When I tell someone (particularly a date) for the first time that I’m a vegan, their reactions typically follow the Five Stages of Grief:

Disbelief: “Wha-what?!?! No, you can’t be. Your hair is too short. You shower. You haven’t worn the same outfit since 1996.”

Anger: “What the hell? How am I supposed to ever eat with you? Damn you, now I’m going to feel so guilty anytime I eat meat. What is wrong with you?”

Bargaining: “C’mon, just order the filet mignon. We’ll split it and I’ll eat most of yours (ironically I never got much peer pressure to do drugs, but I get a LOT to cheat on my diet)”

Depression: “You’re a nice guy, but I dunno if I could ever (date, hang out) with you. I feel like we have nothing in common.”

Acceptance: “I guess it’s not so bad. At least you still drink beer.”

When I made this decision, I expected a wide variety of reactions (mostly critical) whenever I would tell people of my choice. Surprisingly, I’ve found that the reactions (at least to my face) have been pretty consistent across genders, races, and even locations as cuisine-divergent as Dallas and San Francisco. I confess that prior to my conversion to a vegan diet, I was one of the people who looked at vegans as hippie, animal-loving, far-left liberals. But my opinion changed quickly after looking at the research behind it and pulling a dietary Jonas Salk by trying it on myself. 

Three years ago I was a seemingly healthy 27 year old. I worked out 5x/week, kept my vices to weekends and Vegas trips, didn’t smoke, ate mostly lean meats and veggies, slept 8 hrs a night, and didn’t have any major life stresses. Yet my blood pressure remained consistently high for my age: 145/90 (120/80 or below is considered healthy). Perplexed, I quit drinking for 6 months, trained for a half Ironman Triathlon, and cut out red meat almost entirely, but it had no discernable effect. Around the same time I took a trip to NYC and saw a friend of mine who is a well-known chef. When I mentioned my blood pressure issue to her, she recommend a book called The China Study and said it would appeal to my health concerns and science nerd inclinations.

I purchased The China Study the next morning and read it cover to cover the same day. I’ll spare you the details here, but it makes a very strongcase to support a vegan diet as a way of dramatically lowering risks of cancer (see chart below) and heart disease, the two most prevalent causes of death in the US, as well as diabetes and other major killers in Western societies.

The science seemed sound, and I followed it up with independent research of my own that supported the research from the book. Then and there, I decided to give veganism a shot: for three months I’d eat almost exclusively a plant-based diet. I admit I wasn’t (and still am not) 100% strict, and would occasionally have cheese (my weakness) or eggs (typically mixed into something), but I made sure that at least 90% of my meals were vegan. Three months later I went back to the doctor and got my blood pressure checked again, only to stare in disbelief when I saw  a reading of 114/68 - a 25% drop - staring at me from the sphygmomanometer. 

Fast forward a bit and I had convinced my mom, dad, and sister to become vegans. We were already (by normal standards) a very healthy family: none of us smoked, we weren’t overweight, our drinking wasn’t excessive, and we all worked out regularly. Yet we each lost an average of 10 lbs, my dad’s elevated cholesterol dropped by over 25%, my sister’s normal cholesterol experienced a similar drop, and we all felt healthier, more energetic, and looked younger. I personally lost 17 lbs, kept the same low blood pressure, and had improvements in my already healthy blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Again, keep in mind that as a family we were already healthier than probably 95% of American families, yet still experienced these dramatic health improvements within less than 6 months of becoming vegan.

