Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Wetsuit optional.

Also, too.

This Blog Goes to 11…

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

The Math Demands It!

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

Just a few bad apples.

This is a big f—–g deal.

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

Too inconsequential to be sued

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

How has Obama failed you today?

Lighten up, Francis.

Women: They Get Shit Done

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

We still have time to mess this up!

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Han shot first.

Verified, but limited!

I personally stopped the public option…

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Education

Bernie’s Right

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Because of horrible mismanagement, the Rochester City Schools are facing a huge budget shortfall and are laying off teachers to balance their budget. We live in a rich state where the right answer to this problem would be legislation to close the $65 million shortfall along with some kind of oversight by an outside board of management. Instead, we’re going to take a bunch of kids who haven’t had the best start in life and fuck them over.

I hope the other candidates will say something about this–it’s a tragedy.

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: YES QUEEN!

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And too also:


“Wanna find out if I still have those ball bats in my office, boys?”

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Some Context on the Naval Air Station Pensacola Shooting

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Some Context on the Naval Air Station Pensacola Shooting

NBC/MSNBC is now reporting that the shooter at Naval Air Station (NAS) Pensacola is a Saudi national. Which will, of course, turn a tragedy into an absolute shitshow.

I wanted to just take a moment and provide some context here for our readers and commenters who don’t have a lot of exposure to the US military education system. The US military education system, referred to as Professional Military Education (PME), governs how we prepare the force across all three cohorts (officer, enlisted, and warrant) and across the scope of one’s career in the military. At the Joint level – encompassing all four services – the controlling instructions can be found in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction (CJCSI) 1800.01E, better known as the OPMEP (Officers Professional Military Education Policy and CJCSI 1805.0B, the Enlisted Professional Military Education Policy referred to as the EPMEP. Each Service has their own Service specific guidelines and policies, which are further broken down by branch, military occupation specialty, and/or functional area and are supposed to be nested within the Joint policies. US military personnel spend significant parts of their careers, no matter how long or short, in the schoolhouse or training center. A significant part of generating the force is educating them, training them, and running them through exercises as experiential learning. We’re also supposed to be encouraging them to do individual self development, but that usually gets lip service rather than incentivized. Overall, PME is something the military really does well – it invests in educating and training and then continuing to educate and train the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines throughout the course of their career arcs. This is largely a function of scale as the force, across all the Services, is large enough to have significant portions in the schoolhouse or in training without compromising readiness or operational capability.

Part of US PME includes multinational training. There are several reasons for this. One is that the US military is intended to operate within a JIIM – Joint, Interagency, Intergovernmental, and Multinational – environment. So we want our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines exposed to our allies and partners through PME, as well as operationally. But we also want our allies and partners military personnel to be exposed to how we prepare our forces and how we operate. And this means that large numbers of foreign nation military personnel are in the US attending PME programs alongside our own forces. Another reason for doing this, especially at the higher education levels (Senior Leader Colleges/War College, strategist schools, Command & General Staff Schools, and, in some cases even at the Service academies), is to try to socialize these foreign military personnel to US Civil-Military (CIV-MIL) norms. It is also to have personnel from opposing sides of conflicts have to learn and socialize together across their careers. The goals here are aspirational. That these foreign officers, especially from states without strong, or even any, liberal democratic systems will internalize some of our CIV-MIL norms, take them home, and when they’re senior enough actually put them into effect if the opportunity presents itself. It is also to create and foster relationships and friendships that survive the course of study, so that if a conflict looks like it will break out, potential adversaries might call their former classmates and try to deescalate. Like I said, very aspirational. Also, somewhat quintessentially American.

Almost all of these foreign military personnel attending US military PME are covered under the International Military Engagement and Training (IMET) Program. The who, what, and why of IMET are:

Purpose:

The goals of IMET are to:

Train future leaders

Create a better understanding of the United States

Establish a rapport between the U.S. military and the country’s military to build alliances for the future

Enhance interoperability and capabilities for joint operation

Focus on professional military education

Allow countries to use their national funds to receive a reduced cost for other DoD education and training

Provide English Language Training assistance

Who:

Secretary of State determines which countries will have programs.  Secretary of Defense executes the program.

