Technopaideia

Climate Change and the Rising Tide of Distrust in Climate Science

2011-11-30T18:17:00.000-06:00

In this piece, I conclude that in the USA today there is widespread confusion about the difference between (a) the science of anthropogenic global warming and (b) debates about the kind of response that is necessary. Understanding this confusion, and its causes and consequences, is critically important if we are to understand why discussions about global warming rarely seem to generate agreement.

I have been following the topic of climate change (also sometimes referred to as global warming) for years, through both print and broadcast media and online. I occasionally share interesting articles or ideas with my friends on Facebook, and sometimes those posts elicit lively discussion about whether global warming is actually occurring or whether the human contribution to global warming (known as anthropogenic global warming or AGW) is major, minor, or nonexistent. Oftentimes, these conversations focus on the degree to which a consensus exists among scientists, the interrelationship between climate science and politics, or the things that individuals or the larger community can do to limit AGW or its likely effects.

Most of my Facebook friends pretty much agree with my overall "take" on these issues (on which, see here), but a few of them (and some family members) have very different views. Generally, discussions among us remain cordial and focused on the topics at hand, although there have been times when discussion has turned into vigorous debate and even vociferous argument. Eventually, most people with views different from the majority of my friends decide that there is little or nothing they can do to "win over" others to their point of view, and they usually stay out of future discussions on these topics.

I myself often feel at a loss as to how to prevent discussions from becoming arguments, especially when people take completely opposite positions on such fundamental questions as what counts as evidence or whether a particular line of argument follows the rules of logic. The teacher in me sometimes wishes to take the participants aside, sit them down in front of a chalkboard, and take them through some elementary exercises in logical analysis or the steps in the scientific method. However, few (adult) people are willing to believe that they are in need of such instruction, and I've found that I'm very likely to be charged with arrogance, elitism, or worse if I insinuate that any person's point of view is illogical or unsupported. Even if I take pains to adopt a friendly, agreeable tone or point out aspects of another person's perspective that are correct, almost no one has been willing to say something like "Ah, I see your point," or "I hadn't considered that." Typically, what happens is either complete agreement or some variation of agreeing to disagree followed by the withdrawal of one or both parties from further conversation about the topic.

I find it very interesting that climate change in particular is especially likely to lead to loggerheads in discussion. Certainly there are other topics upon which agreement seems difficult: religion comes especially to mind, or anything associated with religion such as evolution vs. creation (or what should be taught in schools) or whether gay marriage should be permitted. But climate change isn't a religious issue--at least not explicitly so (but see below).

However, the topic of climate change does seem to be infused with that other third rail of polite conversation: politics. Perhaps this is one clue as to why people's opinions about it seem so deeply ingrained. Just as it's nearly impossible to convince a dyed-in-the-wool limited government person to accept that increasing government spending on anything other than defense is good for the economy (despite any evidence that it might be), it also seems nearly impossible to convince someone who doesn't believe that AGW is a factor in climate change to reconsider that position in light of a newly-released study or report. It's almost as if the issue is determined not by the facts (or any argument supported by evidence of any kind) but by a fundamental choice made primarily on the basis of intuition, emotion, or personality. "I don't believe in AGW" or "AGW is clearly occurring" are like statements of fundamental values or commitments like "give me liberty or give me death" or "non-violence is always better than the alternative." Just as American politics can be characterized as an increasingly intractable chasm between progressives and conservatives (or "blue" states and "red" states), climate change--something which on the face of it ought to be a scientific issue--at least in the US can be characterized by an increasingly insurmountable divide between those who fundamentally believe that humans cannot alter the future of the Earth and those who believe ~~they~~ we already have. This graph from gallup.com tells the story pretty well:

Notice that belief in AGW has actually decreased among Americans since 2008, even as Gallup has found that Americans believe that they understand the issue increasingly well. Indeed, large numbers of Americans believe that global warming as a problem has been generally exaggerated, as this graph shows:

Interestingly, this divide doesn't appear to be nearly as deep or as insurmountable in Europe, where 89% of adults believe climate change is at least a fairly serious problem.

This divide among Americans in their views of the human contribution to climate change is highly correlated with the increasingly intractable political chasm mentioned above. Seventy-one percent (71%) of Democrats believe that the current "rise in the earth's temperatures [is] due to pollution from human activities" (i.e. they believe in AGW), while only thirty-six percent (36%) of Republicans believe this (source). While one's political party is not completely determinative on this matter (as it seems to be, for example, in the case of support for increased government deficit spending to help the poor), beliefs about AGW reflect--at least in part--the same fundamentally important beliefs that lead someone to choose their political party.

Why is this? While some people's political viewpoints are less easily characterized as conservative or liberal--for example, I have a gay Republican friend who strongly favors gay rights but also strongly wants to limit the size of government--it's fairly easy to understand why a conservative person might be against further deficit spending to help the poor, or why a liberal person might in favor of granting increased rights and social acceptance to homosexuals. However, it's not immediately obvious why belief in AGW would be determined (at least in part) by political beliefs.

Let me put this into perspective. In a quick search, I couldn't find any poll data showing that Republicans and Democrats differ on, say, the cause of cancer or the size of the universe. If such differences do exist, no one has deemed them sufficiently interesting to study. I'm guessing that there is wide acceptance among Americans of all political persuasions that these questions are empirical questions, to be answered through the typical processes of scientific inquiry, including observation, experimentation, creating and testing theories, peer review of publications, meta-analyses, and so on. Few people would claim that a particular scientist's opinion about how smoking leads to lung cancer or the speed at which the universe is expanding reflects that scientist's political views at any level. And while some people may distrust a particular scientific finding due to suspicion that a scientist or team has cooked the numbers to secure external funding or promotion, very few people think that science itself--or any particular branch of science--is irretrievably tainted by such factors.

But plenty of people believe that the science behind AGW is tainted by non-scientific factors.

Take this truly interesting example of people arguing that scientists who believe in AGW are tainted by non-scientific (i.e. political) concerns, recently published at the Weekly Standard. The authors (one of whom is a psychiatrist who teaches courses about conspiracy and groupthink at Harvard Extension School) base their argument in part on what they see as a shift in language from the phrase "global warming" to the phrase "climate change" during the past few years.

These recent winters have been cold, and the summers themselves not so hot. That, in turn, creates a problem, for no sense of impending apocalypse survives widespread disbelief. And so—right around the point where it all started to seem a little hard to swallow—the phrase climate change, more generic if less picturesque, began to slip into public pronouncements, supplanting the old, falsifiable term global warming.

"Climate change," the authors say, is unfalsifiableand therefore is a convenient catch-phrase for the pseudo-science behind AGW:

...the concept of falsifiability still grants some insight into the vagaries of modern environmentalism. In politics, the notion that climate change can’t be falsified—everything only serves to confirm it, nothing imaginable can contradict it—has been a marvelous boon. In science, the fact that climate change can’t be falsified seems to prove, mostly, that climate change isn’t science: There’s no way to test for it, no way to quantify it, and no way to demonstrate it.

Read that again: "climate change isn't science." Then what is it? The authors are clear:

The research enterprise in the modern world is a large-scale activity. Difficult questions are raised, and hypotheses are generated to move toward an answer. This requires hiring staff, recruiting experts and consultants, purchasing equipment, and putting all of it in a building, preferably on a university campus. Most of all, what’s needed for this kind of research is oceans of money. And where money is the driver, politics is the unavoidable road down which the scientist has to race. Grant-making authorities, whether in government, industries, or foundations, tend to have a preferred perspective on the process and outcome of research. These preferences are not lost on the applicant researchers.

And, according to the authors, the obvious "preference" of funding agencies in climate science is to believe that warming is occurring, that it is largely man-made, and that it's going to cause big problems. The first two of these beliefs are captured in AGW; the third, which can be thought of as extreme AGW or "catastrophic AGW" is a somewhat different animal than AGW itself, but it's often conflated with AGW itself when it suits an author's purposes, as here:

As the grant-achieving scientists congealed their opinions around the hypothesis (and now doctrine) of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming—warmed, themselves, by their presumptive guardianship of truth and virtue—some have succumbed to the temptation to cut corners. Dissenting investigators have been marginalized, their research papers viewed with prejudice by academic journals. The principle of free availability of raw data has been ignored. Peer review has degenerated into pal review. Cases of data destruction and tampering have been documented.

I think it's fairly obvious how the addition of the word "catastrophic" changes the debate. The word implies that a person's views are not entirely based on empirical fact; that the person is showing an unscientific faith, or belief, in forecasts or prophecies of imminent doom; that the person intends not to illuminate a discussion with facts, but to induce panic. The "catastrophic" version of AGW certainly serves these particular authors' purposes better than mere AGW:

Perhaps the greatest reason for any of us to feel skepticism about climate change, however, is the unchanging politics of those who employed it to advance their agendas. Are we wrong to suspect that most global warming activists are merely using global warming as the latest in a long series of tools with which to demand fundamental changes in Western civilization?

Think of it this way: The premise of catastrophe produces the conclusion that the political and economic underpinnings of Western civilization must be discarded. Governments must take control of economies. Capitalism must give way. All decisions must be made by our scientific and political elite, for only they can save us from doom.

Now, in a purely logical world, the rejection of the premise would mean that we don’t have to accept the conclusion. If A, then B and not A together produce nothing. But the people who’ve been lecturing us for more than a decade now about global warming and climate change didn’t start by holding A. They began by holding B—the conclusion, the proposition that Western civilization must change. And it is, literally, a nonfalsifiable proposition: If global warming and climate change help lead to it, then hurray for global warming and climate change. If not, well, then, they’ll find something else.

Well, look at that! Without even trying very hard, we've found one reason that beliefs about AGW may be correlated so tightly with political beliefs. There are a couple of interesting points to be made:

First, notice that somewhere in the article the authors shifted from talking about whether climate science is real science--which would actually demand that they discuss the science itself, an increasingly difficult task, as can be seen in any effort to do so for the general public, as you can see here--to talking about the political agenda of "global warming activists ...who've been lecturing us for more than a decade."

Second, no longer is the debate about whether the earth is warming or whether individuals or society as a whole ought to do something about it. It's become, rather, about whether "the political and economic underpinnings of Western civilization must be discarded." WHOA! ... What?!? Clearly this is no longer a scientific question (at least not as it's framed here).

Third, there's no effort in the piece to show any collusion among actual climate scientists, funding agencies, journal review boards, and this alleged agenda. (Indeed, despite many people alleging bias in the field, there seems to be very little such evidence, as discussed by a science reporter for the BBC here.) Rather, the link is taken as obvious: "elites" who "lecture us" and want to "make all decisions" clearly (?) want the government (their government) to take over the economy and destroy (our) capitalism.

I think what this illustrates, quite concretely, is that when some people hear "global warming" or "climate change," what they actually hear are "cataclysm" and "government control." Even the bare notion that humans may be causing measurable changes in the earth's climate (i.e. that AGW is true) raises the fear that someone is about to take something very important away.

Let's look at another example of the claim that AGW is a political, rather than a scientific, conclusion. In this piece, one Karl Schmidt painstakingly shows, with links and graphs and charts, that "the global warming crowd" relies primarily on "speculation" rather than "real science." Schmidt draws a distinction between what "can be measured" and what cannot. He includes this graph of global temperatures from year to year, as measured from satellites:

Schmidt's comment on the graph?

But do you know what Isee in that data? (And I'm really goodat looking at statistics) - Not much that is significant-- mostly some noise - noise that is much higher than any trend. Youcould pick selected start and end points to showeither cooling or warming. There is obviously no hokey-stick.

(I'm thinking that "hokey-stick" is a pun.) The source for this graph is not given in Schmidt's piece, although I traced a broken link to http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2/readme.15Dec2006 by cutting off the ending, and found this later readme file, which is somewhat difficult to interpret, but I did find this sentence:

At this time we are merging AQUA into the time series while keeping
NOAA-15, with its slight, spurious warming, in the mix through the
present.

I did a little investigation of this sentence (pasted it into Google and looked around a bit) and found the web site of Dr. Roy Spencer, and an article "On the Divergence Between the UAH and RSS Global Temperature Records," which contains the following:

Anyway, my UAH cohort and boss John Christy, who does the detailed matching between satellites, is pretty convinced that the RSS data is undergoing spurious cooling because RSS is still using the old NOAA-15 satellite which has a decaying orbit, to which they are then applying a diurnal cycle drift correction based upon a climate model, which does not quite match reality. We have not used NOAA-15 for trend information in years…we use the NASA Aqua AMSU, since that satellite carries extra fuel to maintain a precise orbit.

Of course, this explanation is just our speculation at this point, and more work would need to be done to determine whether this is the case. The RSS folks are our friends, and we both are interested in building the best possible datasets.

But, until the discrepancy is resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, those of you who REALLY REALLY need the global temperature record to show as little warming as possible might want to consider jumping ship, and switch from the UAH to RSS dataset. (emphasis added)

Hmmm....as I poked around a bit more, I learned that UAH is the University of Alabama at Huntsville and that RSS is a company called Remote Sensing Systems. Both UAH and RSS generate periodic graphs based on temperature data derived from satellite measurements of microwave radiation. Wikipedia tells us:

Satellites do not measure temperature. They measure radiances in various wavelength bands, which must then be mathematically inverted to obtain indirect inferences of temperature. The resulting temperature profiles depend on details of the methods that are used to obtain temperatures from radiances. As a result, different groups that have analyzed the satellite data have produced differing temperature datasets. Among these are the UAH dataset prepared at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the RSS dataset prepared by Remote Sensing Systems.