The first question that I typically get asked when I tell someone that I’m vegan are: “Why did you do it/Was it for an ethical choice or for health?” I did it initially for health but the implications of a larger movement towards veganism are pretty compelling for anyone that has even a passing interest in the environment. Among them:

• Consider how much of the US is currently in a severe drought, and the death and suffering it causes. The amount of water saved by removing 2 lbs of beef from your diet is equivalent to the amount of water saved by not showering for an entire year.
• Raising livestock contributes more emissions to the environment and contributes more to global warming than all of the world’s automobiles. 
• The antibiotics given to animals so that they can process the cheap food that we feed them contributes not only to antibiotic resistance (of the kind that leads to things like deadly, once-treatable staph infections) but to increased outbreaks of Salmonella and E Coli that kill and sicken many people every year
• Regardless of your stance on the ethics of eating meat, I challenge you to watch a video inside the livestock industry and not feel like we’re morally obligated to make some changes

The second question I typically get after telling someone that I’m vegan is “Is going vegan difficult?”. The answer is, “Yes, but not as difficult as you might think. And going vegetarian is surprisingly easy”. To put it in perspective, realize that most Americans ate a much less carnivorous diet only a century ago, before livestock production became more automated and drove the prices of meat down as our standard of living increased. But unless you are an absolute die-hard carnivore and can’t imagine living without meat, I extend you an offer to try going vegetarian for a couple months to see how you feel. If you find it palatable, try substituting a a few vegetarian meals with vegan ones each week. There are a lot of great recipes online and in vegan cookbooks that help with the main challenge of finding appropriate substitutes for non-vegan items (e.g. soy milk instead of regular milk) and acclimating your taste buds to new foods. I readily admit that I hated vegan substitutes like soy milk and tofu at first, but now I actually prefer them to the taste of regular milk and most meats. There are a couple changes you’ll need to be watch out for in order to make sure you get enough protein, as well as essential vitamins like B12 that occur almost exclusively in animals. But those can easily be managed and supplemented, if necessary, via a daily multivitamin or enriched vegan foods. Also, don’t feel bad if you need to cheat every so often to keep yourself sane, that’s ok. I still cheat probably once a week (primarily with cheese, and primarily when I’m hungover).

I certainly don’t expect everyone, or even most people, to become vegan. Eating meat and animal products has been a way of life for a long time and is a part of certain cultures, albeit not to the extent that it occurs today. But I have no doubt that as a country and as a species, we can make dramatic improvements to our health, our well-being, our environment, and our moral compass if we cut out the majority of the animal-based products that we consume and replace them with plant-based foods. I challenge you to go vegan or vegetarian for three months and tell me that you don’t feel lighter, healthier, and more energetic. Feel free to ask me questions you have directly in the blog comments, or email/tweet/FB me if you have questions you’d rather ask me directly.

In the aftermath of the terrible act of violence committed at an Aurora movie theater during The Dark Knight Rises movie opening, there has been an outpouring of shock, outrage, prayers, condolences, and sympathy. People from all demographics are lamenting these types of events, revisiting tragedies like Virginia Tech and Columbine, asking why these things happen, and calling for changes to prevent these types of massacres in the future. Yet after the initial shock and disbelief subsides, I will posit with 98% certainty that the following will happen: liberals will call for stricter gun control laws, conservatives will give many reasons why stricter gun control won’t prevent this type of violence and may even contribute to it, and in the end few (if any) changes will be made in legislation and these types of events will continue to happen. Call me cynical if you want, but history supports my assertion. The problem with addressing issues like gun control after situations like this is twofold. One, tragedies like Aurora are very emotionally charged (and understandably so). Two, the issue of gun control itself is very emotionally charged. Unfortunately, what gets lost in emotional moments is the ability to look critically at situations to make real improvements (similar to how true solutions to a disagreement with a significant other are typically only discussed once the anger has subsided). I contend that our society should use moments like these to mourn, regroup, and then create evidence-based, rational dialogue to argue for or against potential legislation like gun control.

