Op Ed

Jerry Patterson is the current Texas Land Commissioner and has declared himself a 2014 candidate for lieutenant governor. Patterson has been in the news quite a bit lately because he sponsored a proposal to allow Texas drivers to display the Confederate flag on their license plates. Patterson submitted the idea on behalf of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group of which he says he is a “proud” member.

The proposal has generated a strong reaction. Last week a coalition of groups opposed to the proposal submitted over 22,000 signatures to the Texas DMV board slated to make the final decision. As with all boards and commissions in the Lone Star State, every member of that board is a Rick Perry appointee. While Perry himself has tried to keep a low profile on this issue, he has sided with SCV in the past.

Why did Patterson sponsor the license plate? Apparently it was because of his “personal heritage” and “commitment to Texas history—even the history others might find offensive” To those who question the wisdom of his efforts to place the Confederate emblem on something as public as license plates, Patterson refers critics to his earlier sponsorship of a similar license plate on behalf of the Buffalo Soldier National Museum in Houston. “I think we can honor both of them,” he says. “If we can honor those who killed Indians and imprisoned them, why is it bad to honor those who theoretically fought for slavery, which is not accurate?”

As someone familiar with the black and Indian history of Texas, let me venture to furnish Mr. Patterson with a response. I will not focus on the obviousness of the reasons (of course it was slavery) behind Texasʼs decision to leave the Union and join the Confederacy. Those reasons were made clear on February 2, 1861, when the secession convention published its “Declaration of the Causes Which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union.”

The story of the Buffalo Soldiers is a history of the meanings, understandings and contradictions of American freedom, whereas the story of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is primarily a history of the glorification and uncritical admiration of racial oppression and white supremacy. Both Indians and blacks were victims of that white supremacy, with one oppressed group utilized to fight against another oppressed group, hardly a novel proposition in American or Texas history, indeed World history.

A Texas license plate for the former is justified; allowing a state sanctioned license plate in honor of the latter would not just be an insult to the stateʼs African American and Indian populations, it would once again send the message, as I first noted eleven years ago, that Texas remains the most unreconstructed state in the nation.

Inter-marriage between blacks and Indians on the sparsely settled frontier was common. Some of the soldiers serving in Buffalo Soldier regiments were themselves descendants of slaves formerly owned by the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes”—some of them were of mixed race. The term “Buffalo Soldier” was intended as a sign of respect on the part of Indians the soldiers encountered. Indeed there are many members of Indian tribes today who are proud of their African-American roots and boast of having a Buffalo Soldier in their family line.

Pattersonʼs focus on the killing of Indians by blacks might seem somewhat strange at first glance, but upon further reflection comes into sharper focus as a decidedly neo-Confederate point of view. That members or fellow travelers of the Sons of Confederate Veterans not only sanctioned but conducted dozens of lynchings in Texas—and that there is not one historical marker commemorating a lynching—seems to have escaped Mr. Pattersonʼs notice. Thatʼs the true history of the organization of which he is a “proud” member.

Historical commemoration is both a private and public matter. While I personally believe that membership in the SCV should disqualify someone from holding public office, if Mr. Patterson or Mr. Perry choose to be proud of their Confederate heritage thatʼs their business, just as it is a Naziʼs personal business if he or she chooses to memorialize or admire the ghoulish philosophies and unspeakable acts of the German government during the National Socialist period (full disclosure: my maternal grandfather fought and died in World War II on the German side, whereas my father was a part of the post-war American occupying force). In a post World War II Germany, however, it is not legal nor socially acceptable to prominently display the swastika.

Unlike the Sons of Confederate Veterans and its sister organization the United Daughters of the Confederacy, whose historical agendas remain apparent by simply examining a random sample of historical markers and commemorations across the state such as the 1959 “Children of the Confederacy Creed” plaque currently mounted at the state Capitol, modern Germans long ago had the good sense to not fool themselves into believing that the sordid mission of genocide and white supremacy largely based on American racial norms somehow constituted a Lost Cause.

Wes Jackson spent the weekend at The Land Institute’s annual Prairie Festival talking up—with his usual precision and passion—the science and strategy behind plans to revolutionize the way we grow food using perennial polyculture grains.

A leading figure in the sustainable agriculture movement, Jackson has been pursuing the science and tweaking the strategy for more than three decades, building an impressive body of knowledge with his colleagues at “The Land,” as it’s known to everyone there. (The group also has produced an impressive full-bodied bread that was on the dinner table during the festival, made from an intermediate wheatgrass grain they’ve developed and dubbed “Kernza.”)

