A big win for public education in West Virginia

 In what was a clear case of people power versus money power, West Virginia voters overwhelmingly rejected two state constitutional measures on the ballot this election day that would have (further) threatened public education in West Virginia.

Amendment 2 would have given the legislature the power to eliminate business equipment taxes, most of which go to local governments to support public education, emergency service, public libraries, senior centers, parks, etc. It was a power grab that would have taken away control from local voters and governments and given it to politicians in Charleston to give tax breaks to their supporters. Needless to say, business interest groups and dark money supported the amendments.

Amendment 2 was defeated by a nearly 2 to 1 margin.

Amendment 4 was equally bad because it would have taken control of public school curriculums away from boards of educations and given it to the same politicians, opening the way to censorship, book banning, stifling of education, and bogus culture wars. 

Amendment 4 was shot down by a margin of approximately 60 to 40.

Credit for this was due to mobilization from many quarters, including boards of education, county commissions, unions, parents, educators and school support workers, firefighters, grassroots advocacy groups and many others. Lots of people I know (myself included) hit the road and threw hearts and souls into stopping 2 and 4.

For once anyway  people power won over money power.

Please vote no on WV 2 and 4 Nov. 8 to protect education

 Public education was a major concern of West Virginia’s founders. Article 12 Section 1 of the state constitution states that “The Legislature shall provide, by general law, for a thorough and efficient system of free schools.”

Article 12 Section 6 of the state constitution that specifies that “the school board of any district shall be elected by the voters of the respective district without reference to political party affiliation.”

Two constitutional amendments on the ballot in November could threaten the intent of those provisions.

Amendment 2 would essentially give the legislature to power to eliminate business taxes on equipment and property that now provide over a quarter of funding for counties, cities, and schools. As a sweetener, it would also give them power to eliminate taxes on personal vehicles, although the lion’s share of more than 70 percent would go to businesses, many of which are out of state corporations.

If voters approve this amendment, the legislature could cut property taxes by over $500 million dollars. As things now stand, 66 percent of this revenue funds county school districts. Another 33.5 percent goes to county and municipal governments to provide funding for things like emergency medical services, fire protection, public safety, public libraries and senior citizen centers and other services.

This would end a long tradition of constitutional protections for local services, take authority for property taxes away from local voters and communities, and could impact bonds and levies supported by supermajorities of 60 percent or more of local voters. Currently 44 of West Virginia’s 55 counties fund services through voter-approved levies.

Supporters of Amendment 2 say that local governments will be “made whole” by state funding, but there’s no guarantee of that—and doing so would simply require cuts to state funding for other programs. The budget surpluses the state now enjoys are mostly the result of one-time federal COVID relief funding. Making long term plans based on temporary gains is a bit like counting on lottery winnings in making a family’s budget.

The likely long-term results will be either cuts in public services or regressive tax increases that fall on working class families…or a combination thereof.

As Governor Jim Justice put it, “We’re taking away an income stream and betting on good times forever and putting at risk our schools, our EMS, our firemen, our police and whatever it may be. We have to step back and think about what we are doing.”

And while eliminating those taxes might do significant damage to funding local services, it’s not likely to result in more jobs for West Virginians. State and local taxes make up less than two percent of the cost of doing business, so we’re talking about a fraction of a fraction. Some evidence even suggests that cuts in equipment taxes can result in automation and loss of manufacturing jobs.

Amendment 4 would threaten the constitutional intent of school governance without regard to party affiliation by giving partisan politicians control over classrooms and taking authority away from educators, school boards, parents, and voters. This could turn schools into political battlegrounds, stifle learning, create a climate of intimidation, impose a narrow range of ideological and religious perspectives, and lead to censorship and book banning.

What both proposed amendments have in common is the centralization of power by a partisan legislature at the expense of local voters, governments, and school boards.

 For those reasons, we are compelled to express our opposition to Amendments 2 and 4.

(Sorry if this sounds familiar but it's kinda important.)

