George Carlin Way

From DNAinfo:

MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS — Comedians, celebrities, relatives and fans of legendary comedian George Carlin gathered Wednesday to commemorate him with a new street sign at the corner of Morningside Drive and West 121st Street.

Gilbert Gottfried, Judah Friedlander, Robert Klein, Rain Pryor, Rick Overton, and Lizz Winstead were among the celebrity comedians who showed up to honor Carlin. His daughter and only child, Kelly Carlin, officiated the ceremony for "George Carlin Way," with speakers alternating between joke and tears.

It was a moment three years in the making, said comedian Kevin Bartini, who made it his mission to get a secondary street sign with Carlin's name placed on 121st Street, where the outspoken comedian grew up.

Carlin died in 2008 at the age of 71.

My introduction to George Carlin was "Class Clown." 

I was eleven.

I haven't thought the same way about the Catholic Church, the Vietnam War, the English language or the United States of America since.

Common Core Texts Students Are Sure To Learn From

I left the following reply to a tweet by NYSED Commissioner John King:

@JohnKingNYSED My favorite CC$$ text? Meeting minutes from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Kids love 'em too!
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) July 19, 2014

It's not the first time I've taken this jab at King or other Common Core supporters when they talk about all the exciting reading teachers can have students do under the informational text-heavy Common Core Federal Standards.

And the reason why it's not the first time I've taken those jabs is because Common Core supporters actually listed Fed Views, the publication page of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, as recommended reading for the informational text category of the Common Core Federal Standards for 11th and 12th students.

Today I went over to Fed Views to see just what I could use for my 11th and 12th graders.

Here's what I found in the latest piece of writing posted, July 10, 2014:

John Fernald, senior research advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, states his views on the current economy and the outlook.

• The first-quarter decline in GDP was revised to be even steeper than previously announced. The new data indicate that health-care spending fell in the first quarter, in contrast to earlier estimates that showed an increase. Nevertheless, the first-quarter dip appears transitory. In addition to the anomalous decline in health spending, other temporary factors include harsh weather in much of the country, a reduced pace of inventory accumulation by businesses, and weak net exports.
• We expect growth to bounce back over the remainder of this year and next. Indeed, available data already suggest a second-quarter rebound. For example, business surveys show an ongoing healthy expansion in the manufacturing and services sectors. Also, light-vehicle sales in June reached their highest level since 2006.
• The labor market report for June was strong—consistent with an economy that continues to improve. Employment gains have been solid in recent months, averaging 231,000 new jobs per month so far this year. The unemployment rate in June fell to 6.1%, the lowest level since September 2008. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate remains above our estimate of the natural rate, suggesting that economic slack remains.
• Inflation has been running well below the Federal Reserve’s 2% objective. In recent months, inflation has run closer to the objective, in part reflecting higher food and energy prices. However, underlying inflation pressures still appear to be subdued. Hence, we expect only a gradual return to a sustained 2% inflation rate as the economy continues its recovery and slack diminishes.
• A recovering economy has prompted a steady reduction this year in the pace of monthly asset purchases by the Federal Reserve. Nevertheless, with persistent economic slack and low inflation, monetary policy remains highly accommodative. 
• Labor productivity, or inflation-adjusted output per hour worked, is an important factor underpinning the sustainable speed limit for the economy. From the early 1970s through 1995, productivity in the business sector rose only about 1½% per year. In the next eight years, through 2003, that pace more than doubled. Considerable evidence links that acceleration to the production and use of information technology (IT). However, over the past decade, productivity growth has returned to roughly its pre-1995 pace of about 1½%.
• The early-2000s slowdown in productivity growth predated the Great Recession of 2007–09. Hence, it does not appear related to financial or other disruptions associated with the recession. Rather, it appears to mark a pause—if not the end—of exceptional productivity growth associated with IT. Many transformative IT-related innovations showed up in the productivity statistics in the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s. Over the past decade, however, the gains may have become more incremental. 
• Productivity also fluctuates around its trend, with many of the most pronounced movements around recessions. For example, productivity growth was weak relative to trend early in the Great Recession. At the end of the recession and early in the recovery, productivity rebounded sharply. 
• An important reason for these short-run cyclical fluctuations in productivity is variation in the intensity with which firms use capital and labor. For example, when the economy goes into recession and firms see a reduction in demand, they may want to maintain much of their existing workforce if they believe the reduced demand is temporary. In that case, firms may have a larger workforce than is ideal from a short-term perspective, and so measured productivity falls. When demand recovers, firms have excess capacity and can quickly ramp up production without needing substantial investment or hiring. 
• Over the period of a decade, these short-term cyclical movements are probably not a key factor explaining weak productivity growth. Measures of capacity utilization, for example, are close to where they were a decade ago.
• Since 2007, hours worked in the business sector have declined. Fewer hours combined with slow trend productivity growth means that output growth in the business sector has been very slow relative to the previous 60 years. As the economy continues its recovery, hours worked are likely to rise. But, with population growth slowing, future increases are likely to be muted relative to the historical experience since World War II. Assuming productivity growth continues at a pace similar to the past decade, output growth will remain slow relative to its historical performance.
• Uncertainty about future productivity growth remains high. Pessimists argue that IT is less important than great innovations of the past that dramatically boosted productivity, such as electricity or the internal combustion engine. Optimists point to the possibilities offered by robots and machine learning. Economic history suggests that it is hard to know until after the fact how revolutionary any particular innovation will turn out to be.

