MEDIA ROOTS- Forty years ago, Finland began transforming its educational system to a more personalized methodology of teacher to student learning as part of the government’s economic recovery plan. Finland’s youth has since shot up to the highest in the world in reading, math and science skills.

Conversely, America’s impersonal initiation of marketplace competition into its educational system has caused the US to fall behind.

According to AFP:

The three-yearly OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics.

Although Obama has slammed his predecessor’s controversial ‘No Child Left Behind’ legislation, he has implemented the same broken concept of a standards based education reform into his administration’s ‘Race to the Top’ policy.

Diane Ravitch, educational policy analyst and former US Assistant Secretary of Education, claims that President Obama’s ‘Race to the Top’ program will further weaken the country’s education process by embracing the following key elements: regular teacher evaluations in accordance with students’ test scores, privatizing schools with low test scores, mass firings in low-performing schools and making states compete for federal money with test ratings.

This current educational model of standardization is inherently flawed. By basing a complete faith in standardized testing statistics to determine the competence of teachers and abilities of children, there is a human element eliminated from the equation– an element that Finland has incorporated as the main pillar of their education strategy.

The Smithsonian sheds some light on Finland’s educational success:

Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else…

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians…

Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.

Furthermore, the solutions posed by ‘Race to the Top’ to improve education will result in private entities looting the system, revealing more collusion between private interests and politicians. In an egregious grab to profit off the public sector, hedge funds along with billionaire Bill Gates have initiated a massive PR push to privatize education, and their campaign has paid off– ‘Race to the Top’ calls for a dramatic expansion of privately owned charter schools.

Robert Cruickshank of the California Progress Report explains the motivation:

They’re engaged in a process of rent seeking, which has no productive value. By taking tax dollars that currently provide public services and channeling them to the private sector, which contracts to provide the service at lower cost – and therefore at lower quality – these wealthy individuals can add new income streams while also blunting any effort to raise their taxes to provide these services.

The trajectory of education in this country is drastically off course.  Human beings are complex creatures and learning isn’t black and white; some of us are brilliant in ways that cannot be expressed through multiple choice answers. Instead of penalizing teachers for low test scores, teachers should be encouraged to develop alternative teaching methods based on students’ differing needs.

To learn more about the education policy and ‘Race to the Top’, check out a recent Project Censored KPFA radio show on the framing of education reform. My news report on the show starts at 8:25.

Written by Abby Martin

Photo by Brett Smith

MEDIA ROOTS- Michelle Bachmann’s catapult to fame eerily resembles Sarah Palin’s rise to the top during the 2008 election circus. Both Bachmann and Palin are media made sensations whose extreme antics and shocking ignorance of basic civics have only garnered them more attention. One can’t help but wonder if the popularity of such inept candidates has been in part manufactured by the establishment to provide insurance for another Obama victory.

On a panel discussing Michelle Bachmann’s potential presidential run, Chris Matthews strangely admitted that Bachmann was “created here“– in reference to his MSNBC show Hardball. Was he insinuating that he was partly responsible for Bachmann’s recognition and success?

In 2008, Matthews excoriated Bachmann for her suggestion to catalog and investigate ‘dissenters’ in the House of Representatives, then proceeded to give her a platform to speak at length on his show. Bachmann’s empty rhetoric equating liberalism with anti-Americanism became a viral hit online.

Michelle Bachmann on Hardball with Chris Matthews

Later on Real Time with Bill Maher, Matthews repeats himself, adding gleefully that “Bachmann’s going to win the nomination.” Maybe Matthews is smiling because he is hoping for his Frankenstein-esque creation to fall on her own sword, creating an easy victory for Obama. Tricks or so called ‘dirty’ ones have always been a part of the election cycle. Matthews is an influential partisan talking head, who is experienced enough in the media world to know exactly what he’s doing.

In a recent Media Roots Interview, Cindy Sheehan said that Sarah Palin was picked as Mccain’s VP as “insurance” for an Obama victory. Whether or not that’s true, it’s undeniable that a large amount of Americans voted for Obama in 2008 solely because of how terrifying the prospect of a Mccain/Palin presidency was.

It’s a sad state of democracy when people are fear-mongered into voting against their own interests. As long as the media continues to prop up such extremist GOP candidates, people who identify themselves as liberal, green and libertarian will continue to knee jerkily vote for bought-and-paid for establishment candidates that will proceed the policies that have bankrupted and demoralized this nation.

MEDIA ROOTS- This year marked the tenth anniversary of America’s invasion of Afghanistan, officially making it the longest war in US history. Now that Osama Bin Laden is finally confirmed dead, the federal government’s logic of continuing the occupation remains unclear.

Initially, the Bush administration irrationally insisted that any sovereign nation harboring terrorists was itself complicit in “terror” and therefore open for pre-emptive US military action. This rationale is absurd– just because one criminal might be living inside of a particular country doesn’t make that entire country guilty of the criminal’s crimes.

In 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was quick to tell CNN that US forces had successfully pushed the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of the region, and reports reveal that Osama Bin Laden hadn’t even been in Afghanistan since 2001. Additionally, a White House spokesperson recently admitted that there hasn’t been a terrorist threat in the country for the last eight years.