Thou shalt not steal (from public education)...for now anyway

I look back with fondness on 2018, for lots of reasons. One of the biggest was the unexpected (by me anyway) wave of unrest by teachers and school service workers tired of being insulted and jerked around that resulted in a successful work stoppage that in turn set off a national--and mostly successful--wave of school strikes.

And they've paid for it ever since. The following year, the legislature rammed through laws enabling charter schools, a step mostly supported by enemies of public education and those out for payback, a Venn diagram with significant overlap. In 2021, it passed a so-called "paycheck protection" act, which was more like a paycheck reduction act, that prohibited the withholding of dues from public employee paychecks. In 2022, they shot the moon with a truly horrible False Hope Scholarship Act, that would basically allow parents to take thousands of dollars from public education funding to do whatever they want.

(It was so bad that I even heard Senator Joe Manchin talk about how crazy it was to pay people to take kids out of school at a recent event in McDowell County.)

The case went to court and fortunately today Judge Joanna Tabit overturned the law. The judge was quoted in WV MetroNews as saying 

“The Hope Scholarship Program in my view undermines the free education system by requiring the Department of Education to take funds appropriated by the Legislature and transferring them to the Hope Scholarship Fund, which is then tasked for dispersing funds for private education.

“And in my view, the Legislature has violated its constitutional level obligations regarding public education and funding by enacting House Bill 2013 for the Hope scholarship fund.”

Supporters of the bill plan to appeal the decision, including the state's attorney general, whose greatest recent achievement is blocking federal action on climate change. Nuff said on that.

Still, it's a win for public education today and I'm going to savor it for as long as it lasts. Good court decisions are rare these days.

 

I knew things were bad but...

It takes a lot to surprise me when it comes to bad statistics about West Virginia, but I didn't see this coming: according  to the WV Department of Education, 10,522 public school students in the state are homeless. 

Recall that West Virginia is a small state population-wise and getting smaller every day. This means that 4 percent of students are living in a vehicle, on a relative or friend's couch or in a shelter. That would average out to one student in every class of 25 kids.

The counties with the highest numbers include:

* Jefferson County — 1,411 students, or 16 percent of students
* Kanawha County — 652 students, or 3 percent of students
* Clay County — 633 students, or 34 percent of students
* Mercer County — 588 students, or 7 percent of students
* Cabell County — 455 students, or 4 percent of students

According to officials, some of this may be due to the lingering effects of the 2016 floods, but opioids are probably a leading cause.

Needless to say, none of this came up in all the time wasted by the legislature in pushing for privatization, charter schools and education savings accounts.

This is another example of how public schools are expected to deal with problems they didn't create, even while some legislators undermine them.

Unforced error or deliberate double cross?

The most infuriating thing about the 2019 special session of the WV legislature, which rammed through charter schools and other unwanted education policies, was that it only happened due to the random antics of WV Governor Jim Justice.

On several occasions over the last year, Justice voiced his opposition to charter schools and other nasty aspects of the ominous omnibus bills that were proposed. All he had to do to keep those things from happening was, literally,  nothing.

Had he done literally nothing, the proposals that were defeated in the regular session would go back to wherever bad ideas live until the 2020 regular session. Then there would be time for bills to work their way through the normal legislative process, with plenty of time for committee meetings, debate and amendments.  During an election year.

But noooooo.

Instead, he called for a special session on "education betterment." This allowed foes of public education to short circuit the process and ram bad ideas through. It's a terrible way to make public policy and a betray of the best principles of old-school conservatism, which are all about cautious approaches to change.

Anyone could have seen that coming.

It didn't have to be that way.

The next best thing to do is organize and educate to make sure that the people who made this happen own it. All of it.

