Ding, Dong, the Dobbs is Dead

Lou Dobbs has resigned from his anchor position at CNN, saying he wants to "go beyond the role" of a television journalist.

Good riddance, in my humble opinion. Dobbs has always been something of a boil on the butt of CNN's news reputation. I say this not because Dobbs is a conservative. In fact, I'm not sure he is a conservative, in a traditional sense, or even what a conservative is, for sure. Conservatives, increasingly, seem to be defined not by a consistent central principle, but by a cluster of dogmatically held views that don't necessarily make sense as a whole. Dobbs is most (in)famous for his opposition to immigration, for instance, which is certainly contrary to the general conservative support for the free market these days (but in the late 19th century, if I remember my history lessons, conservatives in this country favored protectionism because young American industry couldn't compete with the industrial juggernaut of the British Empire).

No, the reason I dislike Mr Dobbs so intensely is because he's been "going beyond the role" of a good journalist for years. He's more of a propagandist than a journalist. That doesn't mean that he didn't break important stories; his single-minded pursuit of the evils of immigration and NAFTA sometimes have led to some real revelations. But I couldn't trust his stories, because he wanted them to come out a certain way and he tailored the facts to suit his views. The Washington Post's story on the Dobbs resignation, for instance, noted that Dobbs had vastly exaggerated the number of young Latinos in U.S. prisons. Dobbs questioned Barack Obama's place of birth even after the birth certificate was made available to the public; he ran a series of stories about "global cooling" based on scattered and anecdotal evidence that shouldn't have convinced anyone, much less a veteran news anchor.

I firmly believe that constructive journalism must start out even-handed; it's okay to develop an opinion, but only after examining the most reliable facts available on both sides (or all sides) of the controversy. This is a very pragmatic view; it's been working ever since the time of the ancient Greeks.

We've just had a horrendous eight-year-long example of what happens when facts get bent to support preconceived opinions. We ended up fighting a war to suppress weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, and ignoring the mounting evidence of global warming because scientists were being muzzled, and watching New Orleans disintegrate while Bush officials discussed free market methods for dealing with a disaster. Bush wasn't a bad president because he was a conservative. He was a bad president because he cherry-picked facts to fit his beliefs, instead of basing his decisions on sound logic and the preponderance of the evidence.

Likewise with Lou Dobbs, and even more so with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. They're bad not because they're conservatives, but because they're propagandists who don't give the facts a fair playing field. When Keith Olbermann does the same thing on the left, it's also bad. And when Nancy Grace prejudges defendants on national TV night after night, based on whatever sensational facts leak out of an investigation, it doesn't serve justice. All of this stuff is entertaining; it gets the emotional juices going, the same way pro wrestling and "documentaries" about Bigfoot and Noah's Ark do. But when you try to base real-life decisions on that stuff, it's disastrous. You just can't run a country on the same principles as the World Wrestling Federation.

So I applaud Lou Dobbs for resigning. If he realized that what he wanted to do didn't fit within the bounds of journalism, that's good, because it didn't. But if, as he hinted, he plans to go into politics, then the modus operandi that helped him get his CNN ratings is not going to be a good thing in that field, either. A propagandist who goes into politics is not a good politician; he's a demagogue.

Archive: The Useful Poor

(This editorial appeared in the Journal's "Best of" theme issue in April of 2001)

Acknowledging the Useful Poor

“Best of” issues, no matter who does them, are never complete. There are always categories that voters don’t get to vote on, because we just never thought of them.

Likewise, when economists and politicians try to figure out why our country manages to keep running, they often miss key factors, simply because they just never had occasion to think about them. They generally consider those living below the poverty line as an economic negative, for instance. But they don’t figure on Cathy, Paradise, Leila, Randy and Sina.

Kathy left her career as an advertising executive to work with battered women on this island. She founded a craft market that helps family violence victims sell their own products to achieve financial independence, and has started a network that gathers household items for victims moving out of family shelters to start their lives anew. Her only income these days comes from a part time job at an organic vegetable garden, but her efforts have helped dozens of women to start new and productive lives.

When Paradise isn’t working for the non-profit dolphin research foundation she helped to start, she’s organizing free concerts to get island musicians more exposure and promote community bonding.

Before being forced into retirement by a stroke, Leila worked selflessly for decades at half-salary--and sometimes for no salary at all--to manage the gallery of a local cultural center.

Randy and Sina helped start an unrecognized Hawaiian fishing community, where homeless families practiced traditional skills to feed themselves and regained some pride in their own identities. Their little community turned a piece of land that no one wanted into an alternative to welfare housing--at least until someone else wanted that piece of land, and bulldozed them out.

Economists and pundits talk of the “idle poor” and the “working poor.” Most of our welfare and support programs, these days, seem to be oriented toward moving people from the “idle” to the “working” categories. But Cathy, Paradise, Leila, Randy and Sina belong in a different class. Call them the “useful poor”: people who don’t earn much money, but who lead lives that are very much of value to the community.

These people don’t really fit any of the Journal’s voting categories, either. But this island has hundreds or thousands like them. They volunteer for art, cultural, social and religious organizations, stretching each dollar of tax or grant money by contributing “sweat equity.” They paint, act, write and dance, often for free, giving tourists something worth coming to see and residents something worth staying to witness. The useful poor volunteer as mediators and self-help group facilitators, cutting the costs of social services and relieving the overloaded court system. They help run feeding programs for they homeless--often for the same organizations that once fed them. They are self-employed craftspeople and small entrepreneurs, putting in long hours and operating at tiny profits, if any, for the privilege of doing what they love. They are housewives who stay home to tutor their children, or unpaid student teachers and low-paid graduate assistants who stretch our education budget.

The value of these people to our economy and quality of life is uncalculated--literally. The state keeps no economic statistics on the useful poor as a class. Our social programs are geared more to use them up than to help them. Our legal system turns “community service” into something shameful that one does in lieu of jail time. Our grant programs often demand “matching funds,” without counting sweat equity toward that match. Our tax and legal structures, especially in this state, are weighted heavily in favor of large companies and civil servants, and stack the odds against the survival of small businesses and non-profits.