Also according to Wikipedia:

Research by Carl Mears and Wentz, both of RSS, highlighted errors in the early satellite temperature records complied by John Christy and Roy Spencer at UAH. The UAH data had previously showed no significant temperature trend, bringing the derived satellite data into closer agreement with surface temperature trends, radiosonde data and computer models. The UAH data is now closer to the RSS data but differences remain.

What's clear is that "the process of constructing a temperature record from a radiance record is difficult" and that there are alternative methods of doing so. More from Wikipedia:

For some time the only available satellite record was the UAH version, which (with early versions of the processing algorithm) showed a global cooling trend for its first decade. Since then, a longer record and a number of corrections to the processing have revised this picture: the UAH dataset has shown an overall warming trend since 1998, though less than the RSS version.

Thus, both UAH and RSS data show a trend of warming in the lower troposphere, which is consistent with AGW.

But what about Schmidt's graph? The graph shows the UAH data in raw form. The UAH's Dr. Spencer (on whom more below) gives the latest data in a slightly more readable form, here:

I wonder if Schmidt would say the same thing ("do you know what I see in that data?...Not much that is significant -- mostly some noise - noise that is much higher than any trend") about this version?

Schmidt does say something else:

To claim as a "fact" something from a trend who'samplitude (anddirection) can be changed by changing end points dueto the noise involved not science; it is politics.

This issue comes into play whenever anyone looks at a given set of data such as this and tries to fit a straight line to it. By choosing particular end-points for the line, you can pretty much choose which trend you would like to see.

Scott Mandia at SUNY-Suffolk discusses this phenomenon is great detail here, and includes a very cool Java applet that lets you decide how many years of data you wish to include, and draws all the possible trend lines, showing "cooling" trends in blue and "warming" trends in red. (You can also choose which of two data sets you want to see.)

Here's what the applet looks like using 10 years:

And here's what it looks like using 60 years:

Clearly, there is quite a bit of variation in what people will conclude from the data, depending on how it is presented. For example, in this graph, which includes surface temperatures as well as atmospheric temperatures (different data sets are distinguished by color), a warming trend is pretty obvious:

So, is it a political choice as to how the graph is interpreted, as Schmidt alleges (and as is implied in the Weekly Standard article)?

In trying to understand better the link between politics and science in relation to AGW, I think it's instructive to look specifically at other scientific concepts that cause similar reactions. The most obvious is the idea that humans evolved from other animals. Many people found this idea threatening when it was first published by Charles Darwin in 1859. Many people still found it threatening at the time of the Scopes trial in 1925. Indeed, many people (particularly Americans) still find the concept of evolution difficult to accept:

Belief about evolution and about climate change are pretty equally distributed through the political spectrum, with the most consistency seen among evangelical Christians. Again, American beliefs are more divided than those found elsewhere:

This pattern is different from that seen in Europe and Japan. ...[S]ignificantly...more adults in Japan and 32 European countries accepted the concept of evolution than did American adults.... Only Turkish adults were less likely to accept the concept of evolution than American adults. In Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and France, 80% or more of adults accepted the concept of evolution, as did 78% of Japanese adults.... A third of American adults indicated that evolution is "absolutely false"; the proportion of European adults who thought that evolution was absolutely false ranged from 7% in Denmark, France, and Great Britain to 15% in the Netherlands.

How can we explain this? One explanation is implied in the finding that evangelical Christians are both much less likely than the average person to believe in evolution and also much less likely to believe in AGW. And the US as a whole is much more religious than Europe.

But this doesn't take us quite far enough. There's a rather obvious connection between being very serious about believing in the literal truth of the Bible (i.e. being an evangelical christian) and not believing that humans evolved from the animals. Specifically, evolution seems to be directly contradicted by the story of creation in Genesis. But why would someone who believes that the Bible is the Word of God find the concept of AGW unacceptable?

(As an aside, it's important to acknowledge that being religious doesn't in and of itself lead people to reject climate science. See this story about religious leaders meeting to craft a coordinated response to climate change.)

For an answer, I turned to the Yale University Project on Climate Change Communication, which has developed a "Six Americas" framework for understanding differences in public opinion on the issue. Americans can be categorized along a spectrum ranging from "Alarmed" to "Concerned" to "Cautious" to "Disengaged" to"Doubtful" to "Dismissive", with the categories ranging from believing in AGW (and very motivated to do something about climate change) through not believing (and very unmotivated). This graph (2009 data) is instructive:

The relative proportion of the population in each group has varied in the years since 2008, with the Alarmed representing 18 percent of the population in 2008 but only 12 percent in 2001, and the Dismissive ranging between 7 percent in 2008 but 10 percent in 2011.

While the entire report is fascinating and worth reading, I am especially interested here in the Dismissive group. The description tells us more:

The Dismissive have a specialized media diet, with a higher than average preference for media sources that reflect their own political point of view. While they are high consumers of political news, they do not trust most sources of information on global warming, including the mainstream news media, and they are more likely than average to turn to conservative news commentators and the Internet. They are most likely to trust their own friends and families as a source of information about global warming, with scientists and religious leaders well behind. (emphasis added)

The Dismissive are distinguished by their certainty that global warming is not occurring. They have thought about the issue a good deal and consider themselves well-informed. They are quite certain that even if it is occurring, it is not caused by human activities. They believe scientists are in disagreement on the issue, and quite a few believe that there is a consensus among scientists that
global warming is not occurring. They believe that no one is in danger of being harmed and anticipate that there will be no impacts on people or the environment.

And...

More than half the Dismissive are concerned that action to reduce global warming will lead to more government regulation (70%).

Finally,

The Dismissive hold the strongest individualistic values of the six groups: 88 percent believe that people should be allowed to make as much money as they can, even if it means some makes millions while others live in poverty. They strongly oppose government intervention: 87 percent say that government regulation of business usually does more harm than good; 86 percent believe government interferes too much in people’s lives and that government tries to do too many things for too many people; and 85 percent feel that we’d be better off if government spent less time trying to “fix everyone’s problems.”

Conversely, the Dismissive strongly disagree with egalitarian values: they don’t believe wealth should be divided more equally, that government should meet everyone’s basic needs, or that discrimination against minorities is a serious problem. Seventy percent oppose government programs to get rid of poverty.

In areas where religion and science conflict, the Dismissive hold traditional religious beliefs more strongly than any other segment: Less than a quarter (23%) believe in human evolution, compared to 47 percent nationally. Almost two-thirds believe the world was created in six days (62%), compared to 54 percent nationally. Regarding the overall value of science, however, 81 percent disagree with the statement, “Overall, modern science does more harm than good.”

Very interesting, indeed. So the Dismissive group isn't anti-science in general. Yet with respect to climate change, only 8% of Dismissives strongly trust scientists as a source of information. And (as an aside), "they are much more likely than average to watch Fox News, Hannity & Colmes, or Bill O’Reilly, and to listen to Rush Limbaugh."

But again, what's the real problem that the Dismissives in general (or evangelicals in particular) have with the science of climate change?

It is because, in their minds, the science is tainted by a "false religion." Larry Bell, writing a column in Forbes, makes the "false religion" charge forcefully:

Global warming (aka “climate change”) has become a religious mantra, a call for action in a crusade against larger evils we have perpetrated against nature, a punishment for our sins. Author Michael Crichton articulated the essence of this creed in a 2003 speech in which he observed:
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with Nature; there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result from eating from the tree of knowledge; and as a result of our actions, there is a judgment day coming for all of us. We are energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment, just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs imbibe.

Bell plays this out further. Feeling guilty for humanity's allegedly arrogant attitude towards nature since the start of the Industrial Revolution, climate change zealots are simply too ready to believe that "nature" will exact some kind of retribution in the form of catastrophic climate change. (The unwillingness of evangelicals to treat "nature" as worthy of religious respect--and their concomitant distrust of "environmental do-gooder flower children" or those who believe in "new age" religion--may be another reason for their distrust of climate science. See here.)

Bell continues:

Global warming zealots have launched an aggressive jihad against those they brand as “deniers”, often asserting presumed fossil energy affiliations to those who don’t buy into their hysterical pronouncements. Another tactic is to conflate rejection of unfounded human-caused climate crisis alarmism with an absurd denial that climate changes regularly occur, or that human activities may have some influence (however incalculably minuscule, either with respect to warming or cooling, those effects may be). They would also have us believe that periods of global warming are assuredly “bad”, and have even caused recent global cooling! In other words, all climate change is bad.

In the church of climate change, most or all unfortunate events that occur are attributable to human causation. Eco-elitists seize upon this dogma to argue that economic growth, promulgated by spurious corporate interests, is the enemy of the environment.

(Notice the charge of elitism again.)

Whether or not we subscribe to a particular orthodoxy, religion plays a vital, if not central role in most of our lives, guiding us to believe we are all part of something much larger than ourselves. It provides age-old lessons that teach us the importance of taking responsibility for our actions, constantly motivating us to do better. Faith in those universal principles binds us together as stable, functioning societies.

Science also has a vital, but very different role. When purported “scientific experts” emulate spiritual prophets they overstep their bounds, and we can no longer trust them.

Of course, Bell's essay ignores the fact that one can actually separate the findings of science (global warming, possibly anthropocentric) from the political prophecy of a global warming catastrophe. But just as the essay in the Weekly Standard (mentioned above) makes a leap from AGW to "catastrophic AGW" and uses that leap to justify disbelief in AGW itself (and by association the entire field of climate science), Bell also uses the fact that some people are "global warming zealots" who think "economic growth, promulgated by spurious corporate interests, is the enemy of the environment" and that AGW requires an immediate coordinated response as reason not to trust the scientists themselves. (Notice: Bell himself raises the issue of trust here.)

Another view of environmentalism as a "religion" (albeit not a false one) is given by Freeman Dyson in a 2008 essay in the New York Review of Books. Dyson writes:

All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

(I have some more to say about Dyson's essay, below.)

Another--and fairly conclusive--clue to the religious basis of disbelief in AGW is found here:

As reported in the New York Times article “An Evangelical Backlash Against Environmentalism”, a non-profit evangelical organization called the Cornwall Alliance calls the environmental movement a “false religion”, and has issued an educational program titled “Resisting the Green Dragon” to warn Christians that the forces of radical environmentalism are seeking tyrannical control over all other beloved institutions such as God and country.

If Christianity is taken as the "true religion," and the environmental movement is seen as a "false religion," then there is clearly a motivation for evangelicals to resist environmentalism in general (and to resist calls for doing something about AGW in particular).

Interestingly, one of the members of the board of advisors to the Cornwall Alliance and a signatory to the declaration is Dr. Roy Spencer, of UAH (mentioned above). Spencer believes that the atmosphere has been warming, as shown in the UAH data, but he does not believe this warming has been primarily caused by human activities. He writes:

“Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more. But to many politicians and the public, the term carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. This website describes evidence from my group’s government-funded research that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution.

Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.

Spencer believes that bias is the primary reason that research similar to his own has not been generally funded. Through books, articles, and appearances in the media, Spencer has done more than perhaps anyone else to raise questions about the science of AGW. Yet, as we've seen, he believes in global warming. What he doesn't believe is that humans are the primary cause. He writes, "Because small, chaotic fluctuations in atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems can cause small changes in global average cloudiness, this is all that is necessary to cause climate change."

According to Wikipedia, Spencer thinks that "small cloud variations connected with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation can explain 75% of global warming in the twentieth century." This can be confirmed by looking at Spencer's web site:

A simple climate model forced by satellite-observed changes in the Earth’s radiative budget associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is shown to mimic the major features of global average temperature change during the 20th Century – including three-quarters of the warming trend. A mostly-natural source of global warming is also consistent with mounting observational evidence that the climate system is much less sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than the IPCC’s climate models simulate.

The theory espoused by Spencer is not supported by most climate scientists; indeed, it's just one alternative theory to AGW. But what I really want to know is what makes Spencer so interested in finding "a mostly-natural source of global warming"? Why is this more desirable to him than a mostly-man-made source? Wikipedia provides a clue:

In an interview with conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh on February 28, 2007, Spencer stated that he doesn't believe "catastrophic manmade global warming" is occurring. He also criticized climate models, saying "The people that have built the climate models that predict global warming believe they have sufficient physics in those models to predict the future. I believe they don't. I believe the climate system, the weather as it is today in the real world shows a stability that they do not yet have in those climate models."

Fair enough; as with all predictive models, there may be erroneous assumptions. But this doesn't answer the question of why climate stability is so important to Spencer.

Interestingly, despite his credentials as a scientist, the fundamental reason seems to be his religion. Spencer is a signatory (confirmed here) to "An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming," issued by the Cornwall Alliance. That states, in part:

We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.

And:

We deny that Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric chemistry. Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally rapid. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.

(Notice that the Alliance does not deny recent warming. Notice also the shift that we've seen before from talking about global warming to talking about "dangerous" global warming.)

In an in-depth analysis that accompanies and justifies the Declaration, the Alliance discusses what they call "global warming alarmism." Notice the inclusion of the word "alarmism," indicating that it is activism around global warming (and its implication that immediate coordinated action is needed) that is their target, more than the science of AGW. In any case, the Alliance finds that global warming alarmism

fails the tests of theology, science, and economics. It rests on poor theology, with a worldview of the Earth and its climate system contrary to that taught in the Bible. It rests on poor science that confuses theory with observation, computer models with reality, and model results with evidence, all while ignoring the lessons of climate history. It rests on poor economics, failing to do reasonable cost/benefit analysis, ignoring or underestimating the costs of reducing fossil fuel use while exaggerating the benefits.