Now if you're an economics teacher, there might be something useful from Fed Views, but I see not much of use for me as an ELA teacher.

Washington Post reporter Lyndsey Layton reported that the architects of the Common Core also recommended students read some government studies:

Proponents of the new standards, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, say U.S. students have suffered from a diet of easy reading and lack the ability to digest complex nonfiction, including studies, reports and primary documents. That has left too many students unprepared for the rigors of college and demands of the workplace, experts say.

The new standards, which are slowly rolling out now and will be in place by 2014, require that nonfiction texts represent 50 percent of reading assignments in elementary schools, and the requirement grows to 70 percent by grade 12.

Among the suggested non­fiction pieces for high school juniors and seniors are Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” “FedViews,” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2009) and “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” published by the General Services Administration.

Here's a little bit “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” for your reading enjoyment:

Executive Order (EO) 13423, "Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management," was signed by President Bush on January 24, 2007. EO 13423 instructs Federal agencies to conduct their environmental, transportation, and energy-related activities under the law in support of their respective missions in an environmentally, economically and fiscally sound, integrated, continuously improving, efficient, and sustainable manner. The Order sets goals in the following areas:

energy efficiency acquisition renewable energy toxic chemical reduction recycling

sustainable buildings electronics stewardship fleets water conservation

E.O. 13423 rescinds several previous EOs, including E.O. 13101, E.O. 13123, E.O. 13134, E.O. 13148, and E.O. 13149. In addition, the order requires more widespread use of Environmental Management Systems (EMS) as the framework in which to manage and continually improve these sustainable practices. It is supplemented by implementing instructions, issued on March 29, 2007 by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).
OMB is also integral in the execution of E.O. 13423. The E.O. requires the OMB Director to issue instructions concerning periodic evaluation, budget matter, and acquisition relating to agency implementation of the E.O. OMB issues budget guidance through updates to Circular No. A-11. OMB will also continue to track agencies' progress on EO and EPACT goals through the three management scorecards on environmental stewardship, energy, and transportation.
Information relating to EO 13423 can be obtained through the following links below:

• Regulations, Guidance, and Policy
  • EO 13423
  • EO 13423 Implementing Instructions
  • EO 13423 Scorecards
  • Reporting Under EO 13423
• Supporting Information and Tools
  • Databases/Software Tools
  • Organizations/Programs
• Lessons Learned
  • EO 13423 Implementing Instruction Support
  • Priority Chemicals
  • Status Reports
• Training, Presentations, and Briefings
• Conferences and Events

CCSS architect David Coleman says the emphasis on informational text and non-fiction reading that Common Core pushes is not limited to just the ELA classroom - much of this reading can be done in math, science, social studies, physical education and CTE classes.

And certainly the two texts above do not lend themselves to ELA classrooms, that's for sure.

I can imagine the Fed Views site could have some use in an economics class and Executive Order (EO) 13423, "Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management" could be discussed in a science or sustainability class.

But the thing is, I'm not sure how useful these texts would be even in those classes.

These are the kinds of texts that best show how the Common Core Standards and many of the people who wrote them and push them fetishize difficult reading, complex language, and jargon often for what seems like their own sake.

This is silly to me.

The older I get, the simpler I like to keep things - including in the language that I speak and use to communicate.

My thinking is, life and communication are complex enough without adding to it by purposely using complex language and jargon.

That doesn't mean you can't ever use either - sometimes you need to use complex language or jargon to communicate something.

