Philadelphia Eagles’ Super Bowl victory — and the film establishes that fact right away. In the first ten minutes, it shows the titular Penn State football coach (not so much played by Al Pacino as resurrected by him) intensely focused on winning his 409th game, the most for any head coach in college football history. As we’re being entertained by the drama and athleticism on the field, however, powerful men are quietly panicking about a crisis that threatens their impending glory right down to its moral foundations. Paterno himself remains oblivious to it all, though, his advanced age having already eroded some of his mental acuity while his longstanding calcification against factors that might distract him from his work does the rest.

The opening sequence captures the themes that dominate the rest of the story, both the one on screen and that which unfolded in real life. As it became increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that Paterno knew about at least some of what Sandusky had done and conspired to cover it up, people who had once held him in high regard began to grapple with the grief of losing an idol. Some reacted with anger, demanding that he resign; others with profound disappointment and heartbreak, including (at least according to the film) his own children; and still others blamed the victims, from the bullies who tormented one of Sandusky’s accusers to the Penn State rioters who overturned a news van in rage upon learning that Paterno had been fired.

While “Paterno” chooses to focus on the Paterno family’s response to the unfolding public scandal, the movie’s beating heart is revealed when it profiles a community’s reaction to the moral flaws of a man it once held up as a hero. Their reaction calls to mind a quote by President Bill Clinton about his father-in-law Hugh Rodham, one that (appropriately enough) I gleaned from a book I found at a Pennsylvania garage sale called “Quotable Joe: Words of Wisdom by and about Joe Paterno, College Football’s Coaching Icon”:

“Until his dying day, he thought if there was a perfect person on Earth, his name was Joe Paterno.”

There are a lot of “perfect people” out there who wind up being exposed as not only imperfect (which is universal and thus forgivable), but deeply morally compromised. Moreover, there are many fans of those “perfect people” who refuse to accept the full truth once it has been exposed. I personally know quite a few individuals who refuse to realize that Al Franken engaged in sexual misconduct, that Bill Cosby was a rapist and that Kevin Spacey didn’t “just do one thing many years ago.” Similarly, there are many people Penn State alums — people who I’ve known for years and respect — who are reluctant to let go of the unassailable living deity he used to be.

“As a Penn State graduate, I feel the focus of this film is misguided, in that it should concentrate on the strength and resilience of the Penn State Community in the wake of the Sandusky scandal, and not Joe Paterno,” Jessica told Salon. “Coach Paterno did incredible things for Penn State, its students and the community, all of which are now overshadowed by this scandal.”

Her thoughts were echoed by Sal.

“As far as JoePa’s overall legacy, the man was so much more than a football coach. As someone who went to Penn State and worked for the university for 8 years I saw first hand how much good he and his whole family did; how much they gave back to the community. I don’t think this should tarnish his legacy forever or ruin or negate all the good he did,” Sal told Salon.

She added, “I’m a diehard fan, but I’m also not blind. I’m not one of the people who will tell you he did nothing wrong and he’s completely innocent. I do think he could have and should have done more, and I think, looking back on it all those years later, he realized that too. But I also truly believe that at the time, he thought he did exactly what he was supposed to do. I don’t believe he was maliciously trying to cover anything up. I think, at the time, he really believed he did the right thing by reporting it to his superiors and trusting them to take over the investigation and see it through.”

These are the people who most need to see “Paterno,” even though they’re the ones least likely to agree with its thesis. It is a movie that I would recommend to just about anyone who is interested in how celebrities try to preserve their good names after past misdeeds are brought to light, or who simply enjoy great acting (again, all props go to Al Pacino here). The film is not without its flaws — the pacing lags at times and some of the more interesting subplots are buried under scenes that repetitively show the Paterno clan trying, and failing, to put out the fire — but it hits home not only because the crimes it profiles are so heinous, so unconscionable, but because the entire subject is so agonizingly relevant today.