They continue:

Our examination of theology, worldview, and ethics (Chapter One) finds that global warming alarmism wrongly views the Earth and its ecosystems as the fragile product of chance, not the robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting product of God’s wise design and powerful sustaining. It rests on and promotes a view of human beings as threats to Earth’s flourishing rather than the bearers of God’s image, crowned with glory and honor, and given a mandate to act as stewards over the Earth—filling, subduing, and ruling it for God’s glory and mankind’s benefit. It either wrongly assumes that the environment can flourish only if humanity forfeits economic advance and prosperity or ignores economic impacts altogether. And in its rush to impose draconian reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, it ignores the destructive impact of that policy on the world’s poor.

(Again, "alarmism" is the target of this.) The Alliance specifically contrast the Bible with "the environmentalist world view":

The Biblical worldview contrasts sharply with the environmentalist worldview—whether secular or religious—in many significant ways. Among these, four are particularly germane:

Environmentalism sees Earth and its systems as the product of chance and therefore fragile, subject to easy and catastrophic disruption. The Biblical worldview sees Earth and its systems as robust, self-regulating, and self-correcting, not immune to harm but durable.

Environmentalism sees human beings principally as consumers and polluters who are only quantitatively, not qualitatively, different from other species. The Bible sees people as made in God’s image, qualitatively different from all other species, and designed to be producers and stewards who, within a just and free social order, can create more resources than they consume and ensure a clean, healthful, and beautiful environment.

Environmentalism tends to view nature untouched by human hands as optimal, while the Bible teaches that it can be improved by wise and holy human action.

Environmentalism tends to substitute subjective, humanist standards of environmental stewardship for the objective, transcendent standards of divine morality.

I think here we see pretty clearly that the Cornwall Alliance's fundamental commitment is not to science, but rather to religion--and to a particular religious perspective that takes the Bible as the literal truth and anything contradictory to that as false.

A crucial element of the environmentalist worldview is that Earth and its habitats and inhabitants are extremely fragile and likely to suffer severe, even irreversible damage from
human action. That view contradicts Genesis 1:31. It is difficult to imagine how God could have called “very good” the habitat of humanity’s vocation in a millennia-long drama if the whole thing were prone to collapse like a house of cards with the least disturbance—like a change in carbon dioxide from 0.027 to 0.039 percent of the atmosphere (the change generally believed to have occurred from pre-industrial times to the present).

(This is the 40% increase in carbon dioxide that is widely cited in the literature.) And,

The Biblical worldview instead suggests that the wise Designer of Earth’s climate system, like any skillful engineer, would have equipped it with balancing positive and negative feedback mechanisms that would make the whole robust, self-regulating, and self-correcting.

This is a faith statement, based on a literal reading of the Bible. It is a view that comes specifically from people who believe that the Bible is literally the Word of God. And it is a view that denies even the possibility that other religions are correct:

Nonbiblical religions and worldviews teach contrary views of God and creation.

Hinduism, Buddhism, and other forms of pantheism deify nature, implying that it is a proper object of worship and depriving humanity of its unique position as bearing God’s image and uniquely called to exercise dominion.

Animism, polytheism, and spiritism invest creation with independent, unpredictable spirits, undermining confidence in scientific experiment, exploration, and technology, and in the exercise of human dominion.

(Human "domination." Hmmm.... a concept also threatened directly by the theory of natural selection, which supposes that humans are subjected to the same physical and biological forces as other animals. I'd say the concept of "domination" is also what's behind the views of those who think that capitalism is not only just but noble. This isn't the only conceptual link behind the religious and political bases for disbelieving in climate science. More below.)

The Alliance believes there is no need to fear any negative impacts on the environment by human activity in the long run:

Fear of environmental catastrophe grows out of lack of the fear of God. That is the real root of the many false or exaggerated environmental scares that have plagued the modern world. And such fears will continue—with or without scientific basis—until people repent and fear the Lord. “Cursed is the man who trusts in man, and makes flesh his strength, whose heart departs from the LORD. . . . Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, and whose hope is in the LORD. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes; but its leaf will be green, and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit” (Jeremiah 17:5, 7–8).

It is this image--of humans as a kind of supra-natural being, not subject to the influence of heat or flood--that is being promoted here. Like the larger belief that the Bible is the literal Word of God--that it is both literally true and not subject to interpretation or amendment by science or any other form of evidence, and that the fear of God is the only fear that can possibly be justified--a position based on faith to be sure, rather than a scientific claim--that is behind Spencer's (and others) search for a "natural" cause to global warming. (Sure, there may very well be natural causes...indeed, there most definitely are natural causes for climate change. But according to the theory of evolution and ~~pretty much~~ all of modern science, "humans" are natural, too. And as part of nature, what humans do always affects nature. Isn't this obvious?)

Above I quoted from an essay by Freeman Dyson in which he applauds environmentalism for its ethics. However, Dyson follows the section I quoted above with a warning:

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

Surely Dyson is correct that differing points of view about how to respond to global warming deserve to be heard. As a scientist, Dyson makes a strong distinction between science and religion. But he does not question global warming itself--just the view that global warming may very well not be the worst threat that the environment faces. He draws a line between the belief in global warming (AGW) and an alarmist response to it. That line, you'll remember, is the one that was so easily crossed in the Weekly Standard essay.

So, what can we make of all this?

First, there is absolutely no reason for anyone not to trust the scientific claim that global warming is occurring. There is no politics in that claim; it's established science: a fact.

Second, there is absolutely no reason for anyone not to trust the scientific claim that carbon dioxide levels have been increasing as a result of human activity. This is also a scientific finding that is undisputed by scientists. It is fact.

Third, the degree to which the man-made increase in carbon levels is causing global warming is not entirely established by science. Certainly carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does capture heat--it is a greenhouse gas. Strong questions remain, however, about just how sensitive the earth's environment is--and will be--to carbon dioxide increases. (This is what is at issue in the study discussed so carefully here.) If the sensitivity is fairly low, then global warming is unlikely to cause serious environmental problems. If the sensitivity is very high, then such problems are coming--soon and with a vengeance. Whether the sensitivity is low or high is unsettled yet by science. (The latest analysis suggests that it will be about 2.4 degrees Celsius with a doubling of carbon dioxide. That's not as big as some scientists have predicted, but it is enough to cause "drastic changes over land," according to the lead researcher in that study.)

This third point is, I believe, extremely important if one is to understand the current debates about whether global warming is to be feared, or not. Anthropogenic increases in carbon levels are a fact; global warming is a fact. Anthropogenic increases in carbon may cause very small (or even negligible) warming. If this is true, then "global warming alarmism"--the belief in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming--is unjustified.

However, if anthropogenic increases in carbon levels cause bigger amounts of warming, then worrying about the effects of continued increases in carbon emissions is quite justified. This is what this debate is all about.

Since the question about whether AGW will be catastrophic is as yet unsettled by science, we can say that whether given person supports immediate governmental intervention in the economy to protect the environment is, indeed, a political decision. A given person's support for such intervention relies at least as much on that person's political values and beliefs (about the role of the government in the economy, specifically) as it does on science.

But a person who believes that government should not intervene in the economy to prevent the possible impacts of global warming is also expressing a political viewpoint. It's political either way!

But widespread skepticism about climate science simply cannot be justified by saying that climate science itself has become overly political. Yes, there are political factors in the ways that the science gets chosen, funded, and disseminated. But that's true of any type of science; indeed, of any human endeavor.

The problem, as I see it, is that there is widespread confusion about the difference between the science of anthropogenic global warming and debates about the kind of response that is necessary. Disagreement about the government's role, for example, in regulating carbon emissions is not evidence of a political bias in climate science. Critics of climate science need to be more careful to name the target of their criticism: it is, for the most part, liberals and their support for government intervention and for the secular "religion" of environmentalism. Their critique is properly aimed at the politics and religion of supporters of governmental intervention, not at "climate science."

But the critique itself is ALSO not scientific: there is very little scientific basis to question whether global warming is occurring or whether man-made carbon emissions are at least partly to blame. When these established scientific facts are attacked, you can be pretty sure that what's really going on is a political or religious disagreement.

Makin' a Shrimp Po'boy

2011-05-29T21:55:00.000-05:00

So I made my own shrimp po'boy this evening for dinner.

As you know, probably, I've been a bit obsessed with shrimp po'boys since I visited New Orleans last month for the American Educational Research Association. While in New Orleans for five days, I had five shrimp po'boys, from four different vendors, and sent photos and comments on them to Facebook. When I returned to Chicago, I still had the taste in my mouth, so I set out to find the best shrimp po'boy in Chicago. I've been on that quest for about 6 weeks, having had probably 6 different ones from around the city, again sending comments and photos to Facebook.

I've made shrimp po'boys at home before, but now I feel a bit like I've got some expertise building up on the subject. So this evening, I decided to make my own.

I used frozen shrimp...so first thawed them in some warm water and then peeled them.

Then, I cut off a 10" slice of french bread and sliced it, leaving a thin piece as a hinge.

I put a nice Louisiana Fish Fry remoulade sauce that I purchased on one side of the bun. I didn't have any tomatoes (and don't really like them that much either), so I chopped up some fresh red pepper.

I added some mayonnaise to the other half of the bun (having recently had a po'boy with both may and remoulade and liking it muchly), and then some dill pickles.

Then, I some chopped romaine lettuce, and a few drops of Frank's Louisiana Hot Sauce to add a little more zing.

I had some Andy's Cajun Fish Fry Breading, which is pretty yummy (corn meal, flour, and spices, basically), and decided to fry the shrimps in that. I just washed the shrimps after peeling and rolled them in the breading to make a very light coating, and fried them in a very shallow pool of hot olive oil.

Then, I fried the shrimps to perfection (about 5 minutes, turning half-way through).

Then, added the shrimp to the sandwich, and served it (to myself) with a side of raw zucchini.

The big challenge was getting my mouth around it--it was a bit thick---and a bunch of the shrimps fell out when I tried to fold it. But I managed to get it folded, and fit it into my mouth.

The result was, if I do say so myself, absolutely YUMMY! The overall flavor was great...the texture was perfect...the shrimps were nice and firm, and the breading just crunchy enough without being intrusive.

There are a couple of things I ~~would~~ will do differently next time:

1. chop the fresh red pepper finer and use a bit less
2. use a bit less lettuce
3. leave off the Frank's Louisiana Hot Sauce since the remoulade and cajun breading provided plenty of flavor and spice
....and....
4. serve something other than raw zucchini with it...the flavor just wasn't right on the side of the po'boy.

All in all, a quite satisfying culinary experience!

Introduction to TIE 542, Spring 2011

2011-04-01T13:22:00.001-05:00

Click to Play

Craig A. Cunningham introduces his online course.

Collecting immediate feedback for an online course

2011-03-30T14:25:00.004-05:00

I'm in the process of developing an online course for the Technology in Education (TIE) program: Designing Resources for the Internet. We use Blackboard (WebCT version) at my university. Fortunately, I don't have to completely rely on the Blackboard tools to create the content of the course, since the WebDAV interface allows me to use Dreamweaver to do most of the development.

(I love Dreamweaver...having been using it--and teaching it--since 1998...and am getting myself up to speed on some of the new features and capabilities in CS5...but I digress.)

This course focuses on the design and development of online resources for teaching and learning (specifically WebQuests or other types of curriculum webs) the faculty of the program have had the constant challenge of deciding which tools are right to teach in the course. We've tried FrontPage, Komposer (an open-source version of the old Netscape Composer), Seamonkey, and Dreamweaver. Personally, I prefer Dreamweaver over all of the other options, due to its power.

(The students are sometimes put off by the cost of Dreamweaver...and some say they will never use it again after the course...but we've managed to address some of these concerns by supplying it in our computer labs and by making different trial versions available--thus extending the normal 30-day limit to a trial. In any case, I am developing this current version of the course to focus on Dreamweaver.)

One of the challenges that this creates is shifting the instructional model for learning the software from direct instruction with guided practice (as I do in the face-to-face environment) to having the students learn the software on their own, with the support of online resources. In essence, I'm replacing my direct demonstration of processes in class with written instructions and videos. I'm taking many of these videos from AdobeTV, and some others from elsewhere around the web (including YouTube and eHow).

The quality and suitability of theses videos varies, of course, especially given that the students in the course are mostly full-time K-12 teachers, rather than budding web designers. I find myself wondering, for example, the extent to which they will be put off by the focus in many of the AdobeTV videos on web designers as the audience. I also wonder how many of them will actually watch these videos...or will find videos on their own...or will use other methods for teaching themselves.

Yesterday while walking to pick my son up from school, I was wrestling with some of these questions, and I had an idea: Maybe I could put a little "rate this resource" tool on each video or other resource and get some feedback from the students about what they find most valuable. I was thinking along the lines of the rating scales used by many web sites that simply require the user to select a certain number of stars or circles, like these that appear on the tripadvisor.com site:

I thought that if I could make my feedback collection as quick and seamless as possible for the students, they would be eager to help me learn what helps them learn best.

So my first thought was that maybe I could find a Javascript applet that would do the trick. I did a bit of hunting around using Google and couldn't find anything that would work easily for me. Then, I had the idea that maybe someone had created a Dreamweaver extension that could do this.

Sure enough, upon searching the Dreamweaver exchange, I found a Spry widget called Rating that would do exactly what I wanted. So I downloaded it and installed it into Dreamweaver, and now it appears on my "Insert" menu along with other Spry widgets that come prepacked into Dreamweaver.

Adding the widget into one of my learning module pages (just under a video) was fairly easy.

However, then I began getting in over my head. The widget uses Javascript, of course, which I only know a little about. And it didn't come with directions, so I was a bit in the dark about where the data would be collected once the students had responded. I fumbled around for an hour or two before finally finding some pages with instructions on the Adobe site.

The instructions contain a somewhat misleading section with this introductory sentence:

If you want to add some optional functionality to this widget, add the options that fit your requests to the widget constructor.