But, perhaps ironically, my faith in Jackson’s vision deepens not when he speaks from the depth of his knowledge (or when people happily bite into the bread) but when he emphasizes the uncertainty of what he knows. More on that, after some background.

Jackson, who co-founded the research center in 1976 after leaving his job as an environmental studies professor at California State University-Sacramento, believes that shifting from fragile annual monocultures to more hearty perennial grains grown in a mixture of plants (polycultures) is the key to a truly sustainable agriculture. Instead of a brittle industrial agriculture dependent on fossil fuels, Jackson’s research team is working to build a resilient agriculture modeled on natural ecosystems.

A plant geneticist who grew up farming, Jackson’s experiences in the fields and the laboratory give him the credentials to talk authoritatively about how to develop agricultural practices capable of producing healthful food without the soil erosion and contamination that comes with today’s highly toxic conventional agriculture. Delivering that message with a style that hybridizes the prairie pulpit and the graduate seminar, Jackson inspired the Prairie Festival audience in Salina, KS, with his sketch of the next step—taking The Land’s work international in the coming decades.

When he gets revved up in front of an audience, Jackson is eager to share all that he knows, but one of the things he knows is the danger that comes with being sure you have the answers.

After the festival ended, Jackson made the rounds of the lunch tables to chat up folks informally. Leaning into one group, the topic turned to the problem of arrogance and certainty, and Jackson suggested an important first step to solving big problems such as agriculture is recognizing that sometimes “we’ve got to give up on what we know.”

If there was one sign he could hang above everyone’s desk, Jackson said, it would be this daily affirmation: “This day I will do everything I can to fight the problem of reassertion.” Reasserting, over and over again, what we think we know is trouble, especially in the sciences, he said.

Don’t mistake Jackson’s warning for the anti-science, know-nothing rhetoric that is popular in some conservative circles. He’s trying to bolster, not undermine, faith in science by encouraging scientists not to get stuck in comfortable approaches. In agriculture, such inertia has led researchers to assume that the so-called “Green Revolution” emphasis on chemicals is the only way to maintain high yields. Research in initiatives such as perennial polyculture grains, Jackson argues, may well reveal the conventional wisdom to be conventional foolhardiness.

With the health of our soils and our own bodies at stake, Jackson says, we can’t afford to assume old approaches can cope with coming crises. Because humans like to resolve ambiguity, we reward researchers who appear to do that within existing systems—such research may be right but irrelevant, if the real problem is at the level of the whole system. Solving individual problems within a system that can’t be sustained actually creates problems.

Jackson believes that’s the trap of much of contemporary research into agriculture, and that’s why he’s hoping to find support for an ambitious program to fund new research into The Land Institute’s approach to sustainability in partnership with other researchers and institutions around the world. He’s confident in the basics but recognizes how much work in the lab and the research plots remains.

He also recognizes that science alone won’t solve the problem; serious changes are necessary in economic, political, and social systems. He diagnoses a large part of the problem of those systems to be their love of abstraction. In contemporary financial capitalism, for example, countless decisions about money are based on abstraction, not on the reality of economics rooted in ecosystems.

“Milton and Blake both acknowledged that the demonic is the abstraction without the particular,” said Jackson, who’s as likely to quote poets and philosophers as scientists.

The particular is the reality, and science helps us understand it only when it remains rooted in that particularity. Farmers work the land in a specific place within a specific ecosystem, where they must attend to the uniqueness of place, Jackson said. That means an idea such as perennial polycultures is valuable not as a monolithic answer in the abstract, but as an idea tested out in specific places, whether that be wheat fields in Kansas or rice paddies in the Philippines. Jackson is not out to make The Land Institute the center of sustainable agriculture, but instead wants to see the ideas developed in as many places as it is sensible.

Jackson also cautions that our specific places must be understood as part of larger systems. To experience our place in that larger living world, sometimes we have to step outside of science.

Jackson offered an example. We know the earth revolves around the sun, but our daily experience is of standing on ground that doesn’t move. To correct that, he said we should take the time to feel the earth move. Jackson was off and running:

“I have actually felt the earth turn. I can tell you how to do that. I’ve gone out there and laid down on the hill when the moon is full, and if you will look when the moon is coming up in the east and the sun is setting in the west—you’ve got to live in Kansas to do that, or Nebraska, someplace flat—and you can actually feel the earth turn. Do that sometime. It’s a great moment. You’ve got to do that extra exercise to experience reality. Otherwise we live with the illusion,” Jackson said, pausing before adding, “which is fun enough.”