Mine Workers pledge solidarity with teachers, school workers

In case you missed it, below is a statement from United Mine Workers president Cecil Roberts about the WV senate majority's attack on teachers and school support workers (I italilcized my favorite part):

“Once again, the Republican leadership in the West Virginia State Senate have demonstrated that they are mere tools of the radical out-of-state billionaires who pull their puppet strings. No one who actually cares about West Virginia schools, children and families would ever propose such meaningless nonsense, let alone codify it in legislation.

“Teachers and school support personnel already do not have the right to strike in West Virginia, but they ignored that and demonstrated the power of solidarity in each of the last two years. Their fight for better education for our kids remains an inspiration to education professionals across the nation, and the UMWA was proud to stand with them.

“From the Baldwin-Felts thugs at Paint Creek and Cabin Creek to Sherriff Chafin at Blair Mountain to Don Blankenship at Massey Energy, the UMWA has a long history of standing up to union-busting bullies in West Virginia. Mitch Carmicheal and his minions in the Senate are no different, and we will never back down to their kind.

“Let me make this very clear: If our state’s education workers believe they need to take to the streets once again, we will be there with them. And if someone comes to arrest them, they will have to go through us first.”​

Another attack on public education

The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce does a great job of representing the economic interests of its members. It can kill bills with a frown and win without even showing up. That’s been true with both Democratic and Republican majorities.

Of course, this is probably easier to do when one represents the power of organized money. However, those interests aren’t necessarily the same as those of ordinary West Virginians, especially working people, kids, families and those just trying to get by.

For example, the Chamber supported the repeal of a prevailing wage policy for building trade workers on state construction jobs, claiming it would save taxpayers money.

It didn’t.

In fact, a new report suggests that repealing prevailing wage lowered wages for local workers, reduced the number of apprenticeships that open the way to middle-class careers and gave more contracts to out-of- state contractors. On-the-job injuries have gone up by 26 percent since the repeal.

Since 2007, the Chamber supported major business tax cuts on the grounds they’d help create jobs. All told, various state tax cuts and credits favoring business groups or the wealthiest West Virginians have reduced state revenues by $478 million per year. That’s more than enough to lift all West Virginia families above the poverty line. Or to provide free in-state tuition to our colleges and universities. Or fix PEIA. Or deal with students’ mental health issues. Or whatever.

Here’s the kicker: we have fewer jobs now than we did in 2007. And West Virginians are earning less in constant dollars. But some folks did pretty well.

For reasons like that, I suspect the interests of the Chamber might not be identical with those of the 270,000 or so students in the state’s public schools.

The Chamber recently released its report on education reform in West Virginia, which not surprisingly highlights the shortcomings of the school system, supports charter schools (which can function as basically unaccountable private schools paid for with public money) and education savings accounts.

It’s a good strategy. Undermining support for and the legitimacy of public institutions has opened doors more than once to profiting at public expense and eventual privatization.

The report is mostly about money and standardized tests. The intent seems to be to demonstrate that schools are failing despite generous funding.

One thing the report doesn’t do is analyze is the effect of poverty and inequality on educational performance, despite the fact that one in four West Virginia children live in poverty and that we all live in a time of runaway inequality.

(If I was them, I’d probably try to avoid that subject too; it helps avoid certain unpleasant conversations and conclusions.)

The word poverty occurs as a blip four times in the report with no in-depth discussion.

But, as Helen Ladd demonstrated in an article on the connection between poverty and education in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, “Study after study has demonstrated that children from disadvantaged households perform less well in school on average than those from more advantaged households.”

We don’t have to look far to see how poverty can impact standardized measures of educational success. Sean O’Leary of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy recently pointed out the contrasts between George Washington and Riverside high schools in Kanawha County.

GW’s math, reading and science proficiency rates “are 30, 23, and 36 percentage points higher respectively, than Riverside High School’s scores. So what is the difference between the two schools? Only 20 percent of George Washington’s students are eligible for free/reduced lunches, compared to nearly 40 percent for Riverside. Riverside has nearly twice as many low-income students as George Washington. Two schools in the same district with the same policies, and same funding source, with vastly different educational outcomes.

