The Demise of Education is a Looming Catastrophe

It’s happening slowly but the consequences will be stunning. From pre-school to elementary and high school to higher education we stand to lose generations of youth and emerging adults who will have been denied their right to accessible, quality education that fosters critical thinking, higher learning, and skills that will allow them to be valuable members of society no matter what they choose to undertake as adults in the workforce.

They may want to be tradespeople, future teachers, scientists, healthcare professionals, policymakers, business owners, and more, but no matter what level they have achieved in school during the Trump administration their educational growth will not be met without a Department of Education. Their futures (and ours) will be compromised and stifled by the myopic, unformed policies promulgated by ignorant sycophants who don’t value education or expertise and fail to understand the importance of quality educated citizens if a nation is to thrive.

What we are facing is a frontal assault on excellence in education that will have higher social costs than we can imagine. We will have forfeited the “American exceptionalism” that many of us like to claim because curiosity and creativity will be absent from curricula.

 Right wing authoritarianism, couple with sheer stupidity, will mean no more excellent faculty at every level who leave the profession because they fear what they say, write, or say will be cause for dismissal. No longer will there be truthful historical context, great literature, and Socratic challenges upon which to build. The truths we tell our children and the ways we help them develop as competent, caring adults will disappear. Bullying will grow bigger while brains shrink, along with our values, compassion and sensitivity toward others because they are things we also learn in school.

Consider what an education department does.  It manages over a trillion dollars of student loan debt and oversees the Pell Grant that provides aid to students below a certain income. It also administers student aid which enables universities to offer financial aid. Its Office for Civil Rights conducts investigations and issues guidance on how civil rights laws should be applied and tracks a database that shows disparities in resources, course access, and discipline for students of color and lower socioeconomic groups.

But the Trump administration has instructed the office to prioritize complaints of antisemitism and has opened investigations that relate to transgender rights. Much of the department’s money for K-12 schools is allocated to large federal programs for low-income schools and disabled individuals.

The Trump administration has also slashed funding that colleges and universities depend on including grants and contracts that support research being conducted in these venues. These cuts result in researchers being fired, and fewer Ph.D. students being accepted at colleges and universities. This impacts highly motivated and competent immigrants who want to advance their scientific training in the United States and who contribute enormously to research and innovation in all fields.

The withdrawal of grants and contracts normally provided to places of higher learning along with targeting schools over antisemitism and diversity initiatives is why so many colleges and university have stopped student organizations and pro-Palestinian protests and have started violating First Amendment rights of free speech and peaceful assembly.

It’s sickening to see places that were once revered as bastions of growth, academic distinction, personal achievement, and logical thinking fold. Universities have always been the reservoirs of knowledge, discourse, increased insight, and realized aspirations. Now they aren’t playing that role because they are being silenced, made fearful and irrelevant, while bowing to power instead of upholding principles that were formerly embraced as guides to learning since the days of ancient places of learning.

At lower levels of education, teachers’ responses to what is happening as a result of the administration’s attitude toward the closing of the Department of Education are telling. In a survey by PBS News Hour in February respondents made clear what’s at stake.

They are worried about the elimination of special education and disability services because of teacher cuts or resignations which will result in larger classes and no accommodation for various learning needs. Rural schools will be among the hardest hit schools. Many will close or consolidate, and teachers will likely be less qualified.

One respondent noted that “the loss of DOE will be predominantly felt in all our programs designed to help economically disadvantaged students and families…it will be like going back in time to the 1960s, when children with learning differences and challenging behaviors were not entitled to an education at all.” Funding for computers, lab equipment and other learning tools will not be funded, nor will technical and training support for teachers exist. Graduate programs  will end.

Linda McMahon, who has no relevant credentials to bring to bring to her job as head of the Education Department, as long as it lasts. She has called her “final mission” to be eliminating what she sees as bureaucratic bloat. She wants to turn the agency’s authority to the states, and we all know how block grants turned out.  If you lived in some states, you were definitely screwed. While the elimination of the department requires an act of Congress, the show of ring-kissing at the State of the Union speech made clear that the department is in very deep trouble. 

