The December 2019 school newsletter in my mind

      Jeannette McCardle’s fourth-grade class has been busy harvesting the produce of our cutting-edge hydroponic garden. The kids have been delivering an abundance of squash, carrots, beets, broccoli, cauliflower and peppers, among other wholesome vegetables, to the Deerfield Food Bank, which serves more than 15,000 residents each year. 

Savannah Russell says that bringing food that she grew herself to the Food Bank was very gratifying.

         ``If you just plant seeds and harvest the food, you don’t see the whole process,’’ Savannah says. ``It was really interesting to see what they do at the food bank. They get a lot of perishables there and it takes a lot to handle it. They have really high shelves. I wanted to help out but they wouldn’t let me.’’

Joshua Flood’s sixth graders have hit the ground running with genealogical research. For the first time, kids at Learning Tree are exploring their family trees (no pun intended!). Ancestry.com has been their main research tool.

This past month they took a field trip to the local history/genealogy sections of the Granville and Deerfield libraries.

Paul Moody says that one of his 8^th-generation great uncles was a Puritan minister who helped an accused witch escape before she could be tried in Salem, Massachusetts. Charlie Britt reports that he discovered that he is a descendant of three Mayflower Compact signatories, among them William Brewster, the minister on the Mayflower. Britt is a 10^th-generation great grandson of Brewster’s.

``Such nobility,'' Charlie says. ``I gotta say that I didn't see that coming.''

Words can’t express our thanks to the Kiwanis Club of Deerfield for its $200,000 donation which will be used to purchase badly needed replacements for our musical instruments, including a refurbished harpsichord.

John Maggs, chairman of the Music Department, says ``The whole thing is truly remarkable.''

``We’re happy to oblige,’’ says Kiwanis President Hatfield Meters.

In the meantime, I’m thrilled to report that after 15 years, yours truly finally managed to bag a deer, near Aldrich Pond.  It was at least a three-mile back hike to our truck. We were concerned that by the time we got to the truck and back, a neighbor might come along and make off with the buck. So Bob came up with another of his ideas. He suggested we cut off the deer’s tongue. We did. It took us an hour and a half to get to the truck and back. Sure enough, there were a couple of guys standing around. I told them the deer was mine. They looked skeptical ``Open his mouth,’’ Bob said. They did. ``No tongue,’’ one of them said. ``Right,’’ Bob said. Then he yanked the tongue out of his pocket. 

Good old Bob. Always fulla surprises.

Talk to you next month!

Jim Taylor, director

Letter To The Cynic, the University of Vermont's Student Newspaper

     I am a grandson of Paul A. Moody, who was a professor of zoology at the University of Vermont from 1927 to 1973. In 1953, Grandpa served on a UVM committee that was charged with deciding whether Alex Novikoff, a Medical College faculty member, was a communist and should be fired. UVM fired Novikoff. My grandfather dissented. 
     Were he alive today, Grandpa would have been disappointed, if not sickened, to hear that the university has dismissed economics Professor John Summa. 
     For six years starting in 1997, 11 years after his death, I researched the life of my grandfather. The so-called ``Novikoff affair’’ and his role in it was the main target of my research. In Vermont, the troubles for Novikoff, a Russian Jew who migrated to the United States with his parents, began after it was learned that he had, in the 1930s, joined the Communist Party of the United States while on the Brooklyn College faculty. He was a leader of the faculty union there. In 1953 Novikoff was subpoenaed to testify the before U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Invoking the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, Novikoff declined to answer several questions. 
      Mired in the reactionary spirit of the McCarthy Era, a substantial part of the general public was willing to interpret ``pleading the Fifth’’ as an admission of guilt.Yet in a written statement made in May 1953, at age 50, Grandpa wrote that he was convinced that Novikoff did so to protest

 ``inquisitorial methods of investigation, and infringement upon personal liberty and individual freedom.’’