Here is the underlying problem that we have to grapple with as a culture: The people who we think of as our heroes often have aspects to their character which we cannot condone as a civilized people. They are broken idols, individuals who loom too large in their respective fields to be simply forgotten or written off, and yet whose legacies have still been forever ruined. Our society is searching for a way to figure out what to make of these people, but no obvious answers are apparent. The best thing we can do, right now, is insist that the whole truth be accepted no matter how heartbreaking, and accept that virtue and success are not always one and the same.

Or as Paterno put it, which I know from that garage sale acquisition:

“Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won’t taste good.”

Google employees protest joint Pentagon drone program: We shouldn’t be in “the business of war”

The Pentagon (Credit: AP/Shutterstock)

Google has proudly touted the motto “Don’t Be Evil” but the tech titan’s ties to the Pentagon are quite strong, presenting a moral dilemma for thousands of the company’s employees who claim they’ve unwittingly been rendered culpable in aiding American warfare.

A letter addressed to Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, raised concerns over the company’s role in Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program that has sought to improve “artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery” which “could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes,” according to The New York Times.

The letter has been signed by over 3,100 Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers.

“We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” the letter reads. “This plan will irreparably damage Google’s brand and its ability to compete for talent.”

It continues, “Amid growing fears of biased and weaponized AI, Google is already struggling to keep the public’s trust.” The letter expressed fears among employees that Google would join the ranks of top defense contractors such as Palantir, Raytheon and General Dynamics.

“The argument that other firms, like Microsoft and Amazon, are also participating doesn’t make this any less risky for Google,” the letter states. “Google’s unique history, its motto Don’t Be Evil, and its direct reach into the lives of billions of users set it apart.”

The company didn’t directly address the letter but said that “any military use of machine learning naturally raises valid concerns,” according to the Times. Google went on to say it is “actively engaged across the company in a comprehensive discussion of this important topic.”

As for its role in Project Maven, Google said it was “specifically scoped to be for non-offensive purposes.” The project is said to cost $70 million and will “find ways to speed up the military application of the latest A.I. technology,” the Times noted.

The tech giant has close ties with the Defense Department, as Google’s former executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, serves on the Defense Innovation Board for the department. Schmidt is still a current member of the Alphabet’s executive board, which is Google’s parent company, the Times noted. Schmidt pointed out last November that there was “a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly, if you will,” the Times reported. But he added that his role in serving on the board was “to at least allow for communications to occur,” because, he said, the military claimed to “use this technology to help keep the country safe.”

The Times noted that “improved analysis of drone video could be used to pick out human targets for strikes, while also better identifying civilians to reduce the accidental killing of innocent people.”

But it’s also important to note that drone technology is deeply flawed, and the use of drones as a weapon in war zones has been widely condemned and thought to only breed more terrorists. While the internal debate continues about whether or not Google or its employees should assist drone technology for military operations, consider that the public has been robbed of a debate on the use of drones as a concept of warfare in the first place.

Exclusive: Scott Pruitt, Trump’s embattled EPA chief, involved in shady 2011 real estate deal

Scott Pruitt (Credit: Getty/Saul Loeb)

Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s embattled EPA administrator, finds himself under attack this week after news broke that he had rented a Washington townhouse at below-market rates from the wife of a lobbyist who represents major fossil fuel companies. That was not the first time Pruitt has exercised questionable judgment around a property transaction, according to documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog group.

In 2011, Pruitt and his wife, Margaret, bought a property in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just days before a court ruled that it had been fraudulently transferred by a Las Vegas developer who was on the hook for a $3.6 million loan default. Pruitt, who was then Oklahoma attorney general, apparently flipped the property for a $70,000 profit four months later, selling it to a dummy corporation set up by a major campaign contributor, Kevin Hern.

Hern, a successful Tulsa businessman and the finance chair of the Oklahoma Republican Party, has been a major donor to Pruitt and other Republican candidates in the state over the years. According to records on file with the Oklahoma Ethics Commission, Hern contributed $3,500 to Pruitt between 2010 and 2014, and has given a total of $33,625 to Oklahoma candidates since 2006.

Hern attended Pruitt’s Senate confirmation hearing in January 2017 and posted about it on his Facebook page. He is now a Republican candidate for Congress in Oklahoma’s 1st congressional district.

