An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

I understand that Facebook has announced that it will be cracking down on users who do not use their legal names, and that you will specifically be targeting drag queens to begin with. As many critics have rightly pointed out this will have a disproportionate effect on drag queens and transgender persons as many people in those subcultures use pseudonyms for reasons ranging from wanting to be known by their performance identities, to not wanting not to be stalked and potentially killed by bigots. I'm not going to go into the specifics of how this policy specifically hurts and targets members of the LGBTQ community. Bloggers, such as FlowerGirlXy10c41n3 at Jezebel have done that issue much greater justice than I could. Nor will I go into how this policy will put people in danger who are trying to hide from those that would do them harm, as Heina Dadabhoy has done a much better job of that at Freethought Blogs.

No, Mr. Zuckerberg, I want to focus attention on a comment of yours from an interview you gave a few years ago:

"You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” (http://www.michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerberg-having-two-identities-for-yourself-is-an-example-of-a-lack-of-integrity/).

Now as one privileged white man to another vastly more privileged white man, your comment belies a complete lack of empathy, compassion, and understanding cloaked in a pseudo intellectual philosophy of radical transparency. A friend on Facebook, Steven Sagan Olsen, summed up where your philosophy falls flat with the following comment:

Facebook's philosophy of radical transparency only works if all agents are well-intentioned and reasonable. We don't live in that world, so anonymity and pseudonyms are a tool that good people can use to protect themselves

Those that use pseudonyms do it for myriad reasons that seem to elude your myopia, and lack of integrity is rarely one. As noted above, many people in this world are not well intentioned and reasonable, and most of us don't have the advantages that you have to shield yourself from those people. I use a pseudonym on Facebook because I work in public education, and certain aspects of my personal life and my political opinions could very well damage or even destroy my career. This does really happen. Let's take for example Ashley Payne, a teacher from Apalachee High School in Georgia, who was asked to resign after her principal found out that there were pictures of her drinking alcohol on her private Facebook profile, as well as a post in which she used an expletive. A pseudonym may very well have helped her avoid this. I'm not even going to get into the fact that her profile was set to private, hence the principal having no right to tell her what she can and cannot post.

I do not use a pseudonym because I lack integrity, I use it to maintain my integrity. The aspects of myself that I share on Facebook are those parts of me that I feel most passionate about, those that allow me to express myself as fully as I can without fearing for my career. Not being able to speak freely is a direct assault on my integrity and autonomy, and that is why I use a pseudonym. Yes, I am white and male, so that shields me from a lot. But I don't have your billions of dollars to protect me from wrongful termination and the inevitable lawsuit that would follow.

Mark Zuckerberg, please reconsider this name policy and show the world that you have empathy, understanding, compassion, and integrity.

Sincerely,
Erasmus P. Sinclair
a.k.a
Brian Lehrer

Common Core: What It Is, and What It Is Not

Pundits, politicians, policy makers, parents, and teachers are in an uproar over the Common Core standards. On the political right pundits and politicians such as Michelle Malkin and Boby Jindal view Common Core as an unconstitutional federal takeover of public education intended to propagandize children and turn them into a horde of gay/secular/socialist hobgoblins. On the political left critics such as Karen Wolfe and Diane Ravitch view Common Core as a federal/corporate ploy to dismantle public education and hand it over to private interests that will turn our children into sociopathic, Monsanto loving, fascist automatons.*

Now, what I've done hear is create two straw men. I created a caricature of critics from both the right and the left (although my caricature of the right was less of a stretch). I've glossed over some fine detail and nuance in the arguments presented above by Common Core critics and it would behoove the reader to click on the links above to examine the minutia of their positions. Nonetheless, I set up these straw men because the average consumer of outlets such as MSNBC and Fox News will likely come away believing in such caricatures. Unfortunately, as with most everything in the universe, the truth is rather opaque and not very amenable to dichotomous thinking.

Common Core was developed by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSS), with substantial funding coming from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.** It is not a federal program, nor has the federal government threatened to withdraw educational funding from states that do not adopt the standards. Individual states voluntarily adopt the standards and decide how to implement and assess them. States that adopt Common Core are welcome to add to the standards as well. However, there is a federal initiative known as Race to the Top which offers grants to states that adopt the standards, among other conditions. This is certainly an incentive, but it is hardly the coercion that critics make it out to be, nor is it in any way a mandate.  Additionally teachers, principals, parents, and students all contributed towards the development of the standards to varying degrees.