     Nowadays academia is the target of the political right wing; likewise, Novikoff was a man marked by political-fringe McCarthyism. In her book, ``Dark Money,’’ Jane Mayer says that by 2014, the libertarian Koch brothers had funded 283 pro free-market programs at four-year colleges and universities. 
     Paul Amos Moody was no leftist. He opposed the repeal of Prohibition and denounced the New Deal in the letters section of the Burlington Free Press. He voted Republican in every presidential election until 1976, when he voted for Jimmy Carter. Yet when it came time to pass judgment on Novikoff, Grandpa disregarded his political inclination biases to focus on facts. He asserted that Novikoff had not been a communist at UVM, that he would not try to influence students toward communism and that he did not pose a security risk to the United States. 
     Comparing immigrants to ``we rather complacent Americans of native birth,’’ he said they are perhaps

``the more worthy spiritual descendants of…the founding fathers whose first-hand knowledge of the suppression of individual rights prompted the writing of the Fifth Amendment…’’

     References to immigrants, complacent Americans and democracies falling into authoritarianism bring to mind the unmistakable new wave of xenophobia and acts of hatred in the United States. My country's respect for civil political discourse is flagging. Suppression of intellectual freedom will do nothing to make things better. 

     In 1997, I interviewed Merton Lambden, a retired UVM professor of biochemistry. Lambden was a contemporary of Novikoff’s at the university. He told me that the political atmosphere at UVM during the Novikoff affair bothered him so much that every day his stomach churned. All of us should consider the politically motivated hiring and firing of faculty to be, at the very least, stomach-churning.

A Fresh Application of Bigotry

      Somewhere along the line in elementary school, I came across a biography of W.E.B DuBois. I read it and then, as best as I can remember, I didn’t pick up another book on African-American history for perhaps 15 years.

     But that does not mean that I learned nothing more about the subject during that time. At what is now the Amherst-Pelham Regional Middle School, I had a class in which Edward O’Daniel taught us about the Reconstruction period, the black codes and the three-fifths compromise.  We watched ``The Diary of Miss Jane Pittman,’’ and when it was done, Mr. O’Daniel said he didn’t like the program because it made slavery look like paradise.

     When I was 13, I started to learn tunes by Mississippi John Hurt; I liked the way they sounded when my guitar teacher played them. I moved on to Blind Blake, Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy. This requires untold hours of practice. I absorbed with my hands, my ears and my heart the harmony, melody and rhythm of music that had been played by African Americans about 45 years earlier. I still wonder what it would have been like to be one of those musicians and one of the people who heard the songs when the songs were young.

     In 1984, I read ``Let the Trumpet Sound,’’ a King biography by Stephen Oates. Since then I’ve read several books about southern American culture and African-American history. Studying African American history and African American culture is a robust way to understand United States history.

***

     Europe and the United States are ensnared in a dreaded historical pattern. Uncertainty, economic and otherwise, is fueling demagoguery. Among the scapegoats in the 20th century were German Americans, Japanese Americans, Jews, blacks and so-called Communists. During this century, transgender people and Muslims have been added to the list.

     Bigotry is receiving a fresh application of fertilizer. Bigots define peoples and religions as foreign and sinister. Bigots embrace the fallacy that one can commit huge amounts of energy demonizing peoples and religions and, at the same time, understand them. This is impossible because to understand something one must clear the path to understanding. To do that one must put aside the underdeveloped ideas that impede the way. Bigots don’t try to clear the way. Instead, they make a career of insisting that they do. And they do it quite publicly. In Nazi Germany, they did it loudly and often enough to make it easy for Hannah Arendt to observe

``the curious contradiction between the totalitarians’ avowed cynical `realism’ and their conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality.’’

     The result, as Geoffrey Chaucer puts it, is something like a cacophony: ``Thus they kept up the jangle of debate/As the illiterate are wont to do/When subtler things are offered to their view/Than their unletterterdness can comprehend/They reach the wrong conclusions in the end.’’