Funding:

Annual appropriation

The now identified shooter at NAS-Pensacola as a Saudi national was most likely in training there under the IMET program as a pilot. And that’s how a Saudi national would most likely be assigned to Naval Air Station Pensacola. The foreign nationals in the IMET program are usually selected by their own countries and there are usually no significant problems as they’re vetted by both their own governments and by the US military. But like everything else involving humans, you do get the occasional issue, though usually nothing like what happened this morning. Sometimes a coup or other change of government will happen and we’ll have foreign military personnel as students that can’t really go home because they were sent by the previous regime and they and their families’ lives are at risk. Sometimes you just get a knucklehead. My second year at USAWC, one of the foreign officers in the resident course got himself into a serious gambling problem, went AWOL trying to run for the Canadian border, got picked up by law enforcement, and ultimately wound up escorted back to his own country by two senior law enforcement officials sent by his government to babysit him. The point here is that these aren’t really problems with the IMET program itself, they’re individual problems that arise because the people in the program are humans. And humans do all sorts of stupid things.

I expect that regardless of the actual motivations of the shooter in Pensacola this morning, this will provide further fodder for the neo-nationalists and neo-fascists that have been able to capture the US’s immigration system under the current administration. What is most likely a tragedy in human terms will be capitalized on by a bunch of xenophobic, racist, white supremacists to push their agenda of whitening America as quickly as possible. And, like everything else that gets in the way of achieving their goals, the IMET program is likely to be in for a rough time as a result of this morning’s shooting. Which is a shame, because it is an excellent program that, while aspirational in a lot of its goals, provides real value for the US, its allies, and its partners.

Two final notes:

  1. Firearms are not authorized on Naval Air Station-Pensacola, or any other base, with a couple of exceptions. Military Police, Shore Patrol, and DOD and Service Police are armed as part of their duty assignments. All other Service issued arms are secured in an arms room/armory and can only be checked out for a legitimate training reason and under the supervision of an Armory Officer/Armorer. Those personnel residing on post are allowed to register their personal arms with the Provost Marshal on post. Those arms are also secured in an arms room/armory and can only be checked out under the supervision of an Armory Officer/Armorer. They must be unloaded and secured in locked containers when this is done. We don’t know how the shooter got his firearm on to post this morning, so beware of speculation about how this happened. I have some thoughts, but I’m not going to speculate at this time.
  2. There is always a spike in homicides, especially domestic/familial/intimate partner and workplace homicides, as well as suicides during the holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Years. This happens every year. There is a robust criminological, sociological, and psychological literature trying to understand and explain it. But it is a very real effect. So expect to see increased incidences of violence between now and the first week of January 2020.

Open thread!

Full disclosure: During my four years assigned as the Cultural Advisor at USAWC I directly supervised as the faculty advisor (frontline supervisor) five foreign officers. I also directly supervised as the research advisor (equivalent to a thesis advisor) ten foreign officers. And I served as the faculty sponsor of two foreign officers. These officers ranged in rank from lieutenant colonel to major general.

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Election 2020 Open Thread: We Can’t Have Nice Things, Because Some People Don’t Deserve Them

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Mayo(r) Pete, having decided that ‘sensible moderate’ is the best lane for him right now, scores an own goal. (He’s the son of two college professors; he knows perfectly well how financial aid programs work — or don’t.) It was over a holiday weekend, so only the politically obsessed paid attention, but boy howdy did they pay attention:


(But it would be a bonanza for the financial-aid prep/certification industry!)


It’s (comparatively) early days, yet; maybe Buttigieg will learn something from this.

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Open Thread – Forgiving Student Loans

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Putting a lot more money in the hands of people who would spend it would boost the economy, economists say. Duh.