Given all that, how do you expect students in the fourth poorest state in the nation to compare with more affluent states?

Much of the discussion in the Chamber report revolves around numbers from the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), which is mentioned 24 times. NAEP data is sometimes referred to as “the nation’s report card.” But, as the Urban Institute argues, “comparing NAEP scores assumes that states serve the same students — and we know they don’t.”

The Urban Institute argues that a more accurate way to talk about NAEP performance is to “use adjusted NAEP scores that account for demographic differences across students in each state.” These adjusted scores allow for students to be compared with those in similar circumstances.

(A full list of those factors includes gender, race and ethnicity, eligibility for free or reduced lunch, English proficiency, special education, age, whether the student was given an accommodation on the NAEP exam, whether the student has various amenities in the home — computer, internet, own room, dishwasher and clothes dryer — the number of books in the home, the language spoken in the home, and the family structure.)

If you adjust for these factors that impact learning and compare our students with others in similar conditions, for example, West Virginia’s fourth-grade math scores rise from 37th to 11th.

Maybe something else is broken ...

There are powerful forces at work in West Virginia to hold public schools responsible for problems they didn’t create. But maybe, it might be more productive to address the real issues that are holding back West Virginia’s kids and communities — even if some people would rather avoid the issue.

A long time ago, Henry David Thoreau observed that “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

Maybe it’s time to change that.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Get ready to defend public education. Again.

Republican leaders in the WV legislature unveiled their legislative priorities for the coming session. Some of these are welcome, such as raising pay for teachers and other public employees, making community college and vocation training more broadly available and improving the Second Chance for  Employment Act.

Others, mostly having to do with public education, fall into the "not so much" category. Included in that are another round of business tax cuts to the tune of $140 million; charter schools, which drain resources from public schools; and "school choice," another word for privatization.

If you want to gear up for the next round, check out this Washington Post story on the drive to privatize education in the US. And  here are some great talking points to use in the weeks ahead.

Here we go again...

Getting the band together again

Mission accomplished: winning the 2018 WV teachers' strike

As we gear up for the 2019 legislative session, I have trouble wrapping my head around the fact that this time last year the great WV teachers' and school support workers' strike wasn't much more than an angry gleam in a few peoples' eyes. It was a real reminder to me that hope can come when least expected.

Still, there are unresolved issues. Last year's raise still isn't what these workers deserve. PEIA funding in unresolved. Worse, Senate Majority Leader Mitch Carmichael wants to eliminate the business inventory tax, which currently brings in $140 million per year, most of which goes to local school districts.

The promise apparently is that this cut, which mostly benefits out of state corporations, will create jobs and won't hurt funding for education....kind of like the last round of business tax cuts would create jobs and pay for themselves. 

Except they didn't.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it's good to know that West Virginia can still go West Virginia on itself.

#Red4Ed

It all started here in WV.

It's been great to see the huge masses of teachers and their allies filling the streets in Raleigh, North Carolina today. I hope the ball that started rolling in West Virginia keeps moving on. And that the victories keep coming.

Like the WV strike, the protests in North Carolina highlight the damage done by passing irresponsible and unproductive tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy at the expense of things like education, health and infrastructure.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that tax cuts enacted in NC since 2013, which haven't even gone into full effect yet, have included:

*Across-the-board cuts to personal income tax rates that disproportionately benefit the wealthy by replacing the state’s graduated system (with rates of 6, 7, and 7.75 percent) with a flat rate, currently 5.499 percent.

*A cut of more than half to the corporate income tax rate, which has fallen from 6.9 percent in 2013 to 3 percent today.

*An end to the state’s estate tax, which will only benefit heirs of estates worth over $5.25 million — under 1 percent of estates.

I guess you could say you get what you don't pay for.

In case you were thinking this is just a coincidence, which anyone reading this probably isn't, check out this piece on how billionaires and corporations have been pushing this kind of agenda for years.
It gets pretty specific.

