The Real Goal: to make us all so cynical about government, we give up

This was written by Robert Reich who is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written thirteen books, including the bestsellers “Aftershock" and “The Work of Nations." His latest, "Beyond Outrage," is now out in paperback. His new film, “Inequality for All,” debuted September 27. Robert Reich blogs here and tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Robert Reich

An old friend who has been active in politics for more than thirty years tells me he’s giving up. “I can’t stomach what’s going on in Washington anymore,” he says. “The hell with all of them. I have better things to do with my life.”

My friend is falling exactly into the trap that the extreme right wants all of us to fall into — such disgust and cynicism that we all give up on politics. Then they’re free to take over everything.

Republicans blame the shutdown of Washington and possible default on the nation’s debt on the President’s “unwillingness to negotiate” over the Affordable Care Act. But that law has already been negotiated. It passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by the President. It withstood a Supreme Court challenge.

The Act is hardly perfect, but neither was Social Security or Medicare when first enacted. The Constitution allows Congress to amend or delay laws that don’t work as well as they were intended, or even to repeal them. But to do any of this requires new legislation – including a majority of both houses of Congress and a president’s signature (or else a vote to override a president’s veto).

Our system does not allow one party to delay, amend, or repeal a law of the land by shutting down the rest of the government until its demands are met. If that were the way our democracy worked, no law would ever be safe or settled. A disciplined majority in one house could always use the threat of a shutdown or default to gut any law it didn’t like.

So the President cannot re-negotiate the Affordable Care Act. And I don’t believe Tea Bag Republicans expect him to.

Their real goal is far more insidious. They want to sow even greater cynicism about the capacity of government to do much of anything. The shutdown and possible default are only the most recent and most dramatic instances of terminal gridlock, designed to get people like my friend to give up.

And on this score, they’re winning. Congress’s approval rating was already at an all-time low before the shutdown, according to a poll released just hours before Washington went dark. TheCNN/ORC poll showed that only 10 percent of Americans approved the job Congress was doing, while 87 percent disapproved. It was the all-time lowest approval rating for Congress on a CNN poll.

A recent Gallup survey found that only 42 percent of Americans — also a record low — have an even “fair” amount of confidence in the government’s capacity to deal with domestic matters.

And in a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, 26% of Americans say they’re angry at the federal government while 51% feel frustrated. Just 17% say they are basically content with the government. The share expressing anger has risen seven points since January, and now equals the record high reached in August 2011, just after the widely-criticized debt-ceiling agreement between the President and Congress.

It’s a vicious cycle. As average Americans give up on government, they pay less attention to what government does or fails to do — thereby making it easier for the moneyed interests to get whatever they want: tax cuts for themselves and their businesses; regulatory changes that help them but harm employees, consumers, and small investors; special subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare. And these skewed benefits only serve to confirm the public’s cynicism.

The same cynicism also makes it easier to convince the public that even when the government does act for the benefit of the vast majority, it’s not really doing so. So a law like the Affordable Care Act, which, for all its shortcomings, is still a step in the right direction relative to the costly mess of the nation’s healthcare system, is transformed into a nightmarish “government takeover.”

So here’s what I told my friend who said he’s giving up on politics: Don’t. If you give in to bullies, their bullying only escalates. If you give in to cynicism about our democracy, our democracy steadily erodes.

If you believe the fix is in and the game is rigged, and that a handful of billionaires and their Tea Party puppets are destroying our government, do something about it. Rather than give up, get more involved. Become more active. Make a ruckus. It’s our government, and the most important thing you can do for yourself, your family, your community, and the future, is to make it work for all of us.

Inequality for all

There is a manufactured crisis going on where standardized test scores are used to undermine confidence in public schools so that education entrepreneurs can pour private equity and venture capital into companies that aim to profit from the public.

Here is an excerpt from my article Telling Time with a Broken Clock: the trouble with standardized testing:

Alfie Kohn begins his article “Fighting the Tests: A practical guide to rescuing our schools” by stating, “Don’t let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered.”[4] The inconvenient truth about standardized testing is that socio-economic status is responsible for an overwhelming proportion (50 to 70 percent) of the variance in test scores. The strongest predictor of student performance on achievement tests is socio-economic status, which is why it is a mistake to believe that the scores tell us about school quality when really they are reflecting affluence or poverty. 

No school or school system has ever become great without great teachers, but what can an excellent teacher do about a child who needs glasses or is hungry? To say that teacher or school quality is the most important variable in education is at best naive. Education historian Diane Ravitch writes, “Reformers tell us that teachers are the most important influence within the school on student scores, and that is right. But the teacher contribution to scores is dwarfed by the influence of family and other out-of-school factors.”[5] 

Ultimately, great teachers make great schools, but great teachers can’t do it alone – they require the support of an equitable society. If we are not careful, we risk misinterpreting the scores, and instead of waging war on poverty and inequity, we end up waging war on teachers and schools.

Ultimately, if you care about standardized test scores, then you have to care about income inequality and poverty -- which is why some of Robert Reich's work is so important. Check out this trailer for a new movie titled Inequality for All.

Here's the TEDtalk that TED doesn't want you to see

Do rich people create jobs?

Nick Hanauer doesn't think so. Here's his TEDtalk that TED curator Chris Anderson believes is too political to release as a TEDtalk (but it can be found on YouTube)

Because every TEDtalk is political, I think Anderson is full of it.

TED and Anderson have plenty of talks that criticize Big Government and rethink politics, but the moment somebody challenges Big Money, Anderson gets nervous because it's "an election year".