This is a bit odd, since the widget doesn't work at all (other than presenting a pretty picture to the end-user) without setting some options...most specifically, information about where to put the data and how.

I had to remind myself of a few things about Javascript syntax, but was able to figure out enough to put what should have been a working copy of the widget into the page. However, there proved to be one big problem: no way for me to change the permissions of a file in Blackboard to allow this Javascript to write to it! (I've seen that some of the newer versions of Blackboard do have something called a "Content Connection" that provides this functionality, and I do realize that with permission from the IT staff I should be able to do it--but I've had enough experience with them to know that a request from a mere faculty member to open a security hole is pretty unlikely to be granted).

So, I thought, I'll put the data file on another server, outside of the University, that I do have some control over. So I put the data file at http://craigcunningham.com (which is hosted at the Chicago Public Schools/University of Chicago Internet Project, CUIP). Unfortunately, that didn't work either. So I emailed the server administrator and asked him if he could help with the permissions. His response wasn't entirely encouraging:

I'll look into it later today. I'm a little wary about XML-RPC stuff in
PHP as that's how our WPMU was hacked a couple weeks ago, but maybe there's no problem.

I'm sure that he (who is quite responsive as well as very responsible and capable) will do what he can to make this possible. So I'll await his response.

But then I had another idea...even though I really like the rollover stars in the Spry widget...couldn't I just embed a Google form into the Blackboard pages? (I already knew that embedded forms work just fine in Blackboard.)

So, I created a very simple form, which looks like this:

And...it certainly works as a way to collect some feedback. (When you "embed" the form, it uses an <iframe> tag...and when you submit it, a standard--but customizable--"thank you" appears in the frame. So far, so good. The problem is, when you embed that little form with one question into the page, it takes up a crapload of screen real estate (760x762 pixels, to be exact), and also distracts quite a bit with the "Powered by Google Docs Report Abuse - Terms of Service - Additional Terms" stuff.

So I wondered if the embedded Google form could be customized a bit. I searched Google (!) for "google forms embed size format" and found a blog entry called "Customize Google Docs Form." Unfortunately, that blog post was primarily about including some kind of data validation in a form...not what I needed.

However, I found a comment on that post that said:

As it happens I just wrote a tutorial for styling Google Forms: http://www.morningcopy.com.au/news/how-to-style-google-forms/

So of course I hurried over to that Australian site and found "How to style Google Forms," which included exactly what I needed!

The essence of the instructions there is that rather than simply embedding the form using Google's automatically generated embed code (which uses an iframe), you open up the page source of the form and only copy the part that is actually between the

tags. Then, you can format the form any way you like, and even change the confirmation message so that it suits your purposes.

What I found was that the only way to get my custom confirmation message to appear in situ on the page was to reintroduce the iframe, only this time without it containing the Google forms page...but, instead, a file of my own containing just the relevant form; tags. That way, the confirmation message (which is itself in a separate file) appears <i>in situ</i> as well.

So here's the code in the learning module page:

<!<iframe src="test_form.htm" width="450" height="250" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>>

And here's the code in the "test_form.htm" page:

<script type="text/javascript">var submitted=false;</script>

<iframe name="hidden_iframe" id="hidden_iframe"

style="display:none;" onload="if(submitted)

{window.location='thanks.htm';}"></iframe><form action="https://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?formkey=XXXXX" method="POST" id="ss-form" target="hidden_iframe" onsubmit="submitted=true";>

<br>

<div class="errorbox-good">

<div class="ss-item ss-scale"><div class="ss-form-entry">

<label class="ss-q-title" for="entry_0">Please rate how useful this video was to you right now.

</label>

<label class="ss-q-help" for="entry_0"></label>

<label class="ss-q-help" for="entry_0"></label>

<table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0"><tr><td class="ss-scalenumbers"></td>

<td class="ss-scalenumbers"><label class="ss-scalenumber" for="group_0_1">1</label></td> <td class="ss-scalenumbers"><label class="ss-scalenumber" for="group_0_2">2</label></td> <td class="ss-scalenumbers"><label class="ss-scalenumber" for="group_0_3">3</label></td> <td class="ss-scalenumbers"><label class="ss-scalenumber" for="group_0_4">4</label></td> <td class="ss-scalenumbers"><label class="ss-scalenumber" for="group_0_5">5</label></td>

<td class="ss-scalenumbers"></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ss-scalerow ss-leftlabel">not at all</td>

<td class="ss-scalerow"><input type="radio" name="entry.0.group" value="1" class="ss-q-radio" id="group_0_1"></td> <td class="ss-scalerow"><input type="radio" name="entry.0.group" value="2" class="ss-q-radio" id="group_0_2"></td> <td class="ss-scalerow"><input type="radio" name="entry.0.group" value="3" class="ss-q-radio" id="group_0_3"></td> <td class="ss-scalerow"><input type="radio" name="entry.0.group" value="4" class="ss-q-radio" id="group_0_4"></td> <td class="ss-scalerow"><input type="radio" name="entry.0.group" value="5" class="ss-q-radio" id="group_0_5"></td>

<td class="ss-scalerow ss-rightlabel">very useful</td></tr></table></div></div></div>

<div class="ss-item ss-navigate"><div class="ss-form-entry">

<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit"></div></div></form>

And here's how the feedback looks in situ, now:

And when you submit the feedback:

Wow...not bad, huh?

And Google handles all the data collection, and even presents me with some great graphics:

(Did you know you can just copy a window on your screen--using Alt-Prtscrn--and paste it right into the Blogger editing window!?!??! Until now, I always used the image button and had to upload the image...wow...this is MUCH better...for any image I don't need to edit!)

I'm pretty pleased with this solution, although I still plan to pursue the Spry widget (since it's much prettier), and want to see what I can do to add a hidden field to the form that indicates which video or resource it is referring to (so I can duplicate it throughout the course without having to create a whole bunch of separate forms). But I wanted to put this out there now, while it's fresh in my mind...because I'm sure there are others who want to get feedback from their online students in a quick and relatively painless way.

(And I just had another idea...maybe I can use the user-interface from the Spry widget--the rollover stars--in my hacked Google form! Maybe I'll work on that for a while....)

Is the Declaration of Independence the most authentic statement of the American Dream?

2011-02-27T09:53:00.002-06:00

[updated 5:5- CDT]

I can agree that the Declaration of Independence is one very influential and significant statement of the American Dream.

But...and here's the rub for tea partiers and strict constructionists of the Founders' "intent":

The DoI was written at a particular time and place by a particular person, and approved by a particular (very white, very privileged, very male, very Anglo-centric) group of people. It certainly is an articulate (and principled) statement of a particular view of the American Dream.

But it ain't (no way, Jose) the "final" or only such statement. Does it speak to the African-American experience? Does it speak to the experience of Native Americans? Does it speak to the experience of those who came here because of famine back home? Does it speak FOR all those who came here through Ellis Island, or those who believed that the Streets were paved of gold? Does it speak to those (Jews, Hmong, Croats, Somalis) who came after being persecuted or ethnic-cleansed? Does it speak to those who came here to escape the brutal conditions of third-world sweatshops (run by American corporations, largely)?

The American Dream is evolving...will ever evolve...and it is very different now than it once was. Sole-proprietor capitalism isn't quite the "pull-oneself-up-by-ones-bootstraps" phenomenon that it once was. And the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor is bigger than ever.

So before you go defining an American Dream that reflects YOUR experience...remember that America is many things to many people and all of those conceptions have just as much right to exist.

Other statements of the American Dream:

Autobiography , Benjamin Franklin (Thx MSByrnes)
The Americans, Henry James
The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution
Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington
The Souls of Black Folks, WEB DuBois
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
"Send me your tired, your poor..."
MLK, Jr's "I Have a Dream"
Dewey's Democracy and Education
"Throwing Stones," Grateful Dead

More?

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Dear Dad: Anthropogenic Climate Change is not "hypothetical"

2011-02-08T11:33:00.000-06:00

My dad (Ed Cunningham), commenting on one of my posts on Facebook, 2-6-11:

Where in the world are our priorities? We agonize over a future hypothetical scenario -- CO2-induced global warming, which many knowledgeable scientists are convinced will never occur -- while billions of people suffer from a host of very... real energy- and health-related hazards in the here-and-now.

Why would anyone in their right mind give the governments of the world a mandate to totally restructure human society to fight a hypothetical problem of vastly greater complexity than the very real and clearly-identified problems we currently face? Why should we not rather confront these genuine energy and health threats with all due haste and with every modern tool we have at our disposal?

The conclusion is what I've been saying all along: and, while the IPCC is using global warming to convince governments and the public that action needs to be taken to reduce CO2; the real problems related to land depletion goes unnoticed and uncorrected.

We would do much more for humanity if we were to take advantage of the current natural warming period to grow food for everyone and reduce hunger throughout the world.

Craig, these scientist are not promoting the growth of CO2 and by you and others like you continue to keep your head in the sand and promote this global warming nonsense, we could be having a real debate on how the world could be saved.

While most people use Facebook ("FB") to play games and update each other on the latest news about their pets and kids, my dad and I have been going back and forth in a rather heated manner for some time now about a number of subjects, including educational funding, health care, the desirability of living in cities, and global warming. Other than our completely opposite opinions of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, our "discussions" about global warming and climate change have shown probably the most clashing of perspectives. I routinely "share" web pages that offer further evidence that humans are influencing the climate and suggest policy approaches to dealing with it, and he routinely questions whether the science is real or whether any such policy approaches are feasible or worth the cost.

I find the entire debate fascinating, especially the way that each side uses rhetorical devices to downplay the opinions or "facts" garnered by the other side. Occasionally others weigh in on these discussions, which are scattered throughout my FB profile (and sometimes on my dad's profile). Most of my friends on FB are rather liberal, and most of them agree more or less with me on these debates; however, I have enough friends who aren't liberal that sometimes there are a few who take my dad's side.

(Most recently, a guy who was a student in the high school I taught in in the mid-1980s chimed in to say "I'm sorry Craig, but the only thing that has been proven about the effects of climate change and the rate at which is changing is that the people creating the reports to display the data will lie at all costs to further their cause. There is 0 credibility with this topic anymore." Interestingly, most of the people who "chime in" like this very quickly lose interest and stop participating as soon as they see that I am not willing to let comments like this stand unchallenged: WHO has zero credibility, for example.)

When we discuss these issues on my dad's profile, pretty much everyone who comments (if they do) agrees with him--I don't think my dad HAS any liberal friends (at least not on FB), and his sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, nieces and nephews all pretty much believe, like him, that global warming is a "sky-is-falling" liberal panic designed to take money away from the people and give more power to the government. Indeed, over time I have come to understand that you can pick almost any political issue and you are sure to be able to predict my dad's position (and the position of nearly every other member of my extended family) by negating what I believe. Why is this the case? I'm not entirely sure, although I think you can blame my college and graduate education for some of it: until 1978 or so, I was a republican too, but once I began hanging out with the the liberal elite and learning from highly-educated professors, I pretty quickly understood that republicanism is just another name for getting normal people to vote against their better interests and in favor of corporate interests that they think are their own interests (except, of course, for those who actually share corporate interests and benefit from them).

Anyway, back to our debate about global warming. My dad can be counted on to pretty much spout the expected "party line" on this issue. During the previous 12 months or so he has pulled all kinds of interesting arguments out of his hat: global warming is natural; the "hockey stick" graph is a hoax; the shift from talk about "global warming" to talk about "climate change" indicates some kind of liberal backtracking; "Climategate" proves that it's ALL a hoax; and even that the recent ice storm in Houston proves that the world is not warming up. I have, of course, responded to each of these claims with what I consider to be the facts, in each case offering links to web sites with supporting materials. At one point, I challenged my dad to show me a list of real scientists that have doubts about man-made global warming, and he very helpfully provided this link, which does, indeed, give a list of scientists who have expressed doubt about global warming, although I can't tell if any of the people listed are climate scientists who are currently publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

My dad also periodically posts his own "evidence" that global warming is a hoax, most recently an article about an unfounded claim about Himalayan glaciers that found its way into an IPCC report. I usually take the time to read these posts, to try to understand if they represent anything that should cause the average person to reassess their point of view. Sadly, nearly all of the things my dad posts on this issue show overt bias or fail to "show" what it is that my dad thinks it "shows". (For example, the article about the unfounded claim about glaciers quotes the scientist who discovered the lack of evidence for the claim as lamenting the "wasting away" of the world's glaciers. This doesn't indicate a failure of science; it represents a success.)

Sometimes, I wonder whether these discussions have any point. My dad seems quite unlikely to change his position...and I am pretty unlikely to change MY position. So why bother discussing it? For me, I think the value of the discussions is NOT the possibility that I may convince my dad (or the rest of the extended family) that they are wrong (although I would be happy to do so!!!); but rather, the value to me is that it gives me a direct window into the thinking of people who have a very different appraisal of the current scientific point of view and a very different reaction to academic scholarship than I do.

There was one time when I felt that the discussion had actually advanced beyond "he said/she said" contradictions between incompatible points of view. That was when my dad admitted, after a long string of back-and-forths on the issue of whether there is a scientific consensus, that scientists probably DID generally believe that man-made carbon was affecting the climate, but that the liberal media and politicians had turned this into a panic by exploiting the science to make unsupportable claims about how fast it was happening and what needs to be done about it. (Sadly, I can't locate this comment in my FB archive.)

Another time, my dad got fairly frustrated with my line of argument, and revealed something about his own beliefs: he basically said "you may be right about the science, but there's no way you liberals are going to use this issue to destroy America by insisting that the potential costs of global warming be borne by the taxpayers." (Again, I can't find this in the archive, unfortunately.) What this said to me was that this argument isn't about science, or data, or facts, or even the validity of certain predictions: it's about the desire to hold on to the "American way of life" (consume, exploit, consume some more) in the face of efforts by liberals (and Europeans) to force Americans to accept that they can no longer get away with this dirty and unsustainable behavior.