Some people don’t gauge their success by their income level. But it’s in everyone’s interest to help those people continue living lives of such value.

It’s time to at least start counting such people, to find out and acknowledge how much they do for us. We can’t begin to protect what we don’t even realize we have. But we’ll all lose if they disappear.

Grassroots Guide: Hawaii County Council

In the 15 years that I’ve been reporting on Hawaii Island politics, campaign spending has followed a consistent pattern. The candidates in every election can be divided into two groups. One group has a big influx of large cash donations from union and corporate interests--mainly construction- and real-estate related, many from outside their districts; if they have small donors, those donors tend to be ethnically homogenous (i.e., Japanese). The second group tend to have little or no corporate or union support; instead, they get their funding from a plethora of small, ethnically diverse donors within their own districts. Call the first group “machine” politicians (We won’t say the Democratic machine, since County elections are officially non-partisan, and even before they were, the same interests would back development-minded Republicans as well). Call the second group “grassroots” politicians.

In recent years, it appeared that the machine might finally be losing its grip. First we elected Harry Kim, who pledged not to accept donations of over $10. Then we got a progressive council majority led by a quintessentially grassroots councilman, Pete Hoffmann, who won re-election this year with only one contributor from out of his district. Then we got the state legislature to pass a law that would make Hawaii County the first in the state to have all-publicly-funded local elections--starting with the election after this one.

But the machine is going all out in the current election--perhaps a last hurrah--or perhaps, if they manage to elect enough councilmembers and a friendly mayor, in preparation to getting the new state law reversed.

Shortly before theHawaii Island Journal closed, I published a story there about O’ahu money in the local mayoral race; it’s reprinted in a blog below, by special permission from the Journal’s former publisher. Suffice it to say that the trends reported there have continued. Billy Kenoi continues to try to be all things to all people; he’s gotten a lot of grassroots support, but he’s accepted huge dollops of cash from development interests as far away as Nevada (but especially from O’ahu). Angel Pilago is not quite an angel in this regard, either (for his construction-industry connections. see Hunter Bishop's blog at http://hunterbishop.com/journal/2008/9/13/pilago-takes-no-developer-think-again.html), but he's nowhere near Billy's class of indiscrimination in this area.

In the primary, the machine successfully defended two East Hawaii council seats, while knocking off one of the prime supporters of publicly funded elections, Council member Bob Jacobson. Jacobson’s opponent, Guy Enriques, mounted perhaps the most extravagantly funded council campaign in history, in which money from donors in his home district was far outnumbered out-dollared by donors from Honolulu, Hilo and Kailua-Kona--including contributions of a thousand dollars or more from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, the Hawaii Carpenters Market Recovery Program, The Hawaii Contractor’s Association, and former Council Chair Jimmy Arakaki.

Many of the same donors are contributing heavily in the remaining council races (in Hawaii County’s “non-partisan” system, candidates win election in the primary if they get 50 percent of the votes cast + one vote, if the top candidate gets fewer votes than that, the top two candidates go to the general election. Each of the three remaining contests includes one candidate who is clearly grassroots; but in all three, the grassroots candidate finished behind the non-grassroots candidate in the primary, and faces an uphill battle. If all three lose, then the machine will clearly have control of the council.

In District 3 (South Hilo) Dennis “Fresh” Inishi is squaring off against Andy Baclig. But “Fresh” is anything but fresh in the funding department. He’s filed so many amended campaign spending reports that it’s difficult to follow exactly how much money he finally ended up with, but one thing is clear: a lot of it is from people who could stand to make a tidy profit from a friendly county government. Among Onishi’s $1000-or-better donor club are the Hawaii Carpenters Political Action fund, the ILWU, Hawaii Operating Engineers Industry, Mitsugi Nakamura of M. Sonomura, Contractor, the Hawaii Committee on Political Education (Honolu); Terry Helfer, President of Renolds Recycling (Honolulu); the Hawaii Contractor’s Association; and the Hawaii Government Employee’s Association.

Baclig has a few development-related donors in his corner, too, such as Waiakea Shopping Center (Hilo Wal-Mart) President Lorraine Shin--but almost all of his donors are local, and they’re mostly donating $100-250. Only two donors gave him a thousand dollar or more: HSC Inc., which donated $2000 worth of broadcast air time; and Data Processing Services President Kenneth Ah Lo, who chipped in a thousand.

In District 5, former Council Chair Gary Safarik has won a rematch with current council member Emily Naeole. In office, Naeole has committed some occasional missteps that have won her some scrutiny over her ethics. But her campaign is clearly grass-roots; almost all of her contributors are small donors from within her district. Her $1000-or-more club has only two members: Sabrina Marquand of Pahoa, who gave $1500, and a band called Sugar Daddy, which donated performances which id valued at $1000.

Safarik, on the other hand, has not shied away from the big guys, and has not hesitated to seek money outside his district. His big contributors from outside Lower Puna include Hawaii Operating Engineers ($1500), the Hawaii Carpenter’s Union ($1500) Suisan head Rex Matsuno of Hilo ($1000), and retired building contractor Shikwan Sung of Glendale, California.

Over in North Kona, the candidate is an enigma. If you look on the Hawaii Campaign Spending Commission’s Web site (https://nc.csc.hawaii.gov/CFSPublic/ReportList.php?ORG_RPTPage=1) for Robert “Kelly” Greenwell’s campaign spending reports, all you’ll find a “No Records Available” notice. Greenwell, a maverick scion of Kona’s famous Greenwell ranching family, may simply have opted to fund his campaign himself and not solicit donations. Greenwell is a former head of the Kona Outdoor Circle with a reputation for “out of the box” thinking, but all of his views may not set well with conservationists; he believes that recycling, for instance, is economically unfeasible. Funding his own campaign might make him beholden to none and free to follow his own ideas, whether the left or the right agree with him or not.