I am not an economist, but it has long seemed to me that if you ended student loan payments, folks could use that money to buy houses, cars, and other consumer goods. Maybe even avocado toast! The NPR article I linked is the first time I’ve seen the media explore that idea.

According to Pew,

  • About one-third of adults under age 30 have student loan debt.
  • In 2016, the amount students owed varied widely, especially by degree attained.
  • Young college graduates with student loans are more likely than those without loans to report struggling financially.
  • Young college graduates with student loans are more likely to live in a higher-income family than those without a bachelor’s degree.
  • Compared with young adults who don’t have student debt, student loan holders are less upbeat about the value of their degree.

The last two points amount to “A college degree leads to higher earnings, but college graduates who have student debt are bummed out about it.” More detail at the Pew link.

Back in May, a majority of voters opposed making college free and forgiving student debt. Now a majority is in favor. People need time to think things over.

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Excellent Read: “My Education in the Patriarchy”

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Wrong time of day to run this, but there’s too damned much breaking news around. A reminder that Gary Wills remains an excellent political commentor as well as an astute writer… and that the New York Review of Books deserves to be more widely read:

In 1962, I began teaching ancient Greek in the graduate school of the Johns Hopkins University. I was twenty-seven and looked younger, and some of my graduate students were almost as old and looked older, so I tried to adopt the manner of a Hopkins “Herr Doktor Professor,” hoping that would give me some authority in the classroom. In my first course, which was on Homer’s Iliad, an argumentative student kept up a disagreement on one Homeric point. When I could not convince her of my position, I huffily quoted Dr. Johnson to her: “I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”

When I told my wife, Natalie, about that day’s class, she was shocked. I had used my position to humiliate a student who was just trying to get to the truth. When I told her the student was a woman (the sole woman student I had amid that hostile university atmosphere of 1962—undergraduate “co-eds” would not be admitted to Hopkins for another eight years), Natalie was distressed. I was not only humiliating a student but bullying her. She asked how I would feel if that happened to our then one-year-old daughter, Lydia, when she went to college. After being put in my place by Natalie, I tried to stay there (it is very helpful to marry someone smarter than yourself).

Even after that correction, I was ill-equipped to cope with the presence of women in a university. There were none in my classes when I was a graduate student at Yale, where they would not be admitted as undergraduates until six years after I got my doctorate. The fact that there was a woman in my graduate class at Hopkins was an oddity, as it would have been at many of the major universities in America…

But our day at Hopkins was not much better than Gildersleeve’s. Though I kept the respect instilled by my wife for the one woman in my class, I did not appreciate the effort that student had had to make just to get there. I learned a little about that at my first faculty meeting to allot fellowship money to applicants for the department. When the résumé came up of a woman who clearly merited admission, our archaeologist, John Young, said that no fellowship money should be given to her. “That is just throwing away money that should be saved for those who will advance the profession. Why give money to a woman who, as soon as she becomes pregnant, will drop the profession and start taking care of her babies?” Young was no shining star of the classics world himself, and I would find over the years that some of the people most intent on showing that women could not meet high standards had barely met those standards themselves, if at all. Yet I did not argue with Young. Since I knew that the head of our small department was with him on this, I went along with the policy. No woman received any money over the six years I was in the department.

I knew that opposing the admission of women to protect the standards of the classics profession was a phony argument. I had come to Hopkins from the inaugural year of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, where I was part of the first class of six junior fellows (young scholars of promise given time off from teaching to develop their research). There were three fellows from America and three from abroad—one from Germany, one from England, one from Italy. The Italian, and our lone woman, was Anna Morpurgo. She was the youngest and clearly the brightest of us. She knew more languages than we did and knew them better…

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Striving to Be Better

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******
It was a (small, but not to me) Pell grant that enabled me to attend an out-of-state college. I understand that Pell grants have changed, not for the better, in the almost 40 years since then, but this still seems like a worthy idea:

Judging from my experience (and that of some of my classmates), grants targeted this way would also be useful to graduates hoping to return to their ‘decaying’ rust-belt post-industrial hometowns, or those ‘forgotten’ ex-coal-mining or Midwestern family-farm hamlets. You know, the sacred haunts of the White Working Class!

