January, 2009

Charles Blow, the visual op-ed columnist for the New York Times, is our guest today to discuss his most recent column titled "No More Excuses."

From The New York Times:

For the presidential inauguration, blacks descended on Washington in droves with a fanatical, Zacchaeus-like need to catch a glimpse of this M.L.K. 2.0. “Ooo-bama!” For them, he was it — a game changer, soul restorer, dream fulfiller. Everything. Ooo-K.

Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the majority whip, tapped into the fervor Monday night at the BET Honors awards in Washington when he proclaimed, “Every child has lost every excuse.”

What? That’s where I have to put my foot down. That’s going a bridge too far.

I’m a big proponent of personal responsibility, but children too often don’t have a choice. They are either prisoners of their parentage or privileged by it. Some of their excuses are hollow. But other excuses are legitimate, and they didn’t magically disappear when Obama put his left hand on the Lincoln Bible.

Representative Clyburn and those like him would do well to cool this rhetoric lest the enormous and ingrained obstacles facing black children get swept under the rug as Obama is swept into power. For instance:

• According to Child Trends, a Washington research group, 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Also, black children are the most likely to live in unsafe neighborhoods. And, black teenagers, both male and female, were more likely to report having been raped.

• According to reports last year from the National Center for Children in Poverty, 60 percent of black children live in low-income families and a third live in poor families, a higher percentage than any other race.

• A 2006 report from National Center for Juvenile Justice said that black children are twice as likely as white and Hispanic children to be the victims of “maltreatment.” The report defines maltreatment as anything ranging from neglect to physical and sexual abuse.

Most of these kids will rise above their circumstances, but too many will succumb to them. Can we really blame them?

Malcolm Gladwell probably said it best in a November interview with New York magazine about his new book, “Outliers”: “I am explicitly turning my back on, I think, these kind of empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. Well, actually, you can’t be whatever you want to be. The world decides what you can and can’t be.”

So black people have to keep their feet on the ground even as their heads are in the clouds. If we want to give these children a fighting chance, we must change the worlds they inhabit. That change requires both better policies and better parenting — a change in our houses as well as the White House.

President Obama is a potent symbol, but he’s no panacea.

I have been thinking non-stop, as have many of you, about the Inauguration and coming Presidency of Barack Obama.   Leaving behind for a moment all the political arguments from the left and right, from those who voted for him and those who did not, this is just an amazing moment.   I look at the Obama family and can't keep from breaking out into a smile.  We are facing the worst of times yet hope is the operative emotion that is coursing through the veins of this nation.   You can read it in the latest polls but more importantly you can feel it when you listen to people, talk to your friends or when people of all stripes discuss this moment.  I have never experienced anything close to this in political annals of our nation.    The closest was JFK, maybe RFK but still, this moment is different.

Over the weekend I could not get Mack Parker out of my head.  Who is Mack Parker?   Fifty years ago he was lynched.   He had been accused of raping a white woman.   Subsequent investigations revealed he was most likely innocent.   But that is not important.   He was lynched by a white mob.   White judges in Mississippi who were part of the White Citizen's Councils (a refined version of the KKK) refused to do anything about the crime.   His brutalized chained body was found floating on the Pearl River ten days after the mob dragged him from his cell.   I can only imagine the fear and pain he suffered.

When I was almost thirteen years old I opened a Life Magazine.   The picture in the center of the Magazine was of a pair of work boots neatly placed under a cot in a prison cell.   They were Mack Parker's boots left behind where he put them before a mob dragged him out to be tortured, mutilated and murdered.

I kept that picture on my wall for years.  It haunted me.   It reminded me why I fight for a new America that belongs to all of her citizens, breathing in, and living, the same air of equality.

Now Barack Obama is standing there fifty years later, an African American man about to become President of the United States of America.    Many people have written that just because we have elected an African American President of the United States of America does not mean that racism will end.   They are right, but I deeply believe that it is having and will have a profound effect on American consciousness.

It is an amazing time.    I can't believe we are here.   The hope is palpable.  Let it be real.

What are you feeling now?

-Marc

I hate watching this happen.  It is no small matter for a sitting Mayor to be indicted.