Let’s get one obvious fact out of way: the United States has some of the more relaxed gun laws of any developed country, and it also has some of the highest levels of gun violence in the developed world. Many European countries (and Canada) have much stricter gun control laws and much less gun violence. Liberals will frequently cite these facts as evidence that gun control works to decrease violence. But the true picture is nowhere near that simple. It is generally true that gun control works to decrease gun violence, but there is no consensus as to whether gun control actually decreases violence in general. After all, a homicide committed with a gun is no less tragic than a homicide committed by other means. Admittedly, it’s generally easier to kill someone with a gun than a knife, and many people will point to the “mass-killing” power of guns in cases like the Aurora shootings. But Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people with a bomb created from materials than can be legally obtained by any adult in the US. More difficult? Yes…but far from impossible for anyone so motivated. 

Let’s get another fact out of the way: the majority of gun homicides take place in poor, predominantly African-American and Hispanic communities. The reason that tragedies like the Aurora shootings (or Virginia Tech, or Columbine) are such big news is precisely because they are so rare. Consider that every three days roughly 250-300 people die in traffic accidents without any fanfare, yet when a jetliner carrying the same number of people crashes, it becomes international news. Rarity breeds interest. There is no doubt that the Aurora massacre is a horrible tragedy, but the reality is that in the scheme of things, the likelihood of anything like this happening to an average American is millions to one, on par with winning the lottery.

The issue of gun control and violence should be brought up in the context of the thousands of annual homicides in poor communities, not in rare, once-a-year events. But even then, try and put aside your personal beliefs and let’s focus on what the research says. Because at the heart of it, the real question everyone means to ask is “Does gun control make a society a safer place?” And the real answer is, no one knows for sure. There are many studies that support both points of view, which is precisely why there is such vehement political discourse in this arena. But there is no true consensus among the academic community to support a belief one way or the other. Just because a country with strict gun control has less violence does not mean the gun control itself is the reason for that. This is another correlation vs causation issue, and in modern society there are so many complex factors that shape our world that it can be very difficult to determine whether something like lax gun laws cause violence, or if it’s more coincidental.

If our lawmakers were truly interested in understanding whether or not gun control would genuinely improve our safety, they would commission multiple large, independent studies to tease out the variables and determine how likely it is that stricter gun laws would decrease violent crime as a whole. That’s the only course of action that would truly give us an understanding of the consequences of our laws, free from the political rhetoric that appeals to our emotions and not to our minds. But let’s not include use the emotional overtones of recent tragic events as a pulpit to assert unfounded positions on gun control. Because while I am unsure as to whether or not stricter gun laws would reduce day-to-day violence in the US, I am fairly certain that they would not prevent incidences like the Aurora massacre. No matter how idyllic a society, there are always people who will make it their mission to cause suffering and terror , and will find and use any means necessary to achieve it. It’s sadly ironic that a quote from the move The Dark Knight summarizes this best: “Because some men aren’t looking or anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” And no law is going to change that.

If you work hard enough and follow the rules, you can be successful.

That phrase is the idea of The American Dream, which is pervasive in popular culture, political discourse, and in stories we read from people who have supposedly achieved success through it. There is perhaps no other idea from which people draw inspiration and assert that our country is the greatest country in the world. I’m here to tell you why that idea is fundamentally wrong, and why America is not even close to being the best country to use as an example of that idea’s validity. For the record, I wrote the notes for this blog long before “The Newsroom” aired on HBO. I don’t watch the show (beyond the first episode) because Aaron Sorkin sucks at creating realistic dialogue flow and I can’t stand to listen to it. But I digress…

First, I want to clarify what I mean by “wrong”. There’s no doubt that The American Dream has been real for many people and that there have been some astonishing successes by it. My point though, is that for the most part these successes are the exception, not the rule, and that the vast majority of people will not be able to use this idea as a vehicle for their own success (especially when compared to other countries). To be clear, I am defining success as socioeconomic success, since that’s usually what The American Dream is associated with. But given that socioeconomic status is strong correlated with a litany of other positive life factors, most notably health, I believe that it’s a fair benchmark. 