***

     A few years ago I was gratified to see that in one Belchertown, Massachusetts public school classroom the objective was to learn about Islamic religion and culture. I imagine that school personnel looked around, became aware of the suffering of American Muslims and developed a curriculum that would help kids learn about Islam in a responsible location, the classroom. Rather than ``on the streets.’’ That is, from the bigots.

Copyright 2018 Daniel Steven Miller

Promising Treatments for Depression Stem from Research into Little-Understood Brain Functions

(Commissioned by a Guru.com client, a.k.a. Asshole)

     People with major depression often find themselves crying for no apparent reason; they report feelings of seemingly insurmountable sorrow, like plummeting down a well of worsening despair. Suicide attempts are common.

     Incidences of the debilitating mental illness major depression are spiking worldwide.  From 1992 to 2017, the number of people with depression at all levels of intensity rose from 168 million to 254 million – an increase of 51 percent.

     For years, researchers focused on the neurochemical explanation for depression: Patients had a deficiency of one or more of the three neurotransmitters that affect mood.

     A June 2019 article from the Harvard Medical School states that numerous non-neurologic causes for depression are now understood. Depression can be triggered by stressful life events, medications the patient is already taking, other medical problems, genetic vulnerability.

     Experts are still focusing on neurochemistry -- but on many more than three chemicals. ``There are millions, even billions, of chemical reactions that make up the dynamic system that is responsible for your mood, perceptions, and how you experience life,’’ the Harvard Medical School article states.

     Indeed, when we consider the different extents that depression affects different people of different ages, ethnicities and genders, we can see that depression is not merely a matter of the presence or absence of neurotransmitters.

     In the United States, the epidemic has proven to be especially rough going for women, younger people, native Alaskans and American Indians and whites. According to the National Institute for Mental Health, in the United States in 2017, 5.3 percent of males and 8.7 percent of females were diagnosed with major depression in the last year. Thirteen percent of people aged 18 to 25 had the diagnosis. The percentage for those aged 26 to 49 is 7.7 percent. For everyone aged 50 and over, the figure is 4.7 percent.

     The highest incidence was the 8 percent suffered by American Indians and native Alaskans. A close second were white people, of whom 7.9 percent were diagnosed. The figure for African Americans and Hispanics is 5.4 percent. (This is interesting because it works against the tide of the conventional wisdom that the lives of African Americans and Hispanics are usually much more stressful than those of white people.)

     Also, there are noteworthy global disparities. For instance, in Greenland in 2017, 6.2 percent suffered some degree of depression. The percentages, respectively, were 4.8 in the United States and 3.5 in India.

     The demographic data raise the question of whether researchers could find a course of treatment that would help a significant of people with depression. Would the same therapeutic regimen provide a comparable level of benefit to a 39-year-old white man and a 15-year-old Hispanic girl? How about a middle-aged woman in southern Asia and a teenage boy in the United States?

     As with all mental-health problems, experts recommend a combination of medication and talk therapy to tackle depression. They also recommend that patients pay attention to their daily routines. But these days researchers are looking into new treatments that are based on neurology.

     In March, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the go-ahead to esketamine, the first new anti-depressant to be approved in decades. The drug is a result of research into ketamine, an aesthetic that acts on NMDA receptors, to which researchers had hitherto given relatively little attention. ``Homing in on this channel appears to provide relief from depression that is better, arrives faster, and works in far more people than current drugs,’’ Business Insider reported in December.

     Researchers are also looking into the use of psilocybin. ``Brain scan studies suggest that depression ramps up the activity in brain circuits linked with negative emotions and weakens the activity in circuits linked with positive ones. Psilocybin appears to restore balance to that system,’’ Business Insider reported.

     The work on esketamine, marketed as the nasal spray SPRAVATO, and psilocybin stem from a ``resurgence of interest’’ in therapies that affect parts of the brain that are not targeted by anti-depressant medications now.

