Innehållsförteckning för Oct-13-14 från The Nation

Snail’s Pace
 Re Mychal Denzel Smith’s “The New Fight for Racial Justice” [Sept. 15]: It appears that the outcome of the civil rights movement has been to replace “Blacks not welcome” with “This is not about race.” TheDom
 * * * When Cops Kill
 I have lived in St. Louis all my life. What happened to Michael Brown is sad, and it’s even sadder that this is not unusual [“The Struggle Renewed,” Sept. 15]. Years ago, two unarmed young men were killed here by police officers in a fast-food parking lot. One is said to have jumped on the hood of the car and shot the driver fourteen times. No one was prosecuted.
 Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, who is in charge of the Brown investigation, will do all he can for…

Is the most powerful man in professional sports about to lose his $44 million-a-year job? That’s what the sports world is wondering following a month in which NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was exposed as an utterly insensitive, incompetent cover-up artist. Goodell has fumbled before—on the issue of head injuries—but this time he erred on the more sensitive and far-reaching issue of domestic violence.
 Goodell’s problems started over the summer when he suspended Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice for two games under the NFL’s personal-conduct policy following the star running back’s assault on his then-fiancée Janay Palmer (now Janay Rice). Video had emerged of Rice dragging an unconscious Janay from a casino elevator in Atlantic City, New Jersey. If Goodell had just suspended Rice for eight games at that point, all…

Here’s a great way to make a movement: have your most famous and powerful public figures obsess over Henry Higgins’s famous question, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Why aren’t they more into critical thinking, argument, logic? more rational? Why do they accuse a man of sexual harassment when he’s just trying to chat them up in an elevator at 4 in the morning? Why do they get drunk and then accuse men of rape? Then, having alienated a huge number of actual and potential members to whom you sound arrogant, vain, sexist and clueless, look around and wonder, Gee, where are the women? They must be even less rational than we thought!
 Atheism is having a moment. Rigid, reactionary Christianity may have captured the Republican Party,…

For as long as there have been teachers unions—and they date back to 1897—there have been tensions between them and other progressives committed to public education. In Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, settlement-house crusader Jane Addams thought teachers union leader Margaret Haley was wrong to resist tougher classroom evaluations. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson created the Teacher Corps, a sort of proto–Teach for America, over the objections of the National Education Association. But it wasn’t until the urban teacher strikes of the late 1960s and early ’70s—when unions opposed black and Hispanic community control in favor of job security for predominantly white teachers—that the unions became downright villains not only to anti-labor conservatives but, for the first time, to large segments of the American left.
 In the push…

In several cities throughout the country, there is a fierce conflict raging over the direction of education reform. At the center of this increasingly acrimonious debate is the question of whether or not charter schools—publicly funded schools that operate outside the rules (and often the control) of traditional public-school systems—should be allowed to proliferate. Given their steady growth (from no more than a handful twenty years ago to over 6,000 today), charter schools and their advocates appear to have the upper hand. A new bipartisan bill—the Expanding Opportunity Through Quality Charter Schools Act, sponsored by Republican senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Mark Kirk of Illinois, and Democratic senators Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Michael Bennet of Colorado—would provide new funds to launch, replicate and expand charter schools nationwide.
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This fall, New Orleans’s Recovery School District became the country’s first all-charter district, completing a process begun following Hurricane Katrina, when the Bush administration refused to pay for reopening public schools, instead providing $45 million for charter schools to take their place. While these schools are publicly funded, the local community has no control over their curriculum or quality because they are not overseen by any democratically elected school board.
 If corporate lobbyists have their way, the New Orleans model will be replicated across the country, with Netflix CEO and charter booster Reed Hastings leading the call to “get rid of school boards.”
 Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, a new type of segregation is spreading across the urban landscape. The US Chamber of Commerce, the American Legislative…

Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of New York City calling for climate justice on Sunday, September 21, in the largest mass protest to date against government and corporate inaction on the overheating of our planet. Organizers of the People’s Climate March said that
 2,646 demonstrations were held that day in 156 countries. “We said it would take everyone to change everything,” said Eddie Bautista, the executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, one of the groups that organized the march. “And everyone showed up.”
 At last transforming the “climate movement” into a “people’s movement,” the march boasted an unprecedented diversity, including many thousands of union members as well as representatives from indigenous peoples’ organizations, students, anti-poverty, family and faith groups—even a contingent of business…

Nation editors and contributors have been sweeping up the awards lately. Editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel won the 2014 Norman Mailer Prize for Magazine Publishing. The Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony, which sponsors the award, said, “Your work with The Nation has taken what was an important voice in the contemporary discourse and turned it into an indispensable one.” Vanden Heuvel also received an Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal Award, given to those who have made “a significant contribution to society in the arts, education, citizenship, philanthropy, community services, and other humanitarian concerns….” And vanden Heuvel and The Nation won the 2014 Champion in Activism Award from the Center for Community Change.
 Other winners include contributing writer Kai Wright, who received the 2014 Salute to Excellence award for investigative…

