My Beauty Best Teacher

Cosmos Education aims to inspire, empower, and engage young Kenyans in science education and to foster critical thinking that will serve as a life skill...We focus on science and technology education and the role of science and technology in health, the environment, and sustainable development. Our model is grassroots development from within; we want the youth in developing regions of the world to decide how their nations develop-organisation website

From the Nordik Africa Institute:

Courtesy of Ottawa Citizen

The struggle against corruption in Africa has come to rest partly on the initiatives of individuals of great convictions. However, the struggle for a fair, just and equitable humanity risks losing direction if it relies primarily on individual initiative at the expense of collective action and on modernizing institutions at the expense of transforming their internal work cultures for better state-society relations. John Githongo’s presentation will reflect on the essentials to transforming institutions and the role local level ideas and participation can play. He will illustrate this using the Zinduko and Twaweza initiatives that he currently co-ordinates...[watch accompanying video here]

Twaweza's name means:

...“we can make it happen” in Swahili. It is a new citizen-centered initiative, focusing on large-scale change in East Africa. Twaweza believes that lasting change requires bottom-up action. We seek to foster conditions and expand opportunities through which millions of people can get information and make change happen in their own communities directly and by holding government to account.

Michael Hendrix in CIPE:

A new generation of authoritarians is creating “decorative democracies,” where pre-determined elections allow the state to co-opt the legitimacy of liberty without the substance to support it. At the grassroots, democracy holds little meaning. People are told that they are living in a democracy, but everything around them belies the trappings of fairness and liberty. This result is often achieved by touting economic success, as well as belittling civic institutions and the disaggregated nature of democracy...The greatest response to decorative democracy lies in nurturing local civil societies from the ground up, laying the foundation for institutions responsive to the voice of reform. CIPE helps local private sector organizations across the globe to institutionalize the democratic process – supporting the very characteristics that set true democracies apart from the merely decorative ones...[continue reading]

John Githongo on corruption and the poverty equation:

There's a sense in which corruption is the No. 1 manufacturer of poverty. In particular, it is the No. 1 engine of creating inequalities in developing societies -- which is worse than poverty in and of itself. It's one thing having high levels of poverty, but it's a completely different thing to have stark inequalities caused by corruption and the conspicuous consumption that comes with it. [The latter] leads to political contradictions that can destabilize a nation or at the very least undermine democratic progress.

Issa G. Shivji argues that:

The state itself has to be reformed and restructured. The despotic colonial and the authoritarian post-colonial state cannot play a popular developmental role. Its limits have been reached. The reformed state must have its roots in the people and must seek legitimacy from the people. It must seek a new social consensus and build its legitimacy not only on the economic terrain – development – but also on the political and legal terrain of popular participation, freedoms, rights and stable constitutional orders...Africa has to go beyond liberal to social democracy which would address not only the question of formal equality but that of social justice and equity as well...The experience of the liberalisation of the state over the last couple of decades does not inspire confidence or hope. Popular democracy, grassroots democracy , local democracy, new democracy, etc. are the new concepts being discussed and debated.

Recently, Michigan Senate Majority leader Mike Bishop asked me for my opinion on the President's Race to the Top program. I told him that I didn't support it, and he looked at me in a way that said "I thought you were a conservative" and "I thought you wanted to help education." At the time, I struggled to explain why I didn't like the program- I didn't really know all the details to it, but suspected that I was indeed correct in opposing it from what little I knew. He thought I was just a tool of the teachers unions, who also oppose RTTT, but I knew that for some reason I didn't like this initiative by Obama, and it wasn't just paranoid anti-Obama sentiment.

Today, via theblogprof, via Right Wing News, I came across the an article called "Ten Rules for Anti-Government Republican Radicals in D.C. ." As an anti-government conservative radical, the kind that our founding fathers were, the kind of people that built our nation and made our country a great success, I find these rules to be useful in helping me begin to articulate why I oppose Race to the Top.

Rule number one for being an anti-government conservative radical is always try to decentralize power as much as possible. Race to the Top does not do this- it bribes the states into giving the central government in Washington DC more centralized decision making power over our education system.

Rule number two is that earmarks are corruption. RTTT is a $4.35 billion incentive program that awards prizes to districts for meeting a certain criteria. Like most Obama initiatives, it will be not be an open and transparent process the fairly distributes grants to the districts, but instead will be an opaque and closed process that awards grants to districts based on highly specific criteria designed to steer money to politically favored districts- ie, it is a program ripe for earmarking.

Rule #3 is that the louder they scream "emergency," the more suspicious you should be. The supposed reason why we should pass RTTT as quickly as possible is because we should never let a serious crisis go to waste, and our education system is in a crisis, and so now is the time when we should jam through massive bad legislation, but I don't buy this argument, and so I reject RTTT.

#5 is that the grassroots are your friend. What RTTT does is attack teachers, all teachers, and pretend that they are all incompetent and bad teachers, and that empowering the central government more to distribute gifts and prizes for things it like will somehow make the education system better. Teachers aren't bad people (or at least no more so than any other person)- I'm a proud member of the MEA. What is bad is the government structure that they operate in, the forced unionization, having them be employees of the state, etc. RTTT attacks the people, and you should never support legislation that attacks people.

#7) We will never control spending unless we change the system. This program steers money intended for 'economic stimulus' into prizes for school districts, prizes that they will become dependent on and become addicted to. It creates and enlarges a system of out-of-control spending and does nothing to help school districts become more efficient in delivering high-quality education to students.

9) We don't need new laws; we need reform. RTTT is yet another multiple-billion dollar new program that only supports and extends and strengthens the existing system, and does not really reform it. Oh, I know there is some good in it, but the main thrust of it is not to reform the system, but to put in place new laws, and thus a good conservative should oppose it.

10) It's better to kill a bad bill than improve it. Mike Bishop communicated to me that although there is a lot of bad stuff in RTTT, there is some good in it that we can work with, and that we need the money, and that education is in a crisis, blah blah blah. Mike, I support you, and think a lot of time you have good instincts, but sometimes it looks to me like the system is slowly corrupting you, as it does all good men. Kill Race to the Top- it is a bad bill, and although it could be improved, it is better to just kill it and start over with real reform that centralizes governments influence in education.

Tostan News reports on the evolution of local democracy, "...Respondents very much wanted to expand on the issue of human rights and to examine the conditions, even the kind of society, in which these could be more durably ensured. The term “democracy” surfaced on a number of occasions, overheard from national political discourse, but no one was too sure exactly what it meant. Staff resolved therefore to try out a training sequence that would use “democracy” as a cover term for the kind of social arrangements under which human rights could be effectively guaranteed and people of all groups and ages could play an active role in determining their own destiny. The module that resulted from these months of effort included information, discussion, role-playing and applied activities all focusing on what human rights society must protect, how individual and group values are balanced, by what means those who have been deprived of rights can assert them, how conflict is healed, and the sort of governance strategies such goals require. Organizers found it worthwhile to go back to the root meaning of “democracy” (in Greek: government by the people) and to facilitate widespread discussion of just what this implied and how it related to the assertion of human rights and the resolution of conflict..."