Whaaaa. She said she was going to hold the football for me.

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/apr/25/controversial-wiggins-pass-development-hasnt-kept-/


Today's link again comes from the Naples Daily News, which reports that a developer . . . wait for it . . . isn't doing what he promised to do when he got the county to approve a couple of condo towers near the beach.


What's surprising is the amount of shock and indignation expressed by readers.


The condo was approved for a piece of ground that once housed the largest marina in northern Collier County. Boaters who didn't want to trailer their vessels all the way to Naples or points south could launch there, or even store their boats there for a fee.


When the condo construction began, that option disappeared. In order to pacify angry area residents, the county commissioners negotiated with the developer to improve traffic near the development and to add public launch facilities. But, hey, the economy went sour and what's a developer to do?


Which prompted one NDN reader to comment:


"Again, money wins,Taxpayers lose and it's all courtesy of the Collier County government."
The mistake this reader makes is identifying three entities where only one exists in the economic monoculture that is Collier County. It works like this: The first faction of this single entity are the developers and the speculators. They put packages together, sniff out financing, line up investors or other sources of capital, and maintain sweet relationships with the consulting engineers and land-use attorneys who know how to run the "machine" known as Collier County, a place where raw land in the form of live oak plains, pine and palmetto scrub and even mangrove wetlands can be magically converted into Vietnamese nail salons, franchise tanning booths, branch banks, used car lots, convenience stores and all the other manifestations of an advanced civilization.
The second faction is the public servants, which includes the county commissioners and the county employees responsible for signing off on new developments.


Our indignant reader is nearly right when he implies that the commissioners' job is to listen to the people who put them in office. But he isn't clear about who makes up that group. He implies it is "the taxpayers." He's wrong.


It's the guys we described above.


Joe Blow might get on the horn and tell Commissioner So-and-So that he doesn't want to see fifty families displaced by the extension of a road that a certain prominent developer needs to provide access to a certain new project out in the boonies. But Joe Blow is just one vote, or maybe a dozen if all his friends call, or maybe a hundred if all the families deliver two calls each. Big deal. Commissioner So-and-So isn't looking for any 100-vote margin. He needs the manifest power inherent in a large, united group sharing a common purpose. He needs the movers and shakers on his side. He needs the developers, and their entourage of contractors, bankers, engineers, environmental scientists, surveyors and everyone else whose paycheck depends on turning raw land into houses or shops.


Such a group, for instance, might be the employees of a humongous consulting engineering firm, a firm capable of providing the expertise to advise the county on where to put that road extension, and, coincidentally, the firm that is helping design and get permits for the new development project. That's where the third faction of our single entity comes in. Let's call them, following the angry reader's example, the "taxpayers." It's amazing how many of them depend on development for their jobs. So the bosses at the firm tell the people working for them that a whole lot of jobs depend on getting the right vote from the commissioners. And the contractors who intend to make a lot of money helping bring that project out of the ground tell their employees the same thing.


And the employees tell the people they give their money to. "You know, if that new development gets squashed by a bunch of tree-huggers, I'm probably not going to be able to afford new acrylic nails every week," they tell the folks at the nail parlor. And the guy running the pizza shop cusses because traffic is a nightmare and his delivery cars need an hour to get around the block, but if the new development falters all those brick masons and carpenters and drywall hangers are going to be ordering less pizza, so what's a fella to do? Why, tell his commissioner to approve that project, and that new road extension, and sorry about the displaced families and tough cheese about the extra traffic but hey, a fella's gotta eat. 


And so it goes.


For every "taxpayer" suffering from the actions of this system there are a dozen more who depend on it for their bread and butter. It IS the economy we've created here, and it rewards handsomely those who play by its rules. The displaced and unhappy can stay and gripe about the loss of beach access, the dearth of places to launch even a piddly canoe, and the time it takes to get anywhere. They can moan about the taxes the county needs to keep the monster machine running. They can make weak jokes about how Naples is still not as bad as Miami. But nothing changes. It never has, and I've been watching it a real long time. The developers, the commissioners who depend on them, and the "taxpayers" whose wages flow from them are all part of the same creature. And as Pogo once said, that creature are us.

First we blame the teachers

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/apr/20/crist-inks-increased-fla-graduation-requirements/


The Florida Legislature has handed Gov. Charlie Crist a new education bill to replace the one he vetoed last week. That one would have essentially linked teachers' jobs to the performance of their students on standardized tests. This one would require end-of-course exams for high school students in math and science classes, and add algebra II, geometry, biology, chemistry and physics to the list of courses required for graduation.