His opponent, Debbie Hecht, is running a classic grassroots campaign. Nearly all of her donors are from her district (She did get $200 from a friend in California), and the most generous of them only gave $700; most contributed $200 or less.

None of these politicians are doing anything illegal if they accept donations from special interests or donations outside their district. But whether what they’re doing leads to good government is a whole different matter. Even if there’s no quid pro quo attached to campaign donations, big developers are not likely to support someone who is not a like-minded soul. And when an industry such as real estate and construction becomes so powerful that it controls elections through donations, it can create a bloated monster that feeds itself at the expense of everyone else; creating an endless demand for more construction projects that “create jobs”--in the construction industry--at the expense of other sectors, such as agriculture and tourism--not to mention lowering the general quality of life for everyone by replacing green space with subdivisions and overcrowded roads. The only way to break out this cycle is to elect people who aren’t beholden, and the only way to do that is to find out who’s not got their nose in the trough and then vote for them.

‘See you at the polls.

Archive--No Child Left Behind

From the Hawaii Island Journal, 2003:

No School Left Ahead?

Is the federal “No Child Left Behind” Program helping local schools or damaging them?

by Alan D. McNarie

“Most of us celebrated the turn of the century on January 1, 2000. But for America’s children, the turn of the century came on January 8, 2002,” began the letter from U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige to the American public.

Paige, whose letter appears on the Department of Education Web site (http://www.ed.gov/nclb/overview/welcome/index.html) was referring to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the controversial federal education initiative that President George W. Bush signed into law on January 8, 2002. NCLB, Paige claims, “will invest in successful public education instead of continuing to fund a failing system. The new law will give states more flexibility on how they spend their education dollars. In return, it requires them to set standards for student achievement, and hold students, teachers and other educators accountable for results.”

The bill’s supporters hope that it will finally force improvement in the nation’s – and the state’s – school systems. But the new law’s detractors fear that it is actually adding a nightmarish new bureaucratic burden for the schools to shoulder, without providing adequate funding to pay for it.

Eight Out of 50 Schools Pass

Under NCLB, every school in the country would be measured annually against a stringent national checklist. Those schools that failed to meet the checklist’s 47 different Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) criteria would be classified as “In Good Standing, Conditional.” Failure to meet the criteria for two years in row would reduce the school’s status to “School Improvement Year 1,” forcing the school to adopt a two-year improvement plan and giving parents at least the theoretical right to pull their children from the school and send them to another with “Good Standing” or “Good Standing – Conditional” status. Three bad years in a row would demote the school to “School Improvement Year 2” and force it to offer tutoring to economically disadvantaged students. Four years of failure in a row would lead to “Corrective Action” status, forcing staff and curriculum changes; five years of inadequate progress would lead to “Planning for Restructuring,” under which drastic measures could be introduced, including replacing most of the school staff and/or conversion of the public school to a privately-run or charter school.

Nearly three years later, Hawai’i’s schools are feeling the weight of the new program’s stringent standards. Many schools in the Federal Government’s Title I Program, which provides extra aid to schools with high percentages of students from low-income families, have already found themselves assigned to “Planning for Restructuring” status based on their past records of testing. Of the Big Island’s 50 schools, 32 failed to meet NCLB’s Annual Yearly Progress requirements last year; 12 schools are already in Planning for Restructuring. Only eight have earned unconditional Good Standing – and half of those schools are small charter or laboratory schools. None of the island’s high schools met this year’s AYP standards. Over a vast swath of the island’s southern coast, from Honaunau in South Kona through all of Pahala in Ka`u, none of the schools have made even conditional good standing.

Doomed to Failure?

According to the Federal DOE Web site, the program’s annual “report cards” on each school are based on a number of factors, including “student academic achievement disaggregated by subgroups,” “comparison of students at basic, proficient, and advanced levels of academic achievement,” “graduation rates,” “professional qualifications of teachers,” “percentages of students not tested,” and “whether the school has been identified as ‘in need of improvement.’” The 37 benchmarks include Language Arts/Reading and Math proficiency scores of each grade in Grades 3-8, as well as the percentage of proficient scores among students classified as “learning disabled,” students who speak English as a second language, and lower income students in the Free and Reduced Lunch program. The students in the last three groups are expected to reach the same percentage of efficiency as their peers in the general population.

“Testing tells parents, communities, educators and school boards which schools are doing well. If a school takes a challenging population and achieves great results, testing will show that. If a school is allowing certain groups to fall behind year after year, testing will expose that, too,” contends the Web site’s description of the program.

But some of those charged with creating and administering those tests believe that they’re based on a flawed concept that may lead to more harm than good. One of the program’s critics is Mike Heim of the Hawai‘i Department of Education’s Planning and Evaluation Branch.

“Among my peers, we call this [the NCLB’s testing structure] a fully conjunctive model, which is a fancy way of saying that each and every condition must be met at the same time,” explains Heim. He notes that a school may meet or exceed expectations in most of the 37 categories, but still be rated unsatisfactory if it fails to make the grade in even one category.

“To expect schools to be nearly perfect in 37 different criteria all at the same time, is, I believe, unrealistic,” he contends. “In real life, people behave in a compensatory fashion. More often than not, in everyday life, people can make up for a weakness, by compensating for it with strengths in another area.”

The same, he believes, may be true of organizations made up of people: they’re never strong in every area, but compensate for weaknesses in one area with exceptional strengths in others. Students who experience a weak fourth-grade curriculum may excel under an exceptional fifth grade teacher; a high school may need improvement in its geometry classes, but have an exceptional science program.

The school status assigned by NCLB’s Annual Progress Reports can stigmatize the entire school, based on the school’s weakest link, Heim contends.

“It’s almost as if somebody put this thing together without thinking about what happens to the people that comprise this organization...and perhaps without thinking through very clearly the effects that these negative labels will have on people,” he suspects. “I wonder if the people that designed this thought that humiliation would be motivating. I’m not so sure that it is.” He notes that some school principals have told him, “It seems we’re doomed to failure.”