The circumstances surrounding Pruitt’s apparent sweetheart deal remain murky.

In 2010, an affiliate of Rialto Capital Management (RCM), a company based in Miami, sued a developer named Keith Lyon in Arizona federal court for defaulting on a $3.6 million loan that Lyon had guaranteed in 2007 with a number of Las Vegas and Tulsa properties. RCM won a $2 million judgment against Lyon and other defendants on Aug. 25, 2011. 



Lyon then apparently vanished, after transferring 27 of those properties in 2009 to entities controlled by a woman named Pamela Rex (formerly Pamela Rooks), a fitness model who had lived with Lyon from 1998 to 2008. 



RCM then sued Rex for fraud under the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act, seeking $4.7 million in damages, claiming that Lyon had fraudulently transferred the properties and other assets worth $7.5 million to Rex for no monetary payment. 

One of those properties was at 1801 Forrest Drive in Tulsa, which was transferred to the Rooks Trust, an entity solely controlled by Pamela Rex. Pruitt bought the vacant lot from the Rooks Trust on Aug. 16, 2011 — just 10 days before the federal court judgment against Lyons — for $415,000.

Four months later, on Dec. 22, 2011, Pruitt sold the property for $485,000 — a $70,000 profit — to a previously unknown company called KNJ Construction, LLC. That entity was set up by Kevin Hern two days before the sale and has been inactive ever since.

Evidence suggests that Pruitt planned the quick turnaround on the property in advance. On Sept. 1, 2011, about two weeks after the purchase, Pruitt and his wife took out a short-term, 15-month mortgage from Security Bank in Tulsa. Hern built a luxury house on the property after purchasing it from Pruitt, and sold it 18 months later for $1.7 million. 

While this transaction raises numerous questions, there is nothing on the face of these documents that is clearly illegal. If any of the parties involved knowingly arranged for a preferential transfer to avoid a court judgment, however, that would imply significant legal issues. The same would be true of any pre-arranged deal to flip the property in a way intended to provide Pruitt, who was then Oklahoma’s top law enforcement official, with a quick windfall profit.

Pruitt’s office did not respond to requests for comment from Salon. At press time, a Hern spokesman had not provided a statement for this story. Salon also sought comment from Rex but a phone number for her could not receive calls or voice messages.

Gaza’s nonviolent protesters exploited by Hamas, but feared by Israel

(Credit: AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

Last Friday was an important day for Christians and Jews around the world. For Christians, it was Good Friday, the day that commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus; and for Jews, it was the beginning of the Passover holiday, which commemorates their liberation from slavery and exodus from Egypt.

Friday was also an important commemoration for Palestinians, called “Land Day.” It marks the date in 1976, when six Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed by Israeli security forces.

Now future generations of Palestinians may well also remember Friday, March 30, 2018, as “Bloody Friday.”

On this day, near the fence that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel, 18 Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. It was the highest Palestinian death toll since the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, when more than 2,000 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians.

For observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, indeed for anyone even remotely acquainted with it in recent years, this latest bloodshed might seem depressingly common — just another tragic episode of what is often characterized as a cycle of violence.

But what happened in Gaza last Friday was, in fact, quite different from what many people might assume. While the violence has dominated the news headlines, it is not the only big story from that day.

Majority were peaceful protesters

The deaths of 18 Palestinians should not distract all attention away from the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians had gathered at six different places near the border between Gaza and Israel in peaceful protest.

They were protesting Israel’s ongoing blockade of the small crowded coastal enclave now in its 12th year. They were calling attention to the resulting humanitarian crisis in Gaza. And they were demanding that Palestinian refugees and their descendants (who make up roughly two-thirds of Gaza’s 1.9 million population) be allowed to return to their former homes and reclaim their lands in Israel.

An estimated 35,000 Palestinians participated in this protest, including many families who picnicked in several large tent encampments that had been set up hundreds of meters from the border fence. The vast majority of the protesters were unarmed and nonviolent.

Only a relatively small number of them — mainly young men — hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers and rolled burning tires toward them. Just a few approached the fence and tried to damage or breach it.