This exchange, like others on this topic, helps me to understand some of the difficulties involved in public education on the issue of climate change. People aren't going to allow themselves to be convinced on scientific grounds if they feel that the real issue is how much it is going to cost them in terms of their lifestyle choices. I would ascribe this to the operation of the hierarchy of needs: people who want cheap gasoline aren't ready to listen to ANY person who believes that cheap gasoline is not now, nor ever will be in the future, possible.

[None of those people are going to keep reading this blog post, for example, now that I've revealed my hand here. :-) Well, maybe my dad will: he wants to know what I'm going to say about him, below.]

[gotta go; more later....]

Congratulations! (Reply All)

2011-01-29T10:39:00.003-06:00

Is it just me, or do others find the "piling on" of reply-all emails of congratulations within their organization a bit annoying?

When someone in our college is recognized in an email announcement (originating from any faculty member in the college) as achieving something newsworthy, inevitably five or ten or even more emails will be sent to everybody with some variaton of "congratulations...we're all proud of you and you make us look great to the world." I'm really glad that we have a faculty that feels happy and thankful when one of our own does something that we all aspire to. (For example, recently, Donna Ogle was elected president of the Reading Hall of Fame and Tim Collins was elected to the TESOL board).

Of course we all feel the urge to offer our congratulations to the person. If we were sitting in the same room when the announcement was made, we'd all cheer and maybe later offer a congratulatory hug or handshake to the honoree. But would a queue of us get up to, one after the other, to offer our personal congratulations, perhaps combined with some reference to how this honor benefits all of us?

What is the purpose of "replying all" to these messages? Is the congratulator trying to get themselves noticed? Is it just laziness? Or is there a commendable reason for this?

I've noticed it tends to be the more senior members of our faculty who do this. Perhaps they hold dear in their hearts the days when the college had 30 faculty members on one campus, and feel that they're recreating that old community feeling? I kinda wish we had that feeling more now, but we have 170 full-time faculty now, on 7 or 8 campuses.

I've been tempted to write to everyone and urge them to ask themselves whether replying all is necessary in any individual case, but I don't want to be seen as a buzz-killer. My own view is that IFF your reply adds some information or substance of value to the majority of the faculty, replying all is justified. But I wonder whether mere piling on without adding tangible value is actually some attempt to put oneself in the limelight for a moment.

I' uncertain about what's right in this situation. As our faculty ages and retires, maybe the sensibility of the current more junior faculty that email (especially reply all) is for business only (which includes discussion of issues of importance to us all) will become more common. But...Part of me worries...will we then lose something important that the more senior faculty members are trying to preserve?

I welcome comments. That is, if they're substantive. :-)

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Is there a "Virulent Left-Wing" Bias in Education?

2010-11-12T18:17:00.034-06:00

[I've updated this post...fixed a few spelling and grammar mistakes...and added a coda. 11-14-10]

It's no secret that the people who control public schools are at war with our nation's history, culture and achievements. - Phyllis Schlafly

I’ve recently become interested [again] in the question of whether an allegedly liberal bias in educators and academics has had a large impact on American schools and…through them…on the beliefs of Americans at large.The question has come up most recently because of something my Dad wrote in a comment on a discussion I was having with a couple of my (professor) colleagues on Facebook. We were talking about the ways in which Kant's philosophy of education (especially his optimism about progress through education) reflected a modern viewpoint, and that that viewpoint had faded with the rise of post-modernism. A colleague asked me if I blamed "po-mo," and I said that I didn't, but instead blamed the reaction to po-mo, and then another asked if Kant could be called "pre-po-mo," or if that was reducible to "mo."

In any case, we were playing with some of the common tropes in academia. My Dad (with whom I've had a number of heated discussions about politics on Facebook and elsewhere), wrote:

NOW I know what we conservatives are up against. Thanks guys for enlightening me.

One of my colleagues asked him what he meant by that, and he wrote:

It's not just Big Government, Pubic programs and Tax and Spend that makes the liberal tic. That's just the symptoms. It goes to a deep seeded need to make mankind better and socially equal and they feel that they know better than the public in general what's best for them.

It all boils down to an ideology. You guys will never see my arguments as having any worth to the discussions. I'm trying not to lower myself to name calling but you guys consider yourself to be the elite, the educated ones that knows best. You talk about what you've learned and read and have been lead to believe that there is no alternative to your philosophies in education and to life in general.

No, there is no sinister plot by the Liberal. You truly believe that what you know is the only way. On your side you have most of academics, Hollywood, the media and the Democrats. There's a new meaning, for me, about what a liberal education really is. With each generation of graduates, you're getting exactly what you want in our children. They will think the same as you do.

Now, there's a lot in my Dad's comment that serves as food for thought. For example, I'm not sure why he believes that me and these particular colleagues think alike (I don't think we do think completely alike, although we are all education professors with a strong interest in furthering our own understanding of the history of ideas and culture in general, and we all know what "po-mo" refers to. Well, okay, I'll admit it, these two colleagues and I are all Democrats). For another, I don't know why we're more guilty of believing that what we know is the "only way" than any, say, group of Sarah Palin fans (of which my Dad is one). For a third, I don't really think that a deep-seated desire to make mankind better is the same as thinking we know better than the public in general what's good for them. (Although it's interesting to contemplate the obverse of this statement...do conservatives think they know better than the general public that has been allegedly brainwashed by liberals in the educational system? Maybe only when conservatives lose elections to liberals?!?...but I digress.) Those questions aren't what I'd like to address here.

Instead, I'm intrigued by this idea that we academics (educators, teachers) are somehow "getting what we want in our children" and that "what we want" is that they think "the same" as we do. This is quite an interesting claim, to me. It seems to imply not only that "we" all think alike and that "we" all have the same desire to produce graduates who think in the same way as "we" do, but it also suggests that we're pretty successful in getting our graduates to think like us. And since we have "Hollywood, the media, and the Democrats" on our side, we don't even have to be especially effective at schooling the kids in the liberal ideology...we can rely on the culture at large to aid and abet our conspiracy.

Once you look around on the Internets, my Dad's notions here about a liberal conspiracy that includes the schools don't seem unusual. In fact, it seems to be a pretty common belief. Here are just a few examples I found in just a few minutes:

1. In an article about the political realities of climate change given the recent elections, it was stated that young people are more likely to believe in global warming than older people are. The article included this paragraph:

Anthony Watts, a prominent climate skeptic who runs the popular and controversial site “Watts Up With That,” blamed the “liberal” education system for the lack of young climate skeptics. “I suppose such a group would be unlikely because our children are conditioned by textbooks and a generally liberal education process to believe in the [man-made global warming] premise as factual and without question,” he said.

The article went on to address the fact that the older people are, the less likely they are to believe in man-made climate change or in the need for drastic governmental efforts to avoid a catastrophe. It's interesting that one of the theories offered as to why people seem to change their minds about this as they get older is that they come to understand the economic costs of seriously addressing the issue, and are less willing to pay those costs. They're also supposedly less alarmist...probably having survived more "the sky is falling" situations in their lives...being a bit jaded, perhaps. But the fact that older people tend to understand the costs of addressing climate change doesn't--it seems to me--explain why they also don't think these efforts should be made...but I guess I underestimate the degree to which people vote their pocketbooks on things like this.

Watt's view that young people today have been "conditioned by textbooks and a generally liberal education process" is the core of what I'm addressing here. The implication, of course, is that this has gotten worse in recent years...thus explaining why young people today are more likely to believe a "liberal" point of view (their elders went to school before this bias took hold, perhaps?).

2. In an opinion piece in the Washington Times in April of this year, Deborah Simmons wrote:

Academia [is] leading young minds in a direction that [will] come to affect every aspect of American tradition and policy. Pity the enemies of liberalism and our children because, well, here we are. Same-sex marriage laws are sweeping the states. So-called medical marijuana laws are, too. The public option almost made it into the health care reform bill, and union demands mean weak-kneed politicians and lawmakers are turning their backs on fiscal conservatism in favor of continuing failed one-size-fits-all education policies. That's the short list.

(Of course, this kind of talk (that our liberal education system is leading the American people to vote in certain ways is...well...only really salient after elections which result in the election of more liberal politicians. So, after the 2008 elections, the liberal bias of schools seemed particular strong. After the 2010 elections? Not so much.)

Simmons goes on to talk about an interview she conducted with David Horowitz:

Mr. Horowitz talked about how "deliberate liberal bias" has ruined America's schools. Teachers unions, he said, are the root of the problem. "They don't want another voice in the room," Mr. Horowitz said. "The teacher unions and the Democratic Party have a monopoly on the public school systems. ... Teachers get paid for showing up. No one in the world gets paid for showing up." And, he continued, "the kids fail and there's no incentive to teach." "Teachers," Mr. Horowitz said, "are overpaid and underworked, and protected ... by the Democratic Party," and unionized teachers will "fight with their last breath."

Teacher bashing and complaining about the liberal bias in curriculum and content seem to go hand in hand. This begins to explain why many on the right prefer to have schools run by corporations...through charters...most of which aren't unionized. By reconfiguring schools so that teachers must teach instead of sitting around--the reasoning goes--the schools will be less likely to brainwash the kids...right? (I'm not sure I get this...the teachers don't work hard...so they effectively brainwash the kids? If they worked harder...they would brainwash less? Clearly, there's a view here of what the "real work" of teachers ought to be. More on this later. But first, let's go on.)

3. (Okay, I admit, this next one is a low-hanging fruit.) Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly wrote earlier this year on her Eagle Forum about the fight to revise the Texas state curriculum guidelines, titling her post "Texas Kicks Out Liberal Bias From Textbooks." The whole piece is really interesting to me, but I'll just include a few excerpts here:

For years, liberals have imposed their revisionist history on our nation's public school students, expunging important facts and historic figures while loading the textbooks with liberal propaganda, distortions and cliches. It's easy to get a quick lesson in the virulent leftwing bias by checking the index and noting how textbooks treat President Ronald Reagan and Senator Joseph McCarthy.... [The link doesn't exactly prove that textbooks treat Reagan badly...but does cite one book that gave the credit for ending the Cold War to Gorbachev and not Reagan...one book...clearly virulent. And the alleged expert who was cited about this...a not-so-liberal professor at the University of Dayton who blogs about "the liars in the government-controlled media." The government controls the media? But I thought it was the liberals who controlled the media...and that conservatives can't succeed in academia... But let's go on...]

In most states, the liberal education establishment enjoys total control over the state's board of education, department of education, and curriculum committees. Texas is different; the Texas State Board of Education is elected, and the people (even including parents!) have a voice. ...

(Parents actually have a lot of control over schools...everywhere...as anyone who has spent any time at all in school board meetings know. Principals, in fact, have as their primary job keeping the parents from getting so upset about things at school that they begin to call school board members...who control the principal's jobs. In fact, one could say that increased parental control over schools has had a considerably stifling effect on teachers in the past few decades. But that doesn't fit into the "liberal bias" storyline...and it's another story for another time.)

Now that I think about it, Schlafly's editorial is worth quoting at some length:

After a public outcry, the [Texas State Board of Education (SBOE)] responded with common-sense improvements. Thomas Edison, the world's greatest inventor, will be again included in the narrative of American History.[Huh? What's this got to do with liberals and conservatives?]

Schoolchildren will no longer be misled into believing that capitalism and the free market are dirty words and that America has an unjust economic system. Instead, they will learn how the free-enterprise system gave our nation and the world so much that is good for so many people.

Liberals don't like the concept of American Exceptionalism. The liberals want to teach what's wrong with America (masquerading under the code word "social justice" [on which, more below]) instead of what's right and successful. The SBOE voted to include describing how American Exceptionalism is based on values that are unique and different from those of other nations. [Don't all nations think they're "unique" and "different"? What's exceptional about the American beliefs in their own exceptionalism?]

The SBOE specified that teaching about the Bill of Rights should include a reference to the right to keep and bear arms. Some school curricula pretend the Second Amendment doesn't exist. [From the linked source: "Let me say point blank that one of the objectives of this [federal] curriculum is to eliminate the Second Amendment." There's an interesting side story here about this so-called "federal curriculum," but again, for another time.]

Texas curriculum standards will henceforth accurately describe the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic" rather than as a democracy. [Yes, not a democracy, really. Something to get my preservice teachers to think more about!] The secularists tried to remove reference to the religious basis for the founding of America, but that was voted down. The Texas Board rejected the anti-Christian crowd's proposal to eliminate the use of B.C. and A.D. for historic dates, as in Before Christ and Anno Domini, and replace them with B.C.E., as in Before the Common Era, and C.E.

The deceptive claim that the United States was founded on a "separation of church and state" gets the ax, and rightfully so. In fact, most of the original thirteen colonies were founded as Christian communities with much overlap between church and state.

History textbooks that deal with Joseph McCarthy will now be required to explain "how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of Communist infiltration in U.S. government." The Venona papers are authentic transcripts of some 3,000 messages between the Soviet Union and its secret agents in the United States.

And, finally:

It's no secret that the people who control public schools are at war with our nation's history, culture and achievements. Since taxpayers foot the bill, it is long overdue for a state board of education to correct many textbooks myths and lies about our magnificent national heritage and achievements.

(Whew! "At war with our nation's achievements"! Damn, those "people who control public schools" must be a virulent, biased, even nefarious bunch! Who are those people, again?) But let's go on:

4. Here's some excerpts from a blog produced by Intellectual Takeout (ITO), "a non-partisan, educational 501(c)(3) institution [whose] vision is to become a national leader in educating and mobilizing conservatives, libertarians, independents, and progressives [?!?] in order to play a pivotal role in expanding individual and economic freedoms while reducing the size and scope of government."