Predictably, the comments that accompanied the story in the Naples Daily News included at least one call for "greater accountability" for teachers. Elnuestros feels strongly enough about this issue to repeat his position here. One never knows when a story or a comment will disappear into the ether. 


Wrote one commenter to the story:


"I saw this on the news, it makes sense but the teachers need to have some kind of accountability."


Responded elnuestros:

I don't think you'd find many teachers arguing against being held accountable.

What you will find are teachers reluctant to be the scapegoats for a failing system.

The rules on what and how to teach roll down from the federal Department of Education, from state education departments, from local school boards and from the education experts working for the superintendents.

The teacher is allowed freedom and movement within the tangled network of standards, practices, regulations, dictates and procedures that results.

But everybody wants to blame the teacher because the product is faulty?

That's like blaming the cook at KFC because the latest whiz-bang creation cooked up in the corporate kitchen is a bomb.

Education, to be carelessly blunt, has been over-professionalized to the point that it no longer works. Teachers with intuition, with the gift of connecting with students and of trying different approaches until they can find the right one, are handicapped in an industrial model that dictates specific tactics and strategies and refuses to acknowledge individual student distinctions unless accompanied by months of painstaking and time-wasting monitoring. That monitoring, by the way, doesn't help the teacher. He or she already knows the problem. It's just to give the supervisors a paper trail and set the stage for the appropriate intervention.

Teaching is a calling, like training race horses, being a minister, or (traditionally) being a physician or nurse. We're turning it into a service position, and telling the best we have to do their paperwork like good technicians and leave the thinking to their "betters" upstairs.

Then we want to blame them when the students don't perform.

Commented another reader:

Thank you for your astute and insightful post. It's comforting to know that sanity prevails.

To which elnuestros was forced to write:

I wish it prevailed. I don't see evidence of it. I know far too many teachers who think the Tea Party offers a solution, that Glenn Beck is right, that Sarah Palin would be better in the White House than that black guy.

It deflates one to see people with advanced degrees, people charged with teaching children, cutting and pasting whatever "credible" lie about Obama they come across: Did you know he lets Muslims pray on Capitol Hill but revoked the National Day of Prayer?

My fear is that by the time the teachers understand that standardized testing has nothing to do with students and everything to do with them, it will be too late.

Once the McDonaldization of education occurs, once the unions are weakened or dissolved, once the kind of "outside contractors" who have done such a wonderful job for the Pentagon complete their infestation of the schools, I envision a world where teachers will report in uniforms, year-round, for the purpose of handing out the materials they are told to, administering the tests they are required to, and uttering not a word that doesn't appear in the accompanying "teacher's" handbook.

When that day arrives, look for an end to extra pay for advanced degrees and for the time off that many experienced teachers know helps "recharge" the batteries for the next season's challenges. Maybe they'll make an advanced degree a job requirement, but I'm betting they won't be paying extra because of its presence.

And folks will line up for those jobs, doing their part not to "teach" our young, but to mold them and train them to color between the lines, sit up straight, stop questioning authority, not be "bullies" as the definition of that term continues to expand to cover more aspects of human nature, and be model little future service workers in the corporate-run world we will have left for them.

Got a problem with that? Look for the same defense of dissenting opinions one now finds among the Tea Party. Those who won't embrace the "majority" groupthink opinion will be ostracized, expelled, made unemployable and otherwise taught to toe the line.

Where will the professionals come from? Private schools. The trend is already under way. Watch for the division between the two to become permanent and beyond repair when the "libertarians" succeed in establishing vouchers, charter arrangements, and other devices intended to dismantle the funding mechanism that supports public education.

What will be left? Special ed. Lots of it. And behavior issues. Lots of them. And even unhealthier food in the lunchrooms, more soda machines in the hallways, and God knows what clever corporate programs designed to hook young consumers before their powers of discretion and critical thinking can be developed.

Ever listen to the garbage they blast on school bus radios these days? That's the sound of the future.

We'll be returning to this thread, I'm sure, since the debate over public education is unlikely to go away. In the current hardscrabble climate, anyone who belongs to a union seems to be fair game for those drowning in the effluvium of Trickle Down Economics. Those who belong to unions, get summers off, and find their creativity and sense of accomplishment plowed under by supervisors who either never taught, or couldn't hack it, are understandably thin-skinned about the public whipping they're getting from the anti-government crowd.