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Small Consolations Open Thread (Russia Edition)

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At least Betsy deVos hasn’t been responsible for any Amway-branded outbreaks of dysentery in America’s charter schools… that we know of. Yet:

… Yaroslav was one of 127 children aged 3 to 7 who were diagnosed with dysentery after eating food at seven state-run day care centers and kindergartens in Moscow in mid-December.

While reports of dysentery are not new in Russia, they mostly have struck provincial areas far from the capital and in much smaller outbreaks. Even more unusual is that the catering firm blamed by opposition activists for the outbreak at six of the seven Moscow sites is owned by businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin.

Prigozhin, who has won $2 billion in contracts for supplying food to Moscow schools since 2009, built an empire on catering and maintenance contracts for the army and has been nicknamed “Putin’s chef” for serving Kremlin functions. He also has been reported to run a private military company known as Wagner that sends Russian contractors to Syria and other countries.

The magnate was among the Russians indicted last year by a U.S. grand jury in the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, alleging he funded the internet trolls involved in interfering with the U.S. presidential election in 2016. The U.S. also imposed sanctions on Prigozhin and two of his companies, Concord Catering and Concord Management and Consulting. Prigozhin has denied any involvement, and Putin said last year that while he knew the businessman, he “doesn’t count him” among his friends.[*]

Prigozhin’s company has denied it is to blame for the dysentery outbreak. The cases have caused an outcry, thanks to a lawyer who has turned a spotlight on the caterers and has mounted a campaign to help the parents whose children fell ill…

The Federal Consumer Oversight Agency confirmed 127 cases of dysentery. At public hearings in March, the capital’s chief sanitary official, Yelena Andreyeva, denied early reports that blamed it on cottage cheese supplied by a company from southern Russia. Health and education officials would not say whether the outbreak would make them reconsider signing new contracts with Concord.

Six companies that are either directly owned by Prigozhin or affiliated with him have controlled almost all school and kindergarten catering in Moscow since 2011, providing prepared meals that can be reheated at school kitchens, according to public filings and the Spark-Interfax database…

Or, y’know, we could treat this as a warning of what happens when the Dear Leader’s cronies are allowed to turn government agencies into for-profit opportunities. Even if “science is a Democrat thing“.

[*] Seems like Prigozhin may have to be sacrificed for the good of the Russian-American Oligarchs Friendship Pact, but I’m no for-pol expert…

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TechBro’s Do Education

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And they do it poorly:

The seed of rebellion was planted in classrooms. It grew in kitchens and living rooms, in conversations between students and their parents.

It culminated when Collin Winter, 14, an eighth grader in McPherson, Kan., joined a classroom walkout in January. In the nearby town of Wellington, high schoolers staged a sit-in. Their parents organized in living rooms, at churches and in the back of machine repair shops. They showed up en masse to school board meetings. In neighborhoods with no political yard signs, homemade signs with dark red slash marks suddenly popped up.

Silicon Valley had come to small-town Kansas schools — and it was not going well.

“I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I’m not doing it anymore,” said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington.

Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-based platform and curriculum from Summit Learning. The Silicon Valley-based program promotes an educational approach called “personalized learning,” which uses online tools to customize education. The platform that Summit provides was developed by Facebook engineers. It is funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician.

It’s almost like teachers have something to offer students beyond just wikipedia searches and that hundreds of years of pedagogical research actually has been important. If there is a group of people who work harder with less respect yet contribute more that is unappreciated than public school teachers, I have no idea who it is. Not to mention, they put up with your annoying fucking kids every day, something you breeders can’t even stand.

This is not about education, btw. It’s about money. It’s always about fucking money with these guys. Oh, and ALEC is involved, because of course they are.