According to many studies [not cited; see below], bias in academia more often than not is liberal bias. Many professors and students admit to possessing liberal ideologies or Democratic voting tendencies. It is natural and right for liberal students and professors to freely express their liberal philosophies, but is it right for liberal professors to continually advance their ideas in the classroom while squelching all other opinions? No.

As many of the pieces in this section suggest, universities are the breeding grounds for a variety of ideas and thought processes. Students who attend American colleges and universities should be able to gain a well-rounded view of their country, its founding principles, and the ideas – from all points on the political spectrum – that continue to shape and mold its future. Unfortunately, today’s colleges have drifted away from these ideals and become bastions of liberal thought and activism.

I dug a little deeper into Intellectual Takeout, which organizes their "information similarly to most university course offerings," by topics. I was curious that one of the topics under "Education" was "Colleges of Education." "Hmmm....I thought...this should be interesting..." And so it is.

There are two sub-topics under Colleges of Education. One is about teacher certification, and the other is called "Education and Social Justice." This phrase "social justice," which seems on its face to be a nonpartisan ideal (who is against justice in society?), appears again and again in writings that claim an alleged left-wing bias in schools. (It's also become one of my Dad's favorite phrases when describing the conspiracy toward a New World Order that me, Obama, and our liberal friends are working toward.) The article in Intellectual Takeout explains the phrase's significance:

As has been mentioned numerous times before, the American education system has undergone major changes in the past fifty years as the principles of teacher-directed education have gradually given way to student-centered learning philosophies. [The history of progressive education is certainly an interesting one...but this quick summary seems a bit...simplistic to me. Anyway....] Although seemingly recent, the changes that have occurred in the classroom were actually initiated many years before in the classrooms of education schools. [Okay...progressive educational ideas certainly achieved a sort of critical mass...say...in the 1940s. So this makes a bit of sense.] The training that occurs in these education schools has a great influence on the social, cultural, and intellectual path that a nation will choose, and due to this fact, it is important to understand what exactly our nation’s education schools are instilling in the minds of our future teachers. The “latest and greatest” education philosophy that education schools are pushing is the central focus of this library section: social justice education.

This is truly interesting. Now comes a bit of a doozy:

Social justice education is also commonly referred to as “critical pedagogy.” [Oh boy!] Although its ambiguous titles suggest virtuous American ideals such as truth and justice, its core principles revolve around a pervasive Marxist ideology. Championed by men such as Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and William Ayers, critical pedagogy seeks to turn students into activists with an anti-capitalist mindset. Education schools are increasingly promoting this idea among their students by encouraging them to reject their “privileged” status, recognize their own racial biases, and focus on the “oppressed” facets of society. Today’s elementary and secondary classrooms are beginning to reflect these ideologies. As a result, American schools are slowly moving away from their old purpose of instilling academic skills and factual knowledge in children and toward a lopsided political indoctrination.

Wow! This is beginning to get a little personal. I work in a college of education. One of my occasional duties is to teach courses in the history and philosophy of American education...to preservice teachers (those who are just getting their teaching credentials). The course that I most often teach in that area is called "Social Justice Perspectives on the History and Philosophy of American Education." (Yes, it is!) Here's the catalog description:

FND 510: Social Justice Perspectives on the History and Philosophy of American Education (for M.A.T. students)

This course critically examines the social, cultural, political, and economic forces, and the philosophies of education that have influenced policy, laws, school structure, and practices throughout the history of American education. Issues addressed include ability and disability, race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Students lay the foundation for the development of a personal philosophy of education and reflectively examine issues of education from legal and social justice perspectives. This course includes a field project requiring at least 15 hours of work outside of class. 3 semester hours

Notice the key phrase "critically examines..." On the very face of it, this seems to confirm ITO's view.

What's more, the National College of Education's conceptual framework includes the following:

NCE Faculty and candidates use scholarly habits of mind and methods of inquiry in order to affect P-12 student learning by:
Envisioning, articulating, and modeling democratic and progressive education
...
...
Advocating for democratic values, equity, access and resources to assure educational success for all

I think this is what we faculty members in the National College of Education at National-Louis University mean by "social justice." Social justice, to me, and to my colleagues, means working for a society that is democratic...where every child has access to a quality education. This means paying attention to the social, political, and economic conditions that affect the quality of schools and that impact the experience that children have in school. It involves attention to what has come to be known as "culturally-relevant" pedagogy...which suggests that teachers must be sensitive to the values, traditions, and perspectives of the families that children come from, and the effects that prior experiences have on their experiences in school. (Click here for more on this approach.)

The thing is, none of this suggests that what we want is to create teachers well-versed in what has been called "critical pedagogy." Rather, our goal is helping new teachers to understand the broader social forces that pertain to their work in classrooms with particular children, so that they can be more effective teachers. (Although, we must admit, colleges of education aren't necessarily doing a great job with this; see here for one take on how poor they are.) We faculty members also want our teacher-graduates to be true professionals who use their understanding of history, sociology, and cultural psychology to further the profession and increase the effectiveness of schools and of the American educational system in general. We most definitely don't believe that teachers should just teach academic skills and factual knowledge...we expect them to know and care about the larger context of schooling and about the daily lives of their students, now and in the future. Thinking critically about education means knowing that education requires more than just getting the kids to be effective in computation and decoding and memorization...and, more importantly, it means more than just teaching lower-income kids to follow orders and upper-income kids to be creative and problem-solve. (Which is what tends to happen in schools; see Anyon, 1980)

Certainly some of us do talk about critical pedagogy in some contexts. Personally, I don't think you can teach a course in the history and philosophy of education without some attention to thinkers who are considered left-wing. Some of us even assign readings, in some contexts, from Freire, Giroux, and Ayers (and...gasp!...even John Dewey!). But we also assign readings from John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann, James Conant, and Diane Ravitch, the books of which do not appear on the list of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries" (Dewey's Democracy and Education does, though.) John Locke's Two Treatises of Government even appears on the Ultimate List of Conservative Must-Read Books. He's no "critical pedagogue," as anyone who has compared his Some Thoughts Concerning Education to Rousseau's Emile (for example) can attest. Actually, I think most teachers of the history and philosophy of education in colleges of education are pretty balanced, overall, because...

...um...

...well, because in many of our courses (especially those in the Foundations of Education), we're trying to get our students to think. That's right: to think.

"But what does "to think" mean?" you ask. "What does having prospective teachers read left-wing ideologues like Freire or Dewey or Rousseau have to do with teaching them to think? Even presenting these thinkers as if they are worth reading is introducing a bias right there, is it not?"

Hmmmm....soooo...let's see: having them read Locke or Jefferson isn't introducing bias? Or..are you saying...it's okay to introduce certain kinds of bias? Or are these thinkers not biased? Some of the other readings I assign my students are clearly biased toward the right: articles by people like William Bennett and Chester Finn, who are known Republicans...and such documents as "A Nation At Risk," a report issued while Reagan was president.) The goal is to help students to understand the wide range of perspectives on educational topics...not to indoctrinate them to think a particular way!

But as I'm writing this, I'm having an internal conversation that is flowing more rapidly than I'm able to write. I'm thinking about what I consider to be the purposes of education, of what it means to be educated...of what it means to be a thinker.

And yes, in my conception of an educated person is....a willingness to read the works of people across the political spectrum, and a willingness to think about the variety of perspectives that exist, and a willingness to accept that each of these perspectives offers something important philosophically, historically, and educationally...and that the only way a reader can understand a reading is to understand that any reading reflects the values, experiences, social positions, and...yes...biases of its author. This is what is meant by critical thinking: gaining the capacity to critique without merely condemning...to understand without condoning...to compare and contrast and contextualize while coming gradually to one's own conclusions...in short, to think for oneself.

Critical thinking, in its broadest sense has been described as "purposeful reflective judgment concerning what to believe or what to do." (source)

"But wait! Then you do have a bias," you're thinking. "Your bias is that multiple perspectives need to be encountered, understood, digested, and then synthesized in the forming of one's own viewpoint. Your bias is that education is about teaching each person to think for him or herself...rather than to merely accept the values and perspectives of a particular group (their parents, their peers, their community, the government, those in business, multinational corporations). In other words, you are trying to indoctrinate teachers into the view that getting their students to think for themselves is a worthy goal!"

Um, yes: guilty as charged.

"So you would rather have a young person form their own political beliefs than just vote the way their parents want them to?" Yes.

"So you believe that all young people should be exposed to a variety of values, beliefs, and perspectives in school, and that they should be taught to evaluate these different perspectives critically rather than unquestioningly"? Yes.

"So you believe that there's no right or wrong...that everything is relative...that capitalism is not always great...that Communists shouldn't be ruthlessly investigated and "outed"...that students should understand why the Constitution prohibited the establishment of religion...that they should understand that the Constitution isn't perfect...that it allowed slavery to continue...and didn't let women or poor people vote.?" Well...maybe.

"So you admit a virulent left-wing bias?!?" Um...if by that you mean a set of values about what education consists of and how best to move young people towards a broader understanding of their world, ...then yes, I do.

"And you admit that your colleagues have the same beliefs about these things that you do?" Well, for the most part, yes...we pride ourselves in our commitments to democratic values, as shown in our Conceptual Framework.

"Okay, then: case closed."

Coda

What is Liberal Education?
Liberal Education is an approach to learning that empowers individuals and prepares them to deal with complexity, diversity, and change. It provides students with broad knowledge of the wider world (e.g. science, culture, and society) as well as in-depth study in a specific area of interest. A liberal education helps students develop a sense of social responsibility, as well as strong and transferable intellectual and practical skills such as communication, analytical and problem-solving skills, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings. (American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2010)

As the above demonstrates, I believe that there is a "liberal" bias in education...if by "liberal" we understand it in the same way that the word is used in the phrase "liberal education." Those of us who work in colleges of education do, for the most part, believe that teaching young people to think for themselves...indeed, to think critically about things...is at least as important as getting them to do their times tables quickly.

The thing is, there are people in America who don't believe that it is a good thing for young people to learn, in schools, to think for themselves, especially when it comes to thinking about issues with political aspects. Fundamentalists, for example, don't want their children to learn, in school, about evolution, or about ongoing intellectual strife about the historical authenticity of the Bible, or about how to use a condom to prevent sexually-transmitted diseases. Fiscal conservatives don't want people developing their capacities to critique "trickle-down" economics, or their understanding of the ways that multinational corporations use the intricacies of American and international law to avoid responsibility for the larger environmental or health effects of their products. Racists don't want their children coming home from school and questioning the stereotypes that they hold about race; male chauvinists don't want their daughters to question their oppressive ideas and behaviors; meat eaters or farmers don't want their kids spouting data related to corporate farming or the true costs of eating meat. All of these groups want and expect their kids' public school to avoid getting into anything that might conflict with their "family values."

On the other hand, liberals also don't want their kids coming home and singing the praises of Reagan's foreign policy, or defending Joseph McCarthy, or using the Bible to justify discrimination against gays, or spouting anti-Muslim rhetoric related to 911. I mentioned above that principals want, primarily, to avoid upsetting parents to the point that complaints find their way to members of the school board. This is why principals, in general, want their teachers to avoid controversial topics. This is, in part, why the standardized testing regime finds such favor among school leaders: teachers who are concentrating on preparing their students to do well on multiple choice tests are unlikely to get parents upset about what's being foisted on their kids by their teachers.

And so, the trend in the schools...in my view...isn't toward student-centered teaching or critical pedagogy (or even social justice). The trend has been, especially since A Nation at Risk in 1983, but probably longer (back to the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which included not only more federal funding for math and science education but also a requirement that students benefiting from the loans it provided sign an affidavit disclaiming belief in the overthrow of the U.S. government). A Nation at Risk solidified the view that the primary purpose of American schools was to increase American economic competitiveness, and that the best way to do that was to increase academic expectations and standardized testing (so-called "accountability"). One way to look at this trend is to see it as a backlash to the so-called "liberal" bias of teachers, who, it is believed, not only waste their time indoctrinating students into their left-wing views, but also fail to develop their students basic skills. The view seems to be that "critical thinking" and "academic excellence" are somehow at odds, and that liberal teachers can't be trusted to strike (pun intended) the proper balance.

So I think the whole question of whether schools and colleges have a "virulent left-wing bias" is clouded by another issue, which is whether schools and colleges should be trying to get their students to learn to think for themselves about larger social and political issues. As an avowed liberal, I am quite willing to accept that I have a "bias" towards students learning to think critically rather than just accepting the values or political views of their parents or communities. I believe that a democratic society (oh, sorry, a "constitutional republic") requires citizens with a capacity to think for themselves, and that schools in such a society have an obligation to develop that capacity...along with an ability to interpret data...conduct independent research...understand multiple perspectives...read between the lines...and suspend judgment. These outcomes don't seem to me to reflect a "left wing" bias...but if they result in our students being less likely to accept dogma (from left OR right), then I'm happy.

As for the "left wing" bias...it's a somewhat different charge. The suggestion is that because so many teachers are allegedly left of center (as many as 87% according to one study!), that they are "squelching" other points of view and unduly influencing their students. This is the charge that my Dad intended to make, and that most of the articles I quote above also make. This is the charge that Rush Limbaugh makes when he claims that "The public school system is a liberal project that is designed to create as many little liberals as possible." This is why Phyllis Schlafly calls it a "virulent" left-wing bias...to reflect the notion that teachers are trying to make as many "mini-me liberals" as they can. And us college of education faculty members? Not only producing mini-me liberals in our own students (eventual teachers)...but in the k-12 students they eventually teach. (It's like a Ponzi scheme...only more satisfying!)

