The 2015 Year in Secular Perspective Blogs

by Gary Berg-Cross

2015 was a diverse year with many issues, some ups and more seemingly downward trends.  In between, as they say there were some learning situations and perhaps some insights. On this Secular Perspective site we had range of topics posted which offers its own perspective.  In case you missed it here are some of the top ones from our volunteer posters. Edd Doerr, president of Americans for Religious Liberty, provided the first 6 or so on some of his favorite issues.

10. Aborting Aristotle  Edd Doerr’s review of a book by  Dave Sterrett had over 200 readers.  He found it an “odd little opus” with an “ anti-abortion screed extruded by an evangelical publisher and concocted by a youngish Southern Evangelical Seminary grad who evidently dwells in a rickety Ivory Tower somewhere in the Twilight Zone beyond Cloud Nine.”

9. Edd Doerr  also had A brief comment on "Zombies of 2016"

Based on Paul Krugman’s column in the April 24 NY Times, that  choped up Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and other Repubs who would like to infest the White House.

8. Edd Doerr also provided a Review of Liberty’s First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech

Freedom of speech, press, assembly and petition, like religious freedom  and church-state  separation, were/are intended to be protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution. However, in 1798, less than a decade after the Bill of Rights was adopted, the Federalist controlled Congress and President John Adams enacted the Sedition Act, which was immediately used to prosecute/persecute the slightest printed or spoken utterance that annoyed the Federalist establishment.

7. Edd published several on vouchers including, “The unpopularity of vouchers” which discussed the DC situation with the Congress and the Obama administration on the wrong side of the issue.   “Despite the council’s objections, Congress seems determined to continue D.C. school vouchers”

6. School Choice Works, Privatization Won't noted the importance of knowing  where the candidates stand on important issues like improving public education.

5. Edd’s Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools? Had over 300 readings and give a 5 star rating to a book by Mercedes K. Schneideron the controversial “Common Core State Standards” system.  The “Core” was largely pushed by big-money entrepreneurs and so-called “reformers” with little actual connection to teaching, including such conservative school-voucher-promoting outfits as the Fordham Institute.

4. I authored the next three mostly popular starting with the seasonal Channeling  Robert Ingersoll for Thanksgiving which had over 300 views.  It excerpted Robert Ingersoll’s 1897 , “Thanksgiving Sermon.” Turning from the divine he instead asked who should be thanked.  He found real groups of people - scientists, artists, statesmen, mothers, fathers, poets in contrast to religious organizations and their operatives.. He found plenty of things to be thankful for starting with the long rise from savagery to civilization.  

  

3. The trouble with Hanukkah? Had over 600 views since it was posted in Dec. based on a fact finding article on the Jewish Holiday.  The blog’s title is based on Tom Flynn’s more famous take on that bigger winter holiday in The Trouble with Christmas.

2. Also seasonally popular (>800 views) was my Sustained Seasonal Symbolic Struggles noting various symbolic struggles over words and associated values.
 such as Italian parents who were reportedly furious when a school canceled the "Christmas" concert with a winter recital.

1.  By far our most popular blog was by Matt Goldstein whose recent Can leftism be saved from Jeff Sparrow?  Had over 1000 views since published on Dec. 6^th. Matt notes that the Guardian newspaper’s Jeff Sparrow has been on the attack against New Atheism for some time. Matt rebuts Jeff’s latest salvo We Can Save Atheism From the New Atheists which begins with the question "Why are the New Atheists such jerks?". The provided explanation for the New Atheist's "dickishness" is "anti-Muslim bigotry" and "paranoid, racist shit". Matt sides with Chris Hitchens & Sam Harris’ idea that, "All religions are bad but some religions – especially those in the Middle East, by sheer coincidence! – are worse than others." 

Matt proposes that “What we really need is to save liberalism from bigoted regressive leftist dickish know-it-all jerks like Jeff Sparrow.”

Happy New year all, from one of the editors of Secular Perspectives.

Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?

Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?, by Mercedes K. Schneider. Teachers College Press, 2015, 245 pp,  $29.95 was reviewed by Edd Doerr.

A “common core” of K-12 education in math and reading sounds like a good idea on the  surface, given the complexity and mobility of our society, but the controversial “Common Core State Standards” system (Common Core or CCSS for short) that started off late during the Bush administration is nothing so simple. Mercedes  Schneider, a veteran public school teacher and author of the important 2014 book, A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education  (which  I reviewed in Voice of Reason No. 128 at Arlinc.org), traces the development and “selling” of Common Core in this well-researched, carefully documented report on the who, how and why of this  little understood movement in the schools that serve nearly 90% of our nation’s kids. This book is essential to understanding what is happening in American public education today.

Now, to get to the heart of the matter, let’s all too briefly summarize Schneider’s opus, quoting the author. “CCSS is a hurriedly produced product intended to impose high-stakes outcomes onto those without power over it. In general, CCSS is not owned and valued by those  required to institute it – current American public school teachers and administrators nationwide. This alone makes CCSS destined to fail.” Common Core grew out of George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind,” with its “dependence on high-stakes testing outcomes to ‘prove’ that education was occurring – or else.” CCSS was largely pushed by big-money entrepreneurs and so-called “reformers” with little actual connection to teaching, including such conservative school-voucher-promoting outfits as the Fordham Institute,  headed by one Chester Finn, appointed in 2015 to the Maryland state board of education by Republican governor Larry Hogan. (Years ago Finn was a speaker at a Catholic University conference on vouchers; I was there and heard him declare that he was “ashamed to be a Jew” because the main Jewish organizations opposed vouchers; a prominent rabbi in the audience responded appropriately.)

Schneider explains that two groups, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, got “their unsuspecting state education systems” to commit to “what would be a set of inflexible standards tied to punitive assessments,” a set-up that “did not emerge from teacher practitioners and other education stakeholders.” And all this before the CCSS had actually been created. She shows that the CCSS was never field-tested before being foisted on the states by the federal government.  She concludes that “In the name of educating children, profitability assumed center stage – an exploitation that is indeed tragic for its corporate-serving end.” Then: “Those who love and respect the locally controlled American classroom  -- and resist its takeover by profiteers or by right-minded but misguided nonprofits who, for funds received, must produce studies, plans, influence, and results – need not despair.”

Schneider’s conclusions are worth citing. “We  need to put an end to policies and programs that betray our vulnerability for worshipping standardized test scores. Test-centric education allows for incredible scapegoating and profiteering even as it bankrupts our children’s education experience.” And: “A second lesson is that CCSS is principally the creation of those outside of the K-12 classroom. . . . There was no piloting of CCSS, and this incredible oversight continues to be excused by CCSS promoters. . . . [It] reduces public education to a dollar sign.”

The emphasis on endless testing in just two subjects tends to stifle other subjects, such as social studies, the arts, phys ed, languages, etc. Note that the respected 2015 Gallup education poll showed that fully 67% of Americans polled agree.

A short review  cannot do justice to this powerful, important, 5-star book. It needs to be purchased and read by everyone who cares about the future of education in our country.

For a 2014  interview with Mercedes K. Schneider see 

Bill Gates and the Push to Privatize Public Education