Following the rules is subjective Imagine it’s dinnertime, and you tell your child “No, you can’t have a chocolate chip cookie for dessert unless you finish your vegetables”. If he/she went behind your back and had a chocolate chip cookie, there would be clear reason for punishment. But what if instead your child took an M&M cookie? Technically he/she followed your rule, but I doubt many parents would offer leniency. The 2008 financial crisis was frequently an application of this same principle. While some people/companies egregiously broke the law, there were many more that technically did not but clearly acted in ways that were questionably ethical (e.g offering mortgages to people who clearly could not afford them). Even worse, those people/companies made billions of dollars in profit from those actions at the expense of millions of mostly law (and rule)-abiding Americans. If you believe that “following the rules” should include ethical as well as legal adherence, then this crisis clearly defies The American Dream and casts a shadow over the way we do business in this country. If you define “following the rules” solely as “following the law”, then there is still the problem of the millions of Americans that lost their jobs or 401k’s despite working hard and following the law for most of their lives. And don’t forget to let your child off the hook for his/her M&M cookie.

There is only so much room at the top You’re one of twenty managers at a large company. A spot for a director (a nice promotion) opens up - what criteria should be used to determine the person most deserving of the promotion? If you apply the principle of The American Dream, that won’t narrow down the field by much. If you’re a manager at a solid company, you likely didn’t get there by being lazy or unethical. Even in cases of blatant hiring favoritism, a majority of managers should still be hard-working individuals. In reality, there are a lot of other factors that will typically determine who gets the job. And when a bunch of people are working equally hard, what differentiates one employee from another may come down to intangibles or things that an employee has no control over (like height or plain old luck).

While this is only one example, the analogy applies to a wide range of jobs. Particularly in today’s technology-centric workplace, there are a lot of jobs that require skills much more easily available to those with successful families and access to a quality education. As higher-paying jobs become more and more specialized and education-dependent, those without initial socioeconomic advantages will have a harder and harder time making up the difference, no matter how hard they work. Imagine being told today that you need a run a marathon in the near future despite hardly ever running before, that you will compete against thousands of other runners, and that those who finish in the top 10% will be much more likely to have a life of happiness, success, and good health - The American Dream. Now imagine being told that 10% of the runners were kids of successful runners, and that they were already running half-marathons with ease. Would you feel like you had a fair shot at The American Dream? That gives you an idea of the scale of disadvantages that millions of young kids in poor socioeconomic environments face today.

The Scandinavian Dream (or, what the research says about The American Dream) Several studies have been conducted to determine how much of an individual’s socioeconomic success in different countries is indicative of his/her parents’ success, i.e. how difficult it is to achieve success without being born into it. Those studies all reached the same conclusion: it is much harder to achieve success in the US without a head start from one’s parents, when compared to other developed countries. In fact, in the US, roughly 50% of a child’s future socioeconomic status can be predicted by the status of his/her parents. Denmark, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, and even France (7 of the 8 other countries studied) all offer a better chance at The “American” Dream than America itself (and in the case of the former four countries, a much better chance). You can find those results here.

The American Dream is the exception, not the rule. And other countries, even ones we consistently mock (France), have leapfrogged us in ways that no one really talks about but which are arguably more telling of our failures than the ones that are uttered with regularity. But we can fix that. We can once again make America a place that other countries look up to as a model for equal opportunity. It starts with our politicians, who must enact legislation to protect Americans from abuses that sap our opportunities, and put in place systems that support success no matter what one’s socioeconomic background is at birth. To that end, but even more importantly than voting for politicians to support those ideas, we must utilize our collective voices and actions to support each other, to create systems that give those less fortunate than ourselves a fighting chance. Only once shared responsibility and social action replace individual interests as a primary motivation in our society will we truly be able to make The American Dream the rule, not the exception, once again.

One of my friends loves the term “pushing rope” and uses it as often as he can, whether or not it’s relevant to the conversation. For those unaccustomed or without working knowledge of inappropriate post-teenage slang, the term “pushing rope” connotes a situation when a male is unable to consumate an intimate situation not for lack of effort,  but because…umm…well…ok, this about the time when you should exercise your imagination or become familiar with Urban Dictionary. But the point is, that regardless of spirited and genuine efforts to salvage the situation, the underlying causes (typically too much alcohol) are not addressed and the problem remains unsolved.