Personally, I don't think that's what most liberal college professors and school teachers want. I don't think most of us want graduates who think the same as we do. As I've argued, we want graduates who do think for themselves, and to the extent that this undermines dogma, we're happy. But "mini-me's"? No. That's no only petty and unprofessional...it's against what we're explicitly trying to do.

And yet, the charge remains. When conservatives lose elections or feel that no one is listening to their point of view (as my Dad clearly felt in that Facebook discussion)...the charge is renewed. When conservatives win or they're talking among themselves, the charge is renewed and they pat themselves on the back for finding a way around the liberal teachers...and (allegedly) liberal media...and (allegedly) liberal government. Aren't those Tea Partiers smart?

Of course, I haven't even begun to touch on another related issue, whether education, in general, opens the mind...and people with open minds tend to be more liberal than those with closed minds. But that's a blog post for another day. Right now, I need to go back to finding ways to indoctrinate my students, in support of the Marxist-Fascist-Liberal New World Order.

And yes, that last sentence was meant facetiously. Have a good day!

New chapter on Second Life....just out

2010-10-12T10:29:00.000-05:00

The Affordances of Second Life for Education

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61692-822-3.ch007 ISBN13: 9781616928223
ISBN10: 1616928220
EISBN13: 9781616928230
Author(s): Craig A. Cunningham (National-Louis University, USA); Kimball Harrison (Virginia Beach City Public Schools, USA)
Pages: 94-119 pp.
Source Title: Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments: Applying Dynamic Elements to the Modern Classroom
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Giovanni Vincenti (Towson University, USA); James Braman (Towson University, USA)
Copyright: 2011
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Abstract
In this chapter, the authors discuss some of the possibilities of Second Life for education from both theoretical and practical standpoints. First, they outline a general theory of meaningful learning using technology that can be applied to Second Life as well as other technologies. Then, the authors discuss some of the particular aspects of Second Life that might support meaningful learning. Next, the authors outline some of the practical realities, or obstacles, that exist to using it in the environment. Finally, they make some recommendations about how educators who are interested in exploring the possibilities of Second Life might proceed. While the chapter focuses its discussion on Second Life, the theoretical framework and even many of the examples apply to any virtual world that allows users to build persistent objects and utilize scripts.

Learning more than I ever wanted to know about HP Backup and Recovery (*.fbw)

2010-09-21T10:42:00.002-05:00

To see the "bottom line" solution, scroll to the bottom of this post.)

A friend of mine had a major computer meltdown a month or so ago. She, like many other people, had not made "system restore" disks when she first bought her HP laptop (HP being too cheap to include them with the system). With multiple Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issues...

....we decided that the best thing for her to do would be to restore the system back to factory condition. There WAS a "recovery" partition on the hard drive, so we figured we could get it back to "good as new" using that. But first, she ran a backup (using HP's supplied Backup and Recovery Tool) onto an external hard disk. That backup ran all night...and still seemed to stop in the middle...but it was all she had, at that point...she couldn't access her files anyway given that she couldn't get into Windows Vista.

So she ran the System Restore from the Recovery partition, and....more BSOD issues. (Now, we couldn't really understand why that would happen...wouldn't the Recovery partition contain a WORKING copy of Vista?!?!) Well, in any case, we finally decided the Vista install was toast, and that she should upgrade to Windows 7, which made sense for a whole lot of reasons. (For one thing, Windows 7 is, according to most commentators, vastly superior to--and faster than--Vista. For another...she'd have her CDs if she bought an upgrade.)

So, she upgraded to Win7, successfully...and has been running it, happily, since.

Of course, after she got her laptop working again, she was eager to get her files from the backup. There were two files in the backup (as I mentioned, I don't think it ever finished doing it's thing)...about 8 gigs of stuff (we're sure she had much more than that on her laptops 200 GB hard drive...but that's all she got). The files were backup.1.exe and backup.2.fbw. According to all the instructions we had read and could find, to restore the files, all you needed to do was...run backup.1.exe.

Well, no. Running the file caused C++ run-time errors.

Despite looking around the 'net for workarounds (and learning ALL about how to make sure to delete the "System Recovery Files" folder before trying to run the damn thing AGAIN)... being tempted to follow instructions to copy these files onto CD or DVD (um...not possible...too big) and even transferring the files to my Windows XP machine to see if we could run it there (nope...more run-time errors)...she pretty much gave up.

Well, as those who know me know...I...don't...give up. (A friend of mine calls me the "bulldozer" or, variously, the "snow plow" for this aspect of my personality.)

So last night I spent a few hours poking around trying to find another solution. I searched for "hp backup repair" and "hp backup *.fbw" and "Softthinks backup tool." I followed each of these trails for a while.

You can see my persistence, in a way, in the list of sites I visited looking for a solution (from my Firefox "history"):

(Fortunately, I had a glass of wine to keep me company.) However, most of the things I tried were dead ends. (It's amazing to me how many "fix-it" sites will show up in a search for something like "backup repair"...when all they're really hawking is some kind of all-in-one registry repair tool....based on the probably erroneous assumption that the problem with the backup restore process is something in the registry. Um...not in this case.)

(It's also pretty interesting how much anger and vituperation there is towards HP about this issue...you'd think they would want to put an easy solution to the problem on their web site....but such a thing I could not find.)

One of the things I tried, based on a whim, was to download from HP the entire 231 MB HP Backup and Recovery software...but after a nearly one hour download, the damn software wouldn't recognize the backup files...it was looking for a completely different file extension (not *.fbw)...clearly a different version of the software from what had been on my friend's machine (although from the same French company, Softthinks).

The search in Google for "hp backup .fbw" proved to be most useful. Appearing at the top of the search was a VERY long thread on an IT discussion forum, Toward the bottom of the thread, I found some links to some recovery tools.

First, I tried something called the "HP Backup and Recovery Fixer," but it couldn't find the "catalog" of the backup (which is stored in the last backup file, it turns out...and since this backup didn't finish...there was no catalog, I guess). Strike one.

But, I was in luck! (I thought): in a FAQ associated with the Fixer, it says:

(Q) HPBackupFixer says it cannot find the catalog or the catalog is corrupt. What does this mean?

A) If the catalog cannot be found, it is very difficult to extract the files from the archive. Try using the Emergency Recovery Tools.

I followed that link, which went directly to a download, ertools.zip. Unfortunately, when I extracted the file for XP, and ran it, I got

(If you can't read that, it says "The file could not be patched. It could be because it's on a read only disc [nope], already patched [nope?] or because the searched sequence couldn't be found." VERY helpful!! :-)) "Searched sequence"? I have no idea what that was (although, thinking about it now, it must have been the "header" to the "index" in the backup files...something different from the "catalog," I believe. In any case: strike two.

Back to the IT forum page. http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1285079352875+28353475&threadId=1116746. After scanning through it some more, I found a post from one Jose F. Ugarte, who wrote, in part,

"Guys, believe it or not, i got feedback from Softthinks!!!

Find below the instructions. (from a Softthinks web page)
First option didnt work for me, but the second actually did!
I have my personal files back!!!
Hope this helps you too!"

I had seen this post before (search the forum page for "Aug 29, 2008 14:47:35 GMT" to find it), but didn't see a link to the tool, and, when I went to the Softthinks page that he quotes (which I found by following a link on their "Support" page which reads " For Customers who experience troubles with HP Configurations." (!), there was no link there as well, so I'd given up on that.

But now, looking at Jose's post more closely, I saw a little paper clip icon in the upper right of the post:

Now, when I clicked on that link, I got a "download" dialog:

...which I dutifully downloaded and opened into Winzip:

..and extracted, then ran (saying "run" in response to the warning that the publisher could not be verified), "load"ed the backup.1.exe file, and got

:
(By the way, the instructions for this ARE at the Softthinks site (and in Jose's post on the forum)

...then I clicked "analyze," and (after clicking "OK" to warning that this might take several hours), about 20 minutes later, got

(have no idea what happened to those 30000+ files that "could not be found")...and after clicking "ok" got:

...and clicked "Emergency Extract," which I ran overnight, resulting in

including over 4000 files without any "type" or extension and the folders you see with plenty more files named "ExtractedFile-20-09-2010..." with extensions like .doc and .mp3 and .jpg, altogether about 12 gigs of stuff. Again, MUCH less than what we hoped for...but it's something.

Now, my friend gets to go through these files-without-real-filenames and figure out what is what. Lucky her!!!

Bottom line: if you have an HP backup set that you can't recover because you are missing the final backup file (or another reason...not sure what will work beyond that), with backup.1.exe and one or more backup.n.fbw, use this Emergency Recovery Tool. (I've put it on my web site so you can download directly rather than going through the forum.)

Enjoy!

Thinking about systems thinking (and how to teach it)

2010-07-30T12:24:00.000-05:00

In the next few months, I'm going to be collecting some quotes related to systems thinking, "21st century skills," and teaching. Here are two:

"The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems." - Roger Levian

"Systems can't heal the diseased economy which systems thinkers have built--only sovereign human spirits intact can do that-- the kind which can't be fashioned in factory schools." - John Taylor Gatto

Ten influential books: or at least ones that I found profound

2010-03-27T12:17:00.001-05:00

Okay, I'll play....

Here are the ten most influential books I can come up with right now off the top of my head:

Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden, a book that I read as a teenager that has forever remained in the base of my brain as an affirmation that humans are animals and often (always?) act as such.

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections: this spiritual autobiography gave me, as a very young man, permission to take "spirituality" seriously, even though I think religions are mostly about power and domination.

John Dewey, Art as Experience: taught me that the aesthetic qualities of experience are more important than the cognitive ones, both for education and for life.

David L. Norton, Personal Destinies, the book that convinced me that paying attention to Joe Gauld's concept of "unique potential" was worthy scholarship.

Henry Perkins, An Imperfect Panacea, a history of American education that focuses on the degree to which the core purposes of schools are so often diluted by the demand that they handle other social problems.

Arthur Powell, et al. The Shopping Mall High School, a book in which the authors describe how the educational system really works to influence who "wins" and who doesn't. (I read this book together with Ted Sizer's Horace's Compromise...an equally revealing book that also offers the benefit of pointing toward some solutions to the ways that high schools get away from their core intellectual mission.)

Thomas F. Green et al., Predicting the Behavior of the Educational System, a wonderful analysis of the ways that educational systems can be expected to evolve over time...I believe the principles enunciated there have pretty much proven to hold true in most cases.

Duncan Kennedy, Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A polemic Against the System, a little book that convinced me that my decision to drop out of Harvard Law School wasn't as ignoble as some people thought at the time.

Ian Pears, An Instance of the Finger Post, an amazing historical novel in which the story is told from three different perspectives...leaves one being pretty sure that we have no idea what's really going on much of the time.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, simply the best novel of all time? Has the added benefit of showing in a viscerally resonating way the social forces that create and reinforce poverty.

"If I have learned nothing from this class, I have learned I am not sure of anything"

2010-03-18T11:45:00.000-05:00

I think it is instructive to look at the “final reflections” by my TIE 512 students for the Winter Quarter to see some of the ways in which my efforts to push their comfort zone with my complex modeling assignment may have paid off.

Create a model of a complex, real-world problem or system utilizing the concepts and techniques described in Jonassen. This model must be created using application software (or other software/tools as approved by the instructor, including Google Maps or Sketch-up). While you can (and probably should) use a concept map or word-processor to collect ideas about your model, the final model should be dynamic and interactive, in the sense that variables or factors can be changed with the effects of those changes seen in the model. The model must both explain why a current situation exists (given data that represents the current situation) and provide a way of predicting what will happen if certain conditions change (given data that reflects those changes hypothetically). A proposal must be submitted to the instructor by the start of class on February 2, and the final model will be demonstrated to the class on March 16. 25% of grade.

>Note that I myself wasn’t sure how this assignment would play out. I told the students the first day it was an “experiment.” Along the way, I modified my expectation to require a beginning brainstorming, and then the initial attempts at creating a model, with evidence that shows the student has struggled with the system, its factors, and the issues of modeling it. All the students met that expectation.

But one thing is clear: student frustration is part of the learning process

Here are the links to their blogs with reflections: http://craigcunningham.com/nlu/tie512win10/#blogs

This project has lead me down a long curvy road, with many bumps, twists and detours that lead be back to where I started. It took me a very long time to wrap my head around what I was being asked to do- create a model of a complex (unsolvable) problem. With some assistance, I finally came up with a topic; how having students with ADHD in a classroom affects the classroom environment and the teacher’s ability to service the other students in the class…I choose 5 categories that seemed to have the most impact. They were parents, resources, severity of ADHD, strategies and class size…..Although I feel like the five categories are strong and have a lot of influence on the classroom environment, there is not actual data to support my choices.” (Student made enormous progress in identifying key factors, but had no data to test the model she had created.)

“But, in making this model in Inspiration I realized that this was just a picture of our system as it is now. I know that there is a problem with the way our system is but I decided that I needed to see how other more successful (in my humble opinion) healthcare systems around the world worked. I scoured the internet for sources comparing different healthcare systems. I found some really interesting resources that helped me piece together the differences between our system and other systems. I found a really great report that compares six different healthcare systems around the world across different categories. I used their data to create an excel file that I was going to use to find averages and such. But then I found where they had simplified their data into a ranking system on different aspects. I took that and then added aspects from my model that I thought would be important to weigh the differences between healthcare systems. And I came up with this so far ...
Now that I have conquered the where to begin question and have gotten a good jump on the data, where should I go from here... I plan on making a healthcare program that will show how the money being spent, people involved, and government involvement changes the way the whole system works. Hopefully by inputing different values into this program one can find the best balance of all the aspects for all involved. I don’t think that there is any perfect answer but I do think that a change might be a good thing.” (Student gained new understanding of the complexity of the problems with the healthcare system and the difficulties of comparing different systems in terms of their effectiveness.)