Not all school officials are so pessimistic. John Thatcher, who manages Connections Charter School in Hilo, believes that overall, NCLB will probably be “more beneficial than detrimental” to his and other charter schools. He notes that all charter schools are already living under the sword that NCLB places over the heads of other public schools:

“If a charter school doesn’t fulfill those obligations, it loses its charter,” he notes. “NCLB basically extends that principle to all public schools.”

Right now, he believes, the NCLB testing benchmarks are set so low that they ought to be achievable, even if there are 37 of them. For the program’s first three years, he says, the benchmarks require that only 30 percent of the students in each category need to be proficient at reading, and only 10 percent must be proficient at math.

“If a school only has 30 percent of their population reading at grade level, they’re not doing something right,” Hatcher maintains.

One point on which Heim and Thatcher agree, however, is that increasing numbers of schools are likely to receive failing NCLB report cards in the future.

Thatcher points out that for the next three years, the benchmarks for percentage of students in each group who are reading up to their grade level will rise to 44 percent, and the math proficiency benchmark will rise in a similar fashion. The standards will continue to rise for the next decade. According to the Federal DOE Web site, every student in the country is expected to be proficient in math and language skills by the 2012-13 school year.

“Unless there are really, really major changes, we’re going to see a lot more schools that are going to be failing,” predicts Thatcher.

Heim has an even gloomier prognosis.

“In 3-5 years, virtually every school in the country is going to be labeled in need of improvement,” he believes.

The Numbers Game

Some critics point out another problem with the NCLB testing regimen: statistical validity. Back in the heyday of “grading on the curve” – the practice of assigning grades so that the majority of students received a ‘C’ and smaller numbers received ‘A’s and ‘F’s, producing a statistical bell-shaped curve on a graph – dissenters pointed out that to produce a statistically valid “natural” bell curve, a class would have to contain at least 400 students. A similar problem haunts the NCLB testing regimen. The NCLB rules only require testing of 30 students to obtain a benchmark sample. In some smaller Hawaii schools, especially, there simply aren’t enough in a given class to produce even this limited sample.

In the short run, notes State DOE curriculum specialist Kathy Kawaguchi, this has worked to the advantage of the smaller schools, which have been measured only on the benchmarks for which they have the required minimum numbers

“It was rare that all 37 components applied to every single school,” she notes. “If you didn’t have at least 30 in that particular class that would be an N.A. [not applicable] for that particular component.”

But that will change in the future, she says, whether the schools have adequate numbers or not.

“By 2005 or 2006, they would take whatever data they have and compute the AYP for that school,” she notes. “At some point, you have to hold all the schools accountable.”

Thatcher knows, from personal experience, the problems of working with assessments based on small numbers. “If you look at the latest report on us, you’ll see that we missed out by one point with our economically disadvantaged group,” he notes. “One child who was listed as a fifth grader was actually a 4th grader....I’m asking them to look at it again.”

He says he is “not going to worry too much about it, because I know our test scores are going to be better this year.” But he adds, “When you have small populations, it’s very skewed. When you’re basing everything on percentage points, and you have a very small number of kids, then one kid can have a big effect on your percentage points.”

But for parents trying to find the best school for their children, this statistical problem has very practical implications. Two of the claims that the Federal DOE repeatedly makes about the NCLB program is that it will provide scientifically valid tools to measure a school’s progress and that, in Paige’s words, it “will give parents new opportunities to make sure their children receive the very best education possible.” But of the handful of Hawai`i Island schools that made unconditional “Good Standing” this year, the majority may be there not because they had met all 47 benchmarks, but because there was not enough data to measure whether the school had met all the benchmarks. And unless parents look at all the benchmarks, not just the overall AYP rating, they may pass over a school that would function very well for their particular children.

Back to Busing?

Another much-trumpeted claim is that NCLB will offer parents of children in deficient schools the option of moving their children to better schools. Ironically, a conservative Republican administration is now claiming that some schools are inherently unequal, and is advocating busing as a solution.

“If a school fails to make adequate yearly progress for two years and continues to be identified as in need of improvement after receiving special help and resources, then students are eligible to transfer to another public school with transportation provided,” claims the Federal DOE Web site.

In reality, though, that claim may be exaggerated. And if it were true, it could create as many problems as it solved.

Consider the case of Ka`u, for instance. Both of the district’s schools, with a collective total of around 900 students, are currently in “Planning for Restructuring” status – the poorest possible category. The nearest school in “Good Standing” is tiny Volcano School of Arts and Sciences, a charter school with a current capacity of only 105 students.

“We could take some of the kids,” says Ted Persig, the school’s business manager. But he adds, “We are completely full in some grade levels, and nearly full in others.”

If the Federal DOE gets its way, his school might have to accept more children than he would like.

“There was a policy letter from Secretary Paige to State Superintendents last fall. We all just sort of dropped our jaws when we read it,” recounts Mike Heim. “It said that the state could not use capacity as a reason to refuse public school choice.... Somehow, we’d have to find the zillions of dollars to enable that public school choice.”

In other words, the state could not refuse to transfer a student from a poorly rated school to a school in “Good standing,” even if all such schools were full. The results, ironically, could knock the schools in “Good Standing” out of out of their standing, with an influx of students that the schools don’t have the physical capacity or the personnel to serve.

Fortunately and/or unfortunately, however, the federal DOE in reality has shown more flexibility than its leader admits – and parents may not have all the freedom of choice that Bush Administration press releases have claimed. According to Kawaguchi, for instance, federal officials have already compromised with the state on the issue of Molokai, where none of the schools have measured up to par. It will allow Molokai students will receive extra tutoring help, rather than forcing the state to fly them to Maui.

Kawaguchi also maintains that according to the federal rules, not every student in a school that is out of NCLB compliance will be allowed to transfer. Instead, a priority system may be set up, giving the first chance of transferring to students who are in academic trouble and those who come from lower-income households.

Thatcher contends that the State Department of Education, in fact, has shown little enthusiasm about even preparing to move students from deficient schools.