I have known Sheila Dixon for over thirty years.   We are not close friends.   We have not been in a private social setting together in 32 years. We met when we were both counselors and teachers at Baltimore Prep, a program at Westside Shopping Center for street kids who had just come out of prison or had been kicked out of school, whose lives were on the corner instead of the classroom.   Sheila was committed to those kids. She didn’t take any stuff from them and she knew every game they could play, because she came from the same streets that they did.  Baltimore Prep is also where she met Mark Smith, who later became her husband, with whom she raised her nephew Juan Dixon and his brother.   The boys’ parents had died from heroin addiction.  Sheila and Mark saw those boys to manhood.  This is the Sheila Dixon I know.

I knew her a little in the intervening years.  I remember when she was first elected to the city council.   I remember when she banged her shoe on the table exclaiming it was our turn now.   She was committed to working class black folks. She lived and knew their pain, joys and struggles.   A lot of white journalists, politicians and others thought she hated white people.  I don’t know what her innermost thoughts about race were, but I can say that anyone who came up in a certain way who was from a certain place had historical reasons to have a mistrust of white people.  Whatever she thought then, however, she has grown from that place, as did William Donald Schaeffer from his place of not caring about Black folks before he became Mayor.  She bleeds working class blue in her veins.   That is the Sheila Dixon I know.

So, these indictments are just tragic.  If they are true, they show stupidity and sheer greed.  

As I wrote last week, the only difference between the actions of our city officials and indicted power developers, and goings on in Congress between politicians and corrupt corporate leaders, is the thin but sturdy line of legality.  

Politicians are always doing favors for the powerful and their friends.  It is part of human existence.   Nevertheless, it was not the fur coats that bought Ron Lipscomb city contracts, but rather all of his city and corporate contacts.  

I am not excusing anything here.  If Sheila and others broke their sacred trust with us, they have to leave elected office at the very least.   It cannot be tolerated.  

The worst offence would be if she actually took gift certificates that were intended for poor families and children to enjoy Christmas.   I hope that even if the bribery and malfeasance indictments are true, that stealing from street kids and poor families is not true.   That could break a city’s heart.

That would not be the Sheila Dixon I know.   Soon we will know whether she broke the law.  If she did, then the court will decide her fate.  If she is exonerated, she could become one of our greatest Mayors. If not, she will become one of our greatest disappointments and tragedies.

With Martin Luther King Day around the corner, we've been thinking about how we can commemorate the day a little differently than usual.  Our friend and frequent collaborator, Director of Pride in Faith and Program Director of the Maryland Black Family Alliance Lea Gilmore, suggested we cover a civil rights tour that she is taking part in.  We decided this would be a great story to build a show around, which we'll host from 5-6pm on The Marc Steiner Show on WEAA 88.9 FM on Martin Luther King Day, January 19th.

The trip began in Atlanta yesterday, and will be on the road through this Sunday.  Here's a dispatch from trip participant Charlie Collyer, professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island, where he also works with the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies.

Lawrence Carter speaking

part of the group at the King Center

Here's a brief summary of Thursday on the tour.

Our group gathered at the Atlanta airport this morning.  The group comes from all over - Carroll County MD, Baltimore, Rhode Island, California, Seattle, Texas, and a few other places.  A happy, upbeat mood took hold, as friends introduced friends and strangers introduced themselves, becoming friends quickly.

We boarded a tour bus and drove to the King Center complex.  We had an hour or so to explore the museum (a National Parks Service site) and visit the King Center itself.  The King Center bookstore is the best place for teachers to find good source material on civil rights history.

There is never enough time at any of the stops on a civil rights tour.  We were rounded up and rode the bus again to Morehouse College, where Dr. King once studied as an undergraduate.  There, by chance, we met Lawrence Carter, for 30 years the Dean of Morehouse's Chapel.  Lawrence gave us a riveting hour off the cuff - the story of Morehouse and its distinguished place in American history, its traditions and famous alumni.  Morehouse was the place where the Gandhian tradition of nonviolence connects to the King tradition: Gandhi to Howard Thurman (from Morehouse, on a visit to India in the 30s) to Mordecai Johnson (at Morehouse, lecturing on Gandhi just after his death) to King (at Morehouse, listening to Johnson and then buying a handful of books on Gandhi).