Then there's this Bloomberg story on how tax cuts pushed the the Kochs and their ilk have driven teachers to the streets. I particularly like this line:

"The wave of strikes in the past three months is just the latest sign that Tea Party-style austerity is losing favor."

May it be so.

Long time gone

It's been several days without a Goat Rope post. I've been on the road a lot lately crisscrossing the state several times to go to citizen advocacy and lobbying trainings. Usually, these are sparsely attended, but for some unknown reason people are turning out by the scores and hundreds. I'm glad--we're going to need all the people power we can get.

Meanwhile, here's the latest Front Porch. Not my best effort, but I was burned out from the road, sick, and uninformed about the topic until the morning we recorded it.

Meanwhile, would someone please tell me when we've hit bottom?

Time to protect public education

This is no time to be a turkey when it comes to our schools. This call to protect public education in  WV was written by my co-worker Lida Shepherd and appeared in today's Sunday Gazette-Mail.

There has been a lot of sad news recently in the Charleston Gazette-Mail about our schools. One example concerns Nicholas County, where Ryan Quinn reports that student enrollment has dropped 26 percent in the last 25 years, resulting in a severe loss in funding.

These cuts come on top of the devastating flood that ripped through the county’s schools last year.

In the shadow of our state’s budget crisis and the $11.1 million budget cut to state school-aid, teachers and administrators are being laid off in alarming numbers, with 73 positions in Kanawha County alone. It doesn’t take a big leap of the imagination to see that this means more people leaving the state to find work elsewhere, and taking their talent (and families) with them.

These ongoing budget woes also means more teachers pulling from their own pocket for school supplies, more students having to raise their own funds for extracurricular activities, bigger classroom sizes, more screen time, shabbier textbooks; and I’m not sure we’ll be seeing many Mandarin Chinese or fine arts classes being added.

For some people, these challenges make things like charter schools, vouchers and privatizing our public education system all the more alluring. Since the election, “education reform” or “educational choice” has gotten a major shot in the arm.

The late economist Milton Friedman would be pleased by this development. He thought the answer to the public education system was the private sector. In effect, this meant that public education was an untapped treasure trove whereby tax dollars can be siphoned out of public coffers and into private ones.

As Naomi Klein argued in her book “The Shock Doctrine,” Friedman and like-minded people were experts at taking advantage of natural or political catastrophes — from Hurricane Katrina to major economic crises — to push an agenda that would never fly in more stable times. She called this “disaster capitalism.”

The sad irony is that part of the reason our schools are suffering so badly now is because we failed to take steps 100 years ago that could have converted our natural resources into a public good. Instead, our coal seams were exploited largely for the private gain of out-of-state interests at the expense of any kind of economic diversification. As Jeff Kessler recently pointed out in an interview on W.Va. Public Broadcasting, “If coal’s been king, it hasn’t taken very good care of its subjects. We’re the poorest state in the nation.”

I fear we are poised to make the same kind of mistake by the weakening and/or privatization of our public education system through vouchers — Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) — charter schools and for-profit K-12 education. These efforts are becoming commonplace, supported by the steady rhetoric of “failed government schools” and “school choice.”

We now have as U.S. Secretary of Education nominee billionaire heiress Betsy DeVos, who never attended or taught at a public school and who has spent millions of her private wealth on campaigns to privatize education systems.

Corporate-backed education “reform” campaigns like the ones DeVos has waged (one to the tune of $5 million in Michigan) have normalized in public discourse what once was the radical idea that we turn the public good of our education system into a source of private profit.

Sometimes, these reforms are touted as “leveling the playing field” in public education so that the quality of education a child can receive is not dependent on his or her zip code; but Henry Levin, professor of economics and education at Columbia University, has found that both in the United States and abroad vouchers result in increased economic and racial stratification.

He also points out that most of our public discourse around what is best for equity and advancements in our educational system is based in ideology instead of evidence.