Jackson took a moment to delight both in his memory of the experience and the smiles on the faces of the people at the table. Then he smiled and, before moving on to the next table, said, “I suppose that in order to experience reality, you have to be a mystic.”

In January 2010, then-Observer editor Bob Moser wrote that the “Supreme Court’s appalling and unconscionable 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission means, essentially, one thing: Corporations will not just dominate, but rule, American politics for the foreseeable future.” Five justices had deemed that corporations have free speech rights, just as individuals do, and thrown out the federal ban on campaign ads funded by corporations.

Were Moser’s words brash, written in the heat of the moment? We think not. Well into the presidential campaign season, we can see the decision’s poisonous fruits.

Stalking the presidential campaign are so-called Super PACs, a new type of political action committee that can raise unlimited money directly from corporations, unions and individuals. Though Super PACs can’t coordinate with campaigns, they can spend freely attacking or supporting candidates. But don’t bother trying to follow the money; Super PACs have no obligation to disclose their donors.

Giant pools of corporate cash from secret sources sloshing around a democracy—what could go wrong?

Make Us Great Again—a ridiculously-named Super PAC backing Gov. Rick Perry’s presidential campaign—plans to spend $55 million during the primary season alone, according to internal documents obtained by MSNBC. The Perry campaign claims to have no knowledge of Make Us Great Again, which, even if true, is beside the point. The Super PAC is run by former Perry chief of staff and Austin corporate lobbyist Mike Toomey. We hate to pick on Mike, but the words “democracy” and “Mike Toomey” do not belong in the same sentence.

Perry is not the only presidential contender with a Super PAC. But he may quickly come to represent new levels of political corruption.

“If you’re saying I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended,” Perry said to Michele Bachmann at the CNN/Tea Party debate in September. He was talking specifically about contributions he received as governor from pharmaceutical giant Merck (which Toomey lobbied for at the time). But the implication—the price of corruption keeps rising—is well taken. More anonymous money keeps pouring into our political process. It’s a wonder citizens have any voice at all.

We do have a powerful weapon at our disposal: shame. We need to shame politicians, certain Supreme Court justices and corporate America into coming to their senses. Citizens United was a misguided decision that must be overturned.

Before relocating to Austin, I had spent eight years teaching math and/or science in Egypt, Mexico and Honduras at elite private schools that used American textbooks, American curriculum and were accredited by American institutions.  The majority of my students were not Americans, but graduated with a combination of diplomas: local, American and/or IB (International Baccalaureate). After graduation, nearly all attended college, mostly in the US, Canada and England, and a few remained in their own country for higher education.

I proudly returned to the US, toting my international bag of creative, engaging teaching tricks, especially curriculum-based projects that I had created, ready to dazzle my American students. So, imagine my utter shock when resettling into American life, teaching at an Austin public high school, and discovering that the standards were actually lower. Moreover, my teaching creativity was all but stifled for the sake of “standardization” in the most controlling environment I had ever taught.  

During the eight years that I had taught outside the US, a gradual yet educationally lethal trend, like a viral infection, had set in.  As a result, no longer were educators preoccupied with fostering such lofty ideals as stimulating students to become “life-long learners” and “critical thinkers” or “accepting personal responsibility.”  Instead, teachers were pressured to focus tremendously on preparing students for high-stakes standardized exams that tested basic knowledge.

During fall semester, I remained at school for 12 hours a day, researching and writing lesson plans, marking papers, making parental contacts and doing a myriad of bureaucratic things. I was in “survival” mode although I had 13 years of teaching experience. By mid-March, we science teachers stopped the regular teaching instruction, which was already geared toward the state standardized test, and did nothing but drill past standardized exam questions and review science objectives.  This was in addition to an 80-question baseline exam, morning/lunch/afterschool science tutoring and horrendously punitive five-question quizzes where the students could score only a zero, 80 or 100. A “more rigorous” version of the five-question quiz was later implemented among Biology teachers: students could only score a zero or 100!

In the end, our science students did well enough on their high-stakes standardized exams to receive “recognized” status.  The school was euphoric, but I was apprehensive.  I had never conceded that the end justified the means and I certainly did not think that doing recognizably well on any state-issued exam should be the aim of education, especially since we classroom teachers were allowed to do little else than standardized test preparation. 