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand what’s at stake here, whether you are a student, a parent, an educator, a policymaker, or a sensible, compassionate human being.  We cannot let this stand. Make sure your legislators know that.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.  www.elayn-clift.com/blog

Are We Facing the End of Free Speech?

CEOs from major businesses in the U.S. demand that Harvard University release the names of students from 30 student organizations who signed a letter casting blame on Israel for the attacks by Hamas. The business leaders further urged the university to provide names of the signatories with photographs so that students who signed the letter would not be hired once they leave Harvard. Students began immediately to take back their signatures, as Axios and The Guardian reported.

 A law firm withdraws its job offer to a New York York University law student, president of the Student Bar Association, who wrote in the Association’s bulletin, “This [Israeli] regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary,” claiming that she made “inflammatory comments” that “profoundly conflict with [our] values.

 edish climate activist Greta Thunberg and 26 others are charged by British police in London for joining a protest outside an oil and gas conference. The charge? “Failing to comply with a condition imposed under section 14 of the Public Order Act,” according to the London Metropolitan police.

 In England police have made dozens of arrests after protests across the UK arose in the aftermath of Hamas terrorist attacks and Israel’s response. Many protesters are unsure whether they can now carry placards or wear symbols, or join in chants after

Suella Braverman, a member of the Conservative Party who became the UK Home Secretary in 2022, wrote to chief constables in England and Wales saying that waving a Palestinian flag or singing to advocate for Arab freedom might be a criminal offence. “I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world, and whether its use … may amount to a racially aggravated … public order offence,” she said

An increasing number of countries are resorting to force and legislation to crush protests, treating them as a threat rather than a right, as Amnesty International points out. “Peaceful protest is a right, not a privilege, and one that states have a duty to respect, protect and  facilitate.”

 In Washington, DC 49 Jewish demonstrators in front of the White House, including rabbis, were arrested urging President Biden to call for a ceasefire on his recent trip to Israel. Their charge? Crossing safety barriers and blocking entrances. And a recent post on social media revealed that the U.S. State Department has instructed ambassadors and other government officials not to use words like “de-escalation, ceasefire, end to violence, restoring calm and bloodshed.” The post has since been taken down.

 These are troubling signs that in this country the Constitution’s First Amendment is being ignored or violated. As a reminder, here is what the Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (emphasis mine).

Arresting protestors making their voices heard in peaceful ways is a dangerous travesty wherever it happens, but it is particularly egregious in a country that prides itself on “the rule of law.” In this time of terror and rapidly escalating international conflict America’s leadership and example could not be more urgent. Calls for a cease fire and an end to killing fields where both sides have become tragic victims is not an act of violence. Nor is it a display of national allegiance. It’s much bigger and more urgent than that. It is a call for restraint, human rights, and shared humanity in the face of unleashed rage and hopelessness.

That collective rage, fear and hopelessness threatens the future we wish for our progeny, whether we are American, Israeli or Palestinian.  We cannot move forward in a world in which a slaughter of innocents, no matter where they live, continues. We can’t make progress in the name of peace without allowing all of us to inhabit land we love because our roots are there. We can’t make peace if we are continually oppressed, and myopic in our views. And we cannot move forward if we cling to limited views of right and wrong, framed by the concept of winners and losers, power and weakness.

The struggles we face are not a matter of politics, persuasion, or power.  They are about people; ordinary people who all matter. In this time of conflict of biblical proportion, a time when history could lead us to the table of resolution, let us not seek to silence those calling out for – indeed begging for - compassion, intelligent discourse and wise decisions free of partisanship.