“There are NCLB grants that provide for transportation,” he says. “The state could have applied for them. I even offered to write the grant a couple of years ago. I tried to put together a team to write the grant. But the State DOE just kind of dragged their feet....”

Thatcher also accuses some local schools of concealing their capacity to take on more students.

“In some schools I’ve seen, there were four or five classrooms just being used for storage space for old computers,” he recounts, “and the administrators were saying that those rooms were being used for technology resources. And that was a lie.”

But even if space in a better school were available and buses or vouchers were provided, the realities of geography, money and time would still limit the choices of some parents. Some Big Island families live more than 50 miles from the nearest grade school in Good Standing, and nearly 90 miles from the nearest high school in Good Standing-Conditional. They would have to choose between sending their children to a low-rated nearby school, or forcing them to endure several hours a day on a school bus.

More Mandates than Money

Another common criticism of NCLB is that the Bush Administration has passed out more rhetoric and rules than money and support.

Heim calls the program an “under-funded mandate.” The money his office gotten for the new testing program, for instance, might have funded multiple choice tests, he says, but not the battery of tests required to determine reading and math skills, which usually require written paragraphs and mathematical proofs.

The same sorts of problems are surfacing not just in the school bureaucracy, but in the schools themselves.

“You’re told to do X, Y and Z, and suddenly you find out that there are no funds available to do X, Y and Z,” complains Persig.

Lack of operating funds, compounded with the state’s budget shortfalls, hiring freezes, and the NCLB’s requirements for rapid implementation – Tawaguchi points out that the state had to have a “consolidation plan” for NCLB in place by June of 1992, months before the USDOE had even supplied its guidelines for such a plan – have driven some educators to the edge.

"[I] myself and a number of other people don’t want to go through another year like we’ve just been through, or else we won’t be here,” says Heim. “Either we’re going to die, or we’re going to walk away from the job.”

The USDOE Web site points out that the NCLB does give the schools greater flexibility with the federal funds that they already receive. But it also places new demands on those funds. The law requires schools that up to 5 percent of Title I funds – money earmarked to help schools with high percentages of economically disadvantaged students – be used by schools with unsatisfactory ratings to ship their students to better schools.

The law has also hit the schools hard in other ways. Persig notes that one of the schools most experienced teachers had to return to school herself to take additional courses, in order to meet newly tightened teacher certification requirements. He finds it ironic that the law is depriving his school of teachers who are achieving the results the NCLB demands.

“It eliminates the local control, which is ironic for the charter schools, because there is accountability built in,” he comments. “The idea of a charter school is that you come up for renewal periodically, and your accountability for the performance of the students will be reviewed at that time.”

Discontent with the new program has started to reach the ears of Hawai‘i’s legislators. Representative Ed Case recently sent a letter to local school administrators, seeking suggestions on how to reform the school reform law.

The educators that the Journal talked to had several suggestions, including more small schools with higher teacher-to-student ratios, more emphasis on student contentment in rating surveys – “If a student likes being in school, he’s going to learn,” maintains Thatcher – and a greater emphasis on children’s total environment, not just the classroom. And of course, a more realistic testing regimen.

“We have students who come to school hungry. We have students to come to school unable to study because their parents had such a horrendous fight last night that they’re terribly distraught. We who come tos chool not knowing where to sleep the next night,” notes Heim. “That all affects their class performance.”

Some DOE officials maintain that the school system isn’t in quite as bad a shape as its publicity warrants – Heim notes that overall, the various testing criteria for school performance are sending out a “mixed signal of what’s going on here.” Compared to other states, he says, Hawai‘i’s NCLB results are about “the middle of the pack.”

But even the program’s critics tend to admit that its goals of better schools and universal education are difficult to argue with, and acknowledge a wave of discontent with public education as it is – especially in Hawai‘i. When this magazine’s predecessor, Ka`u Landing, published a three part series about the Hawai`i education system in 1995, it provoked a flood of letters and calls from distraught parents, each with his or her own horror story about trying to deal with unresponsive teachers and administrators. In the years since then, parents and educators have tried a host of reforms: charter schools, the Felix vs.Waihe`e lawsuit, and Community Children’s Councils, to name a few. Despite those efforts, when the Journal held a reader poll earlier this year, island residents voted the DOE the dubious honor of “Best Example of a Dysfunctional Government Agency.” Whatever the flaws of NCLB, it represents a real wave of public discontent.

“I think we have to go back to Congress again, and ask them to develop broader solution,” believes Heim. “...We can’t do it alone. If we’re expected to do it alone, we are doomed to failure.”

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viewpoint: Sarah the Killer Bunny

This is a genuine blog, not a reprint of an old article.... Like much of America, I've been both amused and horrified by the Sarah Palin phenomenon. If she's off-script, even Katie Couric can make her look like a lightweight. But when she's got speech writers and a "friendly" crowd (friendly to her, not to non-whites, Jews, Muslims, Liberals, Democrats or other "un-American" elements) Sarah Palin is a deadly little demagogue, mouthing the most hateful things with the cutest little smile. Yesterday, she proclaimed, with great glee, that certain sections of Virginia were the "Real America." It was a charge that Barack Obama quickly pounced on, proclaiming that all of America is equally patriotic--probably also incorrect, but at least he's not stirring up sectarian hatred. But Palin's reverse elitism will probably resonate with some voters. After all, Northern Virginia is full of suburbs to that den of iniquity, Washington, D.C. (Never mind that it also contains that den of supercarriers, Norfolk, as well.) It's ironic that for some people, our nation's capital is the least American place on earth.
And of course, there's that beauty queen factor. Sarah Palin is probably the first VP candidate that millions of red-blooded American men have had masturbation fantasies about. For certain "Real American" males, she may be the perfect woman: petite, sexy, and hunts! And doesn't use condoms! If she loses the election, Hugh Hefner should definitely make her an offer. Or, if she refuses, make an offer to Tina Fey. But she's about as great a role model for America's young women as Clarence Thomas is for America's Blacks.
I think I've come up with a great metaphor for Ms. Palin. Remember the killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Cute and adorable and disarming, the sort of critter that makes you want to go "Ah...." and pick it up and cuddle it. Then, when you get it in range, you discover that it's a gleeful killer, super-hopping from throat to throat with blood on its cute little fangs.
I wish the election were the end of this. But I get the feeling that the Sarah the Killer Bunny is going to be with us for years, even if the ticket loses. The Far Right has finally found an even better mouthpiece than Rush Limbaugh.
And this blog is evidence of just how insidious and corrosive that phenomenon is. It even has me hating. Not hating Washington. Hating Sarah Palin. And I hate hating people.
I don't consider myself a liberal or a conservative. But as a journalist and a former rhetoric teacher, I've devoted my career to the notion that good decisions are made by getting solid facts applying sound reasoning--that you get the facts first, then make the decision. The past Republican administration and its neo-con supporters have been anathema to that: they start with the decision, and then accept only the facts that support it. The most powerful military on Earth, and the most robust economy, can be demolished from within by that kind of decision-making. And Palin is bravely waving that same banner for for the next generation and proclaiming it virtue.
It's enough for make an agnostic pacifist wish for a holy hand grenade.