In the federal government, political spending is very much an exercise in pushing rope. Many a TV personality (both Democrat and Republican), political opponents (who ironically seem to forget about their points of dissent when it’s their bill being discussed), and average Joes have lamented wasteful spending in Washington. Yet often the problem with overspending can’t just be attributed to waste (although that’s obviously an issue), it’s that there is no understanding of the underlying problems in the first place. While this is a problem everywhere in every vertical, I’m going to focus on education because this an issue that the government should understand in detail (given that, you know, there’s an entire department devoted to it).

The federal government budgeted over $940B in education spending for 2012. Per student, the US spends over $10,000 annually. Finland, a country known for its educational prowess, spends a lower percentage of its GDP and roughly 20-35% less per student. Yet when you compare international rankings of elementary and secondary education, the US typically ranks in the lower-middle half of developed countries, whereas FInland ranks at or near the top. Granted, there are many differences between our two countries that make education more challenging in the US, but consider this: since the 1960’s, the US education spend per student has increased 400% (in inflation-adjusted dollars) yet our international rankings among developed countries are lower than ever. Given those statistics, it’s pretty clear that we’re throwing more and more money at a problem yet continuing to push rope. I believe that this is because those in charge of our spending either don’t understand the fundamental issues or are unwilling to make the sacrifices needed to affect meaningful change (or both). 

It’s been roughly 6 months since I’ve entered the education vertical and I’ve spoken with hundreds of education personnel: teachers, principals, superintendents, state personnel, CEO’s, professors, researchers, and politicians. When I’ve asked people in each profession what they believe are the major problems in education, I’ve been amazed at the uniformity of responses: lack of accountability (of both teachers and admins), too much focus on tests/memorization (instead of critical thinking), lack of mutual professional respect (both within and outside education), and lack of modernization of schools (to parallel cultural changes and new research on teaching/learning). So on one hand we have people from all over the educational spectrum with essentially the same take on the problems in education, and on the other hand we have policies like No Child Left Behind that essentially address none of these issues with any depth and create unrealistic expectations (honestly, how can someone create legislation to assert a required 100% proficiency in anything and believe that it’s achievable). 

To determine what changes are meaningful, policy-makers need to speak with people from every conceivable location in the education space. They need to understand the shortcomings of our current model both academically and practically, and create different approaches to address those problems and accountability measure to test those methods. There needs to be follow-ups to check progress and pivot plans to address failures and support programs to encourage successes. What isn’t needed is to simply throw billions at “solutions” that, out of the gate, receive widespread opposition from those with vastly more expertise in the space. That’s just pushing rope.

Only recently in history have we viewed literacy as a virtual human right. The proliferation of public education and recently, the Internet, have pushed literacy to corners of society that would never have had access to the tools required to pursue it over the past few millennia. While I fully believe we much teach every person on the planet how to read and write, I also believe that there is another type of literacy - scientific literacy - that is arguably as important but frequently ignored. As science and technology are increasingly integrated into our lives, bodies, and in prominent legislation, it is becoming ever more imperative that people become scientifically literate.

Nowhere has the issue of science illiteracy been more blatant and fraught with so many immediate consequences as it was/is around the autism-vaccine controversy. In 1998, British surgeon Andrew Wakefield released a study that suggested a link between autism and the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine. Despite Wakefield himself saying that he could not prove that the vaccine itself directly caused autism, the public response was swift: scores of parents refused vaccinations for their children, and parents of children with autism immediately became vociferous opponents of vaccinations. Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to make the headlines, celebrities (most notably Jenny McCarthy) used their fame as a soapbox to rally against the supposedly harmful effects of vaccinations. The biggest tragedy of Wakefield’s study ironically came after it was shown that his study was fraudulent, when many parents still refused to reconsider their stances (Jenny McCarthy’s willfully ignorant ramblings certainly didn’t help. I’m not sure why anyone listens to actors about anything other than acting? I certainly won’t be asking my dad - a doctor - for fashion tips unless I’m trying to pair bad sandals with worse socks).