     In March 2018, researchers at the Scripps Research Center’s Florida campus announced that they had started to investigate another unexplored area, the brain receptor GPR158. They found that people with a high GPR158 level were susceptible to major depression.

     "The next step in this process is to come up with a drug that can target this receptor," Science Daily quoted top research investigator Kirill Martemyanov as saying.

     The GPR158 research won’t result in a new drug therapy anytime soon, according to the report. "This is really new biology and we still need to learn a lot," Martemyanov said.

     A psilocybin-derived treatment may not arrive for at least another 10 years.

Sources

·        A fresh crop of promising drugs is poised to change the way depression is treated for the first time in decades. Here are the ones to watch in 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/most-promising-new-depression-drugs-treatments-predictions-2019-2018-12  accessed July 8, 2019

·        Depression: Overview

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/depression/index.shtml

accessed July 7, 2019

·        Depression: What Are Signs and Symptoms http://mentalhealth.fitness/learnabout-your-diagnosis/depression/ accessed July 7, 2019

·        Major Depression https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/major-depression.shtml accessed July 7, 2019

·        New research points to better way to treat depression https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180301125040.htm accessed July 9, 2019

·        Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/mental-health#depression accessed July 6, 2019

·        What Causes Depression? https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/what-causes-depression accessed July 6, 2019

(c) 2019 Daniel S. Miller

Somewhere along the line in elementary school, I came across a biography of W.E.B DuBois. I read it and then, as best as I can remember, I didn’t pick up another book on African-American history for perhaps 15 years.

But that does not mean that I learned nothing more about the subject during that time. At what is now the Amherst-Pelham Regional Middle School, I had a class in which Edward O’Daniel taught us about the Reconstruction period, the black codes and the three-fifths compromise.  We watched ``The Diary of Miss Jane Pittman,’’ and when it was done, Mr. O’Daniel said he didn’t like the program because it made slavery look like paradise.

When I was 13, I started to learn tunes by Mississippi John Hurt; I liked the way they sounded when my guitar teacher played them. I moved on to Blind Blake, Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy. This requires untold hours of practice. I absorbed with my hands, my ears and my heart the harmony, melody and rhythm of music that had been played by African Americans about 45 years earlier. I still wonder what it would have been like to be one of those musicians and one of the people who heard the songs when the songs were young.

In 1984, I read ``Let the Trumpet Sound,’’ a King biography by Stephen Oates. Since then I’ve read several books about southern American culture and African-American history. Studying African American history and African American culture is a robust way to understand United States history.

***

Europe and the United States are ensnared in a dreaded historical pattern. Uncertainty, economic and otherwise, is fueling demagoguery. Among the scapegoats in the 20th century were German Americans, Japanese Americans, Jews, blacks and so-called Communists. During this century, transgender people and Muslims have been added to the list.

Bigotry is receiving a fresh application of fertilizer. Bigots define peoples and religions as foreign and sinister. Bigots embrace the fallacy that one can commit huge amounts of energy demonizing peoples and religions and, at the same time, understand them. This is impossible because to understand something one must clear the path to understanding. To do that one must put aside the underdeveloped ideas that impede the way. Bigots don’t try to clear the way. Instead, they make a career of insisting that they do, as they won't. And they do it quite publicly. In Nazi Germany, they did it loudly and often enough to make it easy for Hannah Arendt to observe

``the curious contradiction between the totalitarians’ avowed cynical `realism’ and their conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality.’’

The result, as Geoffrey Chaucer expresess it, is something like a cacophony.

``Thus they kept up the jangle of debate/As the illiterate are wont to do/When subtler things are offered to their view/Than their unletterterdness can comprehend/They reach the wrong conclusions in the end.’’