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Title inflation and male privilege

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This tweet below is a fairly common experience:

I have seen this behavior a lot. Right now, most of the work groups I’m on have a female Ph.D or MD as the primary investigator and team lead. It is not uncommon for them to be referred to as Ms. Doe while all the guys are referred to as Dr. Smith.

I get a massive amount of title inflation. My highest degree of training is a master’s degree and then an ungodly amount of on the job training and exploration. At this point in my life, going back for a doctorate does not make a ton of sense at this time. A doctorate might be something I do once the kids are in college but the current opportunity cost is higher than the benefit.

I talk with the press a lot. I talk with policy analysts frequently. I am a resource for Duke students, staff and faculty to talk about the arcane and obscure aspects of the Affordable Care Act (Silver Loading and Medical Loss Ratios for the win!) and more broadly insurance questions. I get a reasonable number of cold requests depending on the news, policy and semester cycles. /

If I am getting a cold e-mail from someone who is trying to set up a conversation about something I know something about, there is an even chance the greeting is Mr. Anderson. Most of the inaccuracies are for Dr. Anderson or Professor Anderson.

I get a massive amount of title inflation for something that I have not earned. I get that because I’m a white guy who writes with big words and arcane subjects. I benefit from this credential inflation. I always correct as Mr. Anderson whenever I’m referred to as Doctor or Professor as I have not earned those titles, but I don’t know how to change this situation so the table is not as inordinately tilted my way.

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GOP Horrorshow Open Thread: Cartoonishly Evil, If Only This Was A Cartoon

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She’s not running one step ahead of The Hague, like her brother Erik Prince, but don’t underestimate Betsy deVos’s capacity for raw power-thuggery.

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Status Admissions Open Thread: Easter Island Educational Institutions

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Opening up post-secondary education to aspiring youth of modest means (as with the land-grant college system) was one of the factors that enabled America’s prosperity boom in the late 1800s… which lead, tragically, to the first Gilded Age. The current retrofitting of our most prestigious educational institutions into ‘daycare centers for adolescents maturing enough to take their nepotism slot at daddy’s business’ is the equivalent of cutting down every tree on the islands to build giant totem figures. It’s good for the elite minority who improve their all-important social status, but not for the survival of society as a whole.

One must have a college degree to get a decent job today; and the value of a degree from one of the top colleges can be measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of one’s career. Getting the most ‘prestigious’ degree possible becomes a Red Queen’s Race…

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Kollege Admissions

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The WV Education Bill is Mostly Dead

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Dropped off Steve at the groomers, and on my way home, I picked up a dozen donuts , a dozen paczki, some apples, and a case of bottled water and dropped it off at the teacher strike. By the time I got home, the bill was mostly dead:

The West Virginia House of Delegates voted today to kill an education omnibus bill that would have provided a pay raise to teachers and school workers, but would also have opened the door to charter schools and private education savings accounts, among other measures opposed by teachers and school workers unions.

The House vote to kill the bill, officially a vote to postpone it “indefinitely,” was 53-45. A previous motion to delay consideration of the bill until 4 p.m. failed by the same margin.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

The Senate will need to learn that the House of Delegates is a co-equal branch of government, and learn to work with them rather than trying to just ram shit through. Additionally, it is worth remembering that what they were trying to do was to take the teacher pay raise that Justice promised last year, and add in a bunch of egregious nonsense, and force it through that way. However, it ain’t just over yet:

BREAKING NEWS: It’s been brought to our attention that Delegate Steele (R-Raleigh) switched his vote at the last minute even after giving a passionate speech against those who killed SB 451 with the Motion to Postpone Indefinitely. It appears the Republicans still have some tricks up their sleeve, because according to parliamentary procedure the Republicans could technically move to make a Motion to Reconsider the Motion to Postpone Indefinitely which would bring the motion back to the floor for another vote. Only Delegates who voted in favor of the winning motion can move to reconsider it. In a process full of dirty parliamentary procedure tricks, it appears we aren’t out of the woods quite yet. Ultimately, we don’t think they can flip enough votes to change the outcome, but it’s a possibility….