Let us remember that our voices are not weapons. They are instead our monuments and our roadmap to a sane future for all of us.  No one should be punished for raising them.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, VT. www.elayne-clift.com

A is For Absent: America's Teacher Shortage

 Her name was Shirley Myers, and she was a gift in my life when I needed one. I was in middle school and a loner, unlike most kids that age, because my mother suffered from depression that meant she was hospitalized for long stretches. Ms. Myers was a calm teacher and a gentle soul and somehow, I started going to her classroom after school to talk with her. It was quietly comforting to be with her, and we formed a bond that got me through those lonely times.

 She wasn’t my only good teacher. In high school, Desmond Jones, who scared everyone with his high standards and grim demeanor, taught me how to consider literature carefully and to write cogently about it in his English class. Vivienne Davenport gave me my love of language with her Word for the Day. They were delicious words like obsequious, sartorial, serendipity, and ubiquitous. We were required to learn their definition and to write a sentence using each day’s word. I think about her each time I use one of her many fine words. Doc Martin, slightly disheveled and occasionally distracted got me through Latin; later Spanish helped me become bi-lingual until I forgot how to conjugate.

 In college I had fine teachers who taught me about literature, art, religion, psychology, sociology, and other subjects that interested me.  And in graduate school I learned to do professional research, explore interdisciplinary methodologies in my chosen field, write for publication, and have confidence in my abilities. My advisor during that time is still a close friend.

 Later I became a teacher myself. I taught at high end colleges and universities and at community colleges, and I now teach in adult learning programs because I love teaching no matter where I do it. I know the joy of watching motivated students consider issues they’ve never contemplated before, the pleasure of seeing their thinking and writing skills grow, their openness to new ideas, their new sense of confidence.

 So I am deeply saddened, and worried by the loss of so many good teachers, at all levels, who are leaving their chosen, and often undervalued, profession. They are quitting for numerous reasons that are valid. They work under poor conditions, suffer high stress, heavy workloads and burnout, as well as insulting salaries and a lack of administrative support, and now more than 60 percent of them fear mass shootings at their schools according to a 2018 survey conducted by the National Education Association (NEA) and reported by CNN earlier this year. CNN also reported that “one in three teachers say they are likely to quit and find another job in the next two years, according to a recent survey by the EdWeek Research Center and Merrimack College.

 Briana Takhtani, a teacher who resigned and spoke to CNN, said she quit her “dream job” because of the pandemic and school shootings. “It just became too much for me to handle on a day-to-day basis and still feel sane,” she said. Her statement is reflective of those made by numerous other teachers.

 The loss of qualified teachers is alarming in many ways.  Some schools have had to cancel core classes, others are hiring people who lack professional teaching qualifications and, in some cases don’t even have a basic college degree. The impact is especially dramatic for children who need special education or bilingual teachers as well as those who live in rural areas.

 One superintendent told PBS at the start of the 2022 school year that “it really impacts the children because they’re not learning what they need to learn. “When you have these uncertified, emergency or inexperienced teachers, students are in classrooms where they’re not going to get the level of rigor and classroom experiences.” In other words, a generation of children are not being prepared adequately for what lies ahead for them, not only professionally but intellectually, culturally, and psycho-socially.

 As a story in The Atlantic revealed recently, “The education system is headed toward a cliff at a moment when it most needs to help students who fell behind during the pandemic. For nearly a decade, America’s students have been backsliding on the nation’s report card, which evaluates their command of math, science, U.S. history and reading.”

That’s a sobering reality. It makes me grieve for all the children who will never have a Shirley Myers, a Desmond Jones, or a Vivienne Davenport in their academic lives, and will never experience the difference they make. Teachers like those I was gifted with understood that as a Tibetan proverb says, “A child without education is like a bird without wings.”

I am ever grateful for having been educated in a time when they represented the finest members of the teaching profession and I fervently hope that children will fly again once the reasons for our educational crisis are adequately resolved.  

What's Missing in the Fight Against Covid-19?

Back in the 1970s, the National Institute of Health (NIH) launched a famously successful campaign designed to reduce heart disease, the nation’s number one cause of death, by convincing the public to stop smoking and start exercising. Employing a variety of media channels through which to promote behaviors shown to support heart health, their message was simple: heart disease is a silent killer, but with some basic lifestyle adjustments, you can significantly reduce your risk of dying from it.