The predictable results of these anti-vaccine reactions quickly came to fruition. Measles, whooping cough (another vaccine-preventable illness), and other diseases made comebacks and killed many children in the US and many more worldwide. These deaths were entirely preventable and largely the result of scientific illiteracy. Let’s look in more detail at the barrage of illiteracy missteps that led millions of people to make decisions that led to these deaths.

• Only one study supported the MMR-autism link. Science requires repeatability, and the more repeatable the experiment the more reliable the findings. If we drink too much tequila and trip over our own feet, we will fall to the ground regardless of whether we are in the US or in China. If we didn’t, then our theories of gravity would need to be revised. It is imperative that scientific findings be validated by different studies, as one-off studies lead to many potentially harmful trends, such as fad diets.
• Wakefield admitted that he could only find a correlational, not a causational, link between MMR and autism. That distinction is critical. Correlation only says that two things are related. Causation says that one thing causes another. To get an idea of how misinterpretation of that distinction can lead to absurdity, consider that breathing air is correlated with death: people who breathe air eventually die. But breathing air doesn’t cause death (in normal circumstances, anyway), which is the key point. Trying to make meaningful scientific conclusions off of correlations alone can lead to tragic conclusions.
• As a result of the MMR-autism study, many parents chose to completely abstain from vaccinating their children. While the end result of a vaccine is to prevent disease, comparing one vaccine to another is like comparing apples and oranges. Aside from the obvious difference in virus types, the specifics vary from vaccine to vaccine. Given those differences, autism results from one vaccine may have no bearing on the results from another vaccine. It’s not crucial that people understand vaccine science to get this point, it’s crucial that people realize that they should dig a bit deeper before making potentially life-altering decisions.
• One thing that humans are notoriously terrible at is assessing how risky an activity is. Watching people freak out on airplanes (or refusing to fly altogether) but having no problem with drinking a few glasses of wine and getting behind the wheel is an easy visualization of our poor sense of actual risk. In particular, people tend to underestimate risk when a bad outcome of that risk occurred in the distant past. Very few people in developed countries today have any personal experiences with diseases like polio that killed, paralyzed, and/or disfigured millions of children throughout history. Thus, they tend to view the risk as essentially non-existent. The recent increases in autism diagnosis, however, are very real and in the present to many parents. Unfortunately, this combination of factors leads parents to make decisions that could potentially kill or severely harm not only their children, but any other children who are at risk due to non-vaccination. It is critical that people understand true risks and make decisions accordingly.
• Lastly, and most frustratingly, was the unwillingness of many people to change their anti-vaccine stances after it was proven that the scientific “results” were fraudulent. It’s one thing to misunderstand the results of a correlational study. It’s another to hold onto those results even when it’s been proven that they are not only false, but lies. I think this is simply a case of people wanting to continue to believe something once they’ve developed strong emotional ties to it, ties which wouldn’t have developed in the first place had other missteps not occurred.

Given the MMR controversy and countless other decisions, it’s pretty evident that scientific illiteracy can have damaging effects on society. There are many reasons behind this, but a few are obvious:

1. We don’t teach critical thinking skills, or how to apply those skills to the real world.

2. We don’t value science and scientific inquiry in our educational system or in our culture.

3. News outlets write stories to sell papers, not to accurately inform the public (the autism-vaccine fraudulence story was much less publicized than the initial story)

