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I was thinking about what to call this piece, and what I'm going to suggest to my editor is "America's Teacher," because the film is this incredible piece of old-style popular education.

One of the things that my colleague at The Nation Bill Greider talks about is that we don't do this kind of popular education anymore, that unions used to have budgets to do this kind of thing for their members, to just unpack economic theory and what's going on in the world and make it accessible.

I know you see yourself as an entertainer, but I'm wondering, do you also see yourself as a teacher?

MM: I'm honored that you would use such a term. I like teachers.

Obama also said Chicago's dropout rate "has gone downevery year he's been in charge." Though that's technically true, the committee says it's still unacceptably high: About half of Chicago students drop out of the city's non-selective-enrollment high schools. And more than 70% of 11th-graders fail to meet state standards, a trend that "has remained essentially flat" over the past several years.

Even among those who graduate, it says, skills are poor: An analysis of students entering the Chicago City Colleges in fall 2006 showed that 69% were not prepared for college-level reading, 79% were not prepared for writing, and 95% were not prepared for math.

"Performance is very bad, very weak," says Civic Committee president Eden Martin.

Obama also said Chicago students' ACT test score gains "have been twice as big as those for students in the rest of the state." Again, technically true — ACT data show that Chicago students' composite score rose 0.9 points from 2002 to 2006, while Illinois' score rose 0.4 points. But Chicago students' composite score of 17.4 was lower than the statewide average of 20.5.

Timothy Knowles, who directs the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute, says the report highlights "a highly irresponsible state reaction" to the federal No Child Left Behind law.

"In essence," he says, "many states have lowered (passing) scores on standardized tests to create the public appearance they are meeting federal standards. This practice sells children short — and the states that engage in it are, ironically, leaving themselves behind."

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you have, for instance, chains that are developing—

DEBORAH MEIER: That’s what I mean.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —like the KIPP Academy and some of these others. But one of the things I’ve been noticing in my investigations is that a lot of these charter schools, especially the chain types, pay enormous salaries. I reported on one here in Harlem, Eva Moskowitz. She was making, for just running a school of 300 kids, making $370,000 a year. And the New York Post, last week, reported that a charter school in Brooklyn, the director, was making $700,000 a year. This is a non-profit.

DEBORAH MEIER: And I was making seventy. So, it is an idea cooked up. It was an idea that may have had marvelous origins. I’m really not sure how it started. We have something in Boston called pilot schools, that were an internal attempt to capture the best qualities of charters but to remain within the system and was supported and initiated by the union.

You know, it’s not only that we shouldn’t be driven by data, but informed by data, which would require a much different kind of press coverage of education than we get, so that—we imagine that you can run schools on the basis of a distant—a lever from some distant place that looks at data and manipulates the system from that place. And there’s no data that works. There’s no suggestion—there’s not even, on their own terms, data that works.

AMY GOODMAN: Deborah Meier, this past week is the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate the schools of this country. Where are we today with this?

DEBORAH MEIER: We’re not [inaudible]—not anywhere. I mean, when I came to New York City in the mid-’60s and taught in Central Harlem—actually, by the way, it’s closer to five decades that I’ve been working in the public schools. But when I came to New York City and worked in Central Harlem in kindergarten and was telling the kids about desegregation, it was hard to convince them, because they looked around the room, and what did I—when I said, “It’s only in the South that we have segregation.”

So, segregation has been with us a very long time, but it hasn’t changed. And you can send your kid, if you’re an upper-middle-class New Yorker, you can send your kids, for example, to schools in New York City from kindergarten through twelfth grade that have fewer black and Latino kids in it than most private schools. I know this personally.

And we have not—we’re so interested in the best and the brightest, by our very narrow definition of what we’re looking for in this country, what we mean by merit and what we mean by leadership. So I’m also just stunned by the Department of Education that includes virtually no educators, whose definition of being well-educated is that you graduated from Harvard.

There’s something basically missing about what we want from our schools. And if we don’t get that right, and even discuss it, so that the only meaning of achievement now is improving test scores.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, and when you mentioned the people who are running the system that aren’t even educators, increasingly now, especially with this charter school movement, even the principals have no experience as teachers.