But what’s new? Calls for the privatization of the public sector are happening in Medicare and the health care system, education and, most recently housing, with HUD secretary nominee Ben Carson vowing to privatize sectors of our public housing system.

In spite of troubling national trends, I’m holding out hope that we don’t sell out the public education of our children in West Virginia. Such a step would go against the best traditions of West Virginia and would violate the spirit and letter of our state constitution, which mandates “the establishment of a thorough and efficient system of free schools.”

Four for the road

The latest Front Porch program/podcast features an interview with Joseph Cohen, new director of the ACLU of WV.

A persistent problem. This AP news story is a variation on an old theme: the WV paradox of human poverty amidst huge natural wealth. I'm going to miss outgoing senator and former senate president Jeff Kessler, who is featured in the article.

Glad he noticed. I've been writing, ranting and blogging a lot about the fate of those who might be hurt by repeal of the Affordable Care Act and its provisions like Medicaid expansion. It was a pleasant surprise to see that conservative commentator Hoppy Kercheval share some of these concerns.

Next on the list to wreck: public education. This Gazette-Mail article about anticipated WV Republican legislative efforts to undermine public education was another downer, as if one was needed.

Bring back child labor?

I used to think that I should devote my few remaining days on this earth to the noble cause of changing West Virginia's state motto from "Mountaineers Are Always Free," which doesn't really fit anymore, to "You can't make this **** up."

I'm starting to think that may need to be done for the nation instead. We are, after all having pluribus troubles with our unum.

Here's one example, which is particularly ironic or sad for those familiar with labor history. From the earliest days of the republic, a major demand of working people and the labor movement has been for free public education. Another key demand from long ago was the abolition of child labor. So it's just peachy that the Trump administration's pick for education secretary is someone devoted to torpedoing public education though vouchers and privatization. AND she's served on the board of an organization that celebrates the virtue of child labor.

Here's another cheer for child labor from a similar think tank that talks about how exciting mining can be for kids.

The picture above comes from the 1907 Monongah mine disaster, one of many that occurred in West Virginia. The official death toll was over 360, but nobody knows for sure. In the absence of child labor laws, it was customary for some miners to bring their boys to work with them. We'll never know how many children died in the disaster.

I guess some people find that exciting.

Bad apples and bad ideas

An interesting survey of public opinion on education found that most Americans--68 percent--bear a heavy share of the blame for problems in the nation's public school system. Only 35 percent set a great deal of blame on teachers.

That's quite a different perspective than one finds in recent efforts to promote education reform, including those coming from the Obama administration, where a "if we purge teachers, things will improve" mentality seems to prevail. Some reform initiatives from the administration encourage firing of teachers in poorly performing schools, without taking into account all the other factors involved.

Nobody I know, including people represented by teachers' unions and those who work for them, denies that there are some bad teachers out there. But problem teachers should be dealt with on a case by case basis, not by blanket purges that punish the competent along with the incompetent.

The blame-teachers-first mentality seems to view teachers as the sole or primary cause of poorly performing schools. But as I've said here before, to establish causality, one needs three things, two of which are easy and one of which is hard. First, the cause and effect need to be associated (teachers and schools, in this case). Second, the cause must come before the effect (the teachers were there before the kids were). Third--and this is the kicker--you need to be able to rule out other factors. And here is where that train derails.

There are all kinds of factors affecting poorly performing schools and students, including poverty, family, nutrition, health, community issues, distance from school and enrichment activities, parental and community involvement, etc.

A friend of mine, the Rev. Matthew Watts, actually did the math and calculated that from a child is born until he or she reaches age 19, only 9 percent of the time will have been spent in school. The other 91 percent is spent in the home or in the community. To really address these issues, we need to look at the other 91 percent as well.

MORE ON ALL THAT here.

KLEPTOCRACY lives. And more from Krugman here.

A DOWN PAYMENT ON HEALTH CARE REFORM. West Virginia is launching a new pilot program to provide low cost primary care to the uninsured.