Unfortunately the hazardous effects of scientific illiteracy will only become more commonplace as technology is increasingly interwoven into our lives. Politicians already exploit this illiteracy to pass legislation and policies that sound great on the surface but have no basis in reality. Imagine how much better our society would be if policies and laws were based on research, and tracked independently to show whether or not they were effective. It is up to parents and to our education system to teach students not just facts, but how to think critically and rationally for them themselves. And it’s up to us to dig just a bit deeper and make sure that the studies we read can stack up to the very basics of the scientific method - we don’t need to even know what the studies are about to do this. Only then will we have a society where the success and health of our country and planet will be based on facts and results, not opinions and smooth rhetoric.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie Zoolander occurs when, after a stretch of humiliation and failure that he has never before experienced, clueless male model Derek Zoolander heads to the gas station with his friends in an attempt to shake the mental anguish of his recent defeat. At the gas station, he sees a recent issue of Time magazine which has his photo on the cover with the caption “A Model Idiot”. In a brilliant allusion to his lack of self-awareness, Zoolander reads the caption as “A Model, Idiot?”, implying that he does not recognize his own idiocy and that anyone else must be stupid to not know of his escapades as a really really ridiculously good-looking male model. After the momentary confusion, he then becomes blissfully distracted by his clueless friends who are spraying each other with gasoline before one of them lights a cigarette and sends them all (except Zoolander) into early graves. 

I’m not sure which is worse, that my first post in my education/science blog starts with a Zoolander reference (although I love the movie, let’s hope the sequel is better than Dumb and Dumberer), or that I find the aforementioned scene in Zoolander a pretty apt comparison to the current state of education in the US. But to get context, let’s track the past 50 years or so. In the mid-20th century the US educational system was near the top in the world by most any measure: graduation rates, test scores, higher education matriculation, etc. Then, over the next few decades, things began to slip. The slide has continued through today and now the US measures below most of the industrialized world in most measures of K-12 success. For a country that has long measured its success by one number - #1 - and where second place is often viewed as the first loser, the level of decline has been truly staggering. But perhaps more staggering has been our leaders’ lack of self-awareness about the causes of our shortcomings. A few years ago, had a Time Magazine printed an education cover with “A model failure” on the front I imagine many politicians would have interpreted it in the same context as the clueless Zoolander.

Enter the recent rash of education reform - No Child Left Behind (G.W. Bush), Race to the Top (Obama), and a flurry of state legislation -  which suggests that politicians are, if only for the purposes of reelection, aware of the problems facing the system. But when you dig deeper (or, if you work in education) you realize that the problems aren’t those that can be fixed by any single piece of legislation, no matter how comprehensive. As is typical of “reform” in many industries, politicians throw money at problems with minimal understanding of the subsequent effects or necessary follow-ups required to put that money to the best use. Complicating the matter is the inevitable power struggle between different interest groups (teachers’ unions, politicians, education personnel) over how to appropriate that money. Unfortunately, despite the stated goals of these groups, their actions tend to promote self-preservation and protection of individual interests at the expense of true progress (there are admittedly exceptions, but those people are often viewed as threats or outsiders to the system). 

Indeed, as you delve deeper into the politics and underlying structure that is our current educational system, it becomes painfully obvious that the problems are systemic and are the result of an antiquated system attempting to solve a problem in our increasingly complex world. In fact, as more and more research is conducted about pedagogy (the act of instruction), learning, and child development, the more we learn that our current system does a lot more wrong than it does right towards educating our country’s kids to be productive adults. Unfortunately, the systems in place not only make it difficult to implement positive structural changes, they make it difficult to have conversations about potential changes in the first place (sounds a lot like Congress - coincidence?). And in the end, if there is no progress, we all suffer, because a quality holistic education is the single best tool we have to combat poverty, violence, and ignorance. Let’s just hope that we can figure out ways to fix our shortcoming before we light our own gasoline-soaked cigarettes and send our country into an early grave.

I will delve into multiple aspects of this topic and others in future posts. Please don’t hesitate to reach out via the “Share Your Thoughts With Greg” button, I will try and respond to everyone