More connections today: Lawrence Carter did not have us on his schedule, but came down to meet the group upon hearing that his old colleage Dr. Bernard LaFayette was leading the tour.  We go in to the locked Chapel thanks to Thomas Coverson, Dr. LaFayette's nephew, who is a freshman at Morehouse.  And so it goes.  Tomorrow we are off to Alabama, with a first stop in Tuskegee.

- Charlie Collyer

Sookyung Shutoff thanking Lawrence Carter on behalf of the group

Update: We just received news, at 2pm today (Friday January 9) that Mayor Dixon has been indicted on 12 counts.  Read more in the Sun.

We will see what the day brings but the rumor mill has it that Sheila Dixon will be indicted today, just as Helen Holton and Ron Lipscomb were indicted yesterday.

My feeling is that if she had just declared those coats she would not be in front of a grand jury. If she had just recused herself from voting for a company her sister worked for there would be no investigation.

If Helen Holton had declared that Ron Lipsocmb paid for her poll then how she voted or what she pushed for would not be an issue.

It is not what they did but how stupidly they played the game. That for me is the issue.

Like Governor Blagojevich they were too blatant and not slick enough to get it done. Sure it was greed on some level but many politicians are greedy. Many participate in a life full of graft and influence buying but do it on the edge of the line of law so they get away with it. Notice I wrote many politicians not all. There are many men and women who are highly ethical in this business of politics. Most start that way but some get lost in the power.

Two articles recently in the New York Times brought home for me the glaring reality of it all. One was about New York Senator Chuck Schumer. He was accused of being one of the culprits in deregulating banking and Wall Street that led to this economic disaster we are facing. The article pointed out that Wall Street billions backed his campaigns and campaign fund/. In Congress he did their bidding.

The other article was about the junior Senator form New York, now Secretary of State designee, Hillary Clinton. She helped push through legislation that aided contributors to her husband’s foundation and library.

All this was all legal influence peddling. The corruption in the marriage of corporate wealth and political power is insidious. It must be exposed at every turn and reformed. It is how we ensure the survival of a real democracy.

Our local elected officials played the same game but on the wrong side of the thin but sturdy line of legality.

Yesterday I interviewed two educational leaders from different ends of the ideological spectrum who had written open letters to President-elect Barack Obama.

I always love interviewing Howard Gardner (listen to our interview by clicking here). He is one of the most important educational thinkers in the world. He is just so clear in his analysis, research and thinking. In the past, we have had discussions where we paired him with leaders of educational systems to talk about how to translate his ideas into practice in our city and county public schools. On this show, he came on to talk about his open letter to President-elect Obama, which you can read by clicking here.

It is clear that changing our culture through the bully pulpit of leadership to respect and embrace education, along with treating teaching as a real, respected and well paid profession is the only prescription for success. Within that, we can make all kind of rules and regulations, but without anything implemented, it becomes meaningless and redundant.

Now, my second guest yesterday, Charles Murray, wrote a book I intellectually loathed, The Bell Curve (listen to our interview by clicking here). I just wanted to disagree with his latest New York Times op-ed (read it by clicking here) but I couldn’t. I love it when I am so challenged that I have to change my thinking or admit that life is more complex than simple ideological answers.

My show over the years has taught me that truth lives in all corners of our life. While I might disagree over some of his assumptions, Charles Murray is right. College is highly overrated. Why should someone who wants to be a computer programmer, interior designer, actor, marketing executive, software designer or hundreds of other jobs I could mention, have to take physics, European literature or required gym courses to graduate? If we restructured our world of post-secondary education, it would save money, time and produce a creative population that will build a great nation.

Charles Murray, years back I took on one of your intellectual mentors at Hopkins over the Bell Curve, but your advice to President Obama is dead on.

One of our guests on today's program will be the celebrated educational theorist Howard Gardner.  Scholastic Magazine recently invited leading educational thinkers to offer advice for President-elect Obama in open letters.  Howard Gardner will be our guest to discuss his advice, which is published below.

From Scholastic Magazine (click on link to read other great advice from other leading thinkers):

 Many individuals will advise you about what to do. I suggest that you not do anything, at least for a while. Don’t pay attention to the so-called experts who have reflexive views on issues like merit pay and a national curriculum. Rather, try to understand the demands of today’s world, and what we should prioritize in terms of future citizenry. Only then should action be pursued.
With this warning, here’s my recipe: Begin with what kinds of human beings we would like to have. I submit that we want to have both Good Workers—excellent technically, personally engaged, and ethically behaved—and Good Citizens—well informed, with a disposition to act and a desire to do the right thing by others. We’ve had too many years of people behaving selfishly. You will not be able to bring about change with a populace like that.