DEBORAH MEIER: There is no respect for—now, it’s not the only place we do this. I‘m a little stunned that you send in people on the basis of some general brightness category to fix automobile industries, who know nothing about manufacturing and industry. We’ve gotten—you know, this decade of interest in finance has made us think that only people who know how to manipulate money know how to change the world for the better.

And I think that’s unfortunately the lesson we’re teaching in schools, by the way we view the schools and by the way we want teachers to view their students. We want them to look at their students as products, and that the way they can tell whether their product is good is whether its scores are higher, and then they’ll get paid more money.

And that whole bonus assumption corrupts the work itself. You know, there’s a principle, Campbell’s Principle, I think it’s called, that the more you focus on a particular indicator, the more corrupt that indicator becomes itself. And I think we have under—a corrupt educational system, not in the sense, really, that so many people are making money off it—too many are—but mostly in the sense that we’ve corrupted the purposes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, in New York City, they took it one step further, starting to offer children money for getting higher test scores, right? The mayor wants—has a plan to cash bonuses for students who get higher test scores.

DEBORAH MEIER: Yeah, it’s a fundamental corruption of the definition that I have of being well-educated. And the purpose of small schools and the purpose of a strong and powerful faculty was because you can’t pass on to kids what it means to be part of a powerful community if you’re not part of a powerful community. And teachers whom we don’t respect enough to make judgments of importance can’t teach the fundamental underlying principle of democracy, which is the exercise of judgment.

Indeed, Goldman Sachs has been nicknamed "Government Sachs" by its rivals, for it always seems to have at least one of its top officials strategically placed inside government to bend federal financial rules to its benefit. In the 1990s, for example, two Goldman foxes -- Robert Rubin and Larry Summers -- were inside the Clinton administration henhouse, where they helped craft the deregulation scams that enriched their former banks, before the scams caused the crash of our economy.

Following that crash, up stepped Hank Paulson, who had been Goldman's CEO before George W. plucked him off the Street to run the very bailout that has now deposited so much of our money in his bank. With Bush's demise, Hank is gone, but not Goldman. That sly Goldman Fox from the Clinton years, Larry Summers, is back, this time in Barack Obama's henhouse, where he's top economic advisor.

Not surprisingly, our gold keeps flowing to Goldman Sachs -- but don't expect the bankers to be grateful to you.

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898. But that is to succumb to what historian of imperialism Bernard Porter calls "the saltwater fallacy," the idea that conquest only becomes imperialism when it crosses saltwater. Thus, if the Mississippi had resembled the Irish Sea, Western expansion would have been imperialism. From George Washington to Henry Cabot Lodge, those engaged in the enterprise had a clearer grasp of just what they were doing.

After the success of humanitarian intervention in Cuba in 1898, the next step in the mission assigned by Providence was to confer "the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples" of the Philippines (in the words of the platform of Lodge's Republican party) -- at least those who survived the murderous onslaught and widespread use of torture and other atrocities that accompanied it. These fortunate souls were left to the mercies of the U.S.-established Philippine constabulary within a newly devised model of colonial domination, relying on security forces trained and equipped for sophisticated modes of surveillance, intimidation, and violence. Similar models would be adopted in many other areas where the U.S. imposed brutal National Guards and other client forces.

The Torture Paradigm

Over the past 60 years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA's "torture paradigm," developed at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, according to historian Alfred McCoy in his book A Question of Torture. He shows how torture methods the CIA developed from the 1950s surfaced with little change in the infamous photos at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in the title of Jennifer Harbury's penetrating study of the U.S. torture record: Truth, Torture, and the American Way. So it is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang's descent into the global sewers lament that "in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way."

Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely repositioned it," restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. "[H]is is a return to the status quo ante," writes Nairn, "the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."

Sometimes the American engagement in torture was even more indirect. In a 1980 study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that U.S. aid "has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights." Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, U.S. aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations, commonly improved by the murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists and other such actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward -- a convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance.

Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald reviews the aftermath. Seeking to "preserve the power to abduct people from around the world" and imprison them without due process, the Bush administration decided to ship them to the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, treating "the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game -- fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process."