But more often than not complex language and jargon does more to obfuscate (sorry!) meaning rather than clarify it.

Whenever I'm writing something or thinking about something I want to teach in class, I ask myself "What would the two Georges think?"

By that, I mean George Orwell and George Carlin, two people who have been influential on my own thinking and teaching.

Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" has stuck with me since I first read it in, yes, high school - especially this part:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable.

Truth is, I'm guilty of sins on Rule (i) and Rule (iii) more than I would like - some of that is out of laziness, some of it out of sheer necessity (blogging half a dozen posts a day while holding down a full-time job sometimes requires letting go of perfection!)

But I try my best to subscribe to these rules as best I can as a writer and I don't go out of my way to look for reading material for classes based on the Lexile Framework or anything like that.

On the point of jargon, something that I have posted before is how much contempt I have for people in the education world who throw jargon around.

Let's be frank here - the education world is full of jargon lovers and cliche-meisters who really dig throwing this kind of language around:

across content areas
across spatial and temporal scales
across the curricular areas
across cognitive and affective domains
for high-performing seats
for our 21st Century learners
in authentic, "real world" scenarios
in closing the achievement gap
in data-driven schools
outside the box
throughout the Big Ideas
through cognitive disequilibrium
through the collaborative process
through the experiential based learning process
through the use of centers
throughout multiple modalities
via self-reflection
with a laser-like focus
within a balanced literacy program
within professional learning communities
within the core curriculum
within the new paradigm
within the Zone of Proximity
with synergistic effects

You can find that exact language - and much more of it - at the education jargon generator website that can help you too put together a combination of jargon and cliches that will amaze and terrify your friends and neighbors.

It seems to me that people often use jargon when they want to obscure meaning, want to fool people into thinking they know stuff they don't really know, or just generally do things without people actually understanding what it is they're doing.

George Carlin's work on language hits on this idea often, but I think this one gets at it best:




"Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins, it's as simple as that" - indeed, it is as simple as that.

And now that language is codified in the Common Core Federal Standards, those "higher" standards brought to us by David Coleman, Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Barack Obama and a host of other ed reformers.

Frankly, I think we could better raise the standards by taking Fed Views and Executive Order (EO) 13423, "Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management" off the CCSS reading list and putting some George Carlin - along with more George Orwell - on it.

Sure, the Lexile Framework might not like the "level" of the language (not complex enough!) and the jargon festishists might not like the absence of jargon (unless you consider the "Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say On TV" jargon), but I'll tell you what, I bet students would learn a whole hell of a lot more from Carlin and Orwell than the Federal Reserve Board of San Francisco and the General Services Administration.

The Ownership Class

Education Deform Comes To Catholic Schools

Vulture philanthropists aren't happy with deforming the public school system - they're taking aim at Roman Catholic schools too:

Private philanthropists have changed the face of public education over the last decade, underwriting the rise of charter schools and promoting remedies that rely heavily on student testing and teacher evaluation.

But with much less fanfare, wealthy donors have begun playing a parallel role in the country’s next-largest educational network: Roman Catholic schools.

In New York — as in Boston, Baltimore and Chicago — shrinking enrollment and rising school deficits in recent years have deepened the church’s dependence on its cadres of longtime benefactors. Donors have responded generously, but many who were once content to write checks and attend student pageants are now asking to see school budgets, student reading scores and principals’ job evaluations.

In the jargon of education reform, they want transparency and accountability; and though the church bureaucracy has resisted similar demands from other constituents in the past, the donors are getting pretty much what they want.

To the delight of some educators and the discomfort of others, major contributors have won a voice in decision-making at every level, from the staffing of the schools to the frank financial self-examination that has nudged the Archdiocese of New York toward the most severe school consolidation in its history. Church officials announced last month that falling enrollments and rising deficits would force them to close 27 schools, one-tenth of their total, by the end of this academic year.

“The relationship between the church and its contributors used to be basically, ‘Pray, pay and obey — give us money, we’ll take it from there,’ ” said Francis J. Butler, president of Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities, a national network of Catholic philanthropies. “But donors are much more proactive today. They are concerned about the quality of the schools, the leadership; they’re drilling down into these problems.”

At Our Lady Queen of Angels School in East Harlem, a Wall Street financier, Charles B. Durkin Jr., and a small group of fellow benefactors have donated a total of roughly $100,000 a year for about 15 years. Until about five years ago, the extent of their involvement was to visit several times each year and shake hands with grateful children, as Mr. Durkin, 72, did one recent morning.