Clearly, these goals can’t be achieved by schools alone; they are a community affair. But in the 21st century, they won’t be achieved unless the educational system supports them.

Next, consider the kinds of minds that need to be cultivated in the future. I’ve identified five:
The disciplined mind is familiar with the major ways of thinking (scientific, mathematical, artistic, historical); has mastered one profession; and continues to learn. You have a disciplined mind yourself.

The synthesizing mind knows how to organize information, so we can hold onto it and communicate it to others. You excel in this area as well.

The creating mind goes beyond the disciplines to conceive of new questions and solutions. I hope that at least some of your advisers have these traits.

The respectful mind acknowledges the enormous differences among individuals and strives to make common cause. You have exemplified this trait like few others in current public life.

With the ethical mind, one thinks of oneself as a worker and as a citizen, and tries to behave responsibly in both roles.
No singular national policy could possibly satisfy Jesse Helms, Jesse Jackson, and Jesse Ventura. Our affluent suburbs have entirely different opportunities and challenges than do inner cities or our vast heartland. Learn from our admired, amazingly varied college system. Avoid using a hammer when many scalpels are needed; that’s the fatal flaw of NLCB.

As President of a country where education has traditionally been local, don’t try to orchestrate the details. Identify model programs and help people who want to learn from those models. In a democratic society, only those who want to learn will do so effectively. You can’t mandate quality, only facilitate it.

Last point: Excellent educational systems can differ dramatically from one another. Compare Finland and Korea, Sweden and Singapore. What they share are not national standards or merit pay. They share teachers who act and are treated like professionals, and families that respect education. Use your singular pulpit, and your profound insights into our history, to look deeply for solutions—around the world, but equally, within our own national fabric.

Charles Murray, the controversial author of The Bell Curve among other works, is going to be a guest on the show today.  He will be discussing a recent op-ed he wrote for The New York Times in which he argued that the bachelor's degree should not be used as a job qualification.

From The New York Times:

Op-Ed Contributors | Transitions
Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?
By CHARLES MURRAY

Washington

BARACK OBAMA has two attractive ideas for improving post-secondary education — expanding the use of community colleges and tuition tax credits — but he needs to hitch them to a broader platform. As president, Mr. Obama should use his bully pulpit to undermine the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification. Here’s a suggested battle cry, to be repeated in every speech on the subject: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.”

The residential college leading to a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years works fine for the children of parents who have plenty of money. It works fine for top students from all backgrounds who are drawn toward academics. But most 18-year-olds are not from families with plenty of money, not top students, and not drawn toward academics. They want to learn how to get a satisfying job that also pays well. That almost always means education beyond high school, but it need not mean four years on a campus, nor cost a small fortune. It need not mean getting a bachelor’s degree.

I am not discounting the merits of a liberal education. Students at every level should be encouraged to explore subjects that will not be part of their vocation. It would be even better if more colleges required a rigorous core curriculum for students who seek a traditional bachelor’s degree. My beef is not with liberal education, but with the use of the degree as a job qualification.

For most of the nation’s youths, making the bachelor’s degree a job qualification means demanding a credential that is beyond their reach. It is a truth that politicians and educators cannot bring themselves to say out loud: A large majority of young people do not have the intellectual ability to do genuine college-level work.

If you doubt it, go back and look through your old college textbooks, and then do a little homework on the reading ability of high school seniors. About 10 percent to 20 percent of all 18-year-olds can absorb the material in your old liberal arts textbooks. For engineering and the hard sciences, the percentage is probably not as high as 10.

No improvements in primary and secondary education will do more than tweak those percentages. The core disciplines taught at a true college level are tough, requiring high levels of linguistic and logical-mathematical ability. Those abilities are no more malleable than athletic or musical talent.

You think I’m too pessimistic? Too elitist? Readers who graduated with honors in English literature or Renaissance history should ask themselves if they could have gotten a B.S. in physics, no matter how hard they tried. (I wouldn’t have survived freshman year.) Except for the freakishly gifted, all of us are too dumb to get through college in many majors.