It's an explosive combination, fraught with danger on both sides. Add politicians, those mouth-breathing, publicity-seeking, kneejerk goofballs who, having made a mess of everything but trading political favors for contributions from the connected and the powerful, now feel obliged to "rescue" public education, and you have the kind of pile-up you sometimes see when a heavy fog descends on a California freeway. We'll keep trying to sort it out.


We'll also try to use shorter sentences. No promises, though. You're in the deep end. You have to concentrate.

The Mighty Brent Wades into the Tea Party

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/apr/15/naples-tea-party-infiltrator-Obama/

Well, the Tea Party gathered in Naples today, waving their signs and pretending that the corner of the North Trail and Pine Ridge Road was Independence Hall, circa the late 18th century, when men were men and fathers were founding or some such.

Right into the midst of the fruitcakes stomped that intrepid gatherer of low-hanging fruit, Brent Batten. He's the only columnist the Naples Daily News has, if you don't count the assorted quasi-celebrities, real-estate hucksters and others willing to pen some dribble to keep their names in front of a public that might need what they're selling. (I don't include Ben Bova among that number, by the way. To even things up, I'll count Don Farmer twice.) That means his opinions should be especially cogent, analytical, precise and reasoned. I'm sure he thinks they are.

Anyway, ol' Brent just waded into that melee, right past the lady shrieking at the top of her lungs -- or maybe it was the bird on her shoulder -- and right past the fat guy in flip-flops and baggies who wanted the government to spread his work ethic, not his wealth. A couple of little kids were decked out with signs linking Obama to "bin Lyin," whoever that is, and calling for "ObamaCare" to be flushed. The little boy's sign had a picture of a toilet on it. Cute. Almost everybody wanted to protect the Constitution, although nobody seemed to be bothered by that back when George Bush was paying private companies to gather data on Americans because it would have been illegal for the government to do the gathering itself.

Brent was there because he'd read an Associated Press story about a fellow who planned to organize infiltrations of Tea Party protests across the country. The plan was to have people engage Tea Party types in discussions about their signs and slogans. The predictable result, this fellow told the AP, was that many of the Tea Party arguments would be exposed as silly, ill-conceived, impractical, or just so much blowing off without benefit of facts or logic to argue a case.

Brent wanted to see if there were any of those infiltrators in Collier County. Almost anyone who knows anything about the demographics of Collier County could have told him there probably weren't. But since Brent's only been a columnist for the Naples Daily News for about umpteen years, he couldn't have known that. Brent came and saw and concluded that "They just don't make infiltrators like they used to." Pithy, huh? A regular Mencken, that boy.

Brent also wanted to assure people that there weren't any nasty people among the Tea Party crowd. There were no racists. No homophobes. No "general meanness," whatever that means.

Brent neglected to mention the overwhelming support of Sarah Palin by the Tea Party, and the "general meanness" if not downright snarkiness that exudes from her every time someone turns on a camera. And we wouldn't expect him to recognize racism, since he himself achieved fame for a particularly insensitive column several years back that attempted to communicate a black music event in a dialogue that he fooled himself into thinking was a) clever and b) urban cool. All he did was inflame nearly every black person who heard about it. It did get him, and his newspaper's owners, quite a bit of publicity, though.

Beyond that, Elnuestros has trouble suggesting any possible point at all to the column. 

Was Brent surprised that in Collier County there was no noticeable infiltration of the protesters? He picks a quote out of a national wire story, finds its general message inapplicable in a specific situation and thus finds it false? There's a word for that kind of faulty logic,, but I'm not going to go over Brent's head by speaking Latin.

The New York Times yesterday devoted a huge chunk of its front page to a story summarizing a fairly ambitious poll of Tea Party members. While all polls have a margin of error, was it Brent's intention to suggest that his personal -- and anecdotal -- account trumps the insights into that group's constituency the poll provides? Is that logical? Is that good journalism?

Brent is a knee-jerk reactionary who blew like a hayseed out of Hillbilly Heaven, Ohio, and landed in the closest thing to a haystack his meager talents likely will ever help him acquire. He plays the part perfectly, telling all the wealthy retired Midwesterners who share his taste for goofy humor and meat loaf that they truly are superior to those who think differently, or at all.

His reactions are instinctively protective of the specious success he and his faithful following have achieved, and worthless as anything but a reflection of his limited world view. He's so proud of them he's bundled them into a book with a title that vaingloriously suggests he's never struck out. Most readers know better.

You're still battin' a thousand, boy. Keep swinging.