***

A few years ago I was gratified to see that in one Belchertown, Massachusetts public school classroom the objective was to learn about Islamic religion and culture. I imagine that school personnel looked around, became aware of the suffering of American Muslims and developed a curriculum that would help kids learn about Islam in a responsible location, the classroom. Rather than ``on the streets.’’ That is, from the bigots.

Copyright 2018 Daniel Steven Miller

Following the money: Vote No On Massachusetts Question 2. Part II.

Is it free-market indoctrination, or just plain

union busting? For 

whichever purpose, corporate America is dropping a ton of cash on Massachusetts ballot Question 2.

In an earlier post I described the support of Massachusetts ballot Question 2 as being ``corporation laden.’’ The relatively superficial digging I’ve done reveals that the pro-Question 2 forces have pumped millions of dollars into their campaign.

If the referendum passes the limit on the number of charter schools that can be established in the commonwealth will be lifted; as many as 12 new charters would be allowed each year. Those in favor say that Massachusetts is loaded down with under-performing schools, and that charter schools are high-quality alternatives.

In August, The Boston Globe interviewed UMass Boston political scientist Maurice T. Cunningham, who had been doing research to find out who the Question 2 backers are. He likened the process to opening a Russian nesting doll.

“You open one doll, and then you open the next one, and the next one, and we can’t actually find out who’s writing the check,” the Globe quoted Cunningham as saying.

Using records from the Massachusetts Office of Campaign Finance’s Web site, I’ve discovered that one of those dolls is philanthropist Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, who put in $710,000. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, president of the software company Bloomberg LP, contributed $240,000.

Of course, that comes to only $950,000, which doesn’t come close to the $13.4 million referendum opponents raised last month.

The opposition, a ballot committee called Save Our Public Schools, relies on union support. ** The Massachusetts Teachers Association contributed almost $6 million. The American Federation of Teachers kicked in $820,472.  Save Our Public Schools received another $6.4 million from labor organizations based in Washington, D.C.

Question 2 supporters managed to close the $12.5 million gap.

Some $106,460 was ponied up by employees of Fidelity Investments, which has headquarters in Boston.  Of that, $40,000 came from CEO Abigail Johnson.

In the grand scheme, Fidelity’s total contribution is small. I mention Fidelity, however, because it is one of the investment firms that, according to a report published last month, has taken profits from teachers’ pension funds and contributed it to the anti-charter school effort.

On Oct. 26, David Sirota writing for the International Business Times, reported:

When Massachusetts public school teachers pay into their pension fund each month, they may not realize where the money goes. Wall Street titans are using some of the profits from managing that money to finance an education ballot initiative that many teachers say will harm traditional public schools…. Donors to groups supporting the ballot measure include executives linked to eight firms doing business with (the Massachusetts Pensions Reserves Investment Board):  Fidelity, Summit Partners, Highfields Capital, Berkshire Partners, State Street, Bain Capital, Apollo Global Management, and Charles River Ventures. Together with Charlesbank Capital Partners and Centerbridge — which have other connections to the ballot initiative...

The Massachusetts pension reserves board invests around $61 billion for the state’s retirement system, the Times noted.

Fidelity’s contributions went to Great Schools Massachusetts, the largest of the five ballot committees backing Question 2.

To the pro-charter school campaign, Great Schools Massachusetts has put in $15 million – 85 percent of all contributions combined.

Other investment firms to Great Schools Massachusetts cited by the Times article, and what they coughed up:

·         Bain Capital, the job-killing venture capital outfit started by 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, $80,000.

·         Berkshire Partners, $300,000.

·         State Street Global Advisors, 3,000.

·         Highfields Capital Management, 40,000.

Looking at the campaign office’s data, we can that  the bulk of funding in support of Question 2 is coming from outside Massachusetts.

As of October 28, Great Schools Massachusetts had received $17.5 million in contributions.

Of that, $13.8 million came from three contributors that report having the same address in New York City: Families for Excellent Schools, Families for Excellent Schools, Inc., and Families for Excellent Schools Advocacy, Inc.