Although it was not completely peaceful, this mostly nonviolent mass protest by Gazans is just the beginning of a six-week campaign of nonviolent popular protests that organizers have called the “Great March of Return.”

The campaign will culminate on May 15, which Palestinians commemorate as “Nakba Day.” The Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to Israel’s founding in 1948 and the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians that accompanied it.

Palestinian nonviolent resistance

This is by no means the first time that Palestinians have staged mass protests or used nonviolent tactics — what they call “popular resistance” — to confront and challenge Israel and raise international awareness about their plight.

Most famously they did this during the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1993), which began in Gaza in December 1987.

More recently, masses of Palestinians in East Jerusalem peacefully protested last summer when Israel installed metal detectors at the entrances of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.

Palestinians, in other words, have a long history of nonviolent popular protests, so there is nothing really new about the current campaign in Gaza.

What is new, however, and potentially very significant, is the involvement of Hamas, the militant Palestinian Islamist group that has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007.

Hamas violence

Israel, the United States and the European Union all classify Hamas as a terrorist organization. There’s good reason for that, given Hamas’ track record of indiscriminate violence against Israelis, including dozens of suicide bombings during the second intifada and the launching of thousands of rockets into Israel since then.

Hamas is more than just a terrorist group. It is also a political party and a social service organization that funds hospitals, clinics, schools, orphanages and soup kitchens. But violence against Israel, including Israeli civilians, has always been a core component of its ideology and strategy, and, you might say, its “brand.”

Hamas shows no signs of abandoning its armed struggle against Israel. Its new “policy document,” issued last year, still emphasizes “armed resistance,” just as its 1988 founding charter did. Its military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, continues to prepare and build up its arsenal for the next round of warfare with Israel.

But Hamas’ willingness to endorse and actively promote the so-called “Great March of Return” campaign, which was initiated by independent Palestinian activists in Gaza, suggests that it might be shifting its tactics away from relying upon violence, since that has proven to be disastrous for Gazans and ineffective for Hamas.

New tactic for Hamas

Instead of firing rockets (that Israel’s Iron Dome system can intercept), or using underground tunnels to ambush and capture Israeli soldiers or carry out terror attacks (which Israel’s new anti-tunnel system can now detect and destroy), Hamas has, at least for now, apparently embraced mass protests as a relatively peaceful means to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza and, it hopes, delegitimize Israel in the eyes of the world.

This allows Hamas to avoid a costly and destructive war with Israel. Another war would not only be unpopular among Gazans and unappealing to Hamas’ allies, Qatar and Turkey. It would also be potentially fatal to Hamas’ ability to remain in control of Gaza and its ambition to eventually take over the West Bank as well.

If Hamas can continue to mobilize tens of thousands of Palestinians to protest against Israel on a weekly basis, then it can ensure that the blockade of Gaza receives much more attention in international media and is placed higher on the diplomatic agenda of the international community.

Israel’s PR problem

For Israel, Hamas’ new tactic represents a completely different challenge than the military and terrorist threat that it has long been accustomed to and which it has largely succeeded in containing.

There is no high-tech Israeli answer to masses of unarmed Palestinian protesters congregating at Israel’s border fence or even trying to swarm over it. Israeli soldiers are ill prepared and ill-equipped for this kind of confrontation, as last Friday’s killings arguably demonstrated.

However much Israeli officials insist that Palestinian protesters are really terrorists trying to infiltrate into Israel, many people and many governments around the world are likely to sympathize more with the long-suffering Gazans, isolated and impoverished, than with Israel, especially when its troops fire live ammunition at demonstrators.

Mass demonstrations and marches by Palestinians are, in short, if nothing else, a public relations nightmare for Israel.

No wonder, then, that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh declared after last Friday: “We wish to tell the world that the March of Return was peaceful and civilized, and women, youths, children and elderly participated in it.”

The fact that this was not entirely true is beside the point. What matters more is how the world perceives the protest, and whether more of these popular protests, on a similar scale or larger, will take place over the coming weeks.

