Posted by Michael Haran on Feb 13, 2014
Letter to the Editor
Progressive pedagogy
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
February 10, 2014
EDITOR: Understandably, an official of the Institute of Progressive Education and Learning, Michael Haran, believes that progressive pedagogy should play a strong role in schooling (“The value of common core standards in school,” Close to Home, Thursday). Less clear is why he would insist Common Core should impose progressive pedagogy on all children, despite individual differences that leave some children more in need of structured instruction than others.
Perhaps Haran really believes that governors of the 50 states gathered under the aegis of the National Governors Association and voted for progressive uniformity via Common Core. But that did not happen. The National Governor’s Association’s permanent bureaucracy, the Center for Best Practices, selectively gathered theorists to draft the Common Core curricular guides, drawing on heavy funding from the federal government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. No record exists of governors voting collectively for Common Core. Indeed, some states neither pay dues to the association nor participate in its proceedings.
Progress in education comes when state and local officials, and especially parents and teachers, are free to exercise choices and implement what is best for each child, as opposed to following a onesizefits-all scheme.
ROBERT HOLLAND
Senior fellow, the Heartland Institute Chicago
Response
Letter to the Editor
2/10/2014
Missing the point
Editor: The letter to the Editor “Progressive pedagogy” (Robert Holland of the conservative think tank the Heartland Institute) totally misses the point of my article but this selective commentary is typical of the far right. It doesn’t matter who initiated the new Common Core Standards the point is that because we have a common culture in the U.S. we need to have a standard education system of core subjects such as math, English, history, technology and science for each K-12 grade. Beyond that each school district is free to include other course such as art, music, P.E., local history and social studies even if it includes creationism and the denial of climate change. Regardless of whether a child goes on to college or not we owe our children a decent education. It’s imperative to each child and it is imperative to American and no 19th century mentality is going to change that.
Michael Haran
Healdsburg
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Posted by Michael Haran on Feb 7, 2014
In this year’s State of the Union speech it sounded like women’s issues are going to be a big part of the Democratic 2014 campaign strategy. In 2013 we saw an unprecedented number of women in the U.S. Senate and a lot has been written about the assentation of women. Sheryl Sandberg’s book, “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” has described the evolution of the modern American women and the roll they must play to get ahead in the corporate boardroom.
During WWII women had good jobs. They were contributing to the war effort and had a high self-worth. After the war many of their jobs were eliminated and the jobs created by the post-war economic boom were filled by the men returning from the war. Millions of women had no choice but to become stay-at-home mothers or house wives. Now that in its self is not bad. Given the option many women would choose that life style in a heartbeat but that’s the point – it’s about options. 
When I was growing up I felt a frustration in the women that were raising me. My mother was fear based and there was little joy in the Catholic nuns that taught me. At a young age I thought that that was just the way things were and then along came the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and with it the sexual revolution of the American women. Women wanted to be able to have sex like a man but soon realized that that wasn’t in their best interest and human nature soon reasserted itself. But what did come from it was the beginning of the liberation of the American women which is still going on.
What many people don’t recognize is that the equality of women is just as important to men as it is to women. Women are born multitaskers. They had to be because of the uncertainties of raising a child not knowing whether the father was going to be around. The four Cs that we are trying to instill in our K-12 student for the most part come natural to women. Women have for years used collaboration, critical thinking, cooperation and creativity to survive in a male dominated world. A single mother who has to work while raising a child needs a very exact skill set to not only to function but also to put the child’s development first. Evolution has given women a natural tenancy to run things driven by this subconscious, or conscious, desire for survival. Any man who has cohabitated with a woman knows who runs the household.
Not long ago I was talking with a young Saudi man who was raised in London. We were talking about the station of women in Saudi Arabia particularly about the right to drive a car. I will never forget his remark about why women should be treated as equals in any society. “Women get it in a way men don’t” he said. That just about sums it up.
When a young couple gets married and has a child it’s the mother who is first up to bat. Nature has equipped the mother both physically and emotionally to be the infant’s primary care giver. As the child grows the mother and father both share care for the toddler and around five years old either parent can participate in the child’s activities.
Now let’s say that the mother is career oriented and the father would rather earn a living working from home in say woodwork or writing but he can’t quit his job because the wife can’t earn as much as he can. If women were completely equal in the work place this would not be a problem. Society would benefit, the economy would benefit and the family would benefit.