Links to other Alan McNarie stories

The following stories are available on sites other than here or www.hawaiiislandjournal.com (which was still down as of Oct. 20). Not all of these people asked permission, but what the hey.

"A Sea of Plastic"

http://honoluluweekly.com/diary/2007/12/sea-of-plastic/

"Plenty Papaya Problems"

http://www.hawaiiseed.org/plenty_papaya_problems.html

http://www.gene.ch/genet/2003/Apr/msg00094.html

“The Town of Punalu‘u”

http://www.wildcoast-usa.com/hawaii.htm

“Panning PanSTARRS”

http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/story-continued/2007/03/panning-panstarrs/

“Children Left Behind”

http://www.lejhawaii.org/mckinney/hon.weekly.11.07.07.pdf

“A Dream Takes Root in Pepeekeo”

http://hawaiianrainbows.net/presscenter.htm

“PAC-Men vs. the Krishna Conservatives”

http://www.cultofbutler.com/news.php?extend.28

“Big Island Kapu” (Hokulia)

http://www.honoluluweekly.com/archives/coverstory%202003/03-26-03%20Gated/03-26-03%20Gated.html

“Drum Traditions Span the Pacific”

http://www.planetpuna.com/GreyWolf/mcnarie_on_grey_wolf_.htm

“Still Living, Still on Earth”

www.aliciabaylaurel.com/node/96

“The Art of Bonsai”

http://www.fukubonsai.com/1a11.html

Belly Acres is the Place to be for Jugglers

http://www.planetpuna.com/Shopper/jugglers.htm

Amtrak Diaries

(Note: This Hawaii Island Journal article recounts a trip I made less than a month after 9/11. I wanted to find out if Amtrak was a viable alternative to transportation via flying bomb. I discovered much more than that. F0r an updated editorial based on this story, see "Amtrak Editorial.")

The Amtrak Diaries

The U.S. Congress is currently considering a proposal to dismantle Amtrak, the national passenger rail service. Amtrak officials say that despite five years of increased ridership and profits, the rail service will require a $1.2 billion cash infusion to maintain its aging trains and stations, or will have to close down all long-distance passenger service outside the East Coast by this October.

Hawaii Island itself has been trainless since 1947, but thousands of this state’s residents travel on the mainland each year. In most of the world, passenger trains still thrive, operating at a fraction of the fuel costs for jets. In the wake of 9-ll, are trains still a viable alternative to at least some airline travel?

Last October, Senior Contributing Writer Alan McNarie took Amtrak from California to Missouri, traveling across a changed national landscape to see his son. Here’s what he discovered.

September 21, 2001. My ex e-mails me from Missouri to suggest something good that might come out of the national tragedy of ten days ago. “Why don’t you come see your son while airfares are down?” she asks.

My son, Aidan, will turn five next month. I haven’t seen him in over a year. But I have mixed feelings about air travel that have nothing to do with fear of skyjacking. The last three times I’ve gone to Missouri, I’ve arrived exhausted from nearly twelve hours in cramped airline seats and deliberately uncomfortable airports. I’ve come off the plane with bleeding sinuses from the arid atmosphere inside the planes, where air itself is scrimped on to save money. Inevitably, I’ve fallen sick within a day or two of arrival--likely either from breathing someone’s germs in the closed atmosphere of the plane, or from encountering some mainland microbe that my run-down body and damaged sinuses weren’t prepared to meet. If I only have a few precious days with my son, I’d prefer not to spend them coughing in bed.

Like everyone in this country, I also have a new realization of our vulnerability. Ever since World War II, we’ve been pouring huge government subsidies into airports and highways, while neglecting trains and mass transit. Now our main transportation systems consist of rolling bombs that kill thousands of us in traffic accidents each year, and of flying bombs that can kill thousands with a single explosion.

We can’t get off this island without an airplane. There’s not even a ferry to Oahu. But are there viable alternatives to flying bombs, once we get to the mainland?

I log onto the Web to find out.

October 15. It’s about 4:30 in the evening when the Hele-On Bus pulls into Kailua-Kona and disgorges me, my single overweight duffle and overstuffed canvas briefcase (per new baggage regulations) at a local shopping center.

After several nights of re-checking travel websites and trying alternate routes, I’ve snagged a $289 round trip fare from Kona to L.A. and a $212 round-trip Amtrak ticket from there to Jefferson City, Missouri, where my ex-father-in-law and my son will meet me. I’ve saved more than $600 over a flight to Columbia, Missouri, the nearest airport to my son. But I’ll spend about five extra days en route.

I’m trading time not just for money, but for a better quality of journey (I hope). And then there’s patriotic duty. If significant numbers of people switched from planes to trains, it would be a huge step toward energy independence.

Booking the direct flight from Kona allowed me to replace a connector flight to Honolulu with a $5, four-hour ride from Hilo. The Hele-on was air-conditioned, the seat was comfortable and the scenery, of course, was superb. But thanks to the island’s legislated taxi-cab monopoly, I have to pay $20 for a cab from Kailua-Kona to the airport. The driver is friendly, but doesn’t offer to help with the bags.