Additionally, the standards, which were drilled into the students, had transformed themselves into being the ceiling of knowledge rather than the foundation. Anytime I attempted to go into a deeper level of understanding, some of my colleagues warned me that the “students don’t need to know that,” since the state standardized exam would not test them on it.

I started my second school year refreshed and full of new ideas that I wanted to implement now that I knew how things worked at my high school.  How naïve I was! The powers that be had their own ideas. Since the administration trumps an individual teacher, my creative, fresh ideas were quickly edged out as the school year unfolded, not to resurface again until after the mighty state standardized exams were completed.

The administration deemed that science teachers, who taught the same course, had to use the exact same lessons 80 percent of the time. With tighter control on teachers’ lesson plans, administrators easily compared electronic grade books online. The grade books “looked good” if majority of the assignments looked alike.  The grade books “looked bad” if there was more than 20 percent diversity among assignments.  As it turned out, we common subject teachers taught about 95 to 100 percent of the exact same lessons since, given the challenge of teaching at a conducive pace for student comprehension, more time was necessary to sufficiently cover the learning objectives than we had previously allotted.  Most teachers sacrificed their 20 percent of creative lesson opportunity in order to “be on the same page.”

Whatever happened to effective teachers excelling in their classroom by presenting their own engaging standard-based lessons? Being handed scripted lessons to use in one’s classroom reduces a creative, experienced teacher to a robot. When administrators control lesson plans, they put outstanding teachers into a mediocre box.  Innovative teachers are chastised for thinking out of the box since individuality is only praised when a teacher provides the same instruction as every other teacher.

Could some of the reasons why the US has fallen behind globally in both math and science be due to the mediocrity that is being perpetuated by teaching to high-stakes tests and the practice of forcing teachers to use the exact same lesson plans? In all knowledge domains, we highly value the innovators—not the mediocre masses.  So why in the world would the powers that be squelch innovative teachers?  Answer: Quality control.

As one sympathetic administrator informed me, the quality of teaching instruction had been waning; so the administration had to strengthen it. As noble as that cause sounds, the “one size fits all” approach does not lead to stronger teaching; it lowers superior teaching and makes bad teachers lazier. Teacher enthusiasm for a lesson affects student enthusiasm. If teachers are estranged from the creative, personalizing process of lesson planning, then how well can they deliver those scripted lessons? Public school teachers, who research, write and deliver their own standard-based lesson plans, are the last defense against the mechanization of mediocre public education. The US will only recapture its high academic glory through creative and innovative teaching—not cookie cutter scripted lessons presented by disenfranchised teachers.

 

Teresa Y. Roberson is a teacher and writer living in Austin.

With the support of my family and unwavering belief in the goodness of America, I declare to you today as a candidate for president of the United States.”

With those words—in an Aug. 13 speech in Columbia, South Carolina—our esteemed governor ended years of speculation and made official what had become apparent months ago. Rick Perry will seek the presidency in 2012.

Within days of the announcement, Perry was already dealing with multiple controversies over his statements that Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke might be committing treason, that the jury is still out on climate change, and that Texas schools teach creationism. Despite Perry’s wobbly first week, many pundits were bullish on his chances against Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.

Amid all the horse-race analysis of Perry’s candidacy, we hope the national media—and GOP primary voters—will focus on a more important issue: Can he govern?

His performance in Texas hasn’t been inspiring. Perry is a purely political animal. When the campaigns are over and he actually takes office, he’s not someone who studies, or even cares much about, policy details. On the few occasions he has put forth major policy proposals, the results have been colossal failures.

First there was the Trans-Texas Corridor that would have used government’s eminent domain authority to seize rural farmland for a massive toll road. The backlash from rural Republicans was intense, and the plan died slowly over the next four legislative sessions.

In 2007, Perry proposed that all young girls receive the HPV vaccine. Conservatives in the Legislature would have none of it. That idea suffered defeat even faster.

Then there’s the one major proposal that Perry passed into law: the business margins tax, part of the 2006 school-finance reform. The idea was to cut property taxes and replace the lost revenue with a new business tax. Problem is, it’s been a disaster. The tax doesn’t generate enough revenue. The Texas budget has an ongoing structural deficit because of Perry’s underperforming business tax.

As governor, Perry’s lack of policy depth hasn’t hindered him. He lets the Legislature do the heavy lifting while he floats from one public appearance to another, cheerleading the Texas economy.

If he wins the presidency, Perry will have to deal with complex policy every day. He wouldn’t flourish in that role. Perry is a charismatic and talented campaigner. But the thought of him governing the country is almost too scary to contemplate.