Dov Waxman, Professor of Political Science, International Affairs and Israel Studies, Northeastern University

Rex Tillerson downsized State Department, but paid consultants

Rex Tillerson (Credit: Getty/Salon)

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson hardly left anything positive behind at the State Department, but what he did leave behind is a blueprint that sought to only accelerate a problem that has plagued Washington for years: giving more money to private contractors, while slashing the federal workforce.

Tillerson’s once-highly touted “redesign” cost the department $12 million, mainly charged by one private consulting firm, and consultants who charged an exorbitant fee of more than $300 per hour, according to a new report of materials and figures obtained by Politico. The consulting firm Deloitte ate up most of the money, and the cap on federal contracts was also lifted from roughly $140 million to $265 million.

The goal of the revamp was to “transform the Department of State and USAID, a document showed, according to Politico. The plan would consist of restructuring “bureaus and offices and their reporting chain to improve efficiency,” that could bring about “consolidation, streamlining, or elimination of offices or functions.”

But some congressional aides and former department officials said Tillerson was too reliant on outside consultants, who were ill-equipped to handle a restructuring of a department they knew little about. They also indicated that he neglected more simple options, such as using public sources that would not eat up taxpayer funds.

Politico elaborated:

Some also said that rather than rely on an army of high-priced consultants, Tillerson could have turned to public sources that would cost taxpayers nothing. One, for example, was the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), launched under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It suggested, among other things, ways to streamline workloads and improve technology.

Tillerson and his top aides “had disdain for the professionals,” one former senior State Department official said. “You had years of blueprints for reform developed internally, two QDDR documents, and thousands of career officers and civil servants who crave change and reform and would’ve been thrilled to work on this effort at no added taxpayer expense.”

“Instead,” the former official added, “they chose to lavish money on contractors and consultants who knew nothing about the organization.”

It’s evident that Tillerson didn’t value the opinions of State Department careerists either. A survey that 35,000 staffers from both the State Department and USAID responded to, was conducted by a group called Insigniam, otherwise known as “a consulting firm that also has been a subcontractor of Deloitte’s,” Politico reported. The contract was worth at least $850,000, one document showed, but others indicated it could have been as high as $1 million.

A State Department staffer specifically expressed discontent with Insigniam consultants. “It was painful,” the staffer said of one meeting. “We were literally objecting to the way they were talking. We were trying to educate them on what we did so that they could actually help do the job they were hired to do.”

When February rolled around, Tillerson all but admitted defeat as frustration over the secrecy of his plans mounted from bipartisan legislators. The plan shifted from a department revamp to what he dubbed the “Impact Initiative,” which consisted of “improving the department’s technology, human resources procedures and management training,” according to Politico.

Tillerson left behind a beat up Department of State, and staffers that felt as if they had no sway in plans for a major restructuring, which was something they ultimately wanted, just not the way it had been handled. The current situation has set up a potential contentious hearing for former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who President Donald Trump tapped to lead the department last month, as lawmakers have sought to further understand what steps will be taken next.

“I believe we must look into how taxpayer money was spent on this botched project and will continue to call for the committee to examine these issues in open hearings in the near future,” Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., told Politico. He serves as the leading Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and was highly critical of the “lack of transparency” between the department and members of his panel.

Despite his tumultuous relationship with the president, Tillerson’s vision for the State Department fits right in with the broader theme of the Trump administration, which has consisted of privatization and cutting back on the bureaucratic process.

 

Oregon medical students face tough test: Talking about dying

(Credit: AP)

The distraught wife paced the exam room, anxious for someone to come and tell her about her husband. She’d brought him to the emergency department that afternoon when he complained about chest discomfort.

Sophia Hayes, 27, a fourth-year medical student at the Oregon Health & Science University, entered with a quiet knock, took a seat and asked the wife to sit, too.

Softly and slowly, Hayes explained the unthinkable: The woman’s husband had had a heart attack. His heart stopped. The intensive care team spent 45 minutes trying to save him.

Then Hayes delivered the news dreaded by doctors and family members alike.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she said. “But he died.”

The drama, played out on a recent Friday afternoon, was a scene staffed by actors and recorded by cameras, part of a nerve-wracking exam for Hayes and 143 other would-be doctors. OHSU officials say they’re the first medical students in the U.S. required to pass a tough new test in compassionate communication.