Obama adopted the Bush position, "filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue," arguing that prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in the world (in the case in question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in Thailand and the United Arab Emirates) "can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind -- as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo."

In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo." The Obama administration announced that it would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama's Department of Justice, Greenwald concludes, "squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions," in radical violation of Obama's campaign promises and earlier stands.

By the same standards, if the Nicaraguans had been able to capture the chief terrorism coordinator, John Negroponte, then U.S. ambassador in Honduras (later appointed as the first Director of National Intelligence, essentially counterterrorism czar, without eliciting a murmur), they should have done the same. Cuba would have been justified in acting similarly, had the Castro government been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no need to bring up what their victims should have done to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and other leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits leave al-Qaeda in the dust, and who doubtless had ample information that could have prevented further "ticking bomb" attacks.

Such considerations never seem to arise in public discussion.

There is, to be sure, a response: our terrorism, even if surely terrorism, is benign, deriving as it does from the city on the hill.

Unexceptional Americans

Another standard pretext for torture is the context: the "war on terror" that Bush declared after 9/11. A crime that rendered traditional international law "quaint" and "obsolete" -- so George W. Bush was advised by his legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, later appointed Attorney General. The doctrine has been widely reiterated in one form or another in commentary and analysis.

The 9/11 attack was doubtless unique in many respects. One is where the guns were pointing: typically it is in the opposite direction. In fact, it was the first attack of any consequence on the national territory of the United States since the British burned down Washington in 1814.

Another unique feature was the scale of terror perpetrated by a non-state actor.

Horrifying as it was, however, it could have been worse. Suppose that the perpetrators had bombed the White House, killed the president, and established a vicious military dictatorship that killed 50,000 to 100,000 people and tortured 700,000, set up a huge international terror center that carried out assassinations and helped impose comparable military dictatorships elsewhere, and implemented economic doctrines that so radically dismantled the economy that the state had to virtually take it over a few years later.

That would indeed have been far worse than September 11, 2001. And it happened in Salvador Allende's Chile in what Latin Americans often call "the first 9/11" in 1973. (The numbers above were changed to per-capita U.S. equivalents, a realistic way of measuring crimes.) Responsibility for the military coup against Allende can be traced straight back to Washington. Accordingly, the otherwise quite appropriate analogy is out of consciousness here in the U.S., while the facts are consigned to the "abuse of reality" that the naïve call "history."

It should also be recalled that Bush did not declare the "war on terror," he re-declared it. Twenty years earlier, President Reagan's administration came into office declaring that a centerpiece of its foreign policy would be a war on terror, "the plague of the modern age" and "a return to barbarism in our time" -- to sample the fevered rhetoric of the day.

That first U.S. war on terror has also been deleted from historical consciousness, because the outcome cannot readily be incorporated into the canon: hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the ruined countries of Central America and many more elsewhere, among them an estimated 1.5 million dead in the terrorist wars sponsored in neighboring countries by Reagan's favored ally, apartheid South Africa, which had to defend itself from Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC), one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups," as Washington determined in 1988. In fairness, it should be added that, 20 years later, Congress voted to remove the ANC from the list of terrorist organizations, so that Mandela is now, at last, able to enter the U.S. without obtaining a waiver from the government.

The reigning doctrine of the country is sometimes called "American exceptionalism." It is nothing of the sort. It is probably close to a universal habit among imperial powers. France was hailing its "civilizing mission" in its colonies, while the French Minister of War called for "exterminating the indigenous population" of Algeria. Britain's nobility was a "novelty in the world," John Stuart Mill declared, while urging that this angelic power delay no longer in completing its liberation of India.

Similarly, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Japanese militarists in the 1930s, who were bringing an "earthly paradise" to China under benign Japanese tutelage, as they carried out the rape of Nanking and their "burn all, loot all, kill all" campaigns in rural North China. History is replete with similar glorious episodes.