The bottom line is equality would allow women to not only do what they do best but also get paid for it. Equality is good for everyone.
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Posted by Michael Haran on Feb 6, 2014
By Michael Haran
Press Democrat, Santa Rosa, Ca.
February 6, 2014
George F. Will’s article (The Common Core is Worth Opposing 1/17/2014) is amazing in its “conservative” mentality. He bashes the Common Core Standards as a continuation of “Fifty years of increasing Washington
inputs into K-12 education that has coincided with disappointing cognitive outputs from schools.” Hello? This is exactly why the Standards were enacted.
Will’s reminds us that the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the 1970 General Education Provisions Act and the 1979 law that created the Department of Education are all federal intrusions into what he calls, “state and local responsibility for curriculum control.” He complains that “what begins with national standards must breed ineluctable pressure to standardized educational content.”
He notes that, “Washington already is encouraging the alignment of the GED, SAT and ACT tests with Common Core. By a feedback loop, these tests will beget more curriculum conformity. All this, he contends, will take a toll on parental empowerment.”
What Will fails to recognize, or admit, is that all his criticisms are why the standards were initiated. He says that “it is more likely there will be a half a dozen innovative governors than one creative federal education bureaucracy.” With this remark Will is right. The Common Core Initiative was established by the National Governors Association, many of which are Republicans, and the Council of Chief State School Officers based on a 2004 report titled, “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts.” It found that both employers and colleges are demanding more of high school graduates and that current high-school exit expectations fall well short of demands.
In his article “Why Our Nation Needs Common Standards,” (Hechinger Report, July 18, 2013) Jonah Edelman said “The Common Core Standards are clear and high standards for what every child in the United States should know by the end of each grade and are a practical and effective solution for a system that now dooms some students to learn far less than their peers who happen to live in other states.
They benefit students in states with weak academic standards. They benefit teachers who want to access and share the best possible lesson plans. They benefit parents who have a right to know that an “A” in school or a “proficient” on the state test actually means their child is on track.
Will insinuates that Common Core roll out is experiencing the same “federal touch” that has given us HealthCare.gov. What he doesn’t say is that all new government programs experience roll-out problems. Social Security did, Medicare Part B did and Common Core will.
The biggest problems are cost and technology. Georgia spends 8-9 dollars per student to administer five-subject tests compared to the Common Core’s new per-student cost estimate of $29.50 for just two tests. Only 28 percent of Oklahoma school districts have the infrastructure necessary for the new exams. Both of these problems will be addressed as the $4.35 billion Race to the Top money is released to states when the Common Core Standards are initiated in the 2014-15 school year.
People like George Will look at progressive education as a bad thing. They don’t like change even though change is inevitable. Technology has made the U.S., like the world, a smaller place. Education conformity makes America’s workforce more efficient which allow people to move to where the jobs are. Will calls Bill Gate’s remark: “It’s ludicrous to think that multiplication in Alabama and multiplication in New York are really different,” flippancy. I call it common sense – I call it Common Core.
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Posted by Michael Haran on Jan 30, 2014
Healdsburg Tribune
1/23/2014
By Michael Haran
In December I went to a Regional Climate Protection Authority presentation at the Healdsburg City Council chambers. The RCPA was created in 2009 to improve coordination on climate change issues and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as was mandated by the ten county government’s partnership with the Climate Protection Campaign in 2005.
I was expecting a sit-down presentation on RCPA’s progress but instead there were only charts ringing the room and index cards for suggestions. When I asked one of the RCPA staff members why there wasn’t a formal presentation she said that they decided to forgo one because of the disruptions they had encountered at the Windsor presentation.
It seems that there is a group of climate deniers in the county who attend these meeting as concerned citizens. They pretend not to know each other and then disrupt and dispute anything the RCPA’s staff has to say. I was told that these people are not polite and their sole purpose is to take over the meeting for their own agenda.
Regardless of the fact that the deniers tend to be rather obnoxious and since none of us have done the science ourselves who’s really right about climate change, the deniers or the believers?
On the deniers side the earth warms and cools about every ten thousand years. Eventually we will once again have glaciers in the middle of North America. In pre-historic times we had forest fires that burned from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and at one time the earth was covered in volcanos spewing tons of magma gases into the atmosphere. Humans have only been spewing for about a hundred years and affecting the climate for even less than that.