But I’m not thinking just about students who are not smart enough to deal with college-level material. Many young people who have the intellectual ability to succeed in rigorous liberal arts courses don’t want to. For these students, the distribution requirements of the college degree do not open up new horizons. They are bothersome time-wasters.

A century ago, these students would happily have gone to work after high school. Now they know they need to acquire additional skills, but they want to treat college as vocational training, not as a leisurely journey to well-roundedness.

As more and more students who cannot get or don’t want a liberal education have appeared on campuses, colleges have adapted by expanding the range of courses and adding vocationally oriented majors. That’s appropriate. What’s not appropriate is keeping the bachelor’s degree as the measure of job preparedness, as the minimal requirement to get your foot in the door for vast numbers of jobs that don’t really require a B.A. or B.S.

Discarding the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification would not be difficult. The solution is to substitute certification tests, which would provide evidence that the applicant has acquired the skills the employer needs.

Certification tests can take many forms. For some jobs, a multiple-choice test might be appropriate. But there’s no reason to limit certifications to academic tests. For centuries, the crafts have used work samples to certify journeymen and master craftsmen. Today, many computer programmers without college degrees get jobs by presenting examples of their work. With a little imagination, almost any corporation can come up with analogous work samples.

The benefits of discarding the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification would be huge for both employers and job applicants. Certifications would tell employers far more about their applicants’ qualifications than a B.A. does, and hundreds of thousands of young people would be able to get what they want from post-secondary education without having to twist themselves into knots to comply with the rituals of getting a bachelor’s degree.

Certification tests would not eliminate the role of innate ability — the most gifted applicants would still have an edge — but they would strip away much of the unwarranted halo effect that goes with a degree from a prestigious university. They would put everyone under the same spotlight.

Discrediting the bachelor’s degree is within reach because so many employers already sense that it has become education’s Wizard of Oz. All we need is someone willing to yank the curtain aside. Barack Obama is ideally positioned to do it. He just needs to say it over and over: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.”

Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.”

On todays show you are going to hear an interview with Martha Myers from CARE International. For 14 years, CARE has been implementing programs in Palestinian communities in agriculture and natural resources, economic development, education, emergency relief, health, water and sanitation and civil society strengthening.  Meyers spoke to us from Jerusalem, but CARE has a lot of their staff in Gaza.  Staff members have been sending blog entries to CARE and we've republished one of the most moving below. More to come, we hope!

Care Project Manager Jawad Harb writes:

While the Gaza strip is currently facing some of the toughest challenges in the Palestinian territories, I’m writing my own very personal story. But it is also the story of 1.6 million Palestinians living in Gaza.

The 28th of December, 2008, was a day to remember. It was 4:30 p.m. I was sitting with my six kids at my house which is 500 metres away from the Egyptian border. The darkness was surrounding us like a monster, and a few candles were lighting our path to the kitchen and bathroom. It was a moonless night, full of unpredictable, unknown fear. I was telling my kids stories to distract them, when suddenly it was like an earthquake - six consecutive air strikes shook the house up and down. The house was like a piece of paper swinging in the air. The kids were screaming, running in all directions, seeking to escape the chaos of the airstrikes. It was uncontrollable panic every where. What made the situation more complicated was the screaming of kids all over the quarter. It was the only thing you could hear after the airstrikes. All the children in the neighbourhood ran downstairs to the main road, crying and screaming in such away I have never witnessed in my whole life. The street was full of parents trying to find their kids and bring them back home. Among this chaos, I barely gathered my own children and went back home.

We sat again in darkness and I started talking to them again in an effort to calm them down. Yazan, my 12-year-old son suddenly asked, "Dad, are we ever going to live in peace again? I like to climb, I like to swing like a monkey, and I like to fly like a bird. Why can’t we play like those children we watch in kids’ TV programs every day?"

A burning teardrop rolled down on my face, and all of a sudden, I was not able to say a word.

Yazan continued, "Isn’t it Christmas holiday now dad? Are we not supposed to have a party and eat some cake?"

As I was trying to answer him, another air strike shook the house again, and this time all of my kids snuggled to me like small birds. My body was grabbed by small hands everywhere, and I wished, at that moment, that I had ten hands to hug them all, because this was exactly what they needed.

The last thing I said to them, with pain: "This is temporary." My 16 year-old-daughter replied, "Dad, yes, it is temporary forever."

Posted here.