Education Reform Advocacy Now, which lists an address in Brooklyn, put in $298,127.

The remaining funds came from entities that list addresses in Massachusetts:

·         Expanding Educational Opportunities. Boston. $5.7 million.

·         Strong Economy for Growth, Inc. Lynnfield. $650,000.

·         Great Schools for Massachusetts. Boston. (This entity is separate from Great Schools Massachusetts.) $251,000.

·         Campaign for Fair Access to Quality Public Schools. Brookline. $100,000. (This group donated $100,000 to another Question 2 ballot committee, Advancing Obama’s Legacy on Charter Schools Ballot Committee.)

So why all the corporate interest? I haven’t found an answer that satisfies me.

In her blog, Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former U.S. assistant secretary of education, says,

The free market has been very good to hedge fund managers, and they think that public schools should compete in a free market too. They are not in the game to make money, but to promote their ideology of free-market competition.

I have a hard time imagining that the faculties at the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion School or the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School spend much time if any lecturing their students on the virtues of the free market.

Another argument, that charter schools evade local control and use non-unionized teachers, makes more sense to me. When  I read between the lines of ``schools should compete in a free market,’’ I think or union-busting.

There are a few other organizations worth mentioning:

·         Democrats For Education Reform, comprised of ``hedge fund managers, business executives, and privately-run corporations,’’ part of whose purpose is to defeat teachers’ unions, according to a recent investigation. The authors write:

 DFER billions fund local, state, and federal political races and use “the sky is falling” rhetoric to fuel their continued efforts to control public education. As a result, we have seen elected lawmakers, funded by DFER money, work to slash school aid budgets.  DFER continues to ignore that equity funding is essential to help our most struggling students and schools… The policies DFER lays out for education… are all smoke and mirrors for an agenda that seeks to privatize public education in order to generate massive amounts of profit for their wealthy founders and investors.

·         The American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC. ALEC holds secret meetings in which lobbyists and legislatures determine the content of legislation before it is proposed publicly.  Ravitch writes that ALEC’s ``model legislation’’ is intended to show

…how to replace public schools with charters and vouchers, how to get rid of unions, how to get rid of teacher certification, how to get rid of teacher tenure.

A footnote:  Wal-Mart, whose Alice Walton donated $710,000 to the cause, ended its ALEC membership in 2012. Said spokeswoman Maggie Sans, "We feel that the divide between these activities and our purpose as a business has become too wide.''

That's one way of putting it.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has called for a moratorium of new charter schools in the United States.

In January, the NAACP’s New Area Conference announced it would intervene in a lawsuit that, if successful, would end the limit on charter schools. The Boston Globe reported that the NAACP, along with seven Boston Public School students and the Massachusetts Lawyers’ Committee, argue that charters

divert millions of dollars from traditional public schools each year, but serve far fewer students with disabilities and who are English language learners, as well as impose harsher discipline on students of color.

Enrollment in charters is disproportionately non-white. During the 2015-’16 school year:

·         African-Americans comprised 29.2 percent of enrollments; statewide, they accounted for 8.8 percent.

·         Hispanics made up 30.3 percent of charter school enrollment; statewide they were 18.6 percent.

·         ``Economically disadvantaged’’ students, 35.5; statewide they comprise 19 percent of students.

·         Students whose first language was not English, 25.3 percent; statewide, 19 percent.

·         In the meantime, white students accounted for 32.4 percent of charter students. Statewide, 62.7 percent.

Keep in mind that one percentage accounts for almost 10,000 students.

Copyright © 2016 Daniel Steven Miller

* I am a substitute teacher at three public school districts in western Massachusetts. As such, I am not part of a bargaining unit. 

** Statistics regarding contributions to ballot committees, spending on advertising, etc., are taken from the Office of Campaign & Political Finance Web site. Information pertaining to the number of charter schools, enrollment demographics, and so forth is taken from the Web site of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

All figures are as of late October.