Research published in the journal “Science” on September 8, 2013 stated “Abrupt climate change has been a systemic feature of Earth’s climate for hundreds of thousands of years and may play an active role in longer term climate variability through its influence on ice age terminations.”
On the believers’ side, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950’s, many of the climate changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.
During those “hundreds of thousands of years” climate anthropologists have been able to identify six major species die-offs most likely caused by CO2. This is probably what killed off the dinosaurs some 60 million years ago and let’s hope that we’re not the next with the amount of CO2 humans are currently releasing into the atmosphere.
No matter whether climate warming is real or not, oil is a foul, dirty energy source that pollutes our streets, water-ways and air so we should just ban it as soon as we can. Most products that are petroleum based can be made with synthetic alternatives and that $5 billion a year we give to the oil industry, for whatever reason, would go a long way in feeding the children of the working poor.
So once we get rid of oil what should we do with all the oil and coal slurry pipelines crisscrossing the country? I say fill them with water. Now I don’t know the feasibility or the cost of such an undertaking but with the Great Lakes being the world’s largest deposit of fresh water it stirs the imagination. Drought in the Midwest? No problem. Drought in the West? No problem. Water for oil – pump, baby, pump!
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Posted by Michael Haran on Dec 18, 2013
Commentary
Healdsburg Tribune
12/5/2013
After reading Rollie Atkinson’s editorial it got me thinking just how valuable the Tribune is to Healdsburg and I’m sure how the other Sonoma West Publishers’ weekly papers are to their communities.
Rollie did a good job of listing the paper’s features and their benefits. I had never before looked at ads as news but Rollie’s comment, “The butcher’s special at the grocery story is a big weekly headline for us,” caught my eye. The Big John’s Market back page ad is the first thing my wife looks at when the paper arrives at our house. I look at all the ads in the Business Directory to see who is still advertising and who is new to the section and doing what. I like to follow the activities of the business owners that I know.
I enjoy following the Healdsburg High’s sports teams especially the basketball teams. I play basketball on Saturday mornings at the high school gym which is monitored by Wayne Rudy for the Town’s Park and Rec Department. He is a long time junior high and high school basketball coach for both boys and girls and he regularly brings the younger kids to our pick-up games to play against the all-ages that play there. The kids I have gotten to know I follow their high school sports careers in the Tribune. The Saturday mornings are also an on-going mini reunion of sorts as many of the players that have graduated occasionally come back to play.
In an interview with the California Newspaper Publishers Association in 2012 Rollie said, “We have a very low turnover in most of our organization, except for our newsroom. Our wage level is terrible, but we do offer a great learning experience and lots of freedom to explore the craft and trade of writing and journalism. I think we’ve been very lucky to keep finding the level of talent we do.” When asked “What are some of the ways the industry can preserve newspapers in our communities?” he went on to say… cautiously (very cautiously) explore projects or relationships with civic journalists.”
When we moved here about eight years ago, I wrote my first Tribune Letter-to-the-Editor about little Christmas tree that would light up every night in a vineyard. I have since gone on to write commentary that has been published in not only the Tribune but also the Press Democrat and other publications. I have to say that the tribune has helped me, and others, become a commentary writers and “civic journalists.”
Now if you look at what is published every week in the Tribune such as public notices, obituaries, local news, what the town government is up to, event calendars, school-library-museum announcements, local columnists and editorials on local, state and national issues I too am amazed at what a bargain the paper is at 50 cents. I think it is quite easy to justify $1.00 a copy. I feel the real value is closer to $5.00 but unfortunately you wouldn’t sell many papers at that price.
The paper is not just a local resource. When I travel and stay in a new community the first thing I do is buy the local newspaper to get a lay of the land. Even though my stay will be short I can serendipitously immerse myself in local politics, culture and the business community. I’m sure many Healdsburg tourists have found their stay in our town more rewarding by picking up the Trib and reading it with their morning lattes.
This is some of what the Trib means to me. So in this Thanksgiving season we certainly should be thankful for having the Tribune and we have to support the local merchants that support our town newspaper. I’m sure Rollie is not getting rich running his little publishing empire but he is certainly making us the richer for having the Healdsburg Tribune.
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