At the airport, National Guardsmen patrol with M-16s and ironically conspicuous camouflage uniforms. Forewarned by the travel sites, I’ve left my pocketknife and razor behind. I send my bags through the security x-ray, empty my pockets into the tray, pass through the scanner without setting it off, then get checked with a hand-detector. Someone else opens my duffel to examine my tins of chicken and tuna and cartons of fruit juice (I’ve heard that train food is superb but expensive). The hand-detector goes off for a plastic mint case from my watch pocket. I get patted down.

I settle into a hard plastic departure lounge seat whose “arm rests,” too narrow for human arms; seem designed mainly to keep people from stretching out on more than one seat. I have a tail-numbing three hours to watch the National Guardsmen watch us.

Finally the boarding call comes.

American Airlines advertises the extra legroom in its coach cabin. But when a 6’1” person sits in a Boeing 757’s window seat, the wall curves in to meet his shoulder. The passenger in the next seat meets his other shoulder. The luggage rack cuts off about a quarter of the nearest TV screen, mounted from the aisle ceiling. Thus dissuaded from paying $5 for an in-flight video, I scrunch into myself and try to sleep....

Oct. 16: the plane touches down before dawn. I lug my heavy bags through LAX’s long, long, corridors, past more armed National Guardsmen. After 20 minutes on the smoggy curb, I pay another $21 for a shuttle to Union Station.

This time, the driver earns his money, threading for an hour through the back streets of Hollywood and Burbank and Los Angeles: mile after mile of drab modern architecture and smoggy air.

“The freeway’s impossible this time of day,” the cabbie explains.

Union Station sits across from Olvero St., the Mexican-souvenir-stand-clogged heart of Old Los Angeles. The station is one of those grand secular cathedrals from railroading’s bygone glory days: Spanish-influenced, high arched ceilings painted in deep golds and browns, richly carved woodwork, an acre or so of overstuffed leather seats. The seats here aren’t designed for sleeping, either, but at least you can sit comfortably in them.

I use them long enough to scan a morning Los Angeles Times. More bombing in Afghanistan. More anthrax cases.

I get up to find out if it’s possible to move around without a car in the City of Freeways.

It is. L.A. has a fast, clean, comfortable urban rail system called the Metrolink, and a vast grid of local and express buses. At Union Station’s ornate carved-wood information booth, I learn that I could have gotten a free shuttle from the airport to the nearest Metrolink stop, a $1.60 train ride from Union Station.

I opt for a short subway ride and slightly longer bus ride to the LA County Museum of Art. Next door are the La Brea Tar Pits, one the few places on earth where oil still bubbles naturally to the surface, though we’re slowly draining the petroleum reserve from under it. I spend the morning among Rodin sculptures and Japanese screen paintings, and the afternoon among the bones of saber-tooth tigers who became fatally enmired in petroleum products.

Back at the station by 6 p.m., I lug my reclaimed baggage down the long hallway to the boarding platform. The gleaming, double-decker Superliner coaches of the Southwestern Chief tower on the siding. There are no M-16s in evidence. Apparently the authorities think rail travel is so forgotten that even terrorists won’t bother with it.

A smiling train attendant glances at my ticket, then points out my car to me. The long cross-country experiment has begun.

The train has a top speed of 79 mph, but slows to a crawl as it climbs the pass into the moonlit Sierras. What Southwestern Chief lacks in speed, however, it makes up in space. There’s a lounge car with a snack bar and two large TVs for on-train videos. Each coach car has four restrooms, including men’s and women’s dressing rooms, but no showers. (For an $800 sleeper car berth, I’d have gotten a bed, a shower, gourmet meals and fresh fruit.)

Even the coach car seats are the size of first class airline seats, with living-room-recliner-like adjustable leg rests, plus footrests attached to the seat in front. The seats actually recline, not just tilt back a couple of inches. And no seat belts!

They’re still not designed for a comfortable night’s sleep, though. Nothing keeps your head from twisting or falling over as you snooze. Leaning against the side of the car could leave lumps on your head if you hit a stretch of rough track, despite the little pillows they give you.

People cope with this in various ways. Some use rolled-up clothing for auxiliary padding. Children cram themselves and their sleeping bags into the floor space between the seats. Some shorter adults look for a pair of adjoining empty seats and curl up across them--though those who do, don’t always get to stay. Throughout the night, a trickle of passengers, mostly students and Latino families, continues to board the train from various small-town whistle stops, forcing train attendants to rouse sleeping squatters from their unassigned seats.

The passenger beside me, an Hispanic-American truck driver who’s letting someone else drive for once, soon goes off to the lounge car. While he’s gone, I stretch diagonally across both seats. When he returns, I head for the lounge car. We sleep in shifts.

Oct. 17. I awaken with a bruised tailbone from the hard plastic strip between the seats, and go to the lounge car to watch the sunrise over the ancient tawny mountains of the Arizona desert. A herd of pronghorn antelopes watches us, bolts a few yards, then resumes grazing.

But it isn’t all bucolic scenery. Pulling out of Albuquerque, we pass through miles of junkyards and warehouses, whole graveyards of kitchen appliances and acres of asphalt and parked semi-trailors, interspersed with barrios of wooden shacks and huts--some falling down, some neatly kept, all tiny. Further out sprawl suburbs of new two-story adobe townhouses, set further back from the noisy tracks. The American Dream has fractured into little suburban castles and the noisy hells of industrial workplaces. The poorer you get, the closer you live to hell.

Now we’re moving our hells clear out of the country, to Mexico and China--at the cost of supertankers full of oil, much of it imported from a part of the world where whole generations of children have grown into middle-aged men in refugee camps. We’ve propped up despotic regimes and supplied religious fanatics with Stinger missiles, just to keep those goods and tankers coming. What the hell did we expect to happen?