So what has the US been doing in Afghanistan for the last decade?

War has always been about two things: resources and control. Alongside the supposed surprise discovery of Afghanistan’s $1 trillion wealth of untapped minerals, it’s more than coincidental that before the US invasion, the Taliban along with the UN had successfully eradicated the opium crop in the Golden Crescent. Now 90% of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan.

As reported by Global Research:

Heroin is a multibillion dollar business supported by powerful interests, which requires a steady and secure commodity flow. One of the “hidden” objectives of the war was precisely to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes.

Immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the opium price (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.

In 2001, under the Taliban opiate production stood at 185 tons, increasing  to 3400 tons in 2002 under the US sponsored puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.

While highlighting Karzai’s patriotic struggle against the Taliban, the media fails to mention that Karzai collaborated with the Taliban. He had also been on the payroll of a major US oil company, UNOCAL. In fact, since the mid-1990s, Hamid Karzai had acted as a consultant and lobbyist for UNOCAL in negotiations with the Taliban.

In today’s globalized world, one can’t discount the role that multinational corporations play in US foreign policy decisions. Not only have oil companies and private military contractors made a killing off the Afghanistan occupation: big pharmaceutical companies, who collectively lobby over $250 million to Congress annually, need opium latex to manufacture drugs for this pill happy nation.

Another fact worth mentioning is that Karzai, a notable player in Afghanistan’s opium trade, has been receiving regular payments from the CIA since the invasion. Even more infuriating, the US government has been paying Taliban insurgents to protect supply routes and to “switch sides” in a poor attempt to neutralize the insurgency and buy loyalty from the fighters. The fundamental logic of funding both sides of the war to “win” is possibly the most incomprehensible concept to grasp. Clearly, this war is meant to be sustained– not won.

Fast forward to ten years later, and the turmoil within the country still looms heavy. Last Thursday, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a deadly attack that killed 27 US soldiers and wounded dozens more. Earlier this month marked the deadliest day for US troops since the war started when a rocket propelled grenade shot down a helicopter and killed 30 US soldiers.

In June of this year, Obama delivered a speech about drawing down in Afghanistan, which corporate media outlets touted as a major step to ending the war (Media Roots cut through the speech rhetoric). Yet, a glaringly under reported factor of the praised “drawdown” is the fact that even if the reductions are carried out as planned, the US will still have far more troops in Afghanistan than at any point during Bush’s administration. Furthermore, the US and Afghanistan are about to sign a strategic pact that will allow thousands of special forces troops to remain in Afghanistan until 2024.

Considering how the US is spending at least $6.7 billion a month in Afghanistan and over 55% of Americans think that the US should immediately withdrawal, this issue should be a constant hot topic in the public dialogue– especially amidst the debate of economic sacrifice. Yet in 2010, the corporate news only allotted a measly 4% of its coverage to the war in Afghanistan.

The unsustainability of America’s endless wars and imperialistic foreign policy is the elephant in the room that not enough people in the public arena seem to want to discuss. Sadly, because Americans are conditioned to not bring up politics and religion with others, many are confined to their own rigid perspective fed by biased corporate media outlets. We must begin to challenge this societal dogma if we ever want to progress our society and evolve our collective human consciousness.

Written by Abby Martin

Photo by flickr user DVIDSHUB

MEDIA ROOTS- Abby Martin from Media Roots co-hosts Project Censored’s special three and a half hour KPFA program “Costs of War.” At the beginning of each hour, there is an MR report on the economic, human and environmental costs of US wars in the Middle East. During the program multiple, multiple experts in different fields of study are interviewed on the show about their research for the extensive Brown University study Costs of War. The show focuses on on the socio-economic impacts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and related subjects from scholars worldwide. Listen to the show here or below.

Interview Schedule:

12:00-12:20 Catherine Lutz, Professor Anthro, Brown University, Project Director, Solders and Contractors: Recommendations and Neta Crawford, Professor Political Science at Brown University, Cost of War Project Director,

12:30-12:50 Norah Niland: Former Director Human Rights: United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Afghanistan, social change and women, and Matthew Evangelista, Professor of History and Political Science, Cornell University, Alternatives to War

1:00-1:20 Winslow Wheeler, of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information Washington DC. Department of Defense Budget, Military Cost of War

1:30-1:50 Dahr Jamail, Human Costs of War, Refugees, Life on the Ground and resistance in the military, Author: “The Will to Resist,”

2:00-2:20 John Tirman, MIT, Author of “The Deaths of Others” The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars, Topic: Civilian Civilan Deaths In War—

2:30-2:50 Linda Bilmes, Professor Public Policy Harvard Kennedy School, Topic: Costs of Veteran Care

3:00-3:20 John Pilger, Journalist and Film Producer, covering his new documentary, “The War We Don’t See”

Catherine Lutz, Director of Costs of War: Catherine Lutz on Why We Can’t Turn the Page on America’s Wars {Costs of War} from Watson Institute on Vimeo.

Visit www.CostsOfWar.org for more information