As long as such "exceptionalist" theses remain firmly implanted, however, the occasional revelations of the "abuse of history" often backfire, serving only to efface terrible crimes. The My Lai massacre was a mere footnote to the vastly greater atrocities of the post-Tet pacification programs, ignored while indignation in this country was largely focused on this single crime.

Unfortunately, events are not breaking in the direction we both prefer. The stimulus bill includes millions so that every state can create a data system. This system will track the test scores of every student, from pre-K to college, and attribute their test score gains (or lack thereof) to their teachers. When the information is available, it will be used and misused. Every teacher (at least those who teach the tested subjects) will have a public record detailing whether his or her students made gains or not. This information will be used to establish calibrated merit pay schemes, so that each teacher will get more or fewer dollars depending on the scores of the year. Is this piecework?

The federal government seems ready to impose a Dr. Strangelove approach on our schools to turn them into "data-driven systems." Not, as you suggest, "data-informed" systems, but data-driven systems. Teachers will certainly teach to the tests, since nothing else matters. The only missing ingredient from this grand data-driven scheme will be education.

We agree with Dr. Mathis and will forward his recommendations on to Obama and Duncan:




• stop expanding the number of charter schools and relying on
  takeovers, privatization and other restructuring efforts for school
  improvement, and
  
• focus on making sure that all schools have adequate
  resources and support so that they can improve, and support such proven
  strategies such as early education, smaller class size, small school
  communities, intense personal intervention, and strong counseling and
  social support systems.
  

But having said that, I also just have a very hard-headed analysis about this, which is the path we’re on is unsustainable. If you have six, eight, 10 percent health care inflation every single year, at some point we are all broke; businesses are broke, or you stop providing health care to your employees. The federal government is way broke with Medicare and Medicaid. State governments are groaning under the weight of this stuff; it’s consuming everything.

So what that also means though — and this is something I’ve tried to emphasize to my more progressive friends — we can’t simply just add on a whole bunch of people to a broken system, because that’s also unsustainable. You can’t just take people who are currently uninsured, plop them on to a system that is generating those kinds of costs, not dig into the engine and try to figure out how to make the thing run more efficiently, because then you’ll just be broke that much faster. And at some point, you start making very draconian decisions about people losing benefits.

So the cost issue is the thing that we actually think is the big driver in this whole debate. And that’s why — I know you heard from Peter Orszag — things like comparative effectiveness, health IT, prevention, figuring out how our reimbursement structures are designed under Medicare and Medicaid. Medical liability issues — I think all those things have to be on the table. And I won’t lie to you that everybody agrees on this theoretically until you start getting into the specifics. And oftentimes though, Ivan, one of the things I’ll note, is the resistance is not based on evidence, it’s based on people’s interests. Everybody is kind of dug in. They know that the system doesn’t work, but at least it kind of works for them in one particular aspect.

I just wanted to comment that a number of us in the business community are concerned that a hundred percent auction will effectively be a tax that would impose significant costs on energy-intensive industries such as some that we operate, and may impact existing industries’ ability to fund needed investments in new low-carbon technologies.

I just wondered if you could explain how the hundred percent auction approach would work in our highly challenged economy — because we’re all feeling a lot of pressure today on costs — and yet still preserve jobs for existing industries, and strengthen our existing manufacturing sector.

I was talking to some members of Congress just yesterday, you know, who were concerned about this, because I’m sure they’re hearing from industries and, you know, what does this mean economically, et cetera. I just want to point out, you know, anybody who has been to Las Vegas recently and looked at Lake Mead; or who is familiar with what’s happening in agriculture in California right now; or go down to Atlanta, which may not have any water soon, because of what’s happening in terms of changing weather patterns; or talk to Kevin Rudd in Australia — that’s going to cost us money too. It’s just not — it’s not priced.

And I’m not somebody who — I’ve never bought into these Malthusian — woe — Chicken Little, the earth is falling — I tend to be pretty optimistic. I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t pretty optimistic. But I think this is — the science is overwhelming. This is a real problem. It will have severe economic consequences, as well as political and national security and environmental consequences.

And I’m confident that if we do it smart, if we’re talking to you guys, if we’re talking to industries, if our projections don’t end up being wildly unrealistic, then I think we can handle this problem.