They’re sneaky and shameless. In the years before social media and cell phones, they would have gotten away with it.

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West Virginia Teacher Strike

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A work action has been initiated today in West Virginia, and all county schools (save one) are closed because of a really bad education bill that the Senate is trying to ram through:

A little less than a year since the start of West Virginia’s first statewide public school workers strike, leaders of the state’s three major school employee unions called Monday evening for another strike to begin, starting Tuesday, over the education overhaul bill.

All but one of West Virginia’s 54 countywide public school systems canceled school Tuesday. The outlier was Putnam County, which is among West Virginia’s wealthier counties and is near the state Capitol.

“We are taking action,” said Fred Albert, president of the West Virginia branch of the American Federation of Teachers union. “We are left no other choice, but, as of tomorrow, we are calling a statewide strike.”

He briefly referenced that he’s been told there’s support in the House of Delegates for a version of the bill that the unions oppose.

Long story short, the Republican led legislature in the state, which did not even mention “comprehensive education reform” as a legislative priority before the session started, has been up to their usual bullshit. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch Carmichael, who is as wingnutty as they come, was dead set on retribution for last year’s strike, so some heretofore relatively unknown Senator introduced a piece of ALEC written legislation with all sorts of nonsense, to include charter schools, union-busting, and a whole sort of stuff that had no chance in the House of Delegates.

The Senate, being the Senate, passed it anyway despite the fact that Republicans in the House said they hated it, the Republican governor said he would veto it as is, and virtually everyone who has ever worked in or works in education said the bill is horrible. It then went to the House of Delegates, which promptly stripped most of the crap (you can get a good look at the changes here) and passed it with a bipartisan majority. It was then sent back to the Senate.

Once back in the Senate, they promptly went back to putting all the crap back into it, including jacking up the number of charter schools, removing a provision that said legislators can not profit off charter schools, and reincluding measures to punish unions and prohibit striking. The Senate Republicans refused to allow the minority party to see the bill, and wanted to rush a vote for last night, but there was so much outrage that the votes were postponed until today. It’s a bad bill, but these are Republicans and don’t give a shit. My Senator, William Ihlenfeld (you might remember I volunteered for him and we fundraised for him) put it this way:

Last night, the comprehensive education reform bill was amended by a 18-16 vote and now will go back to the House of Delegates for consideration. Changes from the most recent House version include the increase of charter schools from 2 to 7 and putting ESAs back in after they had been removed. The amendment (130+ pages worth) was worked on all weekend by the majority without any input from the minority, and then provided to everyone 10 minutes before we were asked to vote. This is not how government is supposed to work but it is how the West Virginia Senate operates in 2019.

I voted against the Senate Amendment because of the expansion of the charter schools provision, the addition of ESAs, the uncertainty of what else was in the amendment (even the lead sponsor admitted she hadn’t read all of what was being proposed), the lack of real input from West Virginians, and the oversized influence from outside interests like ALEC and the the Koch brothers-funded Institute for Justice. We don’t need outsiders to tell us how to run our system of education in West Virginia but that’s what has happened with SB 451.

The House Version that was passed last week wasn’t perfect but it was much better than the mess of a bill that the Senate passed out originally. What the House sent back to us was a gift and Senate leadership should have accepted it and said thank you. Instead, they refused it, and added back in much of the garbage that the House had removed.

I’m hearing that the House of Delegates may have the votes to pass the Senate version but that the margin is very slim. I encourage you to contact your representatives to let them know how you feel. Make sure that your voice is heard as you may be able to persuade those who are on the fence.

If you are an educator and will be in Charleston today, please stop by my office in W-229 and say hello. If you need a place to put your jacket, charge your cell phone, or fuel up (I have lots of candy), my office is your office. I hope to see many of you today at the Capitol, and despite what the Putnam superintendent did, we are still #55Strong.

We’ll see what happens next. Now we have to watch as the legislature tries to ram through campus carry over the objection of every educator and educational establishment in the state.

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