TED's mantra of Ideas Worth Spreading may not be as open and honest as many would like to believe.



For more on the topic of income inequality, I suggest you check out Robert Reich's blog, and his new book Beyond Outrage where he writes:

The Great Recession (2008) was followed by an anemic recovery. Because so much income and wealth have gone to the top, America's vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going - not, at least, without going deeper and deeper into debt. But debt bubbles burst. The burst of 2008 ushered in a terrible recession - the worst economic calamity to hit the coutnry since the Great Depression of the 1930s - as middle-class consumers had to sharply reduce their spending and businesses, faced with declining sales, had to lay off millions. We bottomed out, but the so-called recovery has been one of the most anemic on record. That's because the middle class still lacks the purchasing power to keep the economy going and can no longer rely on borrowing.

As for TED, I suggest you take a look at Alex Pareene's article Don't mention income inequality please, we're entrepreneurs where he writes:

At this point TED is a massive, money-soaked orgy of self-congratulatory futurism, with multiple events worldwide, awards and grants to TED-certified high achievers, and a list of speakers that would cost a fortune if they didn’t agree to do it for free out of public-spiritedness...  

...Hanauer’s talk was remarkably dry — and I am sure that was part of the reason for its burying, because TED truly values flash and surprise over substance — and not remotely mistakable for a pro-Democratic Party stump speech. But its central message was incompatible with the TED ethos: that TED People Are Good for the World.

Grading Dependence

As an advocate for abolishing grading, and a teacher who has been working hard to abolish grading for years, I am familiar with both the obstacles and fears to ridding ourselves of grading. Although I constantly challenge these fears and obstacles, I never disparage them. They are as real as they are numerous.

Here is another very real obstacle that I encounter when I abolish grading.

In his book Aftershock, Robert Reich writes:

Gains and losses are not symmetrical, because whatever we possess sets a minimum standard for how we judge our material well-being thereafter. When we lose something of value, we retain the memory of having once had it, and regret the loss. If we lose a convenience or a benefit that we relied on, even worse: We must also forego our dependence on it. Someone who's enjoyed the benefit of an air conditioner and then has to do without because he can't afford to fix it after it breaks, for example, is likely to feel much worse off than someone who could never afford air conditioning in the first place.

Whether grading is good for students or not is irrelevant when it comes to the unavoidable truth that many students, parents and educators have come to depend on the conveniences of grading.

Grading makes assessment easy:

• Students don't need to reflect on their own learning because the teacher will do it for them. 

• Teachers don't need to worry about authentically engaging all learners because grading will garnish compliance from most, and provide evidence to exclude and punish the rest. 

• Parents don't need to talk with their children about their learning or even attend parent-teacher interviews anymore because they can just check their children's grades online or wait for the next report card.

• Administrators, policymakers and politicians don't need to engage in the messy details of what actually goes on in the classrooms because they have spreadsheet friendly data. 

If we convince ourselves that grading is an inevitable part of school, we can live more easily with ourselves. By demanding educators assess with grades in a way that is said to be inevitable, we make the practice of grading inevitable and so we make the proposition true.

All this has been going on for about a hundred years, so is it any surprise that when someone comes around and challenges whether we should be grading at all they are seen as a troublemakers and outcasts.  Even if the case can be made that grading is not a requirement for a sound education, many would see this as inconceivable.

When my students are first exposed to the idea of learning without grading, there are a number of different responses to this (which I've written about here), and one of them is what Alfie Kohn coined as a kind of existential vertigo where they essentially ask "who am I, if not a 75%". They seem to lose a sense for where they stand with their learning. For some, the removal of grading is like turning off gravity -- they've become use to this invisible hand that keeps them in an arbitrary place, so when the hand is removed, they feel lost. For others, it's like losing their air conditioner -- without it things just feel... uncomfortable.

We've seen this before.

When Han Solo was released from the carbon freezing, he experienced temporary loss of sight and the shakes. When Neo was unplugged from the Matrix, he experienced what can only be described as shock. When we wean learners off of grading, they experience a form of withdrawal as they move from experiencing assessment as something done to them to something done by them.

It's important to keep in mind withdrawal and the shakes are not problems to be avoided - rather they are problems to be welcomed and solved because they are signs of recovery and improvement.

Because grades can only ever be experienced as a reward or punishment in an attempt to manipulate short-term compliance, they have to go. Aspiring for mere compliance seems awfully lame when we could and should be aiming for authentic engagement.  It's time we forego our dependence on grading in favour of far more authentic feedback.

Sometimes our comfort keeps us from progress and in the case of grading, it's time we troubled ourselves.

Robert Reich on the American Economy

I'm not an economist nor will I claim to know much about the economy (but I'm learning), however, I found this 2 minute video very interesting.

It would appear that Warren Buffett might agree with at least some of what Reich has to say. Buffett wrote in the New York Times:

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

I am currently reading Reich's book Aftershock. Here's a synopsis from it's back cover:

When the nation’s economy foundered in 2008, blame was directed almost universally at Wall Street bankers. But Robert B. Reich, one of our most experienced and trusted voices on public policy, suggests another reason for the meltdown. Our real problem, he argues, lies in the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest Americans, while stagnant wages and rising costs have forced the middle class to go deep into debt. Reich’s thoughtful and detailed account of where we are headed over the next decades—and how we can fix our economic system—is a practical, humane, and much-needed blueprint for restoring America’s economy and rebuilding our society.