VIRAL CAT VIDEO DEPARTMENT. By way of Youtube, patty cake will never be the same.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BLOWING IT

Aeolus, keeper of the winds. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The series on the Odyssey of Homer continues, along with links and comments on current events.

After several (largely self-inflicted) misadventures, it looks like Odysseus and his men are finally going to get a break. Aeolus, keeper of the winds, has given Odysseus a huge sack containing all the winds but the West Wind, which will blow him straight back to his home of Ithaca.

It should have been a slam dunk. Unfortunately, our hero, like many people who have been traumatized, doesn't trust anybody. He doesn't explain the nature of the gift to his men and he doesn't trust them to be able to steer the ships. He insists on doing it all, without taking any breaks:

Nine whole days we sailed, nine nights, nonstop.
On the tenth our own land hove into sight at last--
we were so close we could see men tending fires.
But now an enticing sleep came on me, bone-weary
from working the vessel's sheet myself, no letup,
never trusting the ropes to any other mate,
the faster to journey back to native land.

His men start to grumble to themselves about the mysterious gift from Aeolus. They are jealous, thinking that he has been given special gifts and declined to share them with his troops. They decide to take a peek:

A fatal plan, but it won my shipmates over.
They loosed the sack and all the winds burst out
and a sudden squall struck and swept us back to sea,
wailing, in tears, far from our own native land.
And I woke up with a start, my spirit churning--
should I leap over the side and drown at once
or grin and bear it, stay among the living?

Helpless and embarrassed, he heads back to Aeolus, hoping for another break. Not this time. Aeolus sends him away in disgust:

'Away from my island--fast--most cursed man alive!
It's a crime to host a man or speed him on his way
when the blessed deathless gods despise him so.
Crawling back like this--
it proves the immortals hate you! Out--get out!'

Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who works with Vietnam veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress problems, finds this story similar to those told by some of his patients who were offered a break such as a great job by a "big man" on returning.

Unfortunately, some of them lost valuable opportunities offered by well meaning benefactors by treating an ordinary job as a "combat mission," working day and night without sleeping, not trusting co-workers to do the job right, and not giving them the information they need to help him do the job. When they failed, they had to go back like Odysseus to ask for one more chance--sometimes with the same results.

But there's a universal theme here as well. Think about how many times in life we almost got things right, almost made it to some desired state, only to have things fall apart when the end seemed to be in sight,leaving us feeling, like Odysseus, to be despised by the gods.

I hate it when that happens.

SPEAKING OF BLOWING IT, scientists are concerned that the permafrost covering parts of the northern hemisphere contains huge amounts of carbon. If this thaws as a result of climate change, they'd release even more into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change even more.

UNDOING THE DAMAGE. A recent issue of Mother Jones magazine has a series of articles on cleaning up the mess that will be left behind by the Bush administration.

MASSEYGATE MAKES THE NY TIMES (AGAIN). Here's an editorial from the Sunday New York Times about Massey Energy's relationship with the WV Supreme Court.

PLENTY OF SCHOOLS LEFT BEHIND. An example of the recent failure to invest in infrastructure and public goods is the declining investment in public school facilities.

NATURE OR NURTURE? This is an interesting article on scientific studies of gender differences.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

Caption: The consequences of our actions are sometimes distinctly uncool.

This week, in addition to links and comments about current events, Goat Rope is offering its readers a daily Nietzschean nugget from his book Beyond Good and Evil.

Admittedly, Nietzsche was kind of whacked at times, but when he was good, he was very, very good.

Today's selection highlights one of the irritating things about life:

The consequences of our actions take us by the scruff of the neck, altogether indifferent to the fact that we have 'improved' in the meantime.

I hate it when that happens. Don't you?

PEOPLE SUPPORT CHIP. A new survey shows overwhelming support for expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program (70 percent) and most (64 percent) support overriding the Bush veto.

HEALTH CARE and growing inequality is the subject of this column by WVU-Tech's John David.