Common Core is a set of standards and nothing more. It is not a curriculum. A curriculum is a planned course of study and student teacher interactions centered on a specific subject or topic and includes lessons, materials, activities, assessments, and approaches. The main purpose of a curriculum is to create a continuing, coherent, educative experience for pupils. Meeting standards is a secondary purpose and can be easily accommodated without diluting the curriculum.  It is not a testing regime. A testing regime consists of the physical standardized tests, and an entire state and district level bureaucracy that designs, administers, and evaluates the tests. Common Core doesn't specify content, materials, or teaching methods. What the standards actually specify are specific skills that students should be able to demonstrate at the end of each grade. For example, one of the grade 6-8 literacy standards for social studies states:

[Students will be able to] determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions.
CCSELA-LITERACY RH.6-8.1 

Teachers have widely varying degrees of latitude in terms of choosing the materials, content, and practices he or she believes are most appropriate for meeting any standards. For the most part in this country curriculum is designed at the individual school and district level, and testing regimes are developed and coordinated at the state level. Common Core changes none of that. The Common Core Initiative is currently developing standardized tests specifically aligned to the standards, but states are free to develop their own tests aligned to the standards. Common Core does not mandate that states add more standardized tests to their testing regimes. Most states are simply replacing existing standardized tests with Common Core aligned tests. Similarly, text book companies are developing materials aligned to Common Core, which schools and districts are free to purchase and use, or not. Like curriculum development the purchasing of books occurs at the district and school level. All of this is par for the course in public education. States and text book companies regularly align testing regimes and materials to state standards and local curricula. 

The real problems with Common Core come down to implementation and ideology. At the state level governors and legislators are using Common Core as a way to push their specific ideologies about what public education should look like. Some states are tying the standards to teacher evaluations, while other states use it as a way to justify the shifting of funding away from public school towards charter schools and voucher programs. Most prominently, many states are moving way too quickly to overhaul their testing regimes putting undue stress on teachers, students, and parents across the country. All of this is being done in the name of Common Core, but there is nothing in the Common Core standards themselves that calls for any such things to be done.

The lesson to take away from all of this is that the debate over Common Core standards has largely (although not exclusively) been motivated by political ideology. If you're a parent with children currently in school then you should be worried about how quickly and haphazardly your local schools, districts, and states are implementing Common Core, but the standards themselves are not the problem. If you have a problem with specific content that your children bring home, then meet with their teachers. If you have problems with the nature of the standardized tests that your children are required to take, then contact your local state legislator and petition your state government. If you have a problem with the federal government offering financial incentives to states for anything related to public education, then contact your congressperson. Absolutely none of the above problems are the result of the Common Core standards themselves. Those are problems which are deep, old, and endemic to public education in the United States.

*In the interest of full disclosure I work as a substitute teacher and I'm certified to teach at the secondary (middle school/high school) level and admit that I am more sympathetic to the critiques of Wolfe and Ravitch than I am to those of Malkin and Jindal.

**The link above is to a thorough piece from Amy Golod at US News and World Report debunking myths about the Common Core Standards. Any factual statements in this post about the Common Core standards are from this source. The facts are easily corroborated here, here, and here.

It Just Keeps Getting Worse, and They Keep Denying the Science

Source

For over a decade I've readily accepted the science behind climate change, because it is good science.Global warming deniers such as Charles Krauthammer would have you believe that climate change science is far from 'settled,’ as if the consensus of ninety-nine percent of climate scientists that the climate is warming, and that is anthropogenic means nothing. A similar consensus exists among physicists regarding gravity. Deniers like Krauthammer are not only wrong, they are dangerous. They are dangerous because they are spreading misinformation and a bastardized notion of science that confuses the general public, which in turn leads congress to enact destructive environmental policies based on the confusion and ignorance of their constituencies.Even if the science wasn't 'settled,' as Krauthammer would have you believe, considering the general direction in which all of the research is pointing, we should be extremely worried.Let's take into consideration two stories that broke earlier this year: a story from the Sydney Morning Herald regarding the toll that climate change will take on Australia's ecosystems and economies, and an article published in Nature Climate Change which suggests that the Greenland ice sheet may melt much sooner than originally expected.