Yet the next day, Mr. Durkin followed up with a long working meeting, poring over test scores and talking with the principal about the progress she was making with the students. When they were done, the two agreed that teachers might need some coaching in math instruction — and Mr. Durkin agreed to pay for it.

...

Historically, parochial schools have fared slightly better in standardized tests than public schools, partly because as private institutions they are not bound by law to take all comers, as public schools are.

But the effort to bring charter-school standards of accountability to a system once dominated by parish priests and their staffs has created some tensions between patrons and school administrators. At one school in the Bronx, a principal wanted to spend a donor’s money on a gym, which he considered crucial to attracting new students, while the donor wanted to stock a new library. The school got the library, but closed soon afterward because of declining enrollment.

Standardized testing, Common Core, benchmarks, data points, SMART goals and all the other jive ass corporate stuff brought to the public schools now coming to the Catholic schools.

I wonder what George Carlin would say about this?

War In Afghanistan - Obama Assassination Squad Edition

President Obama has doubled down on the war in Afghanistan, saying in December of 2009 that

"Afghanistan is not lost, but for several years it has moved backwards," the president said. "There is no imminent threat of the government being overthrown, but the Taliban has gained momentum. Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe-havens along the border....In short: the status quo is not sustainable."

(SIDENOTE: If you substitute "public schools" for Afghanistan and "teachers unions" for "Taliban" and "Al Qaeda", the ed deform rhetoric he uses is interchangeable boilerplate from the war rhetoric.)

Obama hasn't been as unrealistic in his public assessments of the conditions in Afghanistan as Bush was in his public assessments of the war in Iraq, but we learned last night from leaked documents published in the NY Times, the Guardian, and Der Speigal that both the Bush and the Obama administrations have been involved in some major deceptions about the war.

To wit:

A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.

The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.

The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

...

The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:

• The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

• Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.

• The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.

• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.

Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements — attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.

Wow - there's some change we can believe in here in these documents.

Obama has stepped up assassination squads that target insurgent leaders but, oops, sometimes kill the wrong (i.e., innocent) people.

Oh, well, it's all for the good.

What's a couple of hundreds innocent murders a week when we're talking about being all big and manly and strutting and showing how tough we are in the conduct of this war.

Except that of course none of this shit is working.

None of it.

And we will leave this country just the way the Russians left it before - with billions spent, hundreds of thousands of innocents dead, thousands of soldiers injured, maimed or dead, and the place still a mess.

I hate to keep coming back to the Obama education policy, but the comparison is apt.

President Accountability hits on a strategy and will brook no dissent from his viewpoint.

He's like that with education.

Only firing teachers, firing principals, closing schools and reopening them as for-profit charters will fix the ills of the system.

To adapt an LBJ/Nixon era saying to the current situation, we must destroy the public education system in order to save it.

And Obama has the same stubborn strategy for the war in Afghanistan.

He thinks the war is winnable, so it's winnable.

Who cares how long it takes or what it costs or how many people die...

But it's clear from these documents - and the group that leaked them, WikiLeaks, says more are coming soon - that the war is NOT going well, that to WIN this war (whatever win means) will take another ten years and lots more cash and lives.

And to what end? The Taliban and Al Qaeda operate with impunity in Pakistan, so if Obama is doing this because he's going after Bin Laden ("Dead or Alive," Barack?) or he thinks he can permanently diminish the power of the Taliban, try moving the fucking war to Pakistan.

Nope, I don't think he's got such rational reasons for the way he has doubled down on the war with very Bush-like actions (i.e., assassination squads, lying about the actions of "our Afghanis," etc.)

No, I think this war comes down to another example of the BIGGER DICK FOREIGN POLICY in action, as elucidated by George Carlin:



That video of Carlin is old, but it remains as important and accurate an assessment of Obama's foreign policy today as it was of Daddy Bush's conduct of the Persian Gulf war in the 90's, Clinton's various little wars, and Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Change we can believe in?

Nope - just more lying bullshit from an asshole president/war criminal who conducts assassination squads in secret, covers up the real state of the war (and the war crimes the U.S. is engaging in to "win" it) and pursues an unwinnable war for his own egomaniacal ends.

George Carlin on Business Ethics and Businessmen

Here's George Carlin on the history of bullshit in this country, especially as it relates to businessmen.

I think given the preponderance of businessmen running education reform/public education these days, this bit of tape from 1988 is required viewing.

You know, no one called bullshit like George Carlin.

No one.

It's a shame he's gone, because there is even more bullshit to call these days.