YOU WOULDN'T KNOW IT given all the bashing of public education these days, but African-American students have made significant progress in closing the achievement gap according to this EPI snapshot.

OH GOOD. In yesterday's Gazette, no less than two leaders of the religious right have issued fatwas against the infidel.

One called for the banning of Pat Conroy's novels from AP English classes. Now I haven't read Conroy and no doubt would have picked something different since I'm an unapologetic member of the let-them-eat-classics school of literature. I've even tortured more than one GED class by making them read Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" aloud.

But that's not the point. It does not appear to have occurred to the people in question that vastly more harm has been done by people not reading than by reading, not to mention the harm done by censorship itself. Congratulations to the students who attended a school board meeting last night to assert their opposition to censorship.

The other one was mostly about the the "radical homosexual agenda to force their decadent lifestyle upon the citizenry at large." It also castigated some members of Congress for "normalizing and recognizing sodomy as a civil rights entitlement..." (Note to self: look up some legal definitions).

Another target was the recent action of the Charleston City Council to pass a measure opposing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The piece also managed to come out in favor of the death penalty.

It occurs to me that there are certain regimes around the world which share the priorities of these groups and which they might perhaps find more congenial to their felicity.

ON A RELATED NOTE. There are groups in WV, such as Create West Virginia, which have argued that if WV is going to attract creative people and investments and build a high road economy, we need to be open to diversity.

Let's imagine how the actions of the domestic Taliban might look to someone from outside considering West Virginia. They might say "Hmmmm. They like to ban books there. Maybe they'll get around to burning them soon. And they seem to hate x group there, but tomorrow it might be y or z. Thanks but no thanks."

TO CLEAR THE PALATE, it looks like the humble sea cucumber could teach us a lot about tissue regeneration. And it looks like going to the beach and eating seafood is an older tradition than we thought.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ENCIMA DEL MUNDO

COLLECTIVE MADNESS

Caption: This is a mad crowd.

This week, in addition to news and links on current events, El Cabrero is passing out nuggets from the less whacked out portions of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil for your entertainment and edification.

Is this a full service blog or what?

I may have used today's selection before but it's another one that should be widely posted in public places to remind us of the dangers of group behavior:

Madness is something rare in individuals--but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.

Although we are social animals and not all groups are nasty, it is the official Goat Rope verdict that the dude wasn't too far off the mark. Aside from the occasional sociopath, people tend to be fairly harmless taken one at a time. Put a bunch of us together at the same time and place, add a few other choice ingredients, and all bets are off.

(Note: the positive and negative sides of group behavior are frequent Goat Rope themes. If you're interested, search the blog for tags such as group psychology, group behavior, conflict, conformity, obedience.)

GAPS. According to a new study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, millions of low wage Americans struggle to make ends meet due to the gap between employer-provided wages and benefits and public work support programs. Here's a shorter article on the subject by CEPR's Heather Boushey.

ON TOP OF ALL THAT, workplace stress can be lethal.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS HOLD THEIR OWN. According to a Washington Post article on study released last week,

Low-income students who attend urban public high schools generally do just as well as private-school students with similar backgrounds, according to a study being released Wednesday.

Students at independent private schools and most parochial schools scored the same on 12th-grade achievement tests in core academic subjects as those in traditional public high schools when income and other family characteristics were taken into account, according to the study by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.

There's been a lot of public school bashing in the last few years, but the study found that when one controls for factors such as parental involvement, the difference in achievement between public and private schools tends to evaporate.

CHURCHES WEIGH IN. The West Virginia Council of Churches issued a statement on mountaintop removal mining last week. It stopped short of calling for abolition but urged strict enforcement of existing laws and opposed their weakening. Here's AP coverage and here's the statement.

AMERICA IN A FUNK? Some public opinion surveys would indicate one. This is a good follow-up to last week's series on optimism and pessimism.

IT'S ALL GOOD. Here's one on Reaganomics from The Onion.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED