English: Comparison of Charter school performance to public schools. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I believe in public education and its importance. The data on charter schools would have long ago ended any other movement but it continues onward, heavily funded and pushed by opinion leaders across the nation. I can’t help but think we are once again being sold a bill of goods by the privatization crowd and the free market absolutists. No amount of information, no knowledge of history, no deviation from the idea that education is all about making money, will be allowed to stop the movement from turning all education from a public good to a private profit.
James Pilant
Teach for America recommendations: I stopped writing them, and my colleague should, too.
There is a movement rising in every city of this country that seeks true education reform—not the kind funded by billionaires, corporations, and hedge funds, and organized around their values. This movement consists of public school parents and students, veteran teachers, and ex-TFA corps members. It also consists of a national network of college students, such as those in Students United for Public Education, who talk about the damage TFA is inflicting on communities and public schools. These groups and others also acknowledge the relationship between the corporatization of higher education and the vast impact of corporate reform on our youngest and most needy children. It is these children who are harmed by the never-ending cycle of under-trained, uncertified, first- and second-year teachers that now populates disadvantaged schools, and by the data-obsessed approach to education that is enabled by these inexperienced teachers.
I accepted that, and I was a dedicated alumna for about ten years. Then one day I got an email saying that TFA had decided that people who hadn’t finished their full two year commitment could no longer be counted as alumni. It was a bit insulting, that my ten years of talking them up and supporting them suddenly didn’t count, but now I’m glad, because I don’t want to be affiliated with them anymore.
TFA is no longer about filling a desperate need, where no qualified teachers can be found. Now the organization does what I refused to do. They take jobs away from people who are better qualified, more committed to teaching, and much more knowledgeable about the communities in which they teach.
I believe that most of the people involved in TFA have good intentions. I also believe that some TFA teachers may be better than some of the teachers they replace. On the whole, though, the organization is now doing more harm than good, and the people who run it seem to be wearing goggles, made from confidence in their own intelligence and virtue, that blind them to the detrimental effects of their work.
Maybe they don’t have to quit. Maybe they just need to find a way to restructure, so they can go back to filling an actual need. What I know is, when my attempts to help became a hindrance, I stepped out of the way. TFA needs to take off the we-are-saving-the-world goggles and do the same thing.
A construction project to repair and update the building façade at the Department of Education headquarters in 2002 resulted in the installation of structures at all of the entrances to protect employees and visitors from falling debris. ED redesigned these protective structures to promote the “No Child Left Behind Act”. The structures were temporary and were removed in 2008. Source: U.S. Department of Education, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is the same kind of “reform” that is devastating high school education in the United States, a reliance on testing, a emphasis on monetary results from education (“practical” education) and diminished state funding. This is education being re-defined from public good to private acquisition.
Are we who teach in academia on the verge of living in the same world as the public school teacher, that is, teaching to the test, rigidly defined course materials and funding based on test results?
That is certainly the intent of organizations like the Bill Gates Foundation and the Neoliberal movement.
Haven’t we learned enough from the NCLB disaster in the public schools to not have to do this kind of disastrous social experimentation? You’d think so but these zombie ideas just keep on staggering along, rotting and contaminating intelligent thought as they throw off empty ideas and fancy slogans like the miasma from a swamp.
James Pilant
6 ways neoliberal education reform is destroying our college system – Salon.com
“An outcomes-based culture is rapidly developing amongst policymakers in the higher education sector,” declares a 2012 report sponsored by the Gates Foundation and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, “Measuring Value-Added in Higher Education.” With hardly contained delight, they add that this development “mirrors recent trends in the K-12 sector.”Like RTTT’s progenitor No Child Left Behind, much of the genetic material of higher education reform is drawn from Texas. Just as the apocryphal “Texas Miracle” became the backbone of NCLB’s testing and accountability model, college reforms propagated in Texas have captured the attention of reformers nationwide, with the Gates Foundation playing its usual capo-de-tutti-capi role.The foundation also funded Compare College TX, an accountability system, and supported—in fact helped inspire—Governor Rick Perry’s $10,000 degree plan. This initiative epitomizes the Republican higher-ed platform, defined by performance funding, value-added measurements and the likely curtailing of state funds.The foundation’s other forays into higher education—an accountability challenge, numerous nationalcollege completion initiatives, and a series of research paperswith consulting firm HCM Strategists made Gates “one of the strongest voices …
You could say I am angry, but I don’t see that as a negative quality. Anger is a normal reaction to suffering, whether you experience it or witness it. One can be angry without being hostile or violent. One can be angry and still be respectful and polite to others.
Anger is a positive emotion, because anger acknowledges the possibility for change. The opposite of anger is acquiescence – the acceptance of suffering as normal. Anger is a form of compassion.
Corruption and inequality are man-made problems. They are not inevitable and neither is the hardship that accompanies them. But in order to fix a problem, we have to see it as a problem, not an inexorable element of human life or human behavior. Saying “this is the way things are” discourages people from imagining how things could be.
If people are angry after they read my work, I am glad. I hope they use that anger to fight on behalf of others. One of the worst feelings in the world is to suffer in the open and have no one care or raise a hand to help you. We should not take terrible conditions for granted any more than we should treat the suffering they cause as acceptable. Anger demands accountability.
As for your question as to whether I am “mentally and emotionally exhausted“ — probably. But that’s because I am the mother of two young children, not because I’m some sort of revolutionary.
Criticizing corruption is not exhausting. It is far more exhausting to pretend everything is okay.
English: Graduate School (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve heard this same story several times. Being highly educated and a vital part of an educational institution is no guarantee of job security or a significant salary. it’s driving good people from the field and diminishing the value of higher education.
Increasingly society is viewed through a Neoliberal prism where immediate results and marketization are valued over long term success and more traditional value systems. The church, the school and the press are being increasingly infected with the idea of measurable profit over more difficult to measure values. I would argue that intellectual inquisitiveness, love, honor, culture, and an inclination toward an intelligent development of public policy might have values in a civilized society but my voice in increasingly being shouted down by the fine print in budget statements geared toward the short term and quite often the counterproductive.
I think business ethics are tied in with the higher values of Western Civilization. Once those values are thrown away by crass economic doctrine, there will be a decline of society to a system based on power and wealth until the inevitable turn of the wheel and an new society is born.
James Pilant
“Exploitation should not be a rite of passage” | Sarah Kendzior
I went into academia for the reasons you mentioned – I love to write and do research. I enjoyed having the freedom to study topics that interest me, such as the politics of authoritarian states. I never cared about prestige or making a lot of money. But I care about earning a stable income and providing for my children.
In my final year in graduate school, I realized that my ability to stay on the job market and pursue an academic career was dependent on financial resources that I didn’t have. I was a successful academic – I am well-published, in top journals, with strong teaching evaluations and a solid reputation in my field. But this was irrelevant when it came to finding a job in this economy. I was expected to adjunct, subsisting on poverty wages, until a tenure-track job came along.
Money, not merit, is the critical factor to staying in academia in the United States. Most recent PhDs are either living in poverty, in massive debt, or surviving off family wealth. The former two categories tend to drop out, while the latter pay to play.
In the end, I am glad I left, because what I am doing now is more interesting. I didn’t plan to work as a writer – I was recruited once I started writing for the public. Al Jazeera English contacted me after reading my work on website called Registan.net, where I had been blogging about Central Asia during my last year of graduate school. My Al Jazeera articles often go viral. Over time, other publications asked me to write for them as well.
I love to write so I am happy about how this turned out. But I know my story is not typical. That is one of the reasons I write about barriers to entry in journalism, because talented writers are being locked out because they cannot afford unpaid internships or expensive credentials. Journalism is structured in a similar way to academia, where pre-existing wealth is a de facto requirement for entry.
Everyone benefits from a more diverse and even playing field, so I try to draw attention to unfair labor practices in these professions. Exploitation should not be a rite of passage.
Increasingly, adjunct faculty are doing the teaching in the US education system, particularly at the community college level. This is because they are cheap. Much, much cheaper than tenured faculty. They are often paid by the unit, instead of receiving a salary, and don’t get benefits. It’s cheaper to higher multiple adjunct faculty members than one tenured professor. Some community colleges don’t even have a full time faculty member supervising some departments. The entire English department, for example, may be part timers.
Some people enjoy working as adjunct faculty. The work is a lot more flexible, and you can choose whether to renew contracts between semesters, or move on to something else. There’s less pressure to publish, to perform, to establish yourself. You have more time to work directly with students because you don’t have to do administrative work. Some institutions are very open to suggestions for classes, so you get an opportunity to teach courses that interest you and engage with students who genuinely want to learn. Adjunct faculty have a lot to add to academic environments and are an important part of the academic community.
But the exploitation of adjunct faculty is another matter altogether. Many undergraduate students are not aware of the byzantine workings of college administration. They may not know, for example, that administrators tend to make the highest salaries, and that even star faculty may not receive very much from teaching. Their income is from grants, which need to be continually renewed, or awards, not the university directly. Star researchers are informed that they need to fund themselves, and their graduate students. The university is happy to share in the glory, but it doesn’t want to incur any of the expenses.
Portrait of a young Choctaw woman her body turned to the left, her head turned back to the front, and her gaze directed toward the viewer. She wears a pair of earrings and an off-the-shoulder garment made of animal skin. Her long dark hair is parted in the middle and falls down over her back, Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Some of my Hispanic students have commented at one time or another about the problems of having lived in nations (or having relatives in those nations) where there is a mainly Spanish descended ruling class, a more middle group of Spanish/indigenous mix bloods and the indigenous peoples. This is confirmation of what they have told me. Being on the lowest rung makes life difficult and conveys a sense of powerlessness.
I’ll let the article speak for itself.
James Pilant
Indigenous Woman Gives Birth On Hospital Lawn In Mexico After Doctors Denied Her Care
An indigenous woman squats in pain after giving birth, her newborn still bound by the umbilical cord and lying on the ground. It\’s a photograph that horrified Mexicans because of where it took place: the lawn outside a medical clinic where the woman had been denied help, and it struck a nerve in a country where inequity is still pervasive.
The government of the southern state of Oaxaca announced Wednesday that it has suspended the health center\’s director, Dr. Adrian Cruz, while officials conduct state and federal investigations into the Oct. 2 incident.
The mother, Irma Lopez, 29, told The Associated Press that she and her husband were turned away from the health center by a nurse who said she was only eight months pregnant and \”still not ready\” to deliver.
The nurse told her to go outside and walk, and said a doctor could check her in the morning, Lopez said. But an hour and a half later, her water broke, and Lopez gave birth to a son, her third child, while grabbing the wall of a house next to the clinic.
\”I didn\’t want to deliver like this. It was so ugly and with so much pain,\” she said, adding she was alone for the birth because her husband was trying to persuade the nurse to call for help.
NYPD graduation ceremony in Madison Square Garden, July 2005. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Stop and Frisk as used in New York is in my mind the commission of a series of crimes in the hope of deterring other crime. The New York City Police Department commits crimes by frisking using racial profiling and quotas not legitimate police methods. There is no way you can within the law stop and frisk people based on pigmentation and an arbitrary number of stops while still passing constitutional muster.
But I’m also worried about the effect this has on the individual policeman. If the public is just a series of quota targets to be harassed, searched or arrested, when does doing justice or serving the public come into the question? At what point, does police work become the practice of an occupying military force as opposed to public service? What does this practice do to public perception of police? When does a police department become a military force to be used at the discretion of its leadership (like below)?
If the police are an army to be used at the whim of a mayor, the goals of law enforcement are being threatened by politicization. This is poor policy.
Public trust and cooperation are critical elements in police work. The public is not a single community but a variety of communities based on economics, race and geography. Writing one or two off is bad police work and will have critical long term results.
Stop and frisk as a form of pre-emptive strike against minority crime is clearly unconstitutional.
It needs to end now.
James Pilant
NYPD Officer Adhyl Polanco Speaks Out Against Stop And Frisk In Video
Adhyl Polanco, an officer since 2005, has become an outspoken critic of the NYPD\’s policy, which critics say disproportionately targets blacks and Latinos for police stops. He recorded his supervisors asking beat cops to meet a monthly arrest quota and testified in the recent federal trial that found New York City\’s use of stop and frisk unconstitutional.
\”This is not what I became a cop for,\” Polanco says of stop and frisk in the video, which was produced by the reform advocacy group Communities United for Police Reform and released on YouTube on Monday. \”This is not what I wanted to do.\”
A Vera Institute of Justice study released last month found that the experience of being stopped made New Yorkers less likely to trust the police. New York City is currently appealing a federal judge\’s recent ruling against stop and frisk, which prompted outrage from critics at a Monday rally.
I always feel a certain element of surprise when the Justice Department acts on an economic crime. Much of the time they pretend it doesn’t exist or tell everyone how hard it is to prosecute. Well, this one is easy; some juicy kills for a prosecutor who will later parley his victories into money. I’m sorry to be cynical but considering the fish they let get away, these guys are not that much. Of course, they do deserve prosecution and I won’t be sorry to see them go to prison
English: Bernard Madoff’s mugshot (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
.
It is important for business ethics that there be accountability. But right now, getting caught for financial improprieties is about as likely as getting struck by lightning. That’s not much of a deterrent.
James Pilant
Bernie Madoff’s colleagues going on trial – Salon.com
Ponzi scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff claimed he alone orchestrated his $65bn scam – starting tomorrow US prosecutors aim to prove that was another lie.Jury selection starts Tuesday in the case against five of the convicted fraudster’s closest colleagues – all of whom have pleaded not guilty to aiding and abetting Madoff in his scheme.The charges include conspiracy to defraud, securities fraud and falsifying records of a broker-dealer. Madoff is currently serving a 150-year sentence after pleading guilty to fraud following the collapse of his Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities in 2008.Three of the defendants worked for Madoff for decades. Daniel Bonventre, the director of operations for the firm’s back office, started working for Madoff around 1968. Annette Bongiorno, his executive assistant, has known Madoff for over 40 years. Joann Crupi, who managed clients’ investment accounts, worked for Madoff for over 25 years. Also standing trial are computer programmers Jerome O’Hara and George Perez.According to the prosecution Madoff and his accomplises created false records and invented exotic trading schemes to explain the firm’s consistent high returns. In fact “the truth was that Madoff and his co-conspirators – with very rare exception – were not making any trades at all,” the indictment said.
This is a deliberate mess created by the politicians to give
impression they are waging real war on fraud and corruption when in fact
they are only interested in selective prosecution of their opponents.
To restore public confidence; The government should immediately publish
again a clear guidance of when EFCC, ICPC and Nigerian Police can lead
the prosecution of cases. EFCC with its specialised assets, training and
skills should concentrate on major, large and complex crimes only. The
Nigeria police should deal with minor and straightforward financial
crimes. As for ICPC; I am not really sure what value that brings to the
table. It should just be scrapped and EFCC should be strengthened to do
its work.
I believe one of the main reasons EFCC has not been as successful as
it should be is the fact that it is becoming jack of all trade and
master of non. It is prosecuting a N100,000 thief and a N100Billion
thief at the same time. Human nature means many of their staff will be
more interested in the smaller and simpler cases; to be able to raise
their conviction statistics. But that is not why they were established.
EFCC should from now on focus on serious financial crimes and go after
the “big guns” and stop chasing thieving drivers and houseboys. They
should leave that to the regular police.
SVG map of Hong Kong’s administrative districts. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I think something similar has been happening here for some time. It’s because of neoliberalism, the doctrine that education is a good to be purchased like a car or a vacation house. We, Americans, strive for an education to get and keep a job forgetting that education has other vital purposes like the creation of whole and vital human beings. The Chinese in Hong Kong also pursue an education for a job but also for social status, and, of course, their system of high school ends in a test that determines who goes to college and who does not. Less than half will qualify. Our testing regime is hideous beyond words but it does not carry that penalty, at least not yet.
I have a lot of sympathy for Monster parents. There is unfairness for some students. One of my son’s high school teachers told him that he would never go to college. Since my wife (now ex-wife) and I have two degrees apiece, we thought he probably would go to college (he’s attending one now). I let the matter blow over but there is a part of me that wanted confrontation, a confrontation that teacher would not have forgotten.
Still, however sympathetic I may be, I can’t see putting a child through a childhood absent play and solitude.
James Pilant
The Existential Angst of Hong Kong’s ‘Monster Parents’ | Yuen Chan
For a story about the pressures of early childhood in Hong Kong, my students recently interviewed the mother of a four-year-old who has soccer class on Mondays, piano and violin on Thursdays, extra English and maths on Thursdays and Fridays and music on Saturdays. She was also considering Mandarin and swimming, and all this on top of kindergarten. This may be an extreme case, but there is constant pressure for parents to put their kids on the treadmill and a lucrative industry to promote it.
Unsurprisingly, there was much hand-wringing when a survey published by a local university found Hong Kong\’s school children scored higher than those in the United States, Britain and Australia in a questionnaire that detects antisocial traits. Researchers warned that monster parents were creating a generation of over-confident, spoilt brats with a tendency towards aggression and violence to get their way.
But it seems too easy to point the finger at parents, simultaneously accused of fostering cowering, over-dependent children and violent narcissists. Parents are trapped in a pressure cooker — an education system that emphasizes academic achievement, as measured in test results, above all else, a culture that deems those without university degrees as failures.
What\’s worse, more and more students are attaining the minimum grades needed to qualify to study …(Please visit the web site and read the whole article. jp)
English: Comparison of Charter school performance to public schools. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
And why should anybody have expected anything else? Whose brilliant idea was it to have a cyber school without physical facilities? I teach online and maintain a blog. I don’t know about you but it is hard to stay focused on that keyboard when there are so many other things to do, and I’m an adult with years of education. I can’t imagine doing it as a child. The idea that parents who are often working would be able to supervise their children to stay on the computer for hours each day to take classes boggles the mind. The idea that the discipline and rules of a school necessary to keep children at those tasks could simply be abandoned in the hope of voluntary self education on the part of children was always a bit of a stretch.
It’s not working. Take their state money and send these for-profit failure on their way. We have real schools to fund.
James Pilant
From Junk Bonds to Junk Schools: Cyber Schools Fleece Taxpayers for Phantom Students and Failing Grades | Mary Bottari
The Data Is In: Kids Don\’t Learn Well in Front of Computer Screens
So while the public school system is bleeding money to cyber schools, how are those cyber students doing? Until recently, data on performance of these full-time virtual charters has been scarce. But educators at NEPC started to pull together performance data from multiple states for annual and special reports. They confirmed what many suspected: with rare exceptions, kids don\’t learn sitting in front of a computer all day. Using Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) state data, state performance rankings, and graduation rates, the researchers showed that full-time virtual schools lag significantly behind traditional brick-and-mortar schools. In particular, only 27.7 percent of K12 Inc. online schools met AYP in 2010-2011, compared to 52 percent of public schools. Of the 36 K12 Inc. schools that were assigned a school rating by state education authorities, only seven (19.4 percent) had ratings that clearly indicated satisfactory status. The same study shows that on-time graduation rates are also much lower at online schools than at all public schools on average in the United States: only 37.6 percent of students at virtual high schools graduate on time, whereas the national average for all public high schools is more than doubl
I say interesting for a number of reasons, but one is due to the location. Cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania (and Ohio for that matter) when they were first created did suffer from many of the problems described in these articles (e.g., lack of oversight, fraud in terms of funding provided for students that didn’t actually attend the cyber charter school, lack of participation in state testing regimes, etc.). While I believe in both instances (i.e., Pennsylvania and Ohio) that things have gotten much better, I do still believe that within the traditional public education community this early “Wild West” mentality gained them a reputation that they still haven’t been able to shake (and that has followed cyber charter schools to other jurisdictions).
It is also interesting because the main focus of these articles is Pennsylvania. You see a doctoral student of mine, Abigail Hawkins, and I did a study a couple of years ago looking at what policies K-12 online learning programs had with regards to trial periods (i.e., that period of time a student can try out an online course, drop it and not be counted as being officially enrolled) and how they calculated successful completions. Note that this study will be published in the American Journal of Distance Education sometime this month. One of the results of that study was a finding that in Pennsylvania the state required that cyber charter schools not have a trial period – that their enrollment data was kept in the same manner as a brick-and-mortar public school (i.e., beginning on the first day of school). This was the only jurisdiction where this was done. What this means is that comparisons of completion rates, school performance and student performance can be accurately made between the cyber charter schools and the brick-and-mortar schools in Pennsylvania – and only Pennsylvania – because you are comparing apples to apples.
So let’s do some very basic comparisons. The Standard of education article lists that there was 1 cyber charter school making AYP, 3 cyber charter schools that were making progress towards meeting AYP, and 7 cyber charter schools not meeting AYP. When you compare this statewide (and you can get that data here), you get the following:
Type of school
Made AYP
Making Progress Towards AYP
Did Not Meet AYP
Total
Cyber Charter Schools
1 (9.1%)
3 (27.3%)
7 (63.7%)
11
Brick-And-Mortar Schools
2290 (73.8%)
149 (4.8%)
665 (21.4%)
3104
Total
2291 (73.5%)
152 (4.9%)
672 (21.6%)
3115
The numbers don’t look particularly good for the cyber charter school community. I should note that it would be a much better comparison is you could compare the overall student data – which I’ve never done for Pennsylvania – although it would make a nice dissertation project because of the whole apples to apples thing.
I firmly believe that literature is a guide to how other people think, an insight into how other minds differ from yours. I recommend to my business students that they take classes in art, science and literature. Business courses prepare you for business problems. Liberal arts prepare you to live a life of meaning and purpose.
Of course, my students don’t read enough. Oh, they do, if you count their social media and the powerpoints they see in class but real reading is tackling college level text for more than five minutes. That kind of reading develops brain power, and according to the study here referenced, an enhanced ability to empathize and understand others.
James Pilant
Statue, Tomsk. “Anton Pavlovich in Tomsk—drunkard’s view, lying in a ditch, who never read Kashtanka” Print issues, Siberia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Jonathan Franzen can help you read people – Salon.com
Beach reading season is over, so it’s time to plunge into some serious fiction. But if the idea of plowing through a Pynchon feels a bit too much like work, here’s a piece of news that may inspire you: Doing so may help you better discern the beliefs, motivations, and emotions of those around you.That’s the conclusion of a just-published study by two scholars from the New School for Social Research in New York. David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano report that reading literature uniquely boosts “the capacity to identify and understand others’ subjective states.”Literary fiction, they note in the journal Science, “uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters’ subjective experiences.” Unlike most popular fiction, which “tends to portray the world and its characters as internally consistent and predictable,” these works require readers to contend with complex, sometimes contradictory characters.According to Kidd and Castano, this sort of active engagement increases our ability to understand and appreciate the similarly complicated people we come across in real life.The researchers provide evidence for their thesis in the form of five experiments, all of which were conducted online. In the first, the 86 participants read either a short literary work (by Chekhov, Don DeLillo, or …
(Please visit the web site and read the whole article! jp)
The great writers of the classics were masters in their craft. They
knew how to write well and effectively, and how to compose pieces that
would continue to instill wisdom centuries into the future. In other
subjects, such as chemistry, calculus, and history, students study those
people who were masters in these fields. They concentrate on gleaning
knowledge from those who were the most accomplished and had the most to
offer. Why should literature study be any different? Although YA
literature is a good device to get children interested in reading, it
should not be the main focus of study in the classroom. In general, YA
literature does not have the universal appeal or level of skill that
classic literature does. That would be equivalent to history teachers
teaching their students only about the lives of ordinary people rather
than those of people like Napoleon, Washington, or King, Jr. That would
be equivalent to chemistry teachers teaching their students only about
experiments conducted in high school labs, and not about scientists and
discoveries that have changed the world. Classic literature has a place
in the classroom, one that should be revered and never substitued with
work that is simply mediocre.
Tim Gillespie in one of his essays to ‘The English Journal’ says, “We
rightly worry that many youngsters lives are circumscribed by poverty,
discrimination, low expectations, cultural insularity, and other
conditions that may render them unable to see beyond the limits of their
immediate horizons. Literature does offer-inexpensively-a vision of
other lives and other vistas. One of its potential benefits is to
enlarge a reader’s sense about the many possible ways to live. This
enlarged sense seems to me an important part of our traditional national
ethos. Hope for a better world and belief in the possibility of
re-making oneself or improving one’s situation breed optimism and elbow
grease. We have rich testimony of this imaginative function of
literature. ”
The ability of literature to provoke its reader to imagine is
generalized in the above sentences. What I mean to say is that
literature of any kind has a generalized power to make the reader
imagine things. Of course, Tim throws more light on living life in
various ways and imagining situations that one cannot experience but
literature of any kind, whether a science textbook or a novel makes the
reader to imagine. This power of imagination deepens the intellectual
quotient of a person.
I have to wonder if this is not one of the great business ethics issues of our time. Fracking is in many ways protected from federal regulation and the energy companies generous campaign contributions (thanks to Citizens United) have warped state regulations and even the tax laws in favor of the frackers.
I can’t help but think that there could have been protections or developments in process that would have made these methods of exploration safer for the environment. We need the feds on the job. I don’t believe we can look to the industry for our protection. Their press releases have been little but the usual work of corporate PR flacks. That kind of media and public manipulation became obvious a long time ago.
Fracking should be done only with effective regulation both state and federal. What part of American history can lead one to believe in self-regulation? How about the patent medicine companies with their laudanum and opiates? How about investment banks and the great collapse of the first decade of the 21st century? Or simply, the history of the petroleum industry itself, leaks in the Alaska pipeline, a long series of tanker disasters and a little problem called the Gulf Oil Spill? What of this give you confidence that fracking is safe and harmless.
I tell you with confidence that in a few years, fracking will be in every business ethics textbook as a cautionary tale of an industry making its own calls on the safety of the public.
James Pilant
Fracking produces annual toxic waste water enough to flood Washington DC | Environment | theguardian.com
Fracking in America generated 280bn US gallons of toxic waste water last year – enough to flood all of Washington DC beneath a 22ft deep toxic lagoon, a new report out on Thursday found.The report from campaign group Environment America said America’s transformation into an energy superpower was exacting growing costs on the environment.”Our analysis shows that damage from fracking is widespread and occurs on a scale unimagined just a few years ago,” the report, Fracking by the Numbers, said.The full extent of the damage posed by fracking to air and water quality had yet to emerge, the report said.But it concluded: “Even the limited data that are currently available, however, paint an increasingly clear picture of the damage that fracking has done to our environment and health.”
In November of last year the United Nations released a ‘Global Environmental Alert’ on the risks that fracking poses to public health and the environment. In it they state:
While offering economic and energy security benefits, UG (unconventional gas) production presents considerable environmental risks. These range from potential water and soil contamination from surface leaks or from improperly designed well-casing, to spills of improperly treated water, increased competition for water usage, and fugitive emissions of gas with implications for the global climate…air pollution from volatile contaminants, noise pollution, negative impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity losses and landscape disruption.’
Carlos Ovando
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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