In addition to traditional media outlets, the Institute’s initiative, known as the Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program, relied on interpersonal communication techniques used by local opinion leaders and public figures to move people from awareness to behavior change. (“Do it for the loved ones in your life.”) Several years later, the number of smokers and smoking-related deaths had decreased dramatically. To this day, the Stanford Program remains a model of Health Communications.

Shortly afterwards, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded an international health communication program aimed at child survival in 12 countries. Known as the HEALTHCOM Project, it used similar strategies as the Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program—straightforward, evidence-based public messaging—to prevent child deaths from diarrheal dehydration and to promote child immunization. 

In Gambia, a village-level education program reinforced by radio messages, graphic design materials, and trained village volunteers who motivated families to use a simple oral rehydration solution (ORS) through interpersonal support, child survival rates quickly rose. In the Philippines, the project worked creatively with the Ministry of Health and an ad agency to develop engaging mass media messaging at both the national and local levels that promoted both oral rehydration and immunization. And in Honduras, “Dr. Salustiano” delivered radio messages to mothers about immunization and ORS,

So, what has all this got to do with the Covid-19 pandemic?

Today, the disease may be different, but the groundwork for beating Covid-19 through behavioral change has already been laid. Health communications would go a long way towards containment, including targeted media placements tailored for local belief systems and cultural practices. But regardless of geography, just as in the ‘80’s these strategies would share elements of a finely honed, partnership-driven methodology grounded in the use of bottom- up communication that always begins with understanding what people want, what they resist, and why.

History shows us that successful mitigation of health crises is achieved by a multidisciplinary team of specialists including public health professionals, psychologists, media gatekeepers, and instructional design experts. Joining forces with health communication practitioners, together they conduct research, design focus groups, and create regionally appropriate, meaningful communications that not only address the immediate concern, but also become essential to long-term health education.

Back in the not-so-distant pre-Trump administration days, the field of health communications flourished in research settings, while agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had robust health communications departments that designed campaigns to raise awareness and foster behavior change around such crises as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, SARS, and more.

They recognized that carefully chosen public health spokespeople were key partners. When Dr. C. Everett Koop, then U.S. Surgeon General, served as the nation’s trusted messenger for the Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Project, he quickly became a household name and helped change social norms around smoking in dramatic ways that still prevail.

Today, when Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks, most people listen. Yet, Donald Trump chose to rid himself of an expert public health team and to de-staff the health communications arm of the CDC and other relevant agencies. In this wilderness of disinformation, Dr. Fauci alone can’t be expected to shoulder the burden of public education. And while no one would dream of having a pandemic team without epidemiologists, the Trump task force, such as it was, included no communications, social marketing, or media expertise. That is a travesty the Biden task force must remedy.

 Behavior change critical to reducing the spread of Covid-19 is complex. Overcoming mask resistance—and soon, resistance to the new vaccine—is a huge challenge. But simply showing bar charts and graphs, holding talking head updates, and spewing overwhelming numbers will not affect behavior.

Creative epidemiology might.  “Over 1,000 people are dying every day of Covid. That’s equivalent to three jumbo jets crashing every day.”  Revealing a graphic number of jets that went down, metaphorically, every day could raise awareness about one’s responsibility during a catastrophic pandemic. Demonstrating a dialogue in which one person gets another one to accept that masks save lives could provide a learnable moment.

Meanwhile, today’s creative media environment is still waiting for us to take advantage of its offerings. T-shirts, billboards, and social media influencers spreading salient messages based on behavioral and attitudinal research—empower people to change the outcome of a deadly pandemic.

It may be too late to save lives lost unnecessarily to this dangerous virus, but it’s not too late to prevent further tragedy. We must do it for the loved ones in our lives.