 

A story published in the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) revised Fifth Assessment Report on climate change outlined a series of great threats that Australia will have to face in the coming decades. Some of the pending threats include decreased crop yields, further decay of the Great Barrier Reef, the potential displacement of millions of people as they flee the ever warming interior of the continent, greater risks of flooding (which will threaten Australia’s mining industry), and increased risks of destructive wildfires.  

At about the same time the journal Nature Climate Change published a report entitled “Sustained mass loss of northeast Greenland ice sheet triggered by regional warming,” in which the authors show that “that the northeast Greenland ice stream, which extends more than 600 km into the interior of the ice sheet, is now undergoing sustained dynamic thinning, linked to regional warming, after more than a quarter of a century of stability.” This is incredibly important, and scary, because as noted in an article published by the Weather Channel:

The stability of the region is particularly important because it has much deeper ties to the interior ice sheet than other glaciers on the island. If the entire ice sheet were to melt -- which would take thousands of years in most climate change scenarios -- sea levels would rise up to 23 feet, catastrophically altering coastlines around the world.

In other words, the northeastern section of the Greenland ice sheet acts as kind of a thumbtack holding the rest of the ice back from slipping into the ocean and melting. Rather than seeing a three foot sea level rise over the next century, as has been predicted by many climate models, we could see a twenty three foot rise in sea levels by the end of the century if the whole of the Greenland ice sheet were to melt. A three foot rise in sea level will be disastrous for coastal cities around the world. A twenty three foot rise would be catastrophic.

What these two stories have in common is that both illustrate how previous models regarding climate change have been wrong, and not in the direction in which we would prefer.  Rather than finding out that things will not be as bad as we thought we are consistently finding that things will be, and in some cases are, worse than what was initially predicted. Of course this is how science works. Scientific knowledge is in a constant state of flux. As we gather more data and develop more sophisticated instruments, techniques, and models, we refine and clarify our understanding of the natural world. Unfortunately, as we refine climate science we are continually finding that it is worse than we thought.

What is important to note here is that the IPCC and the journal Nature Climate Change are not Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are political environmental organizations that focus on policy and have a specific political agenda (which, in the interest of full disclosure, I happen to support). While their policy recommendations are informed by science they are primarily political organizations.The IPCC, on the other hand, is a non-partisan global scientific organization which operates under the auspices of the United Nations. It is composed of the best climate scientists from across the globe who come together every five years to draft a report that summarizes the global scientific consensus on climate change. At this point, that consensus is pretty damn consistent and solid. The journal Nature Climate Change is a well established, independent, peer reviewed scientific journal which sets rigorous standards for publication. Krauthammer and fellow deniers want you to believe that the IPCC and Greenpeace are one and the same. This is dangerous, because this is how the public comes to be so confused. One can disagree with Greenpeace on political grounds and still be in the right. Not so regarding the IPCC, because the IPCC is not a political organization. Politics are democratic, but science is not. When a majority of scientists come to the same conclusion, it must be accepted. There is no “other side” to be heard in most scientific issues. This is why most biologists refuse to debate creationists, because there is nothing to debate. Similarly, this is why pundits such as Krauthammer need to stop pretending that organizations like the IPCC and journals like Nature are akin to political organizations such as Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. People get the impression that the work that comes out of those august scientific organizations are just political opinions, not scientific fact.

Climate change deniers need us to believe that politics and science are the same thing.  Herein lies the danger. They are not the same thing. These deniers let their politics inform their interpretation of science, and the public in turn does the same. What we need to be doing as citizens, and what our leaders need to be doing, is letting science inform our politics. To do the former is to do a great disservice to the public, and to damage the scientific enterprise as a whole. This complete upending of science to support political ideologies endangers us all. It allows people like Charles Krauthammer to misinform and confuse the public about the real world, which leads to poor and disastrous policy decisions on the part of our leaders.  In order to save our planet and our civilization we must learn to separate politics and science. We can begin do this by ignoring those that deny science, like Charles Krauthammer.