“In creating my model on the factors that influence a school meeting or not meeting AYP, I came across many hurdles….I discovered that the factors I included in my model didn't really help me understand why a school preformed like they did….Overall, creating this model helped me to better understand how schools make AYP and what factors contribute to it. If I were to expand on this model, I would include more specific factors such as reading/math scores, scores from previous years, Safe Harbor scores, etc. When first creating this model, I thought that the information I included in the database was sufficient, but looking back, I realized that I would need to look at more factors.”

“I tried to brainstorm a way to show the relation of world population to the consumption of food in a system. I became stuck. I then was using the "Stumble Upon!" tool that was showed to us in class, and I came upon this amazing website called "Breathing Earth". This site blew my mind! It shows the population of each country, the birth rate of each country, the death rate of each country, the world population, etc. (Keep in mind that the death rate does not include terrorist acts, natural disasters, etc.) It has so much useful and interesting information. I then started to think...how is the birth and death rate going to change the population of each country in the future .I then settled on my new problem statement:Problem Statement: What will the population be in a specific country on a specific date be in the future?... My finished system is so fun to use now that it is finished! I can now choose any of the countries and type in any date in the future to get a predicted population of that country. Here is a screen shot of my finished system…. The user can input data into the yellow boxes: a future date and then click the drop down box to choose a country. Then automatically the predicted population, net change, and percentage of change appears. The system takes into consideration the chosen country's starting population on February 28, 2010, it's birth rate, and it's death rate. Overall, I really enjoyed building this system. It gave me an opportunity to learn more about Microsoft Excel. I discovered many tricks and formulas that I did not know before! Students can use this system to see how population can change in different countries and see how the change is different all over the world. Students can also use this system to compare different countries around the world!”

I chose to try to model the Achievement Gap. As it turns out it is a monster that keeps growing. Every time I investigate one idea there are more and more issues that turn up. Obviously there is no simple solution to the achievement gap or we would have solved it by now. The problem that I have encountered is that every single element of the Achievement Gap intertwines and intersects with each other. You can’t isolate any one factor, it is a never-ending rabbit hole and where does it end? The more I tried to refine the list of factors the more that it grew…. My conclusion is that with No Child Left Behind and schools trying to make AYP everyone is blaming the teachers for all of the troubles of our students while not wanting to address any of the other reasons for the Achievement Gap. We blame the teachers because it is easy. No one wants to point a finger at any of the other variables because it is too hard. It is impossible to isolate all (or any) of these factors so everyone likes to point a finger at teachers and make them the scapegoat in the Achievement Gap crisis.”

It has been quite an experience trying to wrap my head around this complex model project. After I finally chose my topic, I began to brainstorm how I would model my problem: Students not involved in extra-curricular activities don’t perform as well at school. I decided to use a concept map to begin to brainstorm my ideas. The complex problem that we modeled in class together about War helped me to understand how to start to model a concept. Through building upon concept maps or flowcharts, it is easier to make progress and develop a working model….After beginning my flow chart, I realized I had no idea how I would continue with this model. I couldn’t wrap my head around it and felt completely lost. I also didn’t think I had enough research or data to support the information that I was trying to display in the flow chart. I decided to scrap the flow chart. I needed better data! To truly model this problem, I decided that I needed to compare the effect of extracurricular activities on student performance/success for different Chicago Public Schools. After searching for quality data, I found the CPS website to be very helpful….This model isn’t complete. There are still some factors that I would like to compare. I would like to explore the relationship between the causes of low extracurricular participation and the effects that not participating in extracurricular activities has on students. I would also like to explore the possible solutions for attempting to solve this problem. I am not sure if this problem can be solved, but I think I have created a good foundation in attempting to identify and explore this complex problem.”

I made a stab at modeling the use of paper from its invention to its current high level of consumption and how to recycle said consumption. When I started the research I became quickly overwhelmed with information. The more I searched the more interesting it became…and bigger and bigger… The whole process has been frustrating, painful, fascinating, intriguing and many other descriptive epithets. I’ve learned a ton about paper, recycling and the bad habits of humans. I’m sure I’ll learn even more as I add to my model.”

“I was completely confused by the assignment; in the beginning I tried to get clarification and thought I somewhat go the “jest” of the assignment. As I sat down in the beginning it became a clear reality that I was pretty confused. I read several articles with great ideas on how to ensure successful technology integration and inhibitors to be aware of when trying to help teachers integrate technology. The barrier for me is placing value on these items in order to create a system that can be altered. I tried to brainstorm a concept map to start my project but quickly realized that that just further confused me. So I did the next best thing I procrastinated, I told myself that tomorrow I would get it. After last week’s class I started to panic, there was no way I was going to get this project completed. Completed? What exactly was I trying to complete, accomplish? I emailed my concept map to Craig to see if I was any track and after receiving his email on Sunday was convinced I was totally off track. Any hope that I understood what a system in tales - vanished. So I for the past 24 hours I tried to rework this system using the direction I received from Craig. I first tried to input a finite number of influences into excel, giving them values. I believe that maybe (because if I have learned nothing from this class, I have learned I am not sure of anything) being able to change values will help see how influences effect the outcome. Therefore, I have to be able to change the effect of the influences in order to see how the outcome may change. After many revisions of the excel worksheet I abandoned that idea and decided to try Stella to create a system. This proved to be a pretty good idea; I believe it helped me to see the flow of influences. I enjoyed learning to use this software, although I am far from mastering it. I did learn what I wanted to get out of this model of the system; I am interested in what factors make a teacher integrate technology successfully into their curriculum and what factors hinder that success. So what did I learn, procrastinated is not the way to go, it just leads to more frustration. I needed to look to all possibilities for help, classmates, reading material… Face uncertainty head on instead of avoiding it. I have not completed my system but feel that I am on my way to completing it. I hope to use the experience from this class to make me a better teacher and student. I found a lot of information about helping teachers integrate technology into their curriculum, the trouble I had was converting that information to be used into the “system”.

How Should School Principals Be Selected in Chicago?

2010-02-18T13:10:00.000-06:00

[Cross-posed from social issues]

In the Chicago Public Schools, since 1988, school principals have been hired (for five year contracts) and fired by the Local School Council (LSC), an elected body of parents, community members, and teachers that also approves each year's school budget (within some limits imposed by the central office).

A new bill in the Illinois legislature, sponsored by Chicago democrat (and minister) James Meeks, would shift the principal-selection power away from the LSC, returning it to the central office (and thus, the ultimate control of the mayor). Some progressive groups are complaining that this is an affront to the ideals of democracy.

"Why would he want to get rid of the last segment of democracy that exists in our schools, where people who are most directly affected can have a voice in how their schools are run?'' asked Jitu Brown of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization. (from the Sun-Times article; see also this Tribune article)

I have mixed feelings about this one. Besides being democratically elected, do LSCs offer any special insights that give them a better perspective from which to appoint principals? We don't elect the civil engineers who oversee the building of bridges and other critical public infrastructure democratically. Rather, we expect the selection of civil engineers to be determined in accordance with professional standards of expertise. Certainly at some level this selection process is shaped by the democratic process, because the ultimate executive powers overseeing their selection are subjected to democratic elections. But we expect the selection process itself to be shielded from political considerations such as popularity, ability to raise funds, or the appeal of an Irish last name.

Nor do we elect our military leaders. As the Athenians had learned during the Peloponnesian War, military generals need to be able to make military decisions without regard to their personal popularity or appeal to populous impulses. (Of course, the Commander-in-Chief is elected in the US, which of course sometimes results in military decisions that seem designed to shore up popular support for the regime.) Other professions in which popular election seems unwise (and is rarely seen) include university professors, corporate CEOs, and scientists.

The most common way to select school principals in the US is appointment by a superintendent, who is in turn appointed by an elected school board. Yes, we do, in the US, largely follow the practice of electing school boards. This practice with long historical roots in the way that schools were first established in the US, village by village, and the gradual move toward financing those schools increasingly out of local property taxes (thus justifying the notion that their functioning should be subject to periodic public approval).

The key question, I think, that should be asked about how various professionals should be selected (appointed or elected) is the relative balance that the job requires between sensitivity to public desires (elect them) and professonal expertise (appoint them). Amy Gutmann does a nice job of discussing this balance in a section entitled "Democratic Professionalism" in her widely respected book, Democratic Education. She writes that democratic local control of schools has the positive effect of permitting "educational content to vary, as it should, with local circumstances and local democratic preferences," and also ensures local public support of school policies. In addition, local elections of school boards provides a place for individual citizens and local groups to gain experience with active participation in governance (p. 74). The downsides of local control (most importantly, the possibility of tyrannical or corrupt policies) are minimized by both the public's access to school board decisions (if nothing else, people hear about it from their children) and by the on-the-ground presence of teachers, who have their own professional expertise and can, through their unions especially, raise a stink about what they see as bad policies. This balance, Guttmann believes, helps to ensure that schools foster in students not just compliance to majority-supported behavioral and ideological standards, but also (we can only hope!) critical awareness.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the progressive movement worked to replace multiple school boards elected within each neighborhood (and often influenced heavily by local political heavyweights) with more centralized elected boards, especially in larger cities. The power of the elected boards was also moderated by requiring boards to appoint an experienced professional educator as superintendent. (In some states such as Alabama, school boards can only act with the recommendation of the superintendent.) This centralizing reform carried over to rural districts with the policy of district consolidation that prevailed in the 1950s and 60s, and the power of school boards has also been limited by the gradual assumption of power over local education by the federal government (and by the states as well) in the decades since. In a sense, then, Chicago's return in 1988 to the election of local school councils with control over each schools' budget and the hiring and firing of principals is a return to earlier conditions. The justification for that return to an earlier tradition was two-fold. First, Chicago's schools were so terrible (called "worst in the nation" by then US Secretary of Education, William Bennett), that decentralizing control of the schools couldn't make them any worse. Second, the move reflected the growing power of minority groups in Chicago city politics, many of whom felt ill-served by the decisions of a largely white, largely high SES central school board. The actual effect of the change has been mixed, although most observers suggest that many school improvements can be traced to the wisdom of LSCs that make appropriate decisions in light of the unique circumstances of each school.

In general, the tradition of local control of schools through elected school boards has had mixed effects over the years, and even the idea of that they are democratically elected can be questioned in light of extremely low voter turnout in most school board elections. In some areas, elected school boards include people who are elected on a single issue, such as the goal of restoring creationism to the curriculum. The tradition of elected school boards has also recently come under attack (at least with regard to large urban districts) from some conservative educational critics (e.g. Chubb & Moe, and Checker Finn), as well as US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a supposed progressive who believes that such districts need "leadership from the top." Duncan has cited his seven-year experience as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, where the school board has, since 1992, been appointed by the mayor, rather than elected, as evidence that appointed boards are less likely than elected ones to shuffle school leadership for political purposes. But as Jim Horn has pointed out, Duncan's call for appointed school boards only extends to those large urban districts where schools seem most devoted to creating compliance among poor and minority children (rather than learning), and not to the pretty successful suburban districts where elected school boards retain the general support of most of the voting public.

Truly, the election of Local School Councils represents one of very few examples of neighborhood control of urban public institutions anywhere, and (at least according to some research summarized by Designs for Change, a local progressive advocacy group) the majority of the 600+ LSCs actually work fairly well. (Of course, this conclusion depends upon agreeing that have 10-15% of schools in the city with "LSCs ... enmeshed in sustained conflict, ...inactive, or hav[ing] engaged in unethical behavior" -- that's 60 - 90 schools, by the way -- is okay.

It is those 10-15% of LSCs (more or less) that aren't functioning well that are the primary targets of Meek's proposed legislation. The schools with these LSCs are generally awful by any measure, and tend to be in neighborhoods with limited local social capital (such as educated parents or strong community institutions). An LSC "enmeshed in sustained conflict, inactive, or engaged in unethical behavior" simply cannot be trusted to name an effective principal; however, it has proven politically impossible for CPS to take over the selection process in those schools without a change in the law.

Some elected LSCs seem to be doing a decent job of selecting principals. If we roughly accept the numbers cited by Designs for Change, 50-60$ of schools have "highly functioning" LSCs, and another 25-33% are "performing well." Those LSCs can legitimately claim to be offering democratic local control of a process that must place a priority on criteria of professionalism and effectiveness. But the other LSCs probably lack the capacity to understand those criteria or to make selection decisions that are free from personal bias, factionalism, or faulty reasoning. In those cases, most likely democratic control is leading to worse schools than would be the case with more centralized control by educational experts.

I have some experience in one South Side school where the principal has been re-appointed four times, where (it seems to me) the primary reason for this reappointment is the political activities of the principal in maintaining the support of the public in the local community, rather than in his educational policies, which seem (to me, anyway) pretty wrong-headed. For example, this principal works with funders and food distribution companies to ensure that each family in the community has a turkey for Thanksgiving. It's a nice gesture, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with student learning. It's a pretty blatant effort to secure public support.

As Winston Churchill said,

"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Democracy is a messy thing, and it makes mistakes.(Witness the repeated election of George W. Bush.) But when democratically-elected LSCs make mistakes in the selection of school principals, it is the children who ultimately suffer, and they don't have a vote. So it makes sense to me that the people with the ultimate authority for the effectiveness of the schools in Chicago (that is, the mayor and his appointed school board) should, in some cases, overrule the principal-selection decisions of the Local School Councils, not in order to curtail democracy, per se, but in order to do what's best for those poor kids. Democracy is, indeed, under siege in America these days, but we shouldn't use these kids as human shields in its defense.