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Elayne Clift has an M.A. in health communications. As Deputy Director of the HEALTHCOM Project during its initial years she worked in all regions of the world and taught Health Communications at the Yale University School of Public Health.

Why the Teacher Strikes Matter So Much

Recently, in a piece about mentors, I wrote about a teacher I had in middle school who helped me through a rough time just by being present and listening. I visited her every day after classes because she made me feel noticed when my classmates didn’t. Her calming presence helped me know that I mattered. That kind of validation can be deeply important when you are thirteen years old. 

When I was in high school I had several teachers I will never forget. Miss Davenport was one of them. Every day she wrote a word on the blackboard, charging us with learning its definition and using it in a sentence. They were delicious words, like ubiquitous, serendipity, obsequious, superfluous, sartorial, inchoate. They sounded like music to me, and they were, I’m sure, the foundation for my love of language. Mr. Jones was a stickler for good writing and “Doc” Castle made Latin seem fun.  Another teacher whose name I can’t recall helped us grasp geometry and algebra such that we felt competent in math.

All of that in a public school in small-town America in the 1950s because the teachers we had were sharp and dedicated and loved kids. Today, we have Betsy DeVos and her ilk taking away the rights of GLBTG students, stopping after school and lunch programs for poor children, and shutting down civil rights investigations while admonishing striking teachers to stop being so selfish.

I have been a teacher as well as a student so I see the impact they can have from that vantage point. Having taught at the university level, I experienced up close and personal the impact a teacher can have, whether in the classroom or during a crisis. There is nothing more satisfying than helping emerging adults develop a worldview that is informed and compassionate. There is nothing more challenging than having a student break down emotionally as they share the pain in their lives. And there is nothing more rewarding than watching a student have an AHA! Moment, or hearing them say your class changed the course of their lives. Sometimes the best you can do is help them learn how to write a clear and coherent sentence, but just watch the look on their faces when they master that ability.

Teaching has always been an undervalued profession, largely because it was seen as an avocation embraced by women, and we all know that women’s work is never properly rewarded. But now, in the 21st century, surely the time has come to realize what teachers really do and what they contribute to our collective future, even if you don’t have kids yourself.

It’s also time to grasp what teachers contribute out of pocket or pro bono to their classrooms, and the price they pay to remain in those classrooms because they love teaching and they are committed to the kids they serve.   According to one website tracking teacher salaries in the U.S. the median salary for teachers last year was $41,500. But salaries vary widely geographically, and they have been dropping steadily. Adjusting for inflation, teachers are making about $30 less per week than they used to. Many of them who are striking report weekly incomes in the $300 range, which is why they’re taking on second and third jobs to stay afloat.  One science teacher reported that he makes twice as much at his second full-time job as a waiter than he does as a teacher. Another says that her 19-year old daughter who works as a nanny makes more than she does. Teachers are also footing the bill for things they need in the classroom, ranging from books and supplies to rugs and furniture.

That’s what the strikes are all about in Oklahoma, Arizona, West Virginia and Colorado as the movement for teacher-power grows, because teachers’ lives matter too.

The fact is, we can’t afford to lose many more dedicated, qualified teachers. Already, teacher education enrollment is down by about 30 percent in recent years and job turnover is rising. The resulting shortage of teachers is alarming but not surprising. After all, who wants to deal with unmanageable class size, inadequate facilities, and cuts to healthcare?

Looked at through a wider lens, we cannot long survive as a vibrant and productive nation, or leader among nations, if we continue to under-educate our children, underpay those who teach them, and in doing so, undervalue education. Already prisons in this country absorb more of our tax dollars than public higher education did 40 years ago. They are filled with high school dropouts and people with low literacy. It is a disgrace that we spend three times more for each prisoner than we invest in each child's education annually.

Nelson Mandela was right when he claimed that “education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” So was Malala Yousafzai: “One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.” 

We need to change our world now - one child, one teacher, one book, one pen at a time – and who better to lead the way than America’s dedicated, compassionate, determined, and sadly devalued educators.