By graduation this spring, Hayes and her colleagues must be able to show that, in addition to clinical skills, they know how to admit a medical mistake, deliver a death notice and communicate effectively about other emotionally and ethically fraught issues.

It’s a push started in the last two years by Dr. Susan Tolle, director of the OHSU Center for Ethics in Health Care, who wants to improve the way doctors talk to patients, especially in times of crisis.

Tolle has seen doctors who don’t make eye contact, those who spout medical jargon and still others who appear to lack basic compassion for patients and their families.

“They’ll stand in the doorway and say something like, ‘You need to call a funeral home,’” Tolle said.

Part of the problem is that, in the past, aspiring doctors were taught too little, too late about difficult communication and its nuances, said Tolle.

“My generation of faculty were not taught,” she said. “I had history-taking, but it was more about, ‘How long have you had chest pain?’ I did not have [instruction in] how to give bad news.’”

At Tolle’s urging, the OHSU officials revamped the medical school curriculum to include new lessons in — and standards for — communication, ethics and professionalism woven through the coursework, said Dr. George Mejicano, the senior associate dean for education.

“Most of the emphasis has been on the simplest aspects of communication,” he said. “The whole idea here is, how do you tell someone they have a life-threatening or even a fatal illness? How do you tell someone, ‘I’ve actually made a mistake?’”

OHSU isn’t the only center to focus on communication. All medical schools and residency programs in the U.S. are required to include specific instruction in communication skills to gain accreditation, according to Lisa Howley, senior director of strategic initiatives and partnerships for the Association of American Medical Colleges, or AAMC. Residents are required to prove competency in order to graduate from training and be eligible for board certification for individual practice. And there’s been a larger effort nationwide to help practicing doctors learn to talk to patients about dying.

But Dr. Mark Siegler, director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago, who closely follows communication issues, said he believes OHSU’s approach is new.

“So far as I know, there is no other school in the U.S. that has any such standard,” said Siegler. “No other program has both a teaching effort and an evaluation effort.”

Hayes, the OHSU medical student, said she and her fellow students were nervous before the recent exam. But the practice with “standardized patients” — actors trained to portray people undergoing medical care — was crucial to understanding the right way to talk to families in a real-world situation.

“You realize you have this horrible information they don’t have yet,” she said.

Hayes did quite well and passed the test, Tolle said. So did most of the other OHSU medical students. But several — she wouldn’t say exactly how many — will need remedial coaching and testing before graduation.

Some of those students failed to introduce themselves properly or to find out what the family member had already been told, Tolle said. Instead, they bluntly announced they had bad news and quickly added that the patient was dead.

“You watched the screen and it looked like you hit [the spouse] with a truck,” Tolle said. “It comes across as incredibly uncaring.”

In real life, such botched conversations can have far-reaching effects. Mary George-Whittle was just 24 when her father had emergency open-heart surgery in 1979. When the surgeon emerged from the operating room to face the family, his message was jarring.

“He blurted out that Dad had died, that he had too little to work with, that Dad’s veins were like working with the veins of a turkey,” recalled George-Whittle, now 63 and retired after a career as a chaplain in Oregon. “He told us he had Dad’s blood all over him.”

Nearly 40 years later, she and her 11 siblings can still remember the shock.

“The impact that that still has is like PTSD,” she said. “The experience gets caught up in how poorly the news was given.”

This year’s test is a first step, Tolle said. It will be reviewed and refined for future classes. Students who need help will get it. At the same time, OHSU faculty will be offered sessions to help improve their communication skills so they can model what students are taught.

The long-term goal is to raise the bar across the profession, said Tolle, who’s had some practice shifting paradigms. She’s the co-creator of the Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment, known as POLST, a document credited with revolutionizing end-of-life instructions across the U.S.

In the same way, Tolle said, the culture of communication among doctors can change, too, starting with the latest generation.

“Our biggest goal is not to do a kind of ‘gotcha’ thing for the current medical students,” she said. “It’s to find where the pieces are missing.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.