The lounge car serves as a miniature melting pot, where the Have-Nots traveling by coach meet the Haves from the sleeper cars. As the train crawls alongside Interstate 30, past stands of pinion pine and golden aspen in the Sandia Mountains, I enjoy the view with a middle-aged educational consultant, who praises the train’s superb service and excellent dining.

“I’ve driven this route before,” he says, “and you don’t get one tenth out of driving it that you get out of the train. You’re too busy watching the road.”

I wonder aloud what Amtrak could do if it got the $12 billion that was just voted to bail out the airlines. I’m thinking of extra routes, new coaches and upgraded tracks.

My companion has a different reaction.

“God, think of the luxury they could offer then!” he says.

We cross the continental divide at sunset. Mercifully, the train passes through Eastern Colorado and Kansas during the night.

October 18. We roll into Kansas City at dawn, almost exactly on time.

Kansas City’s Union Station is another grand marble relic, recently renovated to include restaurants and an interactive science museum. But Amtrak operates out of a cramped, concrete temporary station next door, with no place to store baggage. My local train leaves at 3:30 p.m. I lug my bags up two stories of stalled escalator steps, walk to Union Station, then ascend another flight of steps to a skywalk that takes me across two streets to the rental lockers in Hallmark’s Crown Center.

The soul of Kansas City used to be the stockyards. Now it’s probably Hallmark Cards, which is remaking part of the city center into a new and different urban dream: a towering complex of apartments, office buildings, hotels, restaurants and shops, all linked by glass skyways. You can walk to work, to shopping, to the train or bus if you have to. But if your job pays well enough, you’d never have to leave the complex.

Even this dream community is still powered by cheap fossil fuel, however. Without air conditioning, these steel-and-glass buildings and skyways would become ovens.

Walking through Crown Center’s posh shops, I try to think like an Afghani or a Palestinian. The average annual personal income in Afganistan is equivalent to about $800. What would I make of entire shops devoted to model cars or wildlife figurines--of a culture with the spare income to buy Official NFL dog scarves, “cat sitter” videos of chirping finches, and $1000 toy train sets?

In the Crown Center lobby, architecture students are building sculptures of canned goods that will be donated to the homeless. I give them my remaining six-pack of juice, whose contents have now traveled from the fruit trees of Washington to a processing plant in Ohio to a store in Hawai‘i to Kansas City, Missouri.

The Kansas City Mule, my train to Jefferson City, is composed of older, single-deck “Heritage” style cars. The seats are still comfortable, but the air-conditioning’s out. We stop twice to let 100-plus car freight trains inch past, with another long delay on the sidings to wait for the Mule’s sister train from St. Louis. Soon we’re nearly an hour behind schedule.

“We could have driven and been home by now!” complains an elderly woman across the aisle.

But the scenery makes up for the delays. Fall is at its peak. Missouri’s rolling hills are brilliant with red-and-yellow maples, yellow-and-brown hickories, red-and-brown oaks. Twice, the train rolls past small herds of deer.

Near Knob Noster, Missouri, passengers stare in awe at a different sight: two B-2 stealth bombers, taking off from Whiteman Air Force Base on their way to Afghanistan. One flies almost directly over us. It casts a shadow like an enormous black bat.

“Boy, that’s a big plane,” remarks the middle-aged farmer behind me. “I hear they fly about 900 miles per hour.”

He’s wrong. The B-2 is supposed to be sub-sonic. But these planes are enormous, with wingspans larger than those of most commercial airliners and a payload capacity of 20 tons of explosives. Each plane costs approximately 1.3 billion dollars. Those two planes up there represent more money than the entire estimated annual gross national product of Afghanistan.

Those planes are flying literally halfway around the world to bomb one of the world’s poorest countries. Figure in the cost of fuel--even cheap fuel--pilot and crew training, depreciation, maintenance, and $20,000 smart bombs, and each mission probably costs tens or hundreds of times more than anything it destroys on the ground. And the other side has learned how to kill thousands of Americans with only a few hate-filled lives and some box openers.

I’m sure we’ll be happy to free the women of Afghanistan if we get the chance. But we’re not fighting for freedom this time, despite our rhetoric. We’ve been sacrificing our own freedoms left and right. We enter a police state each time we enter an airport. We shop, work and drive under the vigilance of surveillance cameras. We can’t cash a check or use an ATM without being photographed. Whenever we sign onto a Web site or use a supermarket discount card, we subject ourselves to massive snooping over our personal habits. And now a new bill is making its way through Congress to authorize new intrusions, more searches without search warrants, more reading of our phone calls and e-mail, more detentions without trial. We’re quite willing to trade freedoms for a little security, a little faster travel, a few more goods priced a little more cheaply. And we’ve been even more willing to sacrifice other people’s freedom, if it keeps the cheap goods and the cheap oil flowing.

We aren’t fighting for freedom. We’re fighting to keep our cars and planes and skyscrapers and not get killed.

Energy in this country now is so cheap and plentiful that the capacity to kill thousands is everywhere. As the train crosses the Missouri countryside, it passes silos full of grain grown with fertilizer so packed with energy you can make bombs from it. Every town we pass holds gas stations whose underground tanks hold enough energy to kill dozens or hundreds. Every tank truck that supplies those filling stations is potentially a massive firebomb. Every petroleum tank farm is a superbomb, every refinery a potential holocaust of flames and poisonous gases, every supertanker an opportunity to wreak havoc over hundreds of miles of coastline. If we have to employ enough guards to cover everything flammable, we’ll go bankrupt.

Our enemies don’t need to invent weapons of mass destruction. We’ve invented them ourselves, and woven them into the fabric of our lives. They just need matches.

We can appear to win this war, just as the Israelis have appeared to win every war they’ve fought. But the hate will still remain, to explode again and again. We’ll still lose, in the long run, if we can’t find ways to cut our dependence on high energy and to stop people from hating us. We can’t continue to live our lives the way we have, and still win this war.

At dusk, the train pulls into the ancient station at Jefferson City. Standing beside his grandfather on the brick platform is my son. He waves. He is small and blond and smiling.

We have to start defusing the bombs.