On the first day of the fall term, Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz began carrying a dorm mattress with her everywhere she went on campus. She says she will continue to do so for as long as she and the male student she says raped her both attend Columbia.
 This action, Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight, comes months after twenty-three Columbia students filed a Title IX complaint against the university, alleging the school discourages students from reporting sexual assault and inadequately sanctions perpetrators.
 In response to Mattress Performance, Columbia students have begun organizing collective carries of the mattress to support Sulkowicz and all survivors of sexual violence on campus. On September 12, students held a speak-out and rally, bringing with them mattresses as a show of solidarity.
 —Allie Rickard
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It has long been a central claim of those who call themselves school reformers that they are civil-rights crusaders challenging the status quo—as embodied by intransigent unions and bloated education bureaucracies—on behalf of people of color. The reform playbook has frequently included measures such as “parent trigger” bills that promise to empower parents in low-income minority communities over teachers and administrators at failing schools. Understandably, many parents grappling with inferior schools were initially intrigued by the promise of market reform. Decades of frustration gave way to the hope that “radical reform” might finally produce something better for their children. 
 But evidence of the reformers’ broken promises has quickly accumulated. In the past five years, more and more parents of color have come to realize that school closings do not…

The media have long been in search of a “miracle” school, a school that can succeed in turning poor children of color into academic superstars. Of course, there already are poor children of color who are academic superstars, but they’re the exception, not the rule (the same is true for poor white children). The defining characteristic of low test scores is poverty, not color. The titans of our society are especially interested in the pursuit of miracle schools because finding them would relieve those with high incomes of any obligation to alleviate the poverty that interferes with academic achievement.
 Today we have that very school—or chain of schools—in New York City: Success Academy. It was declared a success almost from the day it opened, back in 2006, as Harlem Success…

The first advertisement released by Bashar al-Assad during this year’s Syrian presidential election campaign was tagged with the slogan Sawa, or “Together.” It proved to be a misguided choice for a plebiscite marred by widespread ballot stuffing, choreographed pro-Assad celebrations outside the polling stations, and no votes cast by Syrians in rebel-held territories throughout the country. For the incumbent, who won an improbable 89 percent of the vote, the election was a way to demonstrate to friends and foes that he has the wherewithal to survive a civil war now in its third year, no matter the cost—which thus far includes some 190,000 deaths (a third of them civilians, according to the United Kingdom–based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights) and the devastation of much of the country’s economy and infrastructure.
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Charter-school advocates and others who claim the mantle of education reform have now seen their ideas put into practice in a number of areas—from high-stakes testing to digital learning to the takeover of “failing” public schools. The results are in. How are they doing? Suffice it to say, if this were a high-stakes test, they’d fail. 
 As the articles in this issue illustrate, the strategies pursued by education reformers frequently dovetail with those of austerity hawks. The latter burnish their conservative credentials by cutting budgets and defunding schools. The reformers sweep in to capitalize on the situation, introducing charter chains like Rocketship and K12, which produce real no benefits for students. The chains do, however, generate cash for investors—a new trove of public money directed to private coffers. The…

The war whoops of the pundit class helped propel the nation into yet another doomed military adventure in the Middle East. Ghastly beheadings by a newly discovered enemy were the frightening flashpoint. The president ordered bombers aloft, and US munitions were once again pounding battlefields in Iraq—and, at the time of this writing, in Syria. The president promised to “degrade and destroy” ISIS. Here we go again, I thought. This is how modern America goes to war. When the superpower Goliath is challenged by sudden savagery, it has no choice but to respond with brute force. Or so we are told. Otherwise, America would no longer be a convincing Goliath. 
 Citizens and members of the uniformed military are tired of war, but both in a sense are prisoners of…

Less than a year into its existence, The Nation debuted a column headlined “EDUCATIONAL.” The first installment, published on May 8, 1866, included a brief item considering “where the state should stop in its efforts to promote the instruction of the people, and where private schools or incorporated academies should be introduced.” 
 The Nation recommended a recent essay by the English poet Matthew Arnold: 
 “The writer combats in a very vigorous manner the theory which is often heard in the mouths of American, as well as of English, grumblers, that ‘the state mars everything which it touches’; ‘it attempts to do things for private people, and private people could do them a great deal better for themselves.’ His exposition of the value of a public system of instruction…

The older woman wore gloves as she stooped to pick up trash outside Steel Elementary School, tucked into a quiet block of black working-class homes in Philadelphia’s Nicetown section. Apparently, the volunteer had made an impromptu decision to stop by and tidy the place up on her way to wherever she was going.
 “This is a community school,” boasts Steel School Advisory Council president Kendra Brooks, a parent of two Steel students, standing next to banners proclaiming We Are Family and We Love Our School. “We have generations and generations of families who have been through Steel School. We have teachers who have been here eighteen, twenty-eight years. So we’ve built a community.”
 The school’s tenor—what educators call “climate”—seems positive. Inside, first-grade students are engaged in a reading exercise, while…

“In the presence of the violent reality of war,” wrote Wallace Stevens in 1942, “consciousness takes the place of the imagination.” What the poet meant is that in wartime, “everything moves in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact,” so that “we leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained.” But this pressure toward fact and the desire to change, to remake the facts, become “overwhelming.”
 It was difficult to look at “Here and Elsewhere,” the capacious exhibition of “contemporary art from and about the Arab world” (to quote from the press release), without sensing this overwhelming pressure toward fact. In part, this…

The Secret World of Oil By Ken Silverstein. Verso. 281 pp. $25.95. How much are we in the West responsible for the oil dictatorship in the West African nation of Equatorial Guinea, as well as for other corrupt, vicious regimes in the Global South that are like it? ExxonMobil is the single largest exporter from Equatorial Guinea, and the oil giant pays the family dictatorship of Teodoro Obiang without any qualms. But the usual reaction from the West is simple: such corruption is indigenous to the Third World, and since there is little or nothing we can do about it, our responsibility is sharply limited.
 Some of this moral complacency is based on simple ignorance about just how badly the oil